THE
COMING RELIGION.
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OUR "friends the enemy" cheerily assure us that
certain things are settled once for all in favour of Historical Christianity,
and any further kicking against the fact is all in vain. If you show them that
the Mosaic Writings do not contain an original revelation to mankind, but are a
Mosaic of Persian and Egyptian mythology, that the foundations of their creed
are destroyed if the Fall of Man is a fable, they will tell you that does not in
the least invalidate the authority of the Bible, nor imperil the Christian
revelation. Oh, no! The Church has never committed itself to any particular
interpretation. Let us throw up the sponge and continue the battle. Some of the
Apologists (as they call themselves, without meaning it ironically) pretend to
think they are so secure that they can denounce any discussion of the Mosaic
legends as intolerably tiresome. They affect to consider the matter past
discussion. But those same "certain things" were never more uncertain
or unsettled than at the present time; and when they do get settled the
occupation of those who preach them as God's truth to-day will be gone forever!
If they have closed the controversy, we have just begun to open it! We
have not done with the note of interrogation yet. If they have made and tied up
their little bundle of old dried sticks, ours are beginning to grow, and put
forth a new leaf; ours are yet green and lusty with the sap of a new life.
2. These people have a vision of their own, and as it was
bequeathed to them they will not part with it, even though they have to close
their eyes to see! They will die in the "good old faith." But that
is what others of us cannot do. We have but just begun to ascertain the meaning
of the good old facts that preceded the good old faith. We are finding out that
names the most hallowed are spurious counterfeits of the ancient gods. We are
learning that the literary fortunes of the Bible were made by Mythology, and
filched from the peoples who have been spoiled as Pagans, and accursed as the
spawn of Satan. There is a spirit within us that wants to see, with our eyes
wide open, and will see, and must tear the bandages and blinkers off the eyes to
see, each for himself, whether the traditional
vision be false or true. Nature gave us eyes to see with; it was men who added
the blinkers. Nature intended us to be led by our own eyes; it was men who
substituted the system of leading by the nose the mass of dough-faced
humanity which church and state have tried so hard and so long to knuckle
and mould for the purpose of leading it by the nose. We have
found out now-a-days that even the horses pull better without than with
the use of blinkers. So ignorant
are many of these men of what is being thought outside their own little world,
they do not even know how the battle is going against them. They are in
possession of a few crumbling out-works, and do not appear to understand that
the enemy is already in the heart of the citadel itself, with the sappers and
miners depositing their mental dynamite; nor care greatly, so long as the
commissariat remains intact, and they can draw the usual rations! for their
attitude is, "deprive us of what you please doctrinally, and resolve all
our mysteries into myth, so long as you do not disestablish and disendow the
Church!" So long as the out-works are standing with them inside they will
not recognise defeat! And orthodox Christianity is mainly built up of out-works
or scaffolding. It is not the scaffolding, however, with which the institution
was built, but one that conceals the true nature of the real building inside. The ordinary worshipper stands outside and mistakes the scaffolding for the real
building, and looks upon it as it rises tier above tier like so many
landing-stages and resting-places on the upward way to heaven. It has been my
aim to penetrate beyond this scaffolding, discover the secrets of the
hiding-place, and contradict the false report concerning the builders. And what
we do find is that the so-called "Revealed Religion" is simply unrevealed
mythology, and that a spurious system of salvation was proffered to those
who would accept the ancient mythology transmogrified into Historic
Christianity, and be bribed into changing their old lamps for new ones!
Orthodox preachers will go on asserting Sunday after Sunday, in the name of God,
any number of things which their hearers do not believe, only they have heard
them repeated so often—past all power of impinging or impugning—until the
sense is too out-wearied to rebel; things which they themselves do not believe,
if they could once afford to question their own souls. The Pall Mall Gazette has
lately asked the question, if you had £100,000 to spare what do you think would
be the greatest charity to give it to? I should like to have replied,
"Pension off a few of those poor slaves of the pulpit, who are forced to
earn their living by preaching what they no longer believe." How little the
orthodox world dreams of the new dawn that is rolling up the sky, glorious with
its promise of the brighter, better day! Nay, it is already flaming through the
cob-webbed windows, and trying to look in at the shut eyes of the sleepers,
which are fast closed, or blinking at the splendour shining on their faces!
They are still dreaming how to roll the world back the other way once
more into the night of the past, even while they are passing, face upwards,
beneath the radiant arch over their heads, alight with the dawn of a day that is
not theirs; blind to the glory of its coming, deaf to the birds that soar and
prophesy in song, senseless to an amazing apparition of the Eternal growing
visibly present in this our world of time! Now and again the sleepers start,
and you hear a troubled moan from those that dream, and know they dream, but are
afraid to wake. And when they do wake they will begin shouting for the
fire-engines to come and put out the flame of dawn, now reddening the sky as
with a conflagration and the end of all things for them.
3. If these men had truly cared for religion instead of their
Anthropomorphic theology, they would not have gnashed their teeth and shaken the
fist at the alleged phenomena of modern Spiritualism, as they have done. They
would have embraced Spiritualism as if it had held out to them the strong right
hand of salvation itself. For just when scientific research is undermining and
exploding the ancient beliefs that have been falsely founded on mythology—just
when the Materialists think they have discovered the great secret of life in
protoplasm, and we are on the verge of finding the mechanical equivalent for
consciousness—just when some are assuming that force comes from the visible
side of phenomena, that mind is but a property of matter, an effect rather than
a cause, and thought is nothing more than a result of molecular motion—just
when the scientific report is that the deeper we dive physically, the farther
off recedes the heart-beat of eternal life, in breaks this revelation from a
world unknown, and, as it was assumed, unknowable. And these alleged phenomena
contain the sole possible, palpable, natural evidence of a future life, that men
have, or ever did have, or ever can have, to go upon. But no! what they care
for are the old wives' fables and the figments which have become their
hereditary stock in trade; the facts may go to the devil, to whom, indeed, they
generally consign them. For, if it be God himself who tries to speak with them
in this way from behind the mask of matter to prove the fact, they say it cannot
be our God. He is dead, and buried in a book. This must be the devil. It is the
devil. They had succeeded in substituting the non-natural for the natural,
making men believe that this sham was the supernatural. They have taught us to
look for God in the wrong way. They have based religion on erroneous grounds. They have made us the victims of false beliefs, and a false belief will make
despicable cowards of men who would otherwise have looked facts in the face, and
been true to themselves and honest to others. They have evolved our respect and
reverence by means of the whip. And now when the stick and scourge, the knout
and whip, have lost their terrors, have done their worst, and had their day, it
is found that religious reverence has vanished also, and the young are becoming
utterly sceptical in most things, before they are old enough to be in earnest
about anything; for which the false teaching is responsible. The young have
been disgusted with the ancient object of reverence, the grim and gory ghost of
an anthropomorphic God.
4. We are constantly hearing complaints respecting the want of
reverence on the part of the young for the old. But if they are old fools, and
"old women" of the wrong sex, why should they be reverenced? It is
said the children of this generation have no reverence for God or man. But if
the reverence was evoked by the stick, and the reign of the stick is over, what
are you going to do? It is of no use complaining, and probably it is too late
to think of getting a new stick.
5. Before condemning, however, let us look a little deeper. Why should we expect reverence for such a God as we have allowed to be set
before the children? Such a God as that of the Hebrews, who cursed all mankind
because one of them, and the first one, ate an apple: a God for whom David was
a man after his own heart; a God who revealed himself to Moses a posteriori.
