Men, Women, and Gods; and Other Lectures

REVISION

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

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

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

"Oh, yes, I'm the head god's head man." "You are?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, that is not so; my god is no respecter of persons; that's his very strongest hold. He treats rich and poor just alike, only if anything he leans a little toward the poor."

"That is pretty clever. But what else did he tell you in that talk?"

"Well, he told me to tell the people, 'Thou shalt not kill;' and afterwards, at another time, he told me to take a lot of my men, and go over there to that town just across, and kill all the men and boys I could find, and if they fought hard for their homes, and I seemed to be getting the worst of it for a little while, not to be afraid, he'd be with me, and he'd see that I came out all right. Oh, he's the gayest old god you ever saw to help in a fight."

"Well, yes, that was pretty clever to you; but isn't he the god of that village too!"

"Oh, yes; but you see one of the men that lives over there went and worshipped another god one day, and this one didn't like it."

"I see; but if he treats them all that way, don't you think it is rather natural that they should go and hunt up another god to admire?"

Well, while I was waiting for Moses to answer this question, I heard another man say that only a day or two previously this very fellow had burned up their homes, and murdered a good many people who had never injured him; and that he had dashed out the brains of the innocent children, and had actually sold the sweet, pure young girls to his brutal soldiers. Since I heard that, my mind has been so occupied with some other little matters that my revision has not gone any farther, and somebody else has got one out; so I don't know that I shall ever finish mine. It does not seem to be very encouraging work any way; and I am afraid that people would find fault with its scholarship if it should be finished. Theological scholarship and common-sense always did disagree. A man who is well vaccinated with either will never catch the other.

THE CHURCH'S MONEY-BOX

The Church used to keep a box about four feet long and two feet wide which it called the sacred ark of God. It was certain death for any man not a priest to touch that box. It is supposed that they kept in it gold and jewels which they extorted from their dupes, and that for fear of robbery they made superstition their banker. Well, they had to move that jewelry-box once for some reason, and it is not said that anything happened to the men who put it on the cart; but as the man who drove the oxen – in one place it says that they were oxen, in another that they were cows with young calves, and you will be damned if you don't believe both – anyhow, as the driver walked along in horrid fear lest something should happen to that ark of God, the oxen shied, and the ark toppled, and instinctively the driver put out his hand to steady the sacred thing. Well, you would think that any sane man, any reasonable being, would have commended him for it; but no! Jehovah struck him dead for his pains. Why? Because that box was so supremely sacred. Supreme nonsense! Suppose he had not touched it and it had fallen? What then? Most likely Jehovah would then have struck him dead for not touching it. It strikes me that the only reasonable, sensible being connected with that whole story was the driver, the man they abuse, the man the priests murdered, I suspect because he discovered what was in that ark, and threatened to expose the humbug.

Whenever any man uses judgment and common-sense the Church calls him wicked and dangerous. They say he "touches with unholy hands holy things;" and when he dies, whether his death was expedited or otherwise, they say God killed him.

Now, if God did kill that man for touching the ark to save it from falling, what do you think of him – as a God? I can tell you what you would think of him as a man. You would think he was a ruffian and a murderer – that is what you would think of him as a man.

Truly gods are made of poor stuff. If I can't have a god that is nobler and better and truer and kinder than the very best man I ever saw, then I don't want any god at all. And candor forbids me to state that I ever saw, heard, or read of any such a god. All the gods I ever read or heard of have fallen infinitely below a few men I know.

Jehovah, it seems to me, is hardly an average god, even as gods go. He believed in polygamy. He believed in slavery. He was a murderer – killed 52,000 people once because somebody looked into that four-by-two box that he thought so much of. Human life was not worth a copper in his neighborhood. He was always in a rage about something, and you never knew when he would "get the drop on you" because somebody else had ruffled his temper. "Any man was liable," as the Irishman said, "to wake up any morning and find himself burned to ashes in his bed," because one of his neighbors had been wicked enough to lend a five-dollar greenback to one of the Philistines, or had eaten a gum-drop in the dark of the moon, or committed some other awful crime like-that.

SHALL PROGRESS STOP?

