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WILLIAM QENTON.
BOSTON :
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ADDRESS
ELIZABETH M. F. DENTON, WELLESLEY, MASS.
w 13376.~ H ' ‘


WHAT I S RIGHT?
5 Emma.
BY
WILLIAM BENTON.
BOSTON :
PUBLISHED BY FYILEIAM DEMON-WM W
ADDRESS
ELIZABETH M. F. BENTON, WELLESLEY. MASS.
WHAT IS RIGHT‘?

Iris Friday, the Mussulman’s holy day. The cry
of the muezzin has stirred the sultry air, and thou
sands are ﬂowing through the streets to the stately
mosque. Let us follow. The swelling dome is over
our heads, the marble pavement beneath our feet, and
around us a host of bended worshippers, their hands
clasped in the fervor of devotion. Listen to the
voice of this kneeling supplicant by our side: “0
Allah ! I am Weak, but thou art all-strong; strengthen
me to do the right, that I may enjoy hereafter the ‘
bliss of Paradise.”
As he rises from his knees, we accost him, and say,
“ “ Friend, you have been praying to Allah, or God, to
strengthen you to do right: Will you please to tell us
What you mean by right ‘? ” -— “ Certainly,” replies the
Mussulman, with a look of sorrow for our ignorance
of so simple yet important a subject. “There is one
God, and Mohammed is his prophet. This God has
graciously revealed his will to us, by his prophet, in
his holy Word the Koran, -- a book superior to every
other book in the World. To obey the commands of
' a
Q
4 WHAT 1s RIGHT ?
God, as given in this book, is to do right; and to dis-
obey them is to do wrong. Cast away this precious
volume, and we have no guiding star by which to
regulate our wanderings: we cannot tell what is
right, or what is wrong, and are the slaves of igno
rance and vice.”
It is Saturday, the Jewish holy clay. There stands
the gorgeous temple, little less beautiful than the
pride of Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, so silently
erected in the days of Solomon. In the pulpit be-
hold the venerable rabbi, his White beard resting
upon his breast. Around him are the sons of Israel,
and above in the gallery the daughters, assembled to
worship the God of their fathers. From the ark he
has taken the sacred parchment; and, reverentially
unrolling it, he reads a portion of the law of Moses,
and then addresses the assembled congregation:
“Men and brethren, children of our father Jacob, I
beseech you, do right; then shall ye be blessed in
your basket and in your store, in your going-out, and
in your coming-in. Do right at all times, and the
blessing of Jehovah out of Zion will descend and
rest upon you.”
As the aged rabbi descends from the pulpit, we
accost him, “You have been advising your brethren
to do right: will you please to tell us what you mean
by right ‘3 ”-— “ Certainly, my son,” replies the rabbi.
“ The Almighty God, who made the heavens and the
earth, has revealed himself to mankind by his ser-
vant Moses, and the prophets: they have written his
holy law; and that law is contained in a book that
Ghristizns call the Old Testament (the New Testa~
ment is but a record of fables, and unworthy of ore-
WHAT IS RIGHT ? 5
dence from any rational mind). To obey God’s law
as thus revealed, is to do right ; to violate it is to do
wrong: and under heaven there is no other way by
which a man can tell what is right or what is wrong,
but by studying this word of Jehovah.”
It is Sunday, the Christian’s holy day; and from a
hundred steeples ﬂoats the music of a thousand bells;
and through the streets of the city pass multitudes,
dressed in their gayest attire, to their respective
places of worship. There stands the grand cathedral,
with its cloud-reaching spire. We enter, and admire
the stateliness and beauty of this “ God’s house.”
The organ’s peal sweeps through the aisle
In tones would make an angel smile;
Now soft, as is a fairy strain,
Then “ groaning like a god in pain.”