Reverence for such a deity used to be inspired by hell-fire; and now the
fires of hell are going out—in fact, as Horace Greeley said, there are not
half the people damned now-a-days that ought to be, only we want these to be the
proper sort. What right, what reason have we to expect intellectual reverence
for the parents themselves, who pretend to believe and permit such teachings as
have been imposed on their children? They are most likely to be looked upon as
old fogies, hypocrites, and fools by the younger generation, as it rises up to
sit in judgment on them. Reverence must ultimately depend on the object
presented for reverence. The first necessity is that it shall be a reality and
not a sham, not a swindle, not an imposition to be found out, whether as a
father in heaven, a father in the Church, or a father in the family. Possibly
the pious pretences and the pious pretenders are being found out by the younger
generation. But, the veriest larrikin has no lack of respect for the cricketer
Grace, the sculler Beach, or the fighter Gordon, because these, in their way and
range, are living realities. And if you want to have filial respect or religious
reverence, the object must be a living reality that is worthy of it!
Neither men, nor women, nor children will much longer bow down to false
authority, or believe blindly as they have done hitherto perforce.
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The world is waking from its phantom dreams,
To make out that which is from that which seems. |
6. People now demand the verification of all that is taught as
true. They must see for themselves that which is set forth as the truth. They
must touch it and test it to learn whether it has the ring of reality. The
demand of the present is that that which is asserted by the teacher shall be
verifiable by the learner in every domain of thought, all the range of nature—all
that exists, being ready to supply the means of practical experiment for
attaining the sure foothold of a scientific
basis. It is true that we are still compelled to battle vigorously, and spend
life freely in fighting against the shadows and phantoms of to-day that are
thinning out, and will be seen through to-morrow—compelled to fight them and
to expose their false pretensions, because so many still mistake them for solid
realities. But the people, men and women, aye and little children, will ere long
arise and say to these our purblind spiritual teachers—
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Begone,
you foolish preachers!
Howlers, snufflers, screechers!
You miserable teachers!
You God-of-blood beseechers
You forgers of God's features!
Who make us the devil's creatures;
Shut up, you foolish preachers!
Get out, you hell-fire screechers,
Go home, you played-out preachers! |
and the cry will come in sterner tones,—let the war-drums of the workers roll
out with their battle-thunders now, and drown the gabble of all this foolish,
fruitless war of words.
7. Eighteen centuries since the religion of faith, the "good old faith," began to take the place of knowledge. Its history is one
long and gory record of the battles of Belief versus Knowledge, of Faith at war
with Facts. What is there that men have not found compatible with faith that was
all the while at war with facts? Have they not cut each other's throats,
believing it to be for the glory of God? Have they not burned bodies by the
thousand, believing it to be the sure way of saving souls from hell-fire? Have
they not made the Cross into the hilt of the sword to give them the better
grip-hold of it whilst slaughtering myriads for the faith? Men have believed
that they should find God if they un-sexed themselves, and got sufficiently
removed from humanity, and so have gone out as hermits into the wilderness of monkery—which was like going into pitch darkness on purpose to see your face
in a looking-glass! Men have believed that their God was the natural author of
the diseases and evils which they created and fostered for ages, or permitted,
and are responsible for before God and man to-day. They have believed that in
the field of human souls Satan was the great harvester, and God only the
gleaner.
8. Do but think what Woman has suffered from the belief,—the
foul and foolish calumny,—that she was the cause of the fall of the
human race! She ought never to forgive it. She ought to wake up and work, and
sleep no more, until that lying libel is dead and damned, and the whole system
of false teaching to which it belongs is swept out of the world for ever.
9. Men have believed in a God who was an omnipotent fiend, and
demon quite unknown to the devil-worship of the past—a curse that sat
enthroned amid the universe, breathing horror all abroad, and brooding down in
blackness on the souls of men. And the ascending
smoke of torment was to magnify the features of his monstrous majesty. And if
you were one of the chosen, elected to a front seat in the kingdom of this
dreadful God, the daintiest part of your enjoyment was to be a full and perfect
view of the poor tortured souls, including those of your own wee babes, a span
long—the mites and midgets of hell. The inspired Mr. Spurgeon will tell you
what a delectable entertainment you may expect, for he says,—"All their
veins are roads for the feet of pain to travel on, and every nerve is a string
on which the devil shall for ever play his diabolical tune of hell's unutterable
lament!" Then, as the song of the ransomed was being sung, word would come
that your father was among the damned, and you would sing all the louder,—or
that several of your little ones were in hell, and your hallelujahs would be
redoubled. And orthodox hearts have been warmed and hands exultingly rubbed over
these pictures in the fire, which have been enjoyed with an infernal relish.
10. Moody, the ranter, tells a story of his God. A poor, foolish,
fond mother, in Illinois, had a little child that was sick and ailing unto
death. When thinking it was dying, she could not bring her rebellious mind to
say "Thy will be done!" she called on God to spare her babe, she
cried to him,—"Oh! God! I cannot give up my little one." And the
Lord heard her prayer, and answered it too! He snatched the child from
death, and gave it back to her—turned into an idiot for life! That was
a smart specimen of the divine derision that is promised in the Bible,—"The Lord shall have ye in derision!" He had her there.
11. Such was the "good old faith!" Under such a creed the
fathers were rendered unfit to beget a race of free and fearless men.
Under such a creed the mother's womb has been turned into a prison-house
of fear and trembling for the embryo that was wrapped and swathed in a
pall of gloom before it was born, and the divine spark of soul almost
extinguished by the maternal deposit of Calvinistic cloud!
12. The Christian scheme, if true, could only lead to eternal
wretchedness all round, torments in heaven far worse than all the miseries of
hell. Who could be selfishly happy in heaven with a knowledge of everlasting
hell? A Hindu commentator on this creed remarks:—"One of their
teachers said to me lately that all my people, about 800,000,000 every fifty
years, must assuredly go to hell; and at the same time placed before me a
picture of their heaven, asking me to 'flee from the wrath to come!' and escape
the horrible vindictiveness of their 'God of Love!'" The profoundest
appeal made by the Christian creed has ever been made to fear. The bogies of the
human childhood have been continued by it and applied to prevent our growing up
into women and men. Fear of eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Fear of hell-fire,
or the flames of earthly martyrdom. It is fear still even when it has dwindled
down to fear of Mrs. Grundy! From first to last the appeal
has always been to fear. Whereas all the fear in the world could never get from
human beings any more than the affection of a dog that licks the hand of its
tyrant at feeding time, when there is no whip to be seen! Religion, for ages,
has been a reign of terror, under the oppression of which it was impossible for
so tender a flower as love to flourish. It did not dare to breathe forth its
natural sweetness to its own maker. The deepest religious sense that myriads
have ever developed all through life has been a mortal dread of death. The
burden of religion in the past has been—"Prepare to die." And this
is preached with damnable iteration to those who have never yet lived, have not
yet begun to live, and do not know how to begin to realise the glorious
possibilities of living. And what is the spiritual result of all this fearful
teaching, according to the good old faith? Is it such a sense of another life,
and a better world that the concerns of this world are dwarfed and rebuked in
its majestic presence? Not at all! The mass of people who are called religious
do not want to believe in a spirit-world, save in the abstract, as a necessary
article in their creed. They are mortally afraid of the other world. Their
foremost feeling is to draw down the blinds against any light breaking in on the
subject from another world. They accept a second-hand belief in it on authority
as a grim necessity! It's best to believe, in case it does exist after all. As
the old woman said—"Ah, Sir! it's best to be polite, for you may go to
the devil." But you must know that a great deal of Belief on the subject is
like that of the Scotch woman who was asked how she felt when the horse ran away
with her cart. She said she "put her trust in Providence till the breechin'
broke, and then she gave up." She relied upon the visible and tangible link
of connection. Her Providence was the breechin'; when that was gone, her faith
collapsed altogether. For eighteen hundred years they have pretended to teach
men how to die. But the first duty of men who have to die is to learn how to
live, so as to leave the world, or something in it, a little better than we
found it. Our future life must be the natural outcome of this; the root of the
whole matter is in this life. The founders of Historic Christianity began
with an utterly false theory of life. They mistook the anti-physical for the
spiritual; the anti-natural for the divine. Life was a disease, and death the
only cure. Worldly blessings were curses in disguise. Belief would work
miracles, and Doubt ensure damnation. Sense was the natural enemy of the soul,
and had to be suppressed. The most beautiful human body was a dungeon of sin and
death in the prison-house of a doomed world. More spirit than common manifested
by the youngster was the very devil in revolt against authority, and had to be
put into manacles; all nature was un-hallowed, all flesh defiled, until they
had pawed it over with priestly rites of regeneration. The Christian scheme of
salvation is a false method of dodging the devil at last. People will no longer
believe in the lying delusion when once they
learn that there is nothing to be got out of it; no good to be gained by it. Its success hitherto has depended on the appeal to selfishness. Next to fear,
the chief appeal has been made to the desire for gain. What are considered to be
the supreme expressions of Christliness in the Gospels too often denote a low
and vulgar type of morality, or they become immoral in their appeal to
selfishness. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the
earth." "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." Blessed are the poor who are content to give up this world, their's is the
promise of felicity forever in the world to come. He that giveth to the poor is
making a safe investment, because he is lending to the Lord. "Be ye good
bankers" is one of the most significant sayings. The appeal is continually
made to the sense of personal gain, none the less selfish because it is applied
to the next world instead of this; on the contrary, it is increased because the
promised gain is to be eternal. You are invited to invest your capital in a bank
above that offers you an eternal interest, and like all bankrupt concerns
deludes the gullible by promising too much profit. Your alms are to be given
secretly, and he that seeth in secret will recompense you. Isn't that calculated
to fix one eye on the reward with a leer of cunning in it, as of knowing a good
thing when you do see it? One almost expects to see an image of the winking
Christ as well as the winking virgin. Such a promise is security for at least a
profit of cent. per cent. as the rate of eternal interest. But we shall
not catch a whale by merely offering a sprat in that way; nor receive a
hundred-fold in heaven for all that we may have consciously given up and forgone
on earth. All that is but a survival of primitive teachings—the doctrines of
the human childhood—an inducement for the individual not to be at war with
society or the Church, no matter what laws of nature may have to be sacrificed
and violated. And the fact remains to be faced that the teaching is not
true.