In its day the Bible was all very well, no doubt. It was the expression of the best that the Jewish people then knew in morals. In his time Christ was a great reformer and a brave man. His philosophy was then an onward spring, and he detested the shams of the Church.

But with the knowledge we have to-day we should call that man a lunatic who tried to bind medical science by the teachings of that age, and maintained that when a man was sick he had a devil, and that if he got worse he had a whole flock of them. Yet Christ thought that. We should call the man utterly insane who insisted that Joshua gave us the last light that is ever to be thrown on astronomy. We should simply look with pity on one who should try to convince us that the legal profession ought to be bound by the laws of Moses; and we know that any nation that attempted to act under his guidance would be soon convinced by the unerring voice of foreign cannon that somebody had made a mistake.

Science has grown. Philosophy has developed. International law has sprung up. In religion alone we are asked to accept the standard of morality and honor of ages that are dead – to take as the last word of wisdom the reformer's code of eighteen hundred years ago. We may grow in all else; in this we must stand still. We may use a text-book on Nature, Medicine, Law, or Mechanics, until by its aid we pass beyond its knowledge to a higher; but in morals and religion the book that was a light to the ages of ignorance and superstition, and the production of its brain, must still be the sole illuminator of a world made wise and critical and thoughtful by science and deep experience. The fisherman's lantern, although useful in its day, cannot guide us while we stand in the glare of electricity. Why stand persistently with our faces westward, and gaze at the declining light, crying out impotently and hopelessly as we see it grow dim and vanish?

Our wise men have kept steadily onward, guided by the light of the breaking dawn; and with their faces to the East their star has never set. The fishermen's light has sunk below the horizon, leaving behind it the glow of honest labor and earnest effort to keep their memory bright. The scientist's star has risen, and with no claim that it is even yet the highest light – the final promise, it throws its rays of knowledge, its beams of hope, far into the future, and bids us follow, leaving the cold embers of the dead past for the warmth and light of the living future.

The hope of the past is the despair of the future. Stagnation is death. In movement and thought alone is progress. The wealth of the world is the brain of the scholar.

The past is dead; peace to its ashes. The future is ours to form on new models; models deformed by past superstitions, or models though faulty, instinct with true freedom. You are the jury, what is the verdict?

HISTORICAL FACTS AND THEOLOGICAL FICTIONS

CHURCH FICTIONS

IT is one of the glittering fictions of the Church that to her civilization is due,¹⁴ and that it is to her benign influence and direction alone that woman has been advanced to her present position in the social scale; that without the Bible and the Church the status of woman in Christian countries would be lower and her lot harder.

1st. To prove this claim she directs attention to the status of woman in several non-Christian countries, and compares the degradation and hardship she there endures to the position of woman to-day in America, England, and France.

2d. The Church claims the credit of originating and sustaining the various steps of progress by which woman has been elevated. She claims to have originated and to sustain the idea that woman is man's equal, and to recognize her as such in the Church.

3d. She points with pride to the superior education and intelligence of the women of Christian countries, and contrasts this intellectual altitude with that of women elsewhere. She says that women owe their superior opportunities of education and advancement to their religion.

4th. But above all the clergy attempt to silence those who ask questions, by calling attention to the superior legal status of woman in Christian countries, and asserting that the Church secured this, and that it made marriage honorable and home a possibility.

5th. The clergy claim that the Bible is woman's best friend and staunchest defender, and that it is the originator of morality.

HISTORICAL FACTS

"The moment there is fixation, petrification and death ensue." "Profound sincerity is the only basis of character."

– Emerson.

CIVILIZATION

We are told that our superior civilization and high moral tone are due to Christianity. I think that this is not true. The whole, or at least much the larger and foundation part of the question of civilization – where it shall grow and where only live, where it shall drag and where scarcely exist – seems to me to be decided primarily by environment, the basis of which is climate and soil.

Where the climate and soil are most favorable to the highest development; where the environment is neither too hard nor too indulgent; where man is neither enervated by heat and the absence of necessity to labor, nor stunted by cold and hardship and the ever-present necessity to search or labor for food and warmth; there will be the highest types and forms of civilization.¹⁵

If the Buddhist religion had chanced to be the one that in the process of events took root in the climate and soil where the Hebrew Bible and the Christian belief hold sway; and if, on the other hand, the Hebrew and Christian religions had been the ones developed in India or China, the civilization of the various countries would still, in the main, be what they are to-day.