Slowly a head rises from behind a tasselled desk,
and the minister reads, “He that doeth righteous-
ness is righteous, even as he is righteous ; ” and from
this text he preaches. “Friends,” he exclaims, as he
proceeds with his discourse, “to be happy here and '
hereafter, we must obey the will of God; in other
words, do right. He who does the right has God for
his father, Jesus for his friend, and heaven for his
home; but to the wrong-doer there is misery in this
world, and a fearful looking-for of ﬁery indignation
in the next.”
When the congregation is dismissed, we apprcach
the minister, and inquire what he means by the word
“right,” which he has so frequently used in his dis-
course. “ To do right, sir,” he replies, “is to do as
God commands us. He has revealed his will to us by
6 WHAT IS RIGHT?
his word, contained in the Old and New Testaments,
Where we ﬁnd ‘truth without any mixture of error.’
To obey his will, as thus revealed, is to do right: to
violate that will is to do wrong; and the wrong-deer,
unless he applies to the Friend of sinners for pardon,
will be cast into outer darkness, where there is weep-
ing and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.”
We have, then, already three rules of right,—-the
Mohammedan, Jewish, and Christian. “How do you
know,” we say to the Mohammedan, “that yours is the
rule of right? ”—“ There can be no doubt of it,” he
replies. " Did not the angel Gabriel appear to our
prophet, and cause the Koran, that holy volume writ
ten on a table, by the throne of God himself, to de-
scend on his heart for a direction and good-tidings to
the faithful? No unassisted human being could ever
have written such a wonderful book, every page of
which bears the impress of a hand divine. See the
rapid advance of our religion, which, in a few years,
overspread the world, and now comprises so large a
portion of its population. Besides, I know that the
Koran is divine, and the only rule of right. Obeying
its precepts, I have fasted and prayed, with my face
towards Mecca, groaning under the Weight of my sins,
when the prophet (glory to his name I) has taken
away my guilt, revealed himself to my soul, and I
have gone on my Way rejoicing.”
To the Jew we say, “ How do you know that you
are right?” —- “ Nothing can be more certain,” replies
the Jew. “ God appeared to Moses, our lawgiver, on
Mount Sinai, and amid thunders and lightnings deliv-
ered to him our holy law, and instituted his everlast
ing ordinances. Through the Red Sea he brought
WHAT Is RIGHT '2 7
‘D
our fathers by the strength of his own right arm, fed
them with angels’ food, and delivered their enemies
into their hands. And in the day of atonement have
I gone to our synagogue, bowed down with guilt,
where the rabbi has interceded for us, and I have re-
turned rejoicing in the God of my salvation; for my
sins, which were heavy as a mountain, he lifted off,
and removed far from me.”
To the Christian we say, “ Are you sure that yours
is the rule of right‘? May you not be mistaken?”
“Never,” he replies: “it is impossible. The Bible
is God’s holy Word, conﬁrmed by miracles, prophecies,
and a morality pure as the light of day. It is a sun
without a spot, a fountain of eternal truth, of which
he that drinks shall live forever. Besides, I know that
it is true. Burdened with guilt, I came to the foot of
the cross, as this book teaches; I cast my sins on my
Saviour, and rose a new creature in Christ Jesus. I
carry about with me, therefore, continually the evi-
dence, -- God’s seal set to his own word.”
Which of these is right? Each seems to be satis-
ﬁed with his own side, says he knows he is right;
and, of course, if one is right, the rest are wrong.
Suppose we take up some practical questions that
are likely to come before us in daily life, and observe
how these various rules of right deal with them. “Is
it right to drink intoxicating drinks ‘2” we say to the
Mohammedan. “ N o, certainly not,” he replies ,turning
over the leaves of the Koran, and reading to us the
following passage: ‘0 true believers! surely wine
and lots and images and divining. arrows are an abom-
ination, and of the work of Satan; therefore avoid
them that ye may prosper.’ _
8 WHAT IS RIGHT ?
“That is sufficient,” he says. “God, by his holy
prophet, has forbidden wine, which includes every
thing that intoxicates; and no true believer can use
it.”