The meek do not inherit the earth, and are not going to. We are not forgiven
because we are forgiving. Nature does not keep her books of account in that way. Nor are we allowed to cook the accounts in any such fashion. Our false teachers
have been monstrously mistaken. The Lord of all does not carry on the business
of the Universe as an advertised system of Bribes and Fines. We cannot outset on
one line of conduct that which we have done on another. No death of Jesus can
save us from ourselves. It was taught that he came to abrogate certain Jewish
laws, but no Jesus can upset the natural law of development. What we are now is
the result of what we have been, and what we are hereafter will be an evolution
from what we are here. There is no dodging the devil of cause and effect. Belief
can work no cataclysmal change in death for all the false teaching in the world. No blood of the Lamb will wash out one single internal blot; no tear of pity
can make the stained record white. Nothing but life can work any transformation
of character here or hereafter; death does not, cannot do it.
13. All such teaching is entirely false. An old
Scotsman, known to me, used to say, "I like Paul! puir soul, I do like Paul. But I dinna
like Jesus Christ; I canna like Jesus Christ; they are aye casting it in your
teeth that he dee'd for ye; and I dinna want to be dee'd for!" The old
fellow's manhood rose in revolt against this salvation of the savage mind by
means of blood shed in a vicarious atonement. And he was in the right. We do not
want to be died for, and if we did, it would be unavailing. We can no more be
died for for another life than the law will allow us to be died for in this.
14. Men like Jesus, or Jehoshua ben Pandira, the Jewish political
and social reformer, or Bruno, or Garibaldi, or Gordon, or Garfield, are in a
sense Saviours of the world. They set before us an illuminated image of immortal
love. They pull down on themselves, and bear for us, the heavy burden of
martyrdom, because of the wolfish selfishness of the world! But there is no
salvation possible for us out of the mere act of their suffering. The only
salvation is for those who range themselves on the side of these martyrs, and
reformers, and forerunners, against the selfishness of the world, to work and
change the crude conditions of things, which forever demand the sacrifice of the
best and dearest of women and men. When Arnold von Winklereid took the double
armful of the enemies' spears into his own breast, it was to make a way for his
fellow-countrymen to pass on and widen the gap he had made—not for them
to stay behind and pat him on the back, or merely subscribe to erect a statue to
his memory. That the innocent are continually offered up on account of
the besotted selfishness of the many is a fact. That they must continue to be
thus offered up, until the world awakes to see this shameful sacrifice of others
to save its own selfishness, is likewise a fact. But to erect this into a
religious dogma, and call it the divine means of saving men, who wilfully
continue and necessitate the conditions of society which cause and demand the
martyrdom, is about the most immoral and damnable doctrine ever offered to
humanity. Why, this doctrine of atonement is so unmanly, so cowardly, and
currish, that, if put in its naked truth, the lowest rough in Whitechapel, if unperverted by orthodoxy, would be too manly to accept such an immoral mode of
salvation. Any one who would consent to be saved at the expense of another, and
an innocent person, ought only to escape, if at all, because he would not be
worth the damning. Far nobler was the teaching of Captain George W. Pendleton of
the Cleopatra, of Gloucester, Mass. His vessel was doomed and sinking fast, when
the boat put off from the "Lord Gough" with a crew that volunteered
to try and rescue the shipwrecked man. But with salvation in sight the American
captain, by agreement with his men, hauled down his own flag of distress. He
thought the boat could live in such a sea. "I said to my men, shall we let
those brave fellows risk their lives to save ours? and they said 'No.' Then I
hauled down the flag." And so they deliberately elected to die first. That
was the gospel according to George Pendleton! But
this sacrifice of the innocent to save the guilty—of others instead of self—is
the religion of savages; it belongs to the most benighted conditions of the
human race, and as such is doomed to die out of any state of true civilisation. The doom of Historic Christianity is sealed, because it was based upon Dogmas
against which the highest instincts of the race will forever rise in
insurrection, and Doctrines that are certain to be rejected by the growing moral
sense of enfranchised humanity.
15. From what I have learned of the interior operations of natural
law, such selfishness defeats its own end and aim. The only way of helping
oneself is by helping others. The only true way of receiving is by giving. The
fear of being lost never yet saved the soul of any man. Put aside the fable, and
the foolish fraud that has been founded on it, and we are face to face with the
fact that man has no power to lose his own soul or damn himself for all
eternity. If man be immortal by nature, continuity is not based on morality—however
much he may retard development by limiting his life to the lower self, which may
be a hell to think of and struggle out of hereafter. Nor is the hereafter a
heaven provided on purpose to make up for the man-made sufferings to those who
have been deluded and cheated and starved out of their life in this world. If it
were so, then Providence would not only be responsible for all the
mal-arrangement and the misery, through not simply allowing it, but for
permitting it, and providing for it! Whereas we see the wrong is
remediable, the sufferings are unnecessary, and the Christian way out of it is a
misleading cul de sac. It is like some of the squirrel tracks in the
forest with the trail ending up a tree.
16. The orthodox teachings are so false that they have made the
utterance of truth a blasphemy, and all the proclaimers of truth blasphemers!