If our superior civilization were the result of our religion, then the most civilized countries would be the most intensely Christian countries. We all know that this is not the case. Compare the intense Christianity of Spain or Russia, and their backward civilization, with the easy-going religious or irreligious condition of France or America, and their recognition of Liberty and Humanity, equalled nowhere else on earth.

I admit unreservedly that a religion; by its inelasticity, may do much to retard progress, or by its greater elasticity may permit a more rapid development than a more nearly petrified or incoherent system would allow; but what I hold is this, that the primary and controlling causes of the various stages of civilization are climate and soil.

There are, of course, many other things which modify the social development or civilization in any country, as its religion, its laws, and what we may call "accidents of international or civil contest," such as the religious or other wars – our own war in which the blacks were freed, arbitration, and immigration. All of these, and many others, are modifying influences; but no one of them can claim the primary place.

Soil, climate, and location determine the occupation of a nation, as whether it shall be militant, commercial, or agricultural. In turn occupation determines what the character of a people and their laws shall be, whether they shall be warlike or peaceful, inventive or receptive, stationary or roving; and these, in turn, are the matters which determine the civil scale to which a people shall rise.

True, the religion of a people will make itself felt strongly; but whenever a nation has found it expedient or desirable to accomplish a feat which was in opposition to its religion, it has invariably modified the religion to fit the case, or waived it in favor of that particular movement.¹⁶

In keeping with this fact it is found that in those countries where the greatest changes and modifications of government and occupation have occurred, there have the religions undergone the greatest modification to fit the new order of things. If it were the religion that determined the matter, civilization and morals would be immovable, and legislation would revolve around, the guidance of the Church.

According to the very theory of Divine revelation a religion would be most perfect at its beginning. It would be without flaw when born. It would be incapable of improvement or growth. In a word it would be immovable. It would possess the fixation of which Emerson speaks. It would not have to readjust itself to the changed and improved conditions of man, and its word would be always a higher light on every movement of progress. It would be to the Church and not to the State that the great principles of progress, of liberty, and of justice would look for the highest guidance and the last light. How far this is from the real state of things in any country or in any religion all readers of history know.¹⁷

It is the State or Science which has proposed and made the steps of progress, and the Church has (often after the most bitter fight and denunciation) readjusted her creed to the new code, and then claimed that she had that light and knew that principle before, although neither she nor any one else had ever suspected it.

This has been the case with almost every important discovery that Science has ever made. The Church has retarded the acceptance of the new light, and has set her seal of "divine disapproval and damnation" on the brow of the thinkers who strove to bless mankind. It has been the rule in State reforms as well. It was so in the struggle to separate Church and State. It is so in the effort to sustain the belief in the "divine right of kings." The Church fought individual liberty and representative government, and she still contests the questions of individual conscience and universal equality and independence.¹⁸

In these matters the Church has invariably been on the side that ultimately had to go to the wall, and she has become a party to the progress only after the principle has become an established fact.

Now it is the efforts of Science and Law towards the elevation of man and the bettering of his condition in this world – the procuring for him of greater personal advantages, dignity, and liberty – that have marked the progress of civilization.

The climate and soil decided man's occupation; his occupation determined what his higher needs should be; and his higher needs and the gained results of his occupations enabled him to strive for the bettering of his condition and surroundings. The man who lived in a climate favorable to mental and physical activity, and in a country with a rich and varied soil, was enabled to accomplish his ends as his less fortunate brother-lacking such support and stimulus and motive – has been unable to do.

