It is, however, still insisted that the Bible is inspired in its morality. Let us examine this question.
We must admit, if we know anything, if we feel anything, if conscience is more than a word, if there is such a thing as right and such a thing as wrong beneath the dome of heaven--we must admit that slavery is immoral. If we are honest, we must also admit that the Old Testament upholds slavery. It will be cheerfully admitted that Jehovah was opposed to the enslavement of one Hebrew by another. Christians may quote the commandment "Thou shalt not steal" as being opposed to human slavery, but after that commandment was given, Jehovah himself told his chosen people that they might "buy their bondmen and bondwomen of the heathen round about, and that they should be their bondmen and their bondwomen forever." So all that Jehovah meant by the commandment "Thou shalt not steal" was that one Hebrew should not steal from another Hebrew, but that all Hebrews might steal from the people of any other race or creed.
It is perfectly apparent that the Ten Commandments were made only for the Jews, not for the world, because the author of these commandments commanded the people to whom they were given to violate them nearly all as against the surrounding people.
A few years ago it did not occur to the Christian world that slavery was wrong. It was upheld by the church. Ministers bought and sold the very people for whom they declared that Christ had died. Clergymen of the English church owned stock in slave-ships, and the man who denounced slavery was regarded as the enemy of morality, and thereupon was duly mobbed by the followers of Jesus Christ. Churches were built with the results of labor stolen from colored Christians. Babes were sold from mothers and a part of the money given to send missionaries from America to heathen lands with the tidings of great joy. Now every intelligent man on the earth, every decent man, holds in abhorrence the institution of human slavery.
So with the institution of polygamy. If anything on the earth is immoral, that is. If there is anything calculated to destroy home, to do away with human love, to blot out the idea of family life, to cover the hearthstone with serpents, it is the institution of polygamy. The Jehovah of the Old Testament was a believer in that institution.
Can we now say that the Bible is inspired in its morality? Consider for a moment the manner in which, under the direction of Jehovah, wars were waged. Remember the atrocities that were committed. Think of a war where everything was the food of the sword. Think for a moment of a deity capable of committing the crimes that are described and gloated over in the Old Testament. The civilized man has outgrown the sacred cruelties and absurdities.
There is still another side to this question.
A few centuries ago nothing was more natural than the unnatural.
Miracles were as plentiful as actual events. In those blessed days, that which actually occurred was not regarded of sufficient importance to be recorded. A religion without miracles would have excited derision.
A creed that did not fill the horizon--that did not account for everything--that could not answer every question, would have been regarded as worthless.
After the birth of Protestantism, it could not be admitted by the leaders of the Reformation that the Catholic Church still had the power of working miracles. If the Catholic Church was still in partnership with God, what excuse could have been made for the Reformation? The Protestants took the ground that the age of miracles had passed.
This was to justify the new faith. But Protestants could not say that miracles had never been performed, because that would take the foundation not only from the Catholics but from themselves; consequently they were compelled to admit that miracles were performed in the apostolic days, but to insist that, in their time, man must rely upon the facts in nature. Protestants were compelled to carry on two kinds of war; they had to contend with those who insisted that miracles had never been performed; and in that argument they were forced to insist upon the necessity for miracles, on the probability that they were performed, and upon the truthfulness of the apostles. A moment afterward, they had to answer those who contended that miracles were performed at that time; then they brought forward against the Catholics the same arguments that their first opponents had brought against them.
This has made every Protestant brain "a house divided against itself."
This planted in the Reformation the "irrepressible conflict."
But we have learned more and more about what we call Nature--about what we call facts. Slowly it dawned upon the mind that force is indestructible--that we cannot imagine force as existing apart from matter--that we cannot even think of matter existing apart from force--that we cannot by any possibility conceive of a cause without an effect, of an effect without a cause, of an effect that is not also a cause. We find no room between the links of cause and effect for a miracle. We now perceive that a miracle must be outside of Nature--that it can have no father, no mother--that is to say, that it is an impossibility.
The intellectual world has abandoned the miraculous.
Most ministers are now ashamed to defend a miracle. Some try to explain miracles, and yet, if a miracle is explained, it ceases to exist. Few congregations could keep from smiling were the minister to seriously assert the truth of the Old Testament miracles.
Miracles must be given up. That field must be abandoned by the religious world. The evidence accumulates every day, in every possible direction in which the human mind can investigate, that the miraculous is simply the impossible.
Confidence in the eternal constancy of Nature increases day by day. The scientist has perfect confidence in the attraction of gravitation--in chemical affinities--in the great fact of evolution, and feels absolutely certain that the nature of things will remain forever the same.