Oppose their savage theology, and you are denounced as an Atheist. Expose the
folly of their faith, and you are an Infidel all round. Deny their
miracles, and they damn your morals. The Christian Rock, not knowing what to say
against me that was good enough, charged me with having published a
volume of indecent poetry. It was a malicious lie!—a real instance of original
sin. But that was what the ignoramus said—mistaking me, as I
suppose, for Mr. Swinburne. There was something grand in the ancient martyrdom suffered
by the heralds of free thought; whereas the modern reformer has to endure the
prolonged torture and ignominy of being kicked to death by butterflies, or
gnawed to death by gnats. The religion, founded on misunderstood and perverted
mythology, has made everything wrong, and nothing short of an utter reversal,
with all Nature for our guide and on our side, can set us right. Its apotheosis
of sorrow, of suffering and sacrifice is entirely false, because these are on
account of that which, like the "Fall of Man," never really occurred—and
weeping over that which is not real is nothing more
than a waste of water. Nature offers no evidence that man was meant to moan as a
miserable animal. It is true that sorrow and suffering may purge and purify the
life, and add a precious seeing to our sight. That which gives the wound may
deposit the pearl. The iron of a steadfast soul has frequently been forged in
purgatorial fires of pain. The greater the pressure from without, the more has
it evoked and evolved the rebounding spirit from within. But that is because
there is a power which can turn all experience to account if our life be right
in its root-relationship. And human life will always have its full share of
sorrow and suffering. But nothing can be falser than to try and found a religion
on sorrow and suffering, by the representation of this world as destined
to be a vale of tears, which we are bound to grow anxious to get out of as
soon as we recognise that we are in it. No! it is not in sorrow, but in joy, that
we can attain the greatest unconsciousness of self, and live the larger
objective life for others. We learn as we come to a knowledge of joy, that
all sorrow and suffering are but the passing shadows of things mortal, and not
the enduring or eternal reality. When no longer darkened or eclipsed by the
false creed which has benighted our minds and totally obscured so many natural
truths, we can see to the end of these shadows—we can overlook them—in the
larger intellectual light of a truer interpretation of the necessities of
evolution and of the human environment. If nature has one revelation of truth to
make more plainly apparent than another, it is that her creature, man, is
intended for health and happiness here, in this life, and not merely hereafter—on
condition of suffering here! Pleasure is the natural accompaniment of our
creative and productive activities, and the human likeness of life itself is
conceived and imaged in delight. Health, physical or mental, means happiness. And everywhere the pull of the natural forces and elements are on the side of
health, and, therefore, of consequent or premeditated happiness; children of
the blind who never saw, being born to see, and the children of the deaf mutes
being born to talk. That delight in life was intended by means of health and
happiness may likewise be read in the stern punishment administered by nature
for every breach of natural law by which we injure our health and destroy our
happiness; and, lest the personal memory of the fact for one generation
should be too short-lived, the results and effects of the violated law are kept
before us, in some cases from generation to generation, not as gibbets for
mere vengeance, but as sign-posts pointing to the way of reformation. Health is
intended, and happiness is the result. It is the happy who will be moral; not
the miserable. Now, the Christian scheme would make us miserable, in order that
we may be moral here and happy hereafter! Whereas Nature says, be happy here
and now, by learning the laws of health—individual, social, political,
universal; by getting rid of all opposing falsehood, and
establishing the true conditions for evolving health and happiness everywhere
for all.
17. "But," it has actually been urged in reply to me, and in arrest
of judgment, "supposing the Christian Narrative to be entirely mythical, is
not this supreme legend of divinest pity a beautiful and touching story?" Yes, and the more beautiful the deceit, the deeper the delusion. If it were only
a dramatic representation, the plea would apply. But this thing has no meaning
if it is not humanly true. The supreme legend of divine pity! That is pity for
a fallen race on the part of a supposed deity who damned mankind for ever for
the stealing of an apple! Why, our own unpaid magistracy—who are not
over-lenient—would not have made more of it than a matter of fourteen days, or
a month at most. Suppose you do touch the heart of the world upon false
pretences, even to the extent of drawing a tear from John Morley, or getting a
perfumed pastille offered up as a sweet savour in sacrificial smoke by Renan,
where is the gain when once the falsehood is found out? As soon as the
theological Scotsman discovers that his foundations of belief in the fall of
man, in predestination, hell-fire, and eternal damnation are false, he naturally
takes to whisky, and maybe for the rest of his life cannot find a brand that
is quite fiery enough! The illusion of false ideals is always at war with
reality. The Christ of the Gnostics was a true ideal, possible to all men. But
an Historic Christ is a false ideal! Where is the sense of supposing a
God sliding down to earth on a ladder with no steps to it, and then asking us to
walk up minus the foothold? Also, it is in vain we set up an objective ideal
for outer worship of that which can only be a reality within the soul.
18. The god-man of the Gnostics was not a man-god, but the god or
divine nature in man, which represented the spiritual image of the Invisible
God, the formless in our human form; not in our human form of individual
personality as an historical Christ, or Horus, or Buddha. That was but the
symbolical presentment of the matter. The historical realisation was meant for
all men and women, not for one man Jesus, or one female Sophia. We do not want
to be beguiled, or to have our children deceived any longer with the most
beautiful biography of the man in the moon, who came down too soon, and whose
second coming has been looked for so vainly during 1800 years. We are in search
and in need of some truer illumination than moonshine. Having discovered that
these beautiful legends are mythical and non-human, we do not want the little
ones to be misled for life by false teachings before ever they have learned to
think. The illusion of false ideals is the magical glamour with which
Mephistopheles seduces the soul of Faust! A woman who sent to the lending
library for a book that would make her cry, was in search of a false ideal in a
world brimming over with bitter reality. A minister of the gospel had been
telling his little boy a tale that was full of human interest, and the child had
been deeply affected by it, but looking up, with tears
in his eyes, he asked,—"Is that true, papa, or is it only preaching?" Poor child! he had heard so much from the same source that he had
looked upon it as being not necessarily true, but "only preaching!" That child's position is ours. By all we know, the story is untrue. And we have
done for ever with the old wives' fables and romances of mythology as a
foundation for religion. We have done with a "Word of God" that is in
fatal opposition to his Truth as manifested in Nature! We have done with the
very God himself who, when traced to his origin, is found to be chief one of the
seven devils or elementals of mythology; and who is quite worthy of that origin
in many aspects of his character. We have lost the power to make believe and
deceive ourselves further in this matter! It cannot be too often repeated that
the foundations of the Christian faith were laid in falsehood and ignorance. The
Fall of man in the beginning was not a fact, and consequently there could
be no curse. It is but a fable misinterpreted; and the redemption of the
New Testament is based upon a fable in the Old. There is no virtue nor
efficacy in a vicarious atonement, and no priesthood ever had or will have the
power to forgive sin, to break the sequence between cause and effect, or to
evade the Nemesis of Natural law. When the great delusion comes to an end its
true epitaph would be,—"This was a fraud founded on a fable." Meanwhile, the Church that continues to put forth this scheme of salvation and
impose it on the public at the expense of the nation (some eight or ten millions
annually!) ought not only to be disestablished and disendowed, it ought to be
prosecuted for obtaining money on demonstrably false pretences!
19. We are often told that our civilisation is infinitely indebted
to Christianity; but on the other hand it could be shown that Christianity has
been infinitely indebted to civilisation, because it became the adopted
religion, the official religion, of the races that happened to be in the swim
and current of European progress. Indeed, our European progress has been in
exact proportion as the civil law and pre-extant common law have got the upper
hand of the ecclesiastical usurpation. What did Christianity do for Italy, its
birthplace? If it was such a renovator of the ancient worn-out world, why did
it not renew old Rome when its salvation had been adopted? What did it
do for Greece? for Egypt? for the Mexicans? for any of the ancient races or
civilisations? As Jerrold said truly, "We owe much to the
Jews," but what do the Jews owe to Christianity? Its success has been as a
parasite fed on the life of the recent races. The line of renewal was that of
the races, whereas all the good results have been claimed for the Christian
Creed. Thackeray was once attracted to an elderly gentleman at table who was in
the habit of maintaining that everything really good or great in modern
literature came directly or indirectly from Pindar. "At all events,"
said one of the guests, "Pindar did not write 'Vanity Fair'!" "Yes, sir," said the old gentleman with his
customary assurance, "Yes, sir, he did; in the highest and noblest sense, Pindar did write 'Vanity Fair'!" In like manner it has been the custom to
label every virtue as Christian that had been evolved as human, ages and ages
before our own era, at which time every good thing was re-dated, christened, and
re-named, as if it were the result of an historical Christ! Indeed, one expects
to hear of the elements of pure air, fresh water, and clear sunlight being
christened under this name, in the same way that the well-known healing by means
of Mental Medicine, which was practised by the pre-Christian races, has been
designated "Christian Healing." We shall probably have Christian
Lunacy or Christian Idiocy! Yet the fact remains that the direst, bloodiest
enemies of the human race in Europe have been the most besotted supporters of
the doctrines called Christian. On the other hand if it were possible to
eliminate from the factors in European civilisation the direct worth and
hereditary influence of those free-thinkers who have not accepted the Historical
Christian creed, what, think you, would remain of the progress that was made
during many centuries? The only hold the system has ever obtained on the most
intellectual of men has been the hold of the rack! the death-grip of the stake! and the embracing fires of martyrdom! Has it ever struck you how little the
great minds of the past—the Shakspeares and Goëthes, those "serene
creators of immortal things"—troubled themselves about Christianity? How
loftily they tower and overtook it. What preacher from the pulpit ever thinks of
arraigning the present social conditions as based on the rights of the stronger
and the wrongs of the weaker? On the contrary, it has been accepted as a divine
arrangement that suffering humanity was the cheapest thing—with a never-ending
supply—for manuring the soil, for the greasing of wheels, for coining money
out of. They never question whether this is the right basis of the national
life. They rejoice in the scriptural assurance that the poor ye have always with
you, on purpose to keep down the price of labour; or, we may add, keep up the
supply of children to the brothels of the rich, at the lowest possible figure!
