The church has changed; and instead of trying to prove that modern astronomy and geology are false, because they do not agree with Moses, it is now endeavoring to prove that the account by Moses is true, because it agrees with modern astronomy and geology. In other words, the standard has changed; the ancient is measured by the modern, and where the literal statement in the Bible does not agree with modern discoveries, they do not change the discoveries, but give new meanings to the old account. We are not now endeavoring to reconcile science with the Bible, but to reconcile the Bible with science.
Nothing shows the extent of modern doubt more than the eagerness with which Christians search for some new testimony. Luther answered Copernicus with a passage of Scripture, and he answered him to the satisfaction of orthodox ignorance.
The truth is that the Jews adopted the stories of Creation, the Garden of Eden, Forbidden Fruit, and the Fall of Man. They were told by older barbarians than they, and the Jews gave them to us.
I never said that the Bible is all bad. I have always admitted that there are many good and splendid things in the Jewish Scriptures, and many bad things. What I insist is that we should have the courage and the common sense to accept the good, and throw away the bad. Evil is not good because found in good company, and truth is still truth, even when surrounded by falsehood.
_Question_. I see that you are frequently charged with disrespect toward your parents--with lack of reverence for the opinions of your father?
_Answer_. I think my father and mother upon several religious questions were mistaken. In fact, I have no doubt that they were; but I never felt under the slightest obligation to defend my father's mistakes. No one can defend what he thinks is a mistake, without being dishonest. That is a poor way to show respect for parents.
Every Protestant clergyman asks men and women who had Catholic parents to desert the church in which they were raised. They have no hesitation in saying to these people that their fathers and mothers were mistaken, and that they were deceived by priests and popes.
The probability is that we are all mistaken about almost everything; but it is impossible for a man to be respectable enough to make a mistake respectable. There is nothing remarkably holy in a blunder, or praiseworthy in stubbing the toe of the mind against a mistake.
Is it possible that logic stands paralyzed in the presence of paternal absurdity? Suppose a man has a bad father; is he bound by the bad father's opinion, when he is satisfied that the opinion is wrong? How good does a father have to be, in order to put his son under obligation to defend his blunders? Suppose the father thinks one way, and the mother the other; what are the children to do? Suppose the father changes his opinion; what then? Suppose the father thinks one way and the mother the other, and they both die when the boy is young; and the boy is bound out; whose mistakes is he then bound to follow? Our missionaries tell the barbarian boy that his parents are mistaken, that they know nothing, and that the wooden god is nothing but a senseless idol. They do not hesitate to tell this boy that his mother believed lies, and hugged, it may be to her dying heart, a miserable delusion. Why should a barbarian boy cast reproach upon his parents?
I believe it was Christ who commanded his disciples to leave father and mother; not only to leave them, but to desert them; and not only to desert father and mother, but to desert wives and children.
It is also told of Christ that he said that he came to set fathers against children and children against fathers. Strange that a follower of his should object to a man differing in opinion from his parents! The truth is, logic knows nothing of consanguinity; facts have no relatives but other facts; and these facts do not depend upon the character of the person who states them, or upon the position of the discoverer. And this leads me to another branch of the same subject.
The ministers are continually saying that certain great men--kings, presidents, statesmen, millionaires--have believed in the inspiration of the Bible. Only the other day, I read a sermon in which Carlyle was quoted as having said that "the Bible is a noble book." That all may be and yet the book not be inspired. But what is the simple assertion of Thomas Carlyle worth? If the assertion is based upon a reason, then it is worth simply the value of the reason, and the reason is worth just as much without the assertion, but without the reason the assertion is worthless. Thomas Carlyle thought, and solemnly put the thought in print, that his father was a greater man than Robert Burns. His opinion did Burns no harm, and his father no good. Since reading his "Reminiscences," I have no great opinion of his opinion. In some respects he was undoubtedly a great man, in others a small one.