We have at last ascertained that miracles can be perfectly understood; that there is nothing mysterious about them; that they are simply transparent falsehoods.
The real miracles are the facts in nature. No one can explain the attraction of gravitation. No one knows why soil and rain and light become the womb of life. No one knows why grass grows, why water runs, or why the magnetic needle points to the north. The facts in nature are the eternal and the only mysteries. There is nothing strange about the miracles of superstition. They are nothing but the mistakes of ignorance and fear, or falsehoods framed by those who wished to live on the labor of others.
In our time the champions of Christianity, for the most part, take the exact ground occupied by the Deists. They dare not defend in the open field the mistakes, the cruelties, the immoralities and the absurdities of the Bible. They shun the Garden of Eden as though the serpent was still there. They have nothing to say about the fall of man. They are silent as to the laws upholding slavery and polygamy. They are ashamed to defend the miraculous. They talk about these things to Sunday schools and to the elderly members of their congregations; but when doing battle for the faith, they misstate the position of their opponents and then insist that there must be a God, and that the soul is immortal.
We may admit the existence of an infinite Being; we may admit the immortality of the soul, and yet deny the inspiration of the Scriptures and the divine origin of the Christian religion. These doctrines, or these dogmas, have nothing in common. The pagan world believed in God and taught the dogma of immortality. These ideas are far older than Christianity, and they have been almost universal.
Christianity asserts more than this. It is based upon the inspiration of the Bible, on the fall of man, on the atonement, on the dogma of the Trinity, on the divinity of Jesus Christ, on his resurrection from the dead, on his ascension into heaven.
Christianity teaches not simply the immortality of the soul--not simply the immortality of joy--but it teaches the immortality of pain, the eternity of sorrow. It insists that evil, that wickedness, that immorality and that every form of vice are and must be perpetuated forever. It believes in immortal convicts, in eternal imprisonment and in a world of unending pain. It has a serpent for every breast and a curse for nearly every soul. This doctrine is called the dearest hope of the human heart, and he who attacks it is denounced as the most infamous of men.
Let us see what the church, within a few years, has been compelled substantially to abandon,--that is to say, what it is now almost ashamed to defend.
First, the astronomy of the sacred Scriptures; second, the geology; third, the account given of the origin of man; fourth, the doctrine of original sin, the fall of the human race; fifth, the mathematical contradiction known as the Trinity; sixth, the atonement--because it was only on the ground that man is accountable for the sin of another, that he could be justified by reason of the righteousness of another; seventh, that the miraculous is either the misunderstood or the impossible; eighth, that the Bible is not inspired in its morality, for the reason that slavery is not moral, that polygamy is not good, that wars of extermination are not merciful, and that nothing can be more immoral than to punish the innocent on account of the sins of the guilty; and ninth, the divinity of Christ.
All this must be given up by the really intelligent, by those not afraid to think, by those who have the courage of their convictions and the candor to express their thoughts. What then is left?
Let me tell you. Everything in the Bible that is true, is left; it still remains and is still of value. It cannot be said too often that the truth needs no inspiration; neither can it be said too often that inspiration cannot help falsehood. Every good and noble sentiment uttered in the Bible is still good and noble. Every fact remains. All that is good in the Sermon on the Mount is retained. The Lord's Prayer is not affected. The grandeur of self-denial, the nobility of forgiveness, and the ineffable splendor of mercy are with us still. And besides, there remains the great hope for all the human race.
What is lost? All the mistakes, all the falsehoods, all the absurdities, all the cruelties and all the curses contained in the Scriptures.
We have almost lost the "hope" of eternal pain--the "consolation" of perdition; and in time we shall lose the frightful shadow that has fallen upon so many hearts, that has darkened so many lives.
The great trouble for many years has been, and still is, that the clergy are not quite candid. They are disposed to defend the old creed.
They have been educated in the universities of the Sacred Mistake--universities that Bruno would call "the widows of true learning." They have been taught to measure with a false standard; they have weighed with inaccurate scales. In youth, they became convinced of the truth of the creed. This was impressed upon them by the solemnity of professors who spoke in tones of awe. The enthusiasm of life's morning was misdirected. They went out into the world knowing nothing of value.
They preached a creed outgrown. Having been for so many years entirely certain of their position, they met doubt with a spirit of irritation--afterward with hatred. They are hardly courageous enough to admit that they are wrong.
Once the pulpit was the leader--it spoke with authority. By its side was the sword of the state, with the hilt toward its hand. Now it is apologized for--it carries a weight. It is now like a living man to whom has been chained a corpse. It cannot defend the old, and it has not accepted the new. In some strange way it imagines that morality cannot live except in partnership with the sanctified follies and falsehoods of the past.