Christian civilisation to-day is compatible with such a state of Society as was
recently revealed by the Pall Mall Gazette. We have been assured that the
one great sacrifice of the Son of God did put an end to individual human
sacrifice! But Christianity has been compatible with the masses of the people
of Europe being offered up for ever in one great sacrifice. And what matters the
mode, if you are sacrificed?
|
Honey and milk are sacrifice to thee,
Kind Hermes, inexpensive Deity!
But Heracles demands a lamb each day,
For keeping, as he says, the wolves away.
What matters it, meek browsers of the sod,
Whether a wolf devour you or a God? |
The pretended stewards of the mysteries of God have left it for
the future to create the very consciousness of wrong in a myriad ways,
that their religion has never yet taken into account. As the dogs of
Dives, they have now and again given a lick to the sores of Lazarus, and
promised him the healing hereafter. But when have they banded
together and fought against the social system that dooms the many to
poverty—that creates Lazarus as well as his sores?
20. When they have made large fortunes, and grown very rich, and
death is drawing near, some Christians do wax charitable and grow liberal of
alms. They do build large and comfortable houses for broken-down paupers to die
in; they do supply hospitals for the refuge of those who are ailing and
afflicted. But a good deal of the money has been donated for hell-fire
insurance, and perhaps these paupers were left all through their working-life to
pig together in hovels and slums, the breeding-places of pestilence, which were
sure to create the diseases you treat so generously when too late. They starved,
and suffered, and sickened, that wealth might accumulate for others! Peabody
bequests are all very well in their way; but if the Peabody wealth had been
spread in preventing the poverty and crime of the nation, instead of being wrung
out of labour, and accumulating to cause these evils, how much better and more
blessed would have been the prevention than the late attempt to cure, or rather
to help bolster up a state of things which is relief of its running sores! We
do not want to become paupers, as we must ever be if we are to be forever
pauperised. On reading lately that Belgravia had turned out to carry its broken
victuals round in scrap-carts to the starving poor, I declare it struck a glow
of shame into my face as if I had received the insult of a blow, to think of the
unnecessary necessity! You need not wonder if the poor should damn the
charity that is offered to them in the name of religion, as a bribe for them not
to ask for justice; or that they should turn a deaf ear to all talk about the
bread of heaven when they lack the bread of earth; or the milk of human
kindness when their babes are perishing for lack of a little morning-milk from
the cow! It is here that Christianity, after 1800 years, is an utter failure,
and these are some of the things the Coming religion must go to the root of to
be of any use for this world or any other. I know a poor old man in England who,
for 40 years, worked for one firm and its three generations of proprietors. He
began at a wage of 16s. per week, and worked his way, as he grew older and
older, and many necessaries of life grew dearer and dearer, down to six
shillings a week, and still he kept on working, and would not give up. At six
shillings a week he broke a limb, and left work at last, being pensioned off by
the firm with a four-penny piece! I know whereof I speak, for that man was my
father. At the same time, as you are well aware, during those 40 years any
possessor of capital might have put it out to usury, and without lifting a
finger himself it would have been quadrupled. Such are two of our naturalised laws of capital and labour. The one is the
complement of the other; you cannot have the one without the other, and any
religion that is not directed to help revolutionise this state of society
is damned already, under whatsoever name!
21. We never can attain the stature of true manhood, or be man, so
long as we will un-man ourselves by taking so unmanly an advantage as we do of
our more ignorant and hitherto helpless fellow-men. No one class of men can hold
another with their faces to the ground, or noses to the grindstone, without also
stooping over them in a manner that for ever hinders from attaining the perfect
stature of genuine manhood. The degradation, though different, is shared in
common! And, mark you, these things are done as effectually by aid of our
social system, and laws of supply and demand, as if one man stood over another
with the whip of the slave-driver, or sword of the executioner, in his hand. The
wrong and the responsibility, the cruelty and the cowardliness are none the less
because they are warranted by custom, sustained by legal enactments, and
defended by the press. After the recent utterances of the Archbishop of York,
who spoke of our continual doubling of the pile of the rich by halving the wages
of the poor, we shall doubtless hear more from the echoists. But the redemption
preached for 1800 years has failed to save the world, and it must now give way
for other workers with other methods, applied to such matters as the problems of
poverty, the distribution of wealth, and the ownership of land. In vain will
they claim and Christen every good work of Co-operation, Communism, or
Socialism, as Christian by name. The "good Lord Jesus" as an
objective saviour and historical Christ has "had his day." Our
science, applied to civilisation, will part company more and more with the
found-out fraud, and will help to carry it no further! Its triumphs will not be
made or allowed to support the Christian delusion in the future any more than in
the past. And what is the chief cause of this novel interest in the churches on
behalf of the poor to-day? Is it not fear that the new electorate will
reject the orthodox system, and that their political influence will prove
fatal to the Church?
22. And now the question is being asked,—What is going to take the
place of the cast-out faith? for it is already cast out from the minds of the
men who will assuredly mould the freer thought of the future. It is not going to
be re-established by law; nor by the blood and fire of the salvation army—nor
by presenting our cast-off clothes to the aborigines! Nor by teaching blind
Chinamen to read the Bible. Not going to be re-established even though
more Bibles have been printed during the last ten years than in all the
preceding centuries. It is being rejected at home faster than you
can give it away abroad! We have had our religion based on belief—on belief in a
God who cared an infinite deal more for a few apples
than for the eternal damnation of myriads of immortal souls—a God who played
fast and loose with the laws of his own nature and creation! A creed based on
the divine truth of every lie that science has exploded—a belief that was in
deadly opposition to all and every truth that has been established. A "good old faith" which is a fraud—so far as being saved by it goes—founded
upon a legend misinterpreted. And at last the old grounds of belief are breaking
up rapidly; no matter what fresh efforts may be made to deceive, delude, and
secure the ignorant, the infants or the aborigines. The orthodox creed is doomed
to reversal, even as a dish is wiped clean, and turned upside down. The
foundations of the false, cruel, and gory faith are all afloat. It was built as
the Russians reared their palace on the frozen river Neva, and the great thaw
has come suddenly upon them; the ominous sounds of the final break-up are in
their ears; their anchorage and place of trust is crumbling before their eyes. For they had built on the very things (or condition of things) which had sealed
up the running springs, and stayed the stream of progress in its course. They
have arrested for the purpose of resting. And here is the hint of Science, of
Nature, of Spiritualism, of Theosophy, of Freethought, in every form—that they
must move on, and get out of the way, or be moved off for ever. The orthodox
religion has been dying in proportion as it lost the power to persecute! People
now inquire, "what next?" As did the tad-pole when his tail dropped
off. What next? as if we were going to straightway put forth a new tail! But
that is not the way of Nature. She works by transformation, not by repetition;
and her changes imply growth, as the out-come of a new life. It is not possible
for us to swap creeds or formulate a new religion. Religion is not a set of
precepts, or a mode of worship. It is not a creed that counts in the eternal
court. It is not what we believe or profess, but what we are when stripped bare
in the balance. Nothing avails but the life lived. Our past deeds must and will
make our future state! Some people seem to think that Spiritualism is about to
give us a new tail, or at least to put a firmer tag on the old limp stay-lace of
Christianity, to bind us up anew with a fresh support! They are wondering when
the Spiritualists are going to open their Sunday shop for the purposes of prayer
and praise. But I doubt whether that mode of procedure will ever be repeated in
this world. When Sydney Smith saw his child tenderly stroking the hard shell of
a tortoise to please the tortoise, he said, "you might just as well stroke
the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral with the idea of pleasing the Dean and
Chapter." So when we see people crowding together to worship and praise and
flatter the Lord, as if they fancied they could gratify his self-esteem, or
excite his benevolence, or keep his destructiveness quiet, it reminds me
irresistibly of the child's stroking the tortoise to please it. The offering of
words of praise which people make to show their love of God is of no more value
than the cheap oblations of sham banknotes which the Chinese burn to any amount
as a sacrifice to their deities! They offer money by millions in that
way. The only worthy way of showing love to God is in working for
humanity. That is the practical test. The Lord does not want
your long and loud laudations or offerings of false money!