No man should give the opinion of another as authority and in place of fact and reason, unless he is willing to take all the opinions of that man. An opinion is worth the warp and woof of fact and logic in it and no more. A man cannot add to the truthfulness of truth. In the ordinary business of life, we give certain weight to the opinion of specialists--to the opinion of doctors, lawyers, scientists, and historians. Within the domain of the natural, we take the opinions of our fellow-men; but we do not feel that we are absolutely bound by these opinions. We have the right to re- examine them, and if we find they are wrong we feel at liberty to say so. A doctor is supposed to have studied medicine; to have examined and explored the questions entering into his profession; but we know that doctors are often mistaken. We also know that there are many schools of medicine; that these schools disagree with one another, and that the doctors of each school disagree with one another. We also know that many patients die, and so far as we know, these patients have not come back to tell us whether the doctors killed them or not. The grave generally prevents a demonstration. It is exactly the same with the clergy. They have many schools of theology, all despising each other. Probably no two members of the same church exactly agree. They cannot demonstrate their propositions, because between the premise and the logical conclusion or demonstration, stands the tomb. A gravestone marks the end of theology. In some cases, the physician can, by a post- mortem examination, find what killed the patient, but there is no theological post-mortem. It is impossible, by cutting a body open, to find where the soul has gone; or whether baptism, or the lack of it, had the slightest effect upon final destiny. The church, knowing that there are no facts beyond the coffin, relies upon opinions, assertions and theories. For this reason it is always asking alms of distinguished people. Some President wishes to be re-elected, and thereupon speaks about the Bible as "the corner- stone of American Liberty." This sentence is a mouth large enough to swallow any church, and from that time forward the religious people will be citing that remark of the politician to substantiate the inspiration of the Scriptures.
The man who accepts opinions because they have been entertained by distinguished people, is a mental snob. When we blindly follow authority we are serfs. When our reason is convinced we are freemen.
It is rare to find a fully rounded and complete man. A man may be a great doctor and a poor mechanic, a successful politician and a poor metaphysician, a poor painter and a good poet.
The rarest thing in the world is a logician--that is to say, a man who knows the value of a fact. It is hard to find mental proportion.
Theories may be established by names, but facts cannot be demonstrated in that way. Very small people are sometimes right, and very great people are sometimes wrong. Ministers are sometimes right.
In all the philosophies of the world there are undoubtedly contradictions and absurdities. The mind of man is imperfect and perfect results are impossible. A mirror, in order to reflect a perfect picture, a perfect copy, must itself be perfect. The mind is a little piece of intellectual glass the surface of which is not true, not perfect. In consequence of this, every image is more or less distorted. The less we know, the more we imagine that we can know; but the more we know, the smaller seems the sum of knowledge. The less we know, the more we expect, the more we hope for, and the more seems within the range of probability. The less we have, the more we want. There never was a banquet magnificent enough to gratify the imagination of a beggar. The moment people begin to reason about what they call the supernatural, they seem to lose their minds. People seem to have lost their reason in religious matters, very much as the dodo is said to have lost its wings; they have been restricted to a little inspired island, and by disuse their reason has been lost.
In the Jewish Scriptures you will find simply the literature of the Jews. You will find there the tears and anguish of captivity, patriotic fervor, national aspiration, proverbs for the conduct of daily life, laws, regulations, customs, legends, philosophy and folly. These books, of course, were not written by one man, but by many authors. They do not agree, having been written in different centuries, under different circumstances. I see that Mr. Beecher has at last concluded that the Old Testament does not teach the doctrine of immortality. He admits that from Mount Sinai came no hope for the dead. It is very curious that we find in the Old Testament no funeral service. No one stands by the dead and predicts another life. In the Old Testament there is no promise of another world. I have sometimes thought that while the Jews were slaves in Egypt, the doctrine of immortality became hateful. They built so many tombs; they carried so many burdens to commemorate the dead; the saw a nation waste its wealth to adorn its graves, and leave the living naked to embalm the dead, that they concluded the doctrine was a curse and never should be taught.
_Question_. If the Jews did not believe in immortality, how do you account for the allusions made to witches and wizards and things of that nature?