“ What do you think on that subject, Jew ‘? ” --“ I
cannot learn that there is any thing wrong in the
moderate use of intoxicating drinks, though drunken-
ness is of course a great crime, and forbidden by our
holy law.”
“ What is your opinion upon that subject? ” we say
to the Christian. “ Wrong, sir, wrong decidedly, and
contrary to the uniform tenor of God’s word, from
Genesis to Revelations, which expressly declares that
we must touch not, taste not, handle not, the unclean
thing.”
“ That is not so,” says a gentleman standing by his
side, who overhears our conversation. “Pray, what
are you, sir?” -—“ I am a believer in the Bible : and I
say that the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelations,
sanctions the moderate use of intoxicating drinks; and
it is only their abuse that is forbidden.”—-“ What
shall we do in this case ? ” I say. “ Go to the Bible,”
replies the abstaining Christian. “ To the law and to
the testimony,” says the little-drop brother: “ if they
speak not according to this rule, it is because there is
no light in them.” So to the Bible we go; and, after
turning over several of its pages, we at length come
to a passage referring to the subject that we are con-
sidering : “ And Noah began to be a husbandman; and
he planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine,
and was drunken.” (Gen. ix. 20.) Within his tent
the old man lay uncovered; while in this condition,
his younger son found him, and, as it appears, made
WHAT 1s RIGHT ? 9
sport of his father, who, learning the fact, on awak~
ing, cursed his offspring most bitterly. And some
pious divines see in the dark faces of the negrots,
“the servile progeny of Ham,” the consequence of
this black curse of Noah to this day. The Bible does
not, however, inform us whether Noah did right or
wrong in getting drunk or in drinking; and the ques-
tion is left very much as we found it.
We proceed, and our little-drop friend points sig-
niﬁcantly to the case of Lot as one having some hear-
ing upon the question. We ﬁnd, on reading, that,
before the “ﬁre-shower of ruin” descended on the
doomed cities of the plain, Lot and his family ﬂed
from Sodom, his wife being turned into a statue of
salt on the way; and he and his two daughters dwelt
in a cave in the mountain. Having made their fa‘
ther drunk with wine, he committed incest with one of
his daughters, and on the next evening did the same
thing with the other. (Gen. xix. 30-38.) Yet not
a word of condemnation is uttered, either of the man,
or the liquor that was the means of placing him in
such a disgraceful position: he is styled emphatically
“just Lot,” and a “righteous man.” (2 Pet. ii. 7, 8.)
“If,” says the moderate-drinking Christian, “God
had not intended man to use the article, this was just
the very time to forbid its use, and preach your tem~
perance doctrine. Before you reply to my remarks,”
turning to his temperance brother, “let me refer you
to one express passage upon the subject, that ought
to set the question at rest forever. It reads thus:
‘Thou: shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy
soul lusteth after: for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine,
of‘ for strong drink.’ (Dent. xiv. 26.) Now, if a man
-10 _WHAT IS RIGHT ‘P
may spend his money for these articles, he certainly
would be at liberty to drink them after so doing; it
is absurd to think otherwise.”