23. Hermes says "there can be no religion more true or just
than to know the things that are." We have had a religion without
knowledge, and the Coming religion must be founded on knowledge. And it must be
good for this world as its warrant for being good for any other. In knowledge
only can we find a common ground of agreement. That which is based upon
knowledge, need not be the subject of everlasting diversity and contention
amongst innumerable sects. We need a first-hand acquaintanceship with the facts
of Nature—not limiting Nature, however, to the little we may know of it at
present. Of course, mere facts are not everything. No number of separate
vertebral joints will supply a man with a backbone. We have to collect the
various joints in our scattered facts derived from a closer acquaintanceship
with, and truer interpretation of Nature, but life alone can produce the unity
and cohesion that will constitute a back-bone. Amongst these facts we naturally
assign a foremost place to those of Spiritualistic phenomena, which the orthodox
as good as prohibit to their followers in favour of theoretical
teachings. Whereas we need a first-hand acquaintanceship here, if anywhere. Present facts are worth all the teachings of the past: by means of these we can
test them. The facts in nature are the sole ground to go upon for another life,
just as they are for this; facts that are scientific because they are
verifiable to-day as in the past. We claim that the inner vision or second sight
is a fact in nature. Pre-vision is a fact in nature. The spiritual apparition
is, and always has been, a fact in nature. But a physical resurrection from the
dead is not a fact in nature, and here the Aborigines are far ahead of the
orthodox Christian world in a practical knowledge of these phenomena on which
the demonstration of our continuity is based. The naturalist Kircher estimated
the number of intellectual proofs of the existence of God at 6561. A
Spiritualist considers one actual proof of objective spiritual manifestation as
worth them all. Better is one real spirit communication than a divinity put
together in 6561 pieces; it is a fact that for the first time makes those
figures live!—or gives a foothold for taking the first step in the unknown. As evidence of a future life, one single proof in spiritual manifestation is
worth the hear-say revelation of the world. The time has not yet come for any
thinker to set forth the reign of law and order in this obscure domain of Nature
which, for lack of another name, we call "Spiritual," or neo-natural; but Spiritualism is none the less real because orthodox physical science has
not yet established it as one of its truths. A sufficient number of competent
observers and credible witnesses testify to the
occurrence and recurrence of certain phenomenal manifestations, which go to
prove that we have found the sole bridge in nature that crosses the unfathomable
gulf between the dead and the not-dead; the organic and the inorganic—between
mind and matter—which Science has strenuously sought elsewhere, but never yet
found. A million of us know that the cable is laid between the two worlds, and
the messages prove that there are intelligent operators at the other end of it,
who can send us messages in human language. We know that the so-called dead are
living still, however difficult it may be, and is, though not impossible, to
establish their personal identity! We know they can communicate with us and we
with them, objectively as well as subjectively, and that the objective phenomena
enable us to comprehend the true nature of the subjective—to accept and to
found upon it inferentially. We know they can establish a rapport with us
more rare and potent than we can with each other in the body. Some of us
have felt and handled and heard that which was invisible to our sight, in the
presence of those who could see and describe the forms and motions of that (or
of those) which we only felt and heard. And so we can put our evidence
together, and draw the necessary inference. Buckle has said: "The
doctrine of immortality is the doctrine of doctrines. A truth compared with
which it is indifferent whether anything else be true!" Anyway,
Spiritualism alone offers the means of establishing it as a fact. Spiritualism alone
offers a scientific basis for a doctrine of immortality! The Phenomenal
Spiritualist stands level-footed on the only ground of fact that is, or ever has
been, offered by Nature for human foothold in the Unseen. Spiritualism alone
reveals a bridge on which we can get any bit of actual foothold for crossing the
gulf of death. The Spiritualist makes connection between the two worlds, and
runs his trains of thought right through! Indeed, the two worlds are but one
for him—they are not two, any more than the railway runs through another world
by night. It is but one world after all, with two aspects. The daylight part of
it is but half-revealed by day, and the dark side is but half-concealed by
night. The phenomena called Spiritualistic furnish us with a means of
interrogating Nature in such a way that it is sure to revolutionise all our
mental science—psychology, philosophy, metaphysic, and theosophy. These
phenomena show us that we have other and profounder facts to go upon than
those hitherto included in our data. Realistic phenomena, not merely idealistic—facts
in place of faith. Spiritualism opens up to our vision a Power that operates
upon us, and through us, and makes use of us whether we will or no,—whether we
are conscious of its presence or not—our recognition being unnecessary to its
existence or operations. Spiritualism shows us how the soul of man may be fed
with a sustenance drawn from the well of life within us, that is penetrated and
replenished from eternal springs. And we maintain that these phenomena, called
Spiritualistic (which have no relationship to the miracles of misinterpreted
mythology), and these alone, do actually demonstrate the natural nexus for the
continuity of life, and the next step upward in human evolution.
24. Some of our Free-thought Secularist friends seem to suffer from rabies
on the subject of a future existence. The very idea of it drives them frantic;
and that which is as the water of life to others only serves to aggravate their
symptoms, and make them rage more furiously. The editor of the Melbourne
Liberator says it is a swindle of the worst description to keep up the farce
of a future life. Now, I think we know that there are facts in Nature which
warrant the inference of another life; and simply as facts I would have
them made known. Without the facts we cannot know the truth! Anyway, there is
no warrant for those who do not know that man has a soul to dogmatise and teach
that men have no souls, or that there is no future life. Those who do not
know can have no right to pretend to know, and such pretensions of the negational dogmatists constitute a positive imposture. Whosoever owns the head,
you cannot quite bring a knowledge of all things pertaining to the ultimate
reality under one hat. The Agnostics show more modesty. Professor Huxley says:
"Agnosticism means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that
which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know and believe!" So
say we. Only we claim to have scientific grounds for knowing. A crude
materialistic interpretation of the Universe bottoms nothing. There is eternal
motion; there is eternal life. There is a being beyond appearance. There is a
Consciousness that co-ordinates the means to attain the ends, with power to turn
to account all that occurs in the sphere of so-called human Free-Will. There is
Intelligence involved in all that is intelligible. All who break the laws of
nature do so under penalty of punishment. They learn sooner or later that there
is a law-maker, whose ministers and agencies will dog the law-breaker; however
we may deny the law-maker, we cannot evade the law! False Spiritualism merely
begets a craze after another life. But a true Spiritualism will turn our
attention to this life, and help on the work of this world. Spiritualism
enables us to call in the new world in our rectification and adjustment of the
wrong done in the old—somewhat like calling in troops from the new world of
the Colonies to fight the battle of England in the old. It has come to quicken a
keener conscience in the human race; set up a loftier ideal of life and a
nobler standard of appeal than fear of punishment and hope of reward. For me,
Spiritualism means an aid in the certain overthrow of all false dogmas and lying
legends, which have been imposed upon men, and are still imposed upon the
children, in the name of God. Science has been driving in its splitting wedge
with a mighty ripping and rending of the ancient beliefs. But with Spiritualism
the wedge is alive, and takes root just as the seed of the Indian Bo-tree is so
vital that when it is sown singly in the cleft
of some lofty tower or fortress, and a drop of moisture and a smile of sunshine
have caused it to quicken, it will shoot out and lay hold of the stone with its
feelers and strike root to make its way down the walls to the earth outside, and
laying hold of this it gathers strength and grows mightily, and sends back such
force to its birth-place that the walls are rent, and the temporary
resting-place betwixt earth and heaven is shattered in favour of the newer
rootage and firmer foothold upon this more nutritious and life-giving ground. So
will Spiritualism lay hold of the larger substance of reality, and inevitably
rend the barren stone walls of the Establishments into fragments, minute enough
to be ground down into the new fresh soil in which it is destined to flourish
and bear fruit in the freer, larger, loftier life of a nobler human race!