_Answer_. When Saul visited the Witch of Endor, and she, by some magic spell, called up Samuel, the prophet said: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to call me up?" He did not say: Why have you called me from another world? The idea expressed is: I was asleep, why did you disturb that repose which should be eternal? The ancient Jews believed in witches and wizards and familiar spirits; but they did not seem to think that these spirits had once been men and women. They spoke to them as belonging to another world, a world to which man would never find his way. At that time it was supposed that Jehovah and his angels lived in the sky, but that region was not spoken of as the destined home of man. Jacob saw angels going up and down the ladder, but not the spirits of those he had known.
There are two cases where it seems that men were good enough to be adopted into the family of heaven. Enoch was translated, and Elijah was taken up in a chariot of fire. As it is exceedingly cold at the height of a few miles, it is easy to see why the chariot was of fire, and the same fact explains another circumstance--the dropping of the mantle. The Jews probably believed in the existence of other beings--that is to say, in angels and gods and evil spirits --and that they lived in other worlds--but there is no passage showing that they believed in what we call the immortality of the soul.
_Question_. Do you believe, or disbelieve, in the immortality of the soul?
_Answer_. I neither assert nor deny; I simply admit that I do not know. Upon that subject I am absolutely without evidence. This is the only world that I was ever in. There may be spirits, but I have never met them, and do not know that I would recognize a spirit. I can form no conception of what is called spiritual life.
It may be that I am deficient in imagination, and that ministers have no difficulty in conceiving of angels and disembodied souls.
I have not the slightest idea how a soul looks, what shape it is, how it goes from one place to another, whether it walks or flies.
I cannot conceive of the immaterial having form; neither can I conceive of anything existing without form, and yet the fact that I cannot conceive of a thing does not prove that the thing does not exist, but it does prove that I know nothing about it, and that being so, I ought to admit my ignorance. I am satisfied of a good many things that I do not know. I am satisfied that there is no place of eternal torment. I am satisfied that that doctrine has done more harm than all the religious ideas, other than that, have done good. I do not want to take any hope from any human heart.
I have no objection to people believing in any good thing--no objection to their expecting a crown of infinite joy for every human being. Many people imagine that immortality must be an infinite good; but, after all, there is something terrible in the idea of endless life. Think of a river that never reaches the sea; of a bird that never folds its wings; of a journey that never ends.
Most people find great pleasure in thinking about and in believing in another world. There the prisoner expects to be free; the slave to find liberty; the poor man expects wealth; the rich man happiness; the peasant dreams of power, and the king of contentment. They expect to find there what they lack here. I do not wish to destroy these dreams. I am endeavoring to put out the everlasting fires.
A good, cool grave is infinitely better than the fiery furnace of Jehovah's wrath. Eternal sleep is better than eternal pain. For my part I would rather be annihilated than to be an angel, with all the privileges of heaven, and yet have within my breast a heart that could be happy while those who had loved me in this world were in perdition.
I most sincerely hope that the future life will fulfill all splendid dreams; but in the religion of the present day there is no joy.
Nothing is so devoid of comfort, when bending above our dead, as the assertions of theology unsupported by a single fact. The promises are so far away, and the dead are so near. From words spoken eighteen centuries ago, the echoes are so weak, and the sounds of the clods on the coffin are so loud. Above the grave what can the honest minister say? If the dead were not a Christian, what then? What comfort can the orthodox clergyman give to the widow of an honest unbeliever? If Christianity is true, the other world will be worse than this. There the many will be miserable, only the few happy; there the miserable cannot better their condition; the future has no star of hope, and in the east of eternity there can never be a dawn.
_Question_. If you take away the idea of eternal punishment, how do you propose to restrain men; in what way will you influence conduct for good?
_Answer_. Well, the trouble with religion is that it postpones punishment and reward to another world. Wrong is wrong, because it breeds unhappiness. Right is right, because it tends to the happiness of man. These facts are the basis of what I call the religion of this world. When a man does wrong, the consequences follow, and between the cause and effect, a Redeemer cannot step.
Forgiveness cannot form a breastwork between act and consequence.