The old creeds cannot be defended by argument. They are not within the circumference of reason--they are not embraced in any of the facts within the experience of man. All the subterfuges have been exposed; all the excuses have been shown to be shallow, and at last the church must meet, and fairly meet, the objections of our time.
Solemnity is no longer an argument. Falsehood is no longer sacred.
People are not willing to admit that mistakes are divine. Truth is more important than belief--far better than creeds, vastly more useful than superstitions. The church must accept the truths of the present, must admit the demonstrations of science, or take its place in the mental museums with the fossils and monstrosities of the past.
The time for personalities has passed; these questions cannot be determined by ascertaining the character of the disputants; epithets are no longer regarded as arguments; the curse of the church produces laughter; theological slander is no longer a weapon; argument must be answered with argument, and the church must appeal to reason, and by that standard it must stand or fall. The theories and discoveries of Darwin cannot be answered by the resolutions of synods, or by quotations from the Old Testament.
The world has advanced. The Bible has remained the same. We must go back to the book--it cannot come to us--or we must leave it forever. In order to remain orthodox we must forget the discoveries, the inventions, the intellectual efforts of many centuries; we must go back until our knowledge--or rather our ignorance--will harmonize with the barbaric creeds.
It is not pretended that all the creeds have not been naturally produced. It is admitted that under the same circumstances the same religions would again ensnare the human race. It is also admitted that under the same circumstances the same efforts would be made by the great and intellectual of every age to break the chains of superstition.
There is no necessity of attacking people--we should combat error.
We should hate hypocrisy, but not the hypocrite--larceny, but not the thief--superstition, but not its victim. We should do all within our power to inform, to educate, and to benefit our fellow-men.
There is no elevating power in hatred. There is no reformation in punishment. The soul grows greater and grander in the air of kindness, in the sunlight of intelligence.
We must rely upon the evidence of our senses, upon the conclusions of our reason.
For many centuries the church has insisted that man is totally depraved, that he is naturally wicked, that all of his natural desires are contrary to the will of God. Only a few years ago it was solemnly asserted that our senses were originally honest, true and faithful, but having been debauched by original sin, were now cheats and liars; that they constantly deceived and misled the soul; that they were traps and snares; that no man could be safe who relied upon his senses, or upon his reason;--he must simply rely upon faith; in other words, that the only way for man to really see was to put out his eyes.
There has been a rapid improvement in the intellectual world. The improvement has been slow in the realm of religion, for the reason that religion was hedged about, defended and barricaded by fear, by prejudice and by law. It was considered sacred. It was illegal to call its truth in question. Whoever disputed the priest became a criminal; whoever demanded a reason, or an explanation, became a blasphemer, a scoffer, a moral leper.
The church defended its mistakes by every means within its power.
But in spite of all this there has been advancement, and there are enough of the orthodox clergy left to make it possible for us to measure the distance that has been traveled by sensible people.
The world is beginning to see that a minister should be a teacher, and that "he should not endeavor to inculcate a particular system of dogmas, but to prepare his hearers for exercising their own judgments."
As a last resource, the orthodox tell the thoughtful that they are not "spiritual"--that they are "of the earth, earthy"--that they cannot perceive that which is spiritual. They insist that "God is a spirit, and must be worshiped in spirit."
But let me ask, What is it to be spiritual? In order to be really spiritual, must a man sacrifice this world for the sake of another?
Were the selfish hermits, who deserted their wives and children for the miserable purpose of saving their own little souls, spiritual? Were those who put their fellow-men in dungeons, or burned them at the state*
on account of a difference of opinion, all spiritual people? Did John Calvin give evidence of his spirituality by burning Servetus? Were they spiritual people who invented and used instruments of torture--who denied the liberty of thought and expression--who waged wars for the propagation of the faith? Were they spiritual people who insisted that Infinite Love could punish his poor, ignorant children forever? Is it necessary to believe in eternal torment to understand the meaning of the word spiritual? Is it necessary to hate those who disagree with you, and to calumniate those whose argument you cannot answer, in order to be spiritual? Must you hold a demonstrated fact in contempt; must you deny or avoid what you know to be true, in order to substantiate the fact that you are spiritual?
What is it to be spiritual? Is the man spiritual who searches for the truth--who lives in accordance with his highest ideal--who loves his wife and children--who discharges his obligations--who makes a happy fireside for the ones he loves--who succors the oppressed--who gives his honest opinions--who is guided by principle--who is merciful and just?
Is the man spiritual who loves the beautiful--who is thrilled by music, and touched to tears in the presence of the sublime, the heroic and the self-denying? Is the man spiritual who endeavors by thought and deed to ennoble the human race?