If such a thing had been possible, thirty years ago, as that all knowledge of our religion had been utterly wiped out of America, and a thorough knowledge of Buddhism or Mohammedanism instilled into every Yankee brain in its stead, the Yankee brain would have simply adjusted its religion to its surroundings and not its surroundings to its religion; and America would have gone right on in the front rank of liberty and toleration and progress. There would have been social and political and religious contests over "caste" or "harems" or "Tripitaka," instead of over slavery as a divine institution, the right of a mother to her own offspring, or the inspiration of the Bible. The wheels of progress would have been blocked some days by devotees who preached damnation for those who believed in the "Trinity" instead of for those who did not. Hell would have been as freely promised to the man who suggested that Newton knew more than Mohammed, as it is to-day to any one who makes the same odious comparison between Darwin and Moses. The timid would have been terrified by sermons to prove the lost condition of a man who touched one of lower rank, in place of the edification our clergy offer in the shape of eternal damnation for unbaptized infants. And there would have been so little difference between the arguments for the divinity of the Tripitaka and the Bible, and for the miracles of each, that if any devout Presbyterian had by accident left his barrel of sermons on the latter subject behind him, his Buddhist brother could have utilized them without the change of an argument. But the wheel would turn and the devotee would either go down or change his creed, and it would depend chiefly upon his age and consequent flexibility which course he would adopt.

No known religion could transfer the conditions of civilization in China to America or England or France, and no amount of christianizing (if such a thing were possible) could transform China into a like condition with us, so long as her climate, her soil, and her population remain what they are to-day. You may make the Arab or the Jap digest the whole Westminster catechism, but he will, he must, be an Arab or a Jap still – if he lives through it all. If his constitution is good, and he gets over it, his condition and grade of civilization will continue to conform to his environment; and the trifling difference involved between turning-off prayers on a wheel and counting them off on beads will be simply the difference between tweedledee and tweedledum.

Notwithstanding this as a primary fact, the religion of a country has a modifying influence on the rapidity of its progress, and the more fixed a religion – the more certainly it claims perfection, the greater claim it lays to holding the final word; and the more fully this claim is accepted by the people, the greater influence will it have, the greater check will it be to the development of any new thought, discovery, invention, or principle that arises in the process of evolution toward a freer atmosphere and a broader understanding of individual liberty and dignity and life. William Kingdon Clifford, F. R. S., in his delightful book on the "Scientific Basis of Morals," says:

"It is sometimes said that moral questions have been authoritatively settled by other methods; that we ought to accept this decision, and not to question it by any method of scientific inquiry; and that reason should give way to revelation on such matters.

"I hope before I have done to show just cause why we should pronounce on such teaching as this no light sentence of moral condemnation: first, because it is our duty to form those beliefs which are to guide our actions by the two scientific modes of inference, and by these alone; and, secondly, because the proposed mode of settling ethical questions by authority is contrary to the very nature of right and wrong.

"The worship of a deity who is represented as unfair or unfriendly to any portion of the community is a wrong thing, however great may be the threats and promises by which it is commended. And still worse, the reference of right and wrong to his arbitrary will as a standard, the diversion of the allegiance of the moral sense from the community to him, is the most insidious and fatal of social diseases.

"The first principle of natural ethics is the sole and supreme allegiance of conscience to the community.

"Secondly, veracity to the community depends upon faith in man. Surely I ought to be talking platitudes when I say that it is not English to tell a man a lie, or to suggest a lie by your silence or your actions, because you are afraid that he is not prepared for the truth, because you don't quite know what he will do when he knows it, because perhaps after all this lie is a better thing for him than the truth would be, this same man being all the time an honest fellow-citizen whom you have every reason to trust. Surely I have heard that this craven crookedness is the object of our national detestation. And yet it is constantly whispered that it would be dangerous to divulge certain truths to the masses. 'I know the whole thing is untrue: but then it is so useful for the people; you don't know what harm you might do by shaking their faith in it.' Crooked ways are none the less crooked because they are meant to deceive great masses of people instead of individuals. If a thing is true, let us all believe it, rich and poor, men, women, and children. If a thing is untrue, let us all disbelieve it, rich and poor, men, women, and children. Truth is a thing to be shouted from the housetops, not to be whispered over rose-water after dinner when the ladies are gone away.