There should be a religion of the body--a religion that will prevent deformity, that will refuse to multiply insanity, that will not propagate disease--a religion that is judged by its consequences in this world. Orthodox Christianity has taught, and still teaches, that in this world the difference between the good and the bad is that the bad enjoy themselves, while the good carry the cross of virtue with bleeding brows bound and pierced with the thorns of honesty and kindness. All this, in my judgment, is immoral. The man who does wrong carries a cross. There is no world, no star, in which the result of wrong is real happiness. There is no world, no star, in which the result of doing right is unhappiness. Virtue and vice must be the same everywhere.
Vice must be vice everywhere, because its consequences are evil; and virtue must be virtue everywhere, because its consequences are good. There can be no such thing as forgiveness. These facts are the only restraining influences possible--the innocent man cannot suffer for the guilty and satisfy the law.
_Question_. How do you answer the argument, or the fact, that the church is constantly increasing, and that there are now four hundred millions of Christians?
_Answer_. That is what I call the argument of numbers. If that argument is good now, it was always good. If Christians were at any time in the minority, then, according to this argument, Christianity was wrong. Every religion that has succeeded has appealed to the argument of numbers. There was a time when Buddhism was in a majority. Buddha not only had, but has more followers then Christ. Success is not a demonstration. Mohammed was a success, and a success from the commencement. Upon a thousand fields he was victor. Of the scattered tribes of the desert, he made a nation, and this nation took the fairest part of Europe from the followers of the cross. In the history of the world, the success of Mohammed is unparalleled, but this success does not establish that he was the prophet of God.
Now, it is claimed that there are some four hundred millions of Christians. To make that total I am counted as a Christian; I am one of the fifty or sixty millions of Christians in the United States--excluding Indians, not taxed. By this census report, we are all going to heaven--we are all orthodox. At the last great day we can refer with confidence to the ponderous volumes containing the statistics of the United States. As a matter of fact, how many Christians are there in the United States--how many believers in the inspiration of the Scriptures--how many real followers of Christ? I will not pretend to give the number, but I will venture to say that there are not fifty millions. How many in England?
Where are the four hundred millions found? To make this immense number, they have counted all the Heretics, all the Catholics, all the Jews, Spiritualists, Universalists and Unitarians, all the babes, all the idiotic and insane, all the Infidels, all the scientists, all the unbelievers. As a matter of fact, they have no right to count any except the orthodox members of the orthodox churches. There may be more "members" now than formerly, and this increase of members is due to a decrease of religion. Thousands of members are only nominal Christians, wearing the old uniform simply because they do not wish to be charged with desertion. The church, too, is a kind of social institution, a club with a creed instead of by-laws, and the creed is never defended unless attacked by an outsider. No objection is made to the minister because he is liberal, if he says nothing about it in his pulpit. A man like Mr. Beecher draws a congregation, not because he is a Christian, but because he is a genius; not because he is orthodox, but because he has something to say. He is an intellectual athlete. He is full of pathos and poetry. He has more description than divinity; more charity than creed, and altogether more common sense than theology. For these reasons thousands of people love to hear him.
On the other hand, there are many people who have a morbid desire for the abnormal--for intellectual deformities--for thoughts that have two heads. This accounts for the success of some of Mr.
Beecher's rivals.
Christians claim that success is a test of truth. Has any church succeeded as well as the Catholic? Was the tragedy of the Garden of Eden a success? Who succeeded there? The last best thought is not a success, if you mean that only that is a success which has succeeded, and if you mean by succeeding, that it has won the assent of the majority. Besides there is no time fixed for the test. Is that true which succeeds to-day, or next year, or in the next century? Once the Copernican system was not a success. There is no time fixed. The result is that we have to wait. A thing to exist at all has to be, to a certain extent, a success. A thing cannot even die without having been a success. It certainly succeeded enough to have life. Presbyterians should remember, while arguing the majority argument, and the success argument, that there are far more Catholics than Protestants, and that the Catholics can give a longer list of distinguished names.