Spiritualism will help to break up the sacerdotal ring of priestcraft that has
hemmed the people round with terrors and strangled souls with fear. It is
rapidly abolishing the tyranny of death, and restoring freedom for life to those
whose whole living had been turned into one long dread of death. Spiritualism
will have done a great work, if only by destroying that craven dread of dying
which has been instilled into us from before birth; the child in embryo having
been made to feel and embody the mother's shudderings at the frightful language
used by the torturers of souls, who fulminate their cruel formulas from the
pulpit. If it sets us free to do our own thinking as rational men and women, who
have so long and so profoundly suffered from the pretensions of the sacerdotalists, who continue to peddle, in the name of God, a system of
delusion, the foundations of which are to be discovered at last in
misinterpreted mythology; against which system of false teaching I, for one, am
at war to the death, with any and every weapon I can lay hands on, including
this most potent weapon—the sword of Spiritualism. Spiritualism is sure to be
terribly iconoclastic! It means a new light of revelation in the world from the
old eternal source. And you cannot have new light let in without seeing many old
acquaintances with a new face. Many aspects of things will change; and some
things that we mistook for live faces will turn into the sheerest masks of
mockery, and whiten with the sweat of dissolution running down them. Spiritualism, as I interpret it, means a new life in the world, and new life is
not brought forth without pain and parting, and the sheddings of old decay. New
ideas are not born in the mind without the pangs of parturition; and to get rid
of our old ingrained errors of false teaching is like having to tear up by
the root the snags of one's own teeth with our own hand. But, by our
own hand and will, this has to be done, for nothing else can do it.
New light and new life, however, do not come to impoverish, they come to
enrich, and no harm can befall the nature of that which is eternally true.
It is only falsehood that fears or needs to fear the transfiguring touch
of light; that must needs shrink
and shrink until it shrivels away. Spiritualism will prove a mighty iconoclast,
but the fetishes and idols it destroys will yield up their concealed treasures
of innermost truth, as did the statue that was destroyed by Mahmoud, the
image-breaker. The priestly defenders offered him an enormous sum to spare their
God, but he resisted the bribe and smote mightily with his iron mace. Down fell
the image, and as it broke there rolled out of it a river of pent-up wealth,
which had been hoarded and hidden within.
25. Evolution, for which no place has been left in the Christian
system of thought, is of itself quite capable of being the death of that system; but Spiritualism will undermine it, and dig its grave, and plant it with
another nobler life. Spiritualism has already proved itself to be the greatest
solvent of ancient dogmas ever known. It has acted, and is acting, like
Hannibal's vinegar on the Alps, by crumbling the most stupendous obstacles of
mental progress. The Spiritualistic religion is going to conquer because it is
not afraid of any new facts that may be dug out of the earth, or drawn down from
the heavens. It is bound to conquer, because with it free-thinking is no longer
on the side of negation. Our old Free-thinkers were brave men who drew a new
breath of freer life through the enlarging lungs of the world, by daring to
think freely—braver men than our Spiritualists are, who are sadly in need of a
fiery course of persecution to test the metal of their manhood. But on the old
material plane they soon came to where their foothold ceased, and they could get
no further. The freer thought of the Spiritualist gives him arms to swim the
sea, and wings to mount the air, when he comes to where the earth ends,—and to
the Materialist there seemed no more solid ground. I have warrant for saying
that the only form of Free-thought that is feared as deadly by the Church of
Rome is Spiritualistic, which cuts the ground from under it in relation to a
future life. We say to them, Call it a superstition if you please. Our
superstition will be the death of yours. And whenever or whenever they come
fairly to the grapple we shall see, and our enemies will feel, how the old bones
will crackle and crumble in the grip of its crushing power. Spiritualism, as I
apprehend it, is going to be a mighty agent in carrying on the work of this
world, in producing loftier souls for the life of another world, of which it
gives us glimpses on the way. Let me tell you that this despised Spiritualism
will put a light into the one hand and a sword into the other, that have to be
flashed in on many dark places, and through many a dungeon-grating of human
kind, in spite of the birds of night that may hoot at the light, and blaspheme
against its brilliance.
26. There is a cry of womankind now going up in search of God!
Sometimes accompanied with a clasping of hands—at other times with the
clenched fist—and it behooves all men to know what it does really and rightly
mean. It may be found to imply more than "woman suffrage," it may
signify woman suffering. "Suffering from what?" do you reply. "Do we not keep her, and clothe her, and are we
not prohibited, or were under the good old English law, from beating her with a
stick that is thicker than your middle finger?" It may be that the brute
ideal of the savage is getting to be a worn-out type here as elsewhere, and that
there is a desire for a more refined and intellectual form of manhood in the
intimacy of married life! So far from Woman having been the cause of any
pretended Fall of man, she has been the true Saviour of humanity; or rather,
the main instrument for saving because more open to the Divine influence, which
I hold to be for ever working to prevent the propagation of man's worser moods,
and the personification of his baser self. Often has she tried to hinder man
when he was devilishly bent on defacing the coming image of the divine! And
this alone, with her back to the wall, in places where there was no law on her
side. How many idiots, think you, are born into the world through drunken
fathers? Idiocy is an arrested development. Drunkenness is also an arrest of
the soul in its brain action, which means that the idiot child is often a tiny,
pitiful image of the father who was in a state of moral idiocy. The spiritual
life was arrested; and there is as great a deficiency of soul as there is of
blood in the brain when you swoon. It is a moral swoon made visible and
permanent in a hidden effigy of Death-in-life. Lucky if the paralysis be so
complete that a great criminal is not let loose on the world in active, instead
of helpless, idiocy. I only dare hint at the things which are done in the world
to the knowledge of women, and you need not wonder if now and again there rises
the shrill, protesting shriek.
27. Some of my readers may have seen specimens in Greek and Italian
art of what man has done to gratify the lust of the eye that he might perpetuate
the lusts of the soul, and gloat over his own moral deformity, immortalised by
the utmost cunning wherewith art could animate the most precious forms of
inanimate nature. He has set the image of his own corruption in the shining
mirror of a stainless jewel, and figured forth his moral deformity in the lustre
of a gem—think of giving the worst kind of human disease to a gem! He has cut
the devil of his beastlier self in the diamond, enshrined the libidinous satyr,
tongue-lolling and leering from a sapphire's azure heaven, made the innocent
emerald flush the face with the reflection of what was enacted in its green
coolness, called up spirits of all uncleanness in the purity of a crystal. All
this was very bad—very horrible—this corruption of art for the delectation
of the beast with a taste in man! But what was such degradation at its wantonest and worst compared with that of a drunken man—no matter with which
passion he may be aflame—furiously stamping his own hideous face, and the
features of his vice, on that form of humanity which he so darkens and defiles
as to well-nigh blast or blot out of it the image of God or man altogether!