“My dear sir,” replies the temperance man, “you
must never build up a doctrine on an isolated passage
of Scripture: after that fashion, a man may prove
any thing from the Bible. You must take the whole
tenor of the Scriptures, from one end to the other,
and, comparing passage with passage, thus learn what
the will of the Lord is. Let me refer you to some
parts of the Bible having an important bearing on
this question. Take, ‘for instance, the case of Sam-
son, recorded in the 13th chapter of Judges. The
children of Israel had been in bondage to the Phi-
listines for forty years, and the Lord sought a de-
liverer for them. For this purpose be needed a
strong man,—-for God works, you know, by instru-
ments: he desired to put the strength of a hundred
men’s arms into one man’s arm,-— a shepherd of might,
that could rescue his sheep from the jaws of the
devouring lion. Now, mark how he does this: the
angel of the Lord—that is, the Lord’s messenger —-
appears to Samson’s mother, and says to her, ‘Thou
shalt conceive and bear a son. Now, therefore, be-
ware, I pray thee, and drink not wine nor strong
drink.’ And to her husband he says, ‘She may not
eat of any thing that cometh of the vine; neither let
her drink wine nor strong drink.’ Why these strin-
gent prohibitions? Evidently that the child might
be free from alcoholic taint, he being also a Nazarite
from the womb to the day of his death. Thus did
God accomplish his purposes by the strength of this
mighty abstainer, and deliver the Israelites from the
WHAT Is RIGHT ? 11
hand of their oppressors. Nor is this all: God’s word
abounds with passages condemning the use of intoxi-
cating drinks. Let L8 hear what Solomon, the king
of wise men, says, ‘Who hath woe? who hath sor-
row? who hath contentions? who hath babbling?
who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of
eyes? They that tarry long at the wine, they that
go to seek mixed wine. Look not thou upon the
wine when it is red, when it giveth its color in the
cup. when it moveth itself aright: at the last, it
biteto like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.’
(Prov. xxiii. 29.) What can be plainer than this?
No abstainer could write a passage more strongly for-
bidding the use of intoxicating drinks. You must
not even look at the tempter, lest you be poisoned by
its deadly venom.”
“ Stop, stop! ” says the moderate drinker. “I can-
not allow you to rattle along in that way. You must
remember it will never do to build up a doctrine on
an isolated passage of Scripture; you must ‘take the
whole tenor of God’s Word, from one end to the
other :_ that’s the way to arrive at truth. Solomon
certainly never meant what you want to wrest from
his words; for, turn to the last chapter of Proverbs
and read: ‘It is not for kings, O Lemuel! it is not
for kings, to drink wine ; nor for princes strong drink.
Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish,
and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let
him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his
misery no more.’ (Prov. xxxi. 4-7.) That is the
doctrine. You see it is kings and princes that are
not to look on the wine; those are the men that are
not to drink: but, for such men as we, there is no
12 WHAT IS RIGHT r
such command. When our hearts are heavy, we may
drink, and forget our poverty, and remember our mis-
ery no more. When you come to read the Bible
understandingly, you will ﬁnd this to be its tenor
throughout.” ‘’
“The passage that you appeal to,” says his oppo-
nent, “only refers to criminals condemned to die,
who drank till they were stupid, in order to drown
the sense of their miseries. God’s holy word is guilty
of no such contradictions as you seem to make it.
Allow me to refer you to the case of Daniel and the
three Hebrew children, as one bearing out the glori-
ous doctrine of abstinence from all intoxicating drinks.
The children of Israel were carried off captives to
Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar, desirous of having the
most beautiful and intelligent of them instructed in
the language and learning of the Chaldaeans, com-
mands the master of the eunuchs to search them out.
He does so, and Daniel and the three Hebrew chil-
dren are chosen. The king appoints them a certain
portion of meat from his table, and of the wine that
he drank; but they refuse the king’s wine, and eat
not his meat: but pulse had they for food, and water
for drink.
‘ Yet they were fatter and far more fair
Than any among their fellows there,
And surpassed in learning and wisdom, too,
Each proud Chaldeean and boastful Jew.’
“ See how the blessing of God followed these tem-
perate young men! Daniel is saved from the hungry
lions; for God shut their months. The Hebrew chil-
dren walk unhurt in the ﬁery furnace heated seven '
/WHAT 1s RIGHT ? 13
times hotter than it was wont to be; not even the
smell of ﬁre upon their garments. What better evi
dence can we have of God’s blessing crowning the
temperance cause ? ”
“Allow me to ask you a question,” says the drink-
ing Christian. “ Was not Jesus Christ a greater
person than Daniel? ”—“ Oh, certainly! he was God
Almighty, who came down from heaven.”—-“ Very
well, then, the example of Jesus must be as much
more important than Daniel’s as God is greater than
man. Now, let us look at his example (John ii.