"Even in those whom I would most reverence, who would shrink with horror from such actual deception as I have just mentioned, I find traces of a want of faith in man. Even that noble thinker, to whom we of this generation owe more than I can tell, seemed to say in one of his posthumous essays that in regard to questions of great public importance we might encourage a hope in excess of the evidence (which would infallibly grow into a belief and defy evidence) if we found that life was made easier by it. As if we should not lose infinitely more by nourishing a tendency to falsehood than we could gain by the delusion of a pleasing fancy. Life must first of all be made straight and true; it may get easier through the help this brings to the commonwealth. And Lange, the great historian of materialism, says that the amount of false belief necessary to morality in a given society is a matter of taste. I cannot believe that any falsehood whatever is necessary to morality. It cannot be true of my race and yours that to keep ourselves from becoming scoundrels we must needs believe a lie. The sense of right grew up among healthy men and was fixed by the practice of comradeship. It has never had help from phantoms and falsehoods, and it never can want any. By faith in man and piety toward men we have taught each other the right hitherto; with faith in man and piety toward men we shall never more depart from it."

If religion decided and produced the civilization of a people, what sort of civilization would exist to-day among the Jews? All Jews would be bigamists, and murder would be their pastime. No people would be free from their rapine, no woman safe from their lust. But fortunately they have followed their scientific and political leaders instead of their Prophets, and the consequence is that they are so far above and superior to their religion and their Bible, that only in its trivial and immaterial dictates is it their guide and law to-day.

And we, building upon the same foundation, with an added story to our edifice, modify, to suit legislation and a higher public sentiment and a broader conception of justice, both the foundation and the roof whenever a new principle is born or some great soul floods the world with light.

And so the world moves on, those nations in advance that possess the climate to stimulate and the soil to support to the best advantage their citizens – philosophers and scientists who grope towards perfection and stumble on the way over real and imaginary obstacles, but still bring each generation nearer the goal, and freer to brush aside the cobwebs of superstition and ignorance, and to look fairly out on the light that breaks in the East.

There is another feature of the subject that will bear looking at. Christians are the last to give credit to other religions for the development and advance of civilization in the countries possessing them. What Christian will admit that it is the religion of the Chinese that makes them the most orderly, law-abiding, mob-avoiding people on the globe? Will any Christian admit that it is the inferior moral tone of Christ and his teachings which enables the followers of Confucius and Buddha to offer this superior showing? Is he prepared to say that Mohammedanism is superior to Christianity because its followers outdo the Christians in honesty?¹⁹ Is it owing to the superior blessings of the Mormon faith that its followers are more thrifty, and that paupers are few or unknown among them?

Is it because their religion is superior to ours that the Lapp women are better treated; that their comparative status is higher, and their family life purer than with ourselves?²⁰

The claim that superiority of civilization is due to Christianity, and that to it we owe the good things of the nations where it is the prevailing religion, proves too much. It will work just as well for any other religion as for our own. Its reach is too extended, its conclusion too comprehensive for its purpose. Christianity could not be made its sole terminus. It reminds one of the story of the brakeman who was persuaded to go to church. When he came out his friend asked him how he liked the preacher. He said, "Very well, on the main line. He had good wheels, his track was straight and level, and he carried a good head of steam, but he seemed to lack terminal facilities."

Horace Seaver recently wrote the following:

"ALL OWING TO THE BIBLE.

"It is a very common argument with Christians, that only those nations which have had the Bible were refined, civilized, and learned. A Christian paper, now before us, exultingly says:

"'Take the map of the world, draw a line around those countries that have enjoyed the highest degree of refinement, and you will encircle just those nations that have received the Bible as their authority in religion.'

"From this language the plain inference is, that those nations have been indebted to the influence of the Bible for the positions to which they have attained. Let us follow out a little this line of argument and see where it will lead.

"The ancient Egyptians stood as far in advance of their contemporaries as do the nations of Christendom at the present day, as the remains of Egyptian cities and temples fully attest. And if the argument is good, they were indebted for that superiority to their worship of cats, crocodiles, and onions!

"The ancient Greek might have exclaimed, as he beheld the proud position to which Greece had attained – 'See what we owe to a belief in our glorious mythology; we have reached the highest point of enlightenment the world has ever witnessed; we stand unequalled in power, wealth, the cultivation of the arts, and all that makes a nation refined, polished, and great!'"