These jewels of life, these creations of love, to be thus brutally defaced in
such a cruel way! It is horrible, most horrible! Enough to make all womankind,
all motherhood, nay, all manhood, rise in revolt against it, and sicken, and
spew it out. If men go reeling to the marriage-bed, reeking with the foul
effluvia of drink, gross with gluttony, and stained through and through with
moral disease, if the children are made from the scum of bad blood into an outer
likeness of the inner corruption, what can we expect the men and women to be?
If you held a tiny little bird's egg in your hand, how tenderly would you touch
it! how protectingly would you fence it round and shield it from all danger!
and here is an immortal soul in embryo, susceptible to every influence of the
father, every feeling of the mother, looking with all its life to them for its
environing conditions! Here then, instead of the ancient damnation of the flesh
we need a religion of the body as well as of the soul, and a gospel of human
physics. Hitherto the utmost that has been aimed at scientifically has been a
better breed of horses or cattle; we ought to be at least as careful in the
bringing forth of human beings. Make the tree good and its fruit will be good
(barring certain "throws back" or "sports" of nature). The
work has to be done from the root, and not by late trying to graft the good on a
bad stock. Remember that life comes into the world according to conditions, and
the first of these conditions are those of the married life. Human embryology
has now to be studied religiously in the light of evolution. If I were a woman I
doubt whether I should consider a smoker, or chewer of tobacco, quite good
enough to father my children! The final effect—the supposed beneficial effect—of
nicotine is to arrest the decay of matter that ought to be sloughed off in order
that it may be renewed. No smoker is so live a man, all round, as he ought to
be, or might be; and you can study them in all the various stages and degrees
of dreaming, decaying, dying, poisoning the springs of future life, or bringing
death into the world.
28. The truth is, that woman at her best and noblest must be monarch
of the marriage-bed. We must begin in the creatory if we are to benefit the
race, and the woman has got to rescue and take possession of herself, and
consciously assume all the responsibilities of maternity, on behalf of the
children. No woman has any right to part with the absolute ownership of her own
body, but she has the right to be protected against all forms of brute force. No
woman has any business to marry anything that is less than a man. No woman has
any right to marry any man who will sow the seeds of hereditary disease in her
darlings. Not for all the money in the world! No woman has any right, according
to the highest law, to bear a child to a man she does not love. No mother has
any right to allow her innocent little ones to be injured mentally for life by
orthodox drugs and false nostrums of salvation that are vended from the pulpit
by pious impostors. These—and other things as vital—will become practical so
soon as womankind co-operate and insist that they shall be practised. "Women, obey your husbands," is a text that, when wrongly applied, has
wrought as much human misery as that other
relic of barbarism, "Spare the rod and spoil the child!" Why, the
great and sole incentive with the mass of male hypocrites who support the
Churches is because orthodox Christianity encourages the subjection of women,
and helps to make them better—that is more spiritless—household slaves. They
do not believe for themselves, but they think anything good enough for their
wives and daughters to believe. |
"You cannot serve two masters, saith the Word,"
But Satan nudges them and whispers "Gammon;"
"You lend your Wives and Daughters to the Lord,
You give yourselves to love and worship
Mammon." |
29. Our women and children are bound to break away from this
system of fettered thought. If I could stand where stood the cock when all the
world could here him crow, my cry would be to the wives and mothers on
behalf of the children. The women are bound to rescue the children, and to head
their Exodus from the bondage of orthodoxy, even if the men are too unmanly—too
cowardly to help them. No doubt, one real crux is, What are we going to teach
the children? And here there is so much to be done and lived by the parents in
presence of the children, and so little to be said! The life we live with them
every day is the teaching that tells; and not the precepts uttered weekly that
are continually belied by our own daily practices. Give the children a knowledge
of natural law, especially in that domain of physical nature which has hitherto
been tabooed. If we break a natural law we suffer pain in consequence, no matter
whether we knew the law or not. This result is not an accident, because it
always happens, and is obviously intended to happen. Punishments are not to be
avoided by ignorance of effects; they can only be warded off by a knowledge of
causes. Therefore nothing but knowledge can help them. Teach the children
to become the soldiers of duty instead of the slaves of selfish desire. Show
them how the sins against self reappear in the lives of others. Teach them to
think of those others as the means of getting out of self. Teach them how the
laws of nature work by heredity. How often has the apparently pious, God-fearing
parent produced a child that seemed to the outside world the very opposite of
himself, as if the devil had dropped an egg in the good man's nest. And yet this
Satan of a son was but the nature of the saintly father turned inside out—only
an exposure of that which had been hidden for a time beneath the cloak of
hypocrisy; because in the end nature is honest, and will out with it. Children have ears like the very spies of nature herself; eyes that penetrate
all subterfuge and pretence; and a sense of justice that, if allowed fair-play,
would straightway wreck the orthodox gospel. Guide the curiosity of the little
ones whilst it is yet innocent, and give them all necessary knowledge fresh and
sweet from the lips of the mother and father, Mr. Ruskin notwithstanding. Let the children be well grounded in the doctrine of development, without which
we cannot begin to think coherently. Give them the best material, the soundest
method; let the spirit-world have a chance as a living influence on them, and
then let them do the rest. Never forget that the faculty for seeing is worth all
that is to be seen. It is good to set before the youngsters the loftiest and
noblest ideals—not those that are mythical and non-natural, but those that
have been lived in human reality. The best ideal of all has to be pourtrayed by
the parents in the realities of life at home. The teaching that goes deepest
will be indirect, and the truth will tell most on them when it is overheard. When you are not watching, and the children are—that is when the
lessons are learned for life.
30. Possibly my Coming Religion may suggest a coming
revolution? I should not wonder if it does. Anyway, we mean to do our own
thinking, and to have absolute freedom of thought and expression. We mean to
rescue our Sunday from the sacerdotal ring. But we do not mean that the
day of rest and recreation shall fall into the hands of the capitalists. We mean
to try and rescue this world from the clutches of those who profess to have the
keys and the keeping of the other—they who hold up the other world in front of
that beast of burden, the producer, as a decoying lure, like the bunch of
carrots before the donkey's nose, in order that the suggestion of plenty in
paradise may induce him to forego his common right to grazing-ground on earth. We mean to have a day of reckoning with the unjust stewards of the earth. We
mean to have the national property restored to the people, which the churches
and other bodies have withheld from the people. We mean that the land, with its
inalienable right of living, its mineral wealth below the soil and its waters
above, shall be open to all. We mean to have our banking done by the State, and
our railways worked for the benefit of the whole people. We mean to temper the
terror of rampant individualism with the principles of co-operation. We mean to
show that the wages' system is a relic of barbarism and social serfdom. That
under it labour must remain a slave in the prison-house of property. We mean for
woman to have perfect equality with man, social, religious, and political, and
her fair share in that equity which is of no sex. We mean also that the same
standard of morality shall apply to the woman as to the man. In short, we intend
that the redress of wrongs and the righting of inequalities, which can only be
rectified in this world, shall not be put off and postponed to any future stage
of existence. The religion of the future has got to include not only
Spiritualism, but the salvation of humanity for this life—any other may be
left to follow hereafter. It has to be a sincerity of life, in place of
pretended belief. A religion of science, in place of superstition. Of joy,
instead of sorrow. Of man's Ascent, instead of his Fall. A religion of fact in
the present, and not of mere faith for the future. A religion
in which the temple reared to God will be in human form, instead of being built
of brick or stone. A religion of work, rather than worship; and, in place of
the deathly creeds, with all their hungry parasites of prey, a religion of life—life
actual, life here, life now, as well as the promise of life everlasting! |
――――♦――――
INDEX
to
THE PUBLISHED LECTURES
of
GERALD MASSEY. |