1-10.) There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee, and
Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding.
The tables are spread for the feast, and the guests sit
down to partake: the wine is handed round, and, be-
fore the feast is over, it is all gone (not many of your
kind of people there, you see). The mother of Jesus
Whispers to him, ‘They have no wine.’ There were
set there six water-pots, holding, say the commenta-
tors, about a hundred and twenty gallons. Jesus
‘says, ‘Fill them with water.’ They ﬁll them to the
brim. ‘Now bear out to the governor of the feast.’
They do so, and the governor proclaims it good wine.
‘ The conscious water saw its God,
And, blushing, turned to generous wine.’
Had you temperance men had his power, you would
have turned all the wine provided for the feast to
water; but “ he, the gracious Lord divine, turns sim-
ple water into wine,” and by so doing places the force
of his holy example on the side of those who believe
in using with moderation the gifts of God’s bounty.
When about to leave his disciples, they took a last
14 WHAT IS RIGHT?
supper together; at that supper they had bread and
wine. Taking the cup in his hand, and offering it to
them, he said, ‘Drink ye all of it.’ (Matt. xxvi. 27.)
‘And as oft as ye do it, do it in remembrance of me.’
(1 Cor. xi. 25.) And I never take a glass of wine
without remembering the dying Saviour. But you
temperance men, by your doctrines, cast discredit on
the Saviour of the world; and, if he were here now,
you would look down upon him with scorn and con-
tempt: and how must he look upon you in the last
great day‘? Paul, who followed in the footsteps of
his Master, when writing to Timothy, one of your
cold-water men, says (1 Tim. v. 23), ‘ Drink no longer
water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake
and thine often inﬁrmities.’ ”
After these two Christians have thus fought their
way through the Bible, can any man tell on which
side of the question the Bible stands? Is it not on
both sides? It is a witness as ready to swear for
plaintiff as defendant; a guide pointing east and west
at the same time, to the great astonishment of the be-
wildered traveller. Right and wrong are alternately
on the sides of drinking and abstaining; and a man
who seeks for information in the Bible on this subject
is farther off when done than when he began. And
what is true in reference to the use of intoxicating
drinks is equally true in reference to every other
practical question that can come before us.
“Is there any day holier than another?” I say to
the Mohammedan. “Most assuredly,” he replies.
“What day is it? ”——“ Friday, of course: every child
knows that.” --“ What makes Friday so much better
than other days? " --“ What a question, 0 inﬁdel, to
WHAT IS RIGHT? 15
ask! Friday is the day on which God ended his la
bors, and rested after he had made the heavens and
the earth. Friday is the day on which our holy
prophet (blessed be his name!) ﬂed from Mecca to
Medina; it is the day set apart by the Koran as the
sabbath, and has been observed by our Church from
the earliest times: the man who labors on that day .
is accursed of God.” .
I turn to the Jew. “ What do you think upon that
subject ‘.9 ” —- “ There is no holy day,” he replies, “ but
Saturday. Fridays are no better than Sundays; but
Saturday, the seventh day, is the sabbath of the Lord
our God, on which no manner of work may be done.”
“What makes Saturday so much better than other
days? ” —-“ Do you not know that in six days the Lord
made heaven and earth, and rested on the seventh,
wherefore he blessed and hallowed it‘? In his law,
delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave the com-
mand to observe this day as a holy day forever. (Ex.
xxxi. 13-16.) And what God commands, man must
do.”
“ What do you think about that, Christian ? ” ——“ Well,
sir,pf keeping Fridays and Saturdays I know nothing.
They are no better than other days of the week; but
Sunday is the Lord’s Day: and whoever breaks the
sabbath, by work or play, does it at the peril of his
soul; for all sabbath-breakers shall have their portion
in the lake that burns with ﬁre and brimstone.” -— “ But
wherein lies the peculiar sanctity of the Sunday?”
