Men, Women, and Gods Part 9

WHAT YOU MAY THINK.

Show me a grade of society that buckles its little belt of belief and faith around its members, and you will show me a collection of hopeless mediocres. The thinkers move out or die out. They object to being fossilized. They decline to go down to history as physical members of the nineteenth century, and mental members of the third.

I would rather have the right to put on my monument, "She was abreast of her time," than have all the sounding texts and all the feathered tribes chiseled upon it. I would prefer that it be said of me, "She was a good woman because she had a pure heart," than to have this record: "She was a Christian. She was afraid of h.e.l.l. She cast her burdens on the Lord, and went to heaven."

You have been told, "Blessed are they who die in the Lord." Rather let us say, "Blessed are they who live clean lives."

But the Church does not allow you to regulate your lives by what you believe to be right. It always did and it always will hate a thinker. It proposes to do the mental labor for great minds by means of brains large enough to hold nothing but Faith. It says, "I cannot, and you shall not outgrow the past. The measure of my capacity shall be the limit of your attainment."

The laws of a nation presume to regulate only what you may do. The Church is kind enough to say what you may think. It proposes to control the mental condition of every man and woman for time and eternity, and its first command is that we shall not grow.

It seems to me rather a queer admission to make, but the Church says that a child or a fool knows quite enough for its purpose--and it does not seem to be my place to question that fact. Now that may be all very well for the child and the fool, but it is rather binding on the rest of us.

Once in a while a minister outgrows the doctrines that were big enough for him in his youth; but that minister, though his life be as pure and his character as sweet as a flower, would be safer to be cast into the sea than that this instrument of torture, this court of injustice, should discover that he had laid aside the outfit of his undeveloped years. His mind may have grown to be a giant in strength, but it must be compressed into the nut-sh.e.l.l of superst.i.tion--dwarfed to the capacity of intellectual pigmies.

Christ was a thinker, a man of progress, an infidel, a man who outgrew the Church of his time; and the Church of his time crucified him. Those who oppose the spirit of religious stagnation to-day meet the same spirit in the Church that Christ met, and receive the same treatment so far as the law will permit.

It is a sentiment as true as it is beautiful that asks us to reverence the great men, the thinkers of the past; but it is no mark of respect to them to rest forever over their graves. We show our respect and our appreciation better by a spirit of research that reaches beyond them, than by a simple admiration which takes their gifts and dies. The lessons they left were not alone lessons of memory and acceptance, but examples of effort and progress.

A pupil who stops content with his teacher's last words is no great credit either to himself or to his master. If he has learned only to accept, his lesson is only begun; and until he knows that he must investigate, his education is that of a child, his development that of a clown.

It is no compliment to Christ, the man of progress 1800 years ago, that his followers clip the wings of thought. He struck for freedom from ecclesiastical bondage. He added a new link to the chain of intellectual growth, and his followers have riveted it back to the immovable rock of superst.i.tion. He offered a key to open the door of individual liberty.

They have wrapped it in the folds of ignorance and laid it in the closet of fear. He said in effect, "When you have outgrown the Church, leave it and bless the world." They say, "Leave it and be d.a.m.ned." For what is a Christian to-day without his h.e.l.l? The chief objection I hear offered to the last arrangements made for us by the revisers is that they left out some of the h.e.l.l, and gave the part they kept a poetical name.

INTELLECTUAL GAG-LAW.

When the day comes when offences against the intellect are deemed as great crimes as offences against the person, intellectual gag-law will meet with no more respect than lynch-law does to-day, and will be recognized as the expression of an undeveloped moral and social condition. Choking an opinion into or out of a man's mind is no more respectable than the same argument applied to his body.

Any form of faith, any religion, that has the vicarious element in it, is an insult to the intellect. It is based upon the idea of a G.o.d of revenge, a ruler infamously unjust. It is a system utterly ineffectual without the wanton sacrifice of helpless innocence under fangs of beastly cruelty--a revenge that has no thought of the redress of wrong by its punishment--a revenge that simply requires a victim--and blood!

Even with those two elements of the plan it is still impotent until it has appealed to the basest element in every human breast--the willingness to accept happiness that is bought by the agony of another!

It is too abjectly selfish and groveling to command the least respect from a n.o.ble character or a great, tender soul. It severs the ties of affection without compunction. It destroys all loyalty. It says, "No matter what becomes of my loved ones--those who would die to help me--I must save my soul." Without the use of the microscope, however, such a soul would never know whether it was saved or not.

What sort of a soul would it be that could have a heaven apart from those it loved? It would not be big enough to save, and its heaven would not be good enough to have.

I prefer the philosophy, the dignified loyalty and love for the dead of the old Goth, the captive warrior whom the Christians persuaded to be baptized. As he stood by the font he asked the bishop, "Where are the souls of my heathen ancestors?" The bishop, with great alacrity, replied, "In h.e.l.l."

The brave old warrior, the loyal Goth, drew his skins about him and said, "I would prefer, if you do not object, to go to my people;" and he left unbaptized.

That was heathen philosophy; but I think I prefer it to the Christianity of a devout man, a Sunday-school superintendent, whom I know. He is a great light in a Christian church today. He wors.h.i.+ps the beautiful provisions of vicarious atonement. He refused his mother her dying wish, and on the following Sunday atoned for the inhuman act by singing with unusual unction, "How gentle G.o.d's commands," and reading with devout fervor, "The Lord is my shepherd, _I_ shall not want." His mother, who had the same shepherd, had wanted for much. She even wanted for a stone to mark her grave, because the money she had left for that purpose her holy son thought best to use, vicariously, upon himself. That man believes in the Bible absolutely. He is a good Christian, and he abhors an infidel! He knows he is going to heaven because he has faith in Christ, and Christ had an extra stab on his account. He is willing to take his heavenly home through the blood of Christ, and his earthly one out of the pockets of a dead mother. The blood of the murdered Nazarene obliterates the infamy of his acts over her dishonored grave.