My answer to all this, however, is that the history of the world shows that ignorance has always been in the majority. There is one right road; numberless paths that are wrong. Truth is one; error is many. When a great truth has been discovered, one man has pitted himself against the world. A few think; the many believe.
The few lead; the many follow. The light of the new day, as it looks over the window sill of the east, falls at first on only one forehead.
There is another thing. A great many people pass for Christians who are not. Only a little while ago a couple of ladies were returning from church in a carriage. They had listened to a good orthodox sermon. One said to the other: "I am going to tell you something--I am going to shock you--I do not believe in the Bible."
And the other replied: "Neither do I."
--_The News_, Detroit, Michigan, January 6, 1884.
POLITICS, MORMONISM AND MR. BEECHER
_Question_. What will be the main issues in the next presidential campaign?
_Answer_. I think that the principal issues will be civil rights and protection for American industries. The Democratic party is not a unit on the tariff question--neither is the Republican; but I think that a majority of the Democrats are in favor of free trade and a majority of Republicans in favor of a protective tariff.
The Democratic Congressmen will talk just enough about free trade to frighten the manufacturing interests of the country, and probably not quite enough to satisfy the free traders. The result will be that the Democrats will talk about reforming the tariff, but will do nothing but talk. I think the tariff ought to be reformed in many particulars; but as long as we need to raise a great revenue my idea is that it ought to be so arranged as to protect to the utmost, without producing monopoly in American manufacturers. I am in favor of protection because it multiplies industries; and I am in favor of a great number of industries because they develop the brain, because they give employment to all and allow us to utilize all the muscle and all the sense we have. If we were all farmers we would grow stupid. If we all worked at one kind of mechanic art we would grow dull. But with a variety of industries, with a constant premium upon ingenuity, with the promise of wealth as the reward of success in any direction, the people become intelligent, and while we are protecting our industries we develop our brains. So I am in favor of the protection of civil rights by the Federal Government, and that, in my judgment, will be one of the great issues in the next campaign.
_Question_. I see that you say that one of the great issues in the coming campaign will be civil rights; what do you mean by that?
_Answer_. Well, I mean this. The Supreme Court has recently decided that a colored man whose rights are trampled upon, in a State, cannot appeal to the Federal Government for protection.
The decision amounts to this: That Congress has no right until a State has acted, and has acted contrary to the Constitution. Now, if a State refuses to do anything upon the subject, what is the citizen to do? My opinion is that the Government is bound to protect its citizens, and as a consideration for this protection, the citizen is bound to stand by the Government. When the nation calls for troops, the citizen of each State is bound to respond, no matter what his State may think. This doctrine must be maintained, or the United States ceases to be a nation. If a man looks to his State for protection, then he must go with his State. My doctrine is, that there should be patriotism upon the one hand, and protection upon the other. If a State endeavors to secede from the Union, a citizen of that State should be in a position to defy the State and appeal to the Nation for protection. The doctrine now is, that the General Government turns the citizen over to the State for protection, and if the State does not protect him, that is his misfortune; and the consequence of this doctrine will be to build up the old heresy of State Sovereignty--a doctrine that was never appealed to except in the interest of thieving or robbery. That doctrine was first appealed to when the Constitution was formed, because they were afraid the National Government would interfere with the slave trade. It was next appealed to, to uphold the Fugitive Slave Law. It was next appealed to, to give the territories of the United States to slavery. Then it was appealed to, to support rebellion, and now out of this doctrine they attempt to build a breastwork, behind which they can trample upon the rights of free colored men.
I believe in the sovereignty of the Nation. A nation that cannot protect its citizens ought to stop playing nation. In the old times the Supreme Court found no difficulty in supporting slavery by "inference," by "intendment," but now that liberty has become national, the Court is driven to less than a literal interpretation.
If the Constitution does not support liberty, it is of no use. To maintain liberty is the only legitimate object of human government.
I hope the time will come when the judges of the Supreme Court will be elected, say for a period of ten years. I do not believe in the legal monk system. I believe in judges still maintaining an interest in human affairs.
_Question_. What do you think of the Mormon question?