“ Have you not read the Bible, sir, God’s holy word
of truth? ‘ Remember the sabbath day to keep it
holy.’ ”—-“ Yes; but that is Saturday.”—-“ No, it is
Sunday; for the day has been changed by the resur~
16 WHAT Is RIGHT?
rection of Jesus Christ from the dead, on the ﬁrst
day of the week.” ——-“ But, as he rested in the grave
on Saturday, the Jewish sabbath might very well
have been retained.”--“ The Church, sir, from the
earliest times, observed the ﬁrst day of the week.
On that day the disciples met to break bread; and,
from those earliest times to the present, the Sunday
has been observed as a day of rest, and a peculiarly
holy day, by all classes of Christians everywhere.
John, in the Revelation, evidently refers to it when
he speaks of ‘ the Lord’s Day.’ ”
“Is thee not somewhat mistaken there? ” says an
old gentleman with a broad-brimmed hat, who had
entered during our conversation. “ I am a Christian,
and a believer in that book to which thee has been
appealing, and I ﬁnd no such doctrine in it as thee
sets forth. I ﬁnd Jesus setting at nought the sab~
bath by selecting it for the performance of his most
notable miracles; and, when chided by the Pharisees,
he says, ‘The sabbath was made for man, and not
man for the sabbath. The Son of man is Lord also of
the sabbath day.’ (Mark ii. 27.) He never com-
manded his followers to observe holy days, but nailed
all their ceremonial observances to his cross; for they
were only a shadow of good things to come. Paul
says, ‘One man esteemeth one day above another;
another regardeth every day alike: let every man
be fully persuaded in his own mind.’ (Rom. xiv. 5.)
And, writing to the Colossians, in the spirit of his
Master, he says, ‘ Let no man, therefore, judge you in
meat or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of
the new moon, or of the sabbath, which are a shadow
of things to come; but the body is of Christ.’ (Col.
WHAT IS RIGHT ‘2 17
fool, need not err therein ?
ii. 16.) Now, when a man has his body, he never
troubles himself to look after his shadow; and when
Jesus, the body, came in his light and glory, the J ew-
ish types and shadows disappeared, 10‘ in his re-
splendent brightness. In writing to the Galatians,
Paul says, ‘ Ye observe days and months and times:
1. am afraid of you lest I have bestowed upon you la-
bor in vain.’ (Gal. iv. 10-11.) There are multitudes
living now that Paul would be afraid of if he were
here; for they have departed from the simplicity of
the gospel of Jesus, and are bowing to the idols that
men have set up'.” So says this Quaker of the old
schooL
If these men are to be believed, the Bible is a
guide-board pointing in three different directions, for
the same place, at the same time. Saturday is the
holy day, and no other; Sunday is the holy day, and
must be observed ; and no day is holier than another,
but all are alike good. What shall the traveller do
who ﬁnds these contradictory directions? Is this the
road that is so plain that a Wayfaring man, though a
If We take any other practical question, we ﬁnd
the same difficulty in deciding what is right or wrong
by any sacred book that may have been adopted
as a standard. Should a man have more wives than
one? The Mohammedan replies yes, at once: his
prophet had, and his holy book permits polygamy.
The Jew says it was allowed by God at one time, but
is no longer permitted. We ask the Christian; but he
stares with astonishment that we should ask him such
a question. “()ne man and one woman united to-
gather for life is the doctrine of the Bible, taught
18 WHAT Is RIGHT?
most explicitly throughout the pages of tha blessed
book; and no Christian for a moment doubts it.”