And this is perfectly consistent! A religion of faith, a religion that gets its good vicariously and s.h.i.+fts its sins and responsibilities on to the past, is a religion that can never elevate character; _it simply makes a man more intensely what he was before_. It is all self, self, self. Think of the infinitesimal smallness, the irredeemable worthlessness, the unutterable meanness of a soul that could forsake those it had loved, and be happy believing that they were suffering and eternally lost!

Yet who does not know men who go tramping about the country, living on the charity of their dupes, and declaring that "the Lord is their Shepherd, _they_ shall not want," whose families want for almost every comfort of life? And this is true orthodox doctrine. "Ye shall forsake father, mother, wife, and children," for what?--to "follow me!" Think of the infamy of it!

If that is the kind of souls that go to heaven, I shall do all I can to keep mine amongst more respectable spirits. I will go with the Goth. I could suffer in h.e.l.l (if there were such a place) with those I love, and keep my self-respect.

If I believed I could be happy in heaven with my loved ones in agony below--if I believed it of myself--there is no vile, slime-covered reptile on earth that I would so loathe! Forsake father, mother, husband, children to save my soul! Never! I will go with my people!

THE VICARIOUS THEORY THE CAUSE OF CRIME.

This idea of vicarious atonement has encouraged injustice and crime of every kind. Out of eighty-four men who have been hanged recently, seventy-one have gone directly to heaven. They asked the a.s.sembled spectators to be as good as they conveniently could, and meet them on the other sh.o.r.e. Their spiritual advisers administered the holy sacrament, and a.s.sured them that they were "lambs of the fold," and that a robe and a harp awaited them at the right hand of G.o.d.

Just imagine a lamb in a robe, playing on a harp! A lamb with wings, a harp, a long white robe, and golden slippers seems to me an object to arouse the sympathy of a demon. Poor lamb! He would wish himself a goat every hour of the day.

There is an implied crime in the very word vicarious. If it means anything it means the suffering of innocence to atone for guilt.

It means that one crime is condoned by the commission of another--a deliberate one. It means that truth must die in order that dishonor may live. It subst.i.tutes vengeance for justice. It does not seek to protect society by checking villany; it seeks the safety of the criminal by a s.h.i.+fting of responsibility. If the framers of human laws were no wiser that the revealers of divine law, no nation could live, no family would be secure, no justice possible.

[See Appendix S.]

Not long ago the New York _Independent_ contained an article against Sarah Bernhart, calling her "a lewd woman," and against her play because it did not contain good morals. The same paper contained an article against George Eliot's works, and said that the Mormon Congressman is a disgrace to all America because he is a polygamist. All these things by a man who swallows David and Lot whole, and has Solomon pose as the summit of all wisdom! All this by a man who builds his life on the word of Moses, and denies to others the right to object to his code of morals or his version of heavenly wisdom and divine direction!

I should like a little consistency. The Christian who rails against polygamy, and at the same time poses in morals with a bible in his hand, is a man who saws his own legs from under him, and still expects us to believe that he has legs, which we might possibly do if only our sight were aided by faith. As long as my eyes hold out, I'll stick to unaided vision; after that, spectacles or faith according to circ.u.mstances.

When goodness and virtue are measured, not by a book, but by our own acts toward each other; when a man's character is judged by the amount of joy he gives to his household; when a happy laugh from his children and a bright smile from his wife greet him as often as he comes home; when these are taken as the evidence of a good man, deacons will go out of fas.h.i.+on. Meek, tired, persecuted-looking wives will not listen to a canting husband and believe that he is a holy man, when they know that he is a bad husband and a tyrannical father.

There is not any way that I know of to make a home happy vicariously. No confession of faith can take pain out of a mother's heart. No "testimony of the spirit" can make love and beauty in a home where "the heathen"

hold the first place, and foreign missions get tangled up in the children's hair. No man accustomed to a high intellectual temperature can keep warm by theological fires. No man whose brain is king can ever again recognize the authority of this mere undisciplined sentiment.

REVISION.

As a system Christianity has had its day. Long ago it may have served a good purpose, but after eighteen hundred years it is worn threadbare and useless. If some of its milder tenets still cling to and fit our vast mediocrity, it is equally certain that the intellectual giants have moulted it as the birds moult their plumage in a dying year, and have taken on the bright new garments of higher thought, the spring plumage of intellectual liberty.

When I heard that the Bible was going to be revised I felt very glad, because I thought there was a wide field of usefulness open to somebody right there; and I concluded to do all I could to help it along. I understood that they wanted the substance retained as it was, with the language made more as we use language now.

So I began my revision in this way: "Good morning, Moses, I hear that you have some G.o.ds in this country. Do you know anything about it?"

"Oh, yes, I'm the head G.o.d's head man." "You are?"

"Yes, I had a talk with the head G.o.d--the top one of the three (we are down to three here now), and he told me to tell people what a good G.o.d he is, and that they must all praise him up for it."

"He did! Well is that all he said?"

"Oh, no, he told me to tell them that he is the only G.o.d, and is the kind father of all, and loves all alike, and that they must all just trust in him and he will take good care of them."

"I thought you said a while ago that there were three of these G.o.ds; now this one says he is the only one. Is there trouble in the cabinet?"

"No, there are three, but there is one. See?"

"Well, no, I can't say that I do. But no matter, the rest of that about the father business was pretty good. That was the best I ever heard. But do you know that the very last man I talked with said that this G.o.d was partial to some folks and treated some others pretty shabbily."