“ You are mistaken, sir,” exclaims the Mormon:
“ on the coﬂtrary, polygamy is plainly taught in the
Scriptures, as practised in our Church at the'present
time.” -—“ How can you say so?” replies the Monoga-
mist. “ The Bible is opposed to such a doctrine
from Genesis to Revelation. Just turn to the ac-
count of creation as given in Genesis, and what can
be plainer than the dual relation between the sexes
there declared, as established by God himself? Adam
being created, and placed in Eden’s ﬂowery garden,
the beasts were brought to him to name; and, as they
marched before him, from the mouse to the monkey,
he gave them appropriate names, but sought in vain
for a companion. God, compassionating Adam in his
lonely condition, cast him into a deep sleep, extracted
one of his ribs, and of this made a woman,and brought
her unto Adam. Had polygamy been right for man,
then was the time for it to be made manifest. God
could just as easily have taken out two or three ribs,
and made as many women of them, as to take one;
but, in his inﬁnite wisdom and goodness, he makes of
one rib one woman, a companion for Adam for life.
By what sophistries can you set aside these explicit
revelations?”
“ You don’t understand the Bible, sir: you are
blind to the beauty of its glorious teachings. Do you
not know, sir, that, through all Nature, every thing has
a small beginning, however mighty it may become?
First we have the germ peeping above the ground,
then the sapling, and in the end the giant oak. First
the spring, then the rill, the streamlet, and the river.
WHAT Is RIGHT? 19
This is God’s method of working; and it is not sur-
prising that the statements of the Bible, God’s holy
word, should harmonize with it. Adam had one wife
by God’s appointment: that is true, and what we
should reasonably expect. God could not have given
him less, and, in accordance with his natural law, we
could not expect him to give more. But mark, as we
advance along the line of the eminent worthies whom
God has chosen to honor in his sacred word, how the
stream widens and deepens. Abraham, who was ‘ the
father of the faithful, and the friend of God,’ had one
wife Sarah, and another Hagar. (Gen. xvi. 3.) And,
when Sarah died, he took another (Keturah), so as
to keep up his number, two. (Gen. xxv. 1.) Jacob,
farther along the line, married two wives, his own
ﬁrst cousins, daughters of his Uncle Laban; and then
had children by their two handmaids, making his num-
ber four. Gideon, a‘ man of the Lord, by whom he
delivered Israel, and one of Paul’s cloud of witnesses,
must have had at least ten wives; for the Bible informs
us that he had many wives and seventy sons. (Judg.
viii. 30.) Then David, the ‘man after God’s own
heart,’ the man who, we are told by God him-
self, never did wrong in his life but once (and that
was in the matterof .Uriah), takes to himself a num-
ber of wives; and, when Saul dies, the blessed Bible
declares that ‘God gave to him the wives of his
master Saul into his bosom.’ (2 Sam. xii. 8.) Do
‘not you begin to see how naturally and beautifully
this blessed system of polygamy grows‘?-—A.dam one,
Abraham two, Jacob four, Gideon ‘ten, David twenty
or thirty, and, lastly, Solomon, the wisest man that
ever lived or ever shall live, with his seven hundred
20 WHAT IS RIGHT ?
wives and three hundred concubines. In him hu-
manity culminated ; and from that time men went
downward and backward, till Joseph Smith, the
prophet of the Lord, arose and brought in the glory
of the latter day. The Bible is full of beauty when
properly understood, but in the hands of the wilful
and ignorant is like a sharp sword, that cuts the hand
of him who knows not how to wield it.”
“ Filthy wretchesl to pervert the word of God in
order to pander to your depraved appetites,” says a
tall, pale, overcoated, broad-brimmed-hatted gentleman,
who has been listening attentively to the discussion.
“ Who are you?” exclaim both with one breath. “ I
am a Shaker, gentlemen, and a devout believer in the
truths of that‘ blessed volume that you wrest to your
own destruction : and I say that the Bible teaches, by
example and precept, that marriage is one of the most
proliﬁc sources of evil; and that, as God’s children,
we should abstain from it. Go to the garden of Eden,
and what do you ﬁnd? A paradise of delights. Every
thing that is pleasant to the eye and useful for food is
there. No earthquake heaves the ground,no volcano
opens its ﬁery mouth; but the angel of peace holds
dominion over the world. The lion and the tiger, the
lamb and the kid, lie side by side together, and there
is nothing to hurt or destroy. But mark the change 1
Adam, dissatisﬁed, desires a helpmeet; and no sooner
does she come than misery comes as her companion.
When woman came, the Devil came ; and then came
death and all our woe. The fair face of Nature be-
came seamed with yawning chasms, earthquakes shook
the world, and volcanoes poured out desolating ﬂoods ;
the lion ﬂeshed his teeth in the innocent lamb, and the
WHAT Is RIGHT? 21
tiger, seizing the kid, rent it in pieces; .the soul
of man was dyed by sin as black as hell, and nothing
but the blood of God could wash it out. Abraham
has two wives; but their quarrels imbitter his exist
ence: and, for the sake of peace, he is compelled to
turn one of them with her child out of doors into the
wilderness. Jacob the shepherd, keeping the sheep
of his uncle Laban, is a lovely character, dreaming of
heaven and angels, and communing with God; but
with his marriage commences his misery. His wives
quarrel; his children are robbers and murderers, and
even conspire against the life of their brother, till the
old man, in the anguish of his heart, exclaims, ‘Ye
will bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the
grave.’ David’s wives vex his righteous soul, and
Bathsheba leads him to the commission of that terri-
ble crime that blots his whole life. His beloved son
makes war against his father, and is slain; David, in
his soul’s agony, exclaiming, ‘O Absalom! my son,
my son! Would God I had died for thee, 0 Ab-
salom, my son!’ Even Solomon, the wisest man, is
dragged down from the throne of his glory by his
wives and concubines, who turned his heart from the
Lord; and he gives us the result of his wide expe-
rience in the mournful words,‘ A man in a thousand
have I found, but a woman in a thousand have I not
found.’ ‘Vanity of vanities ; all is vanity, and vexa-
tion of spirit.’ Come down to the New Testament;
and Jesus our Lord and Master, who set us an exam-
ple that We should tread in his steps, was never mar-
ried; and he says,.(oh that mankind would read and
understand 1) ‘He that looketh on a woman to lust
after her hath committed adultery with her already in
22 WHAT Is RIGHT ?‘
Q:
his heart.’ Paul, who trod in the footsteps of his
divine Master, was no husband to any woman, no
father to any child, and desired others to follow him,
as he followed Jesus. When John the revelator had
those sublime visions in the Isle of Patmos, he saw a
hundred‘ and forty-four thousand around the throne of
God, who were singing day and night unto him.
John inquires who these favored few are, who thus
approach the throne, and on whom God’s smile rests
continually; and the answer is,— mark it,—- ‘These are
they that were not deﬁled with women.’ (Rev. xvi.
4.) In other words,they were Shakers ; and we shall
bask in the sunshine of God’s glory, when ﬁlthy sin-
ners like you will be compelled to stand afar off.”
So argue Bible believers; and no wonder, while
they follow such a guide, who stands at life’s cross-
roads, with as many hands as a Hindoo god; his ﬁn-
gers directing to every point of the compass, while he
exclaims, “ That is the way to life 1 ”
Does it point slavery-ward? “ No such thing,” said
the North, and shouted itself hoarse in repeating,“ ‘ Do
unto another as ye would that another should do unto
you.’ ‘Call no man master; for one is your master,
even Christ, and all ye are brethren.’ ‘Woe unto
him that useth his neighbor’s service without wages,
and giveth him not for his work.’ ‘ The stranger
that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born
among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.’ ” “How
plain ! ” said the antislavery minister. “ None but
those blinded by avarice can help seeing how God
frowns upon the damnahle traﬁric in the souls of human
beings, and how his Word is laid like an axe at the
root of this tree of misery.”
wHAT Is RIGHT ? 23
“ The Almighty Maker of the universe,” said the
Southern slaveholder, “ is ever the same. He never
commands in one age what he forbids in another, nor
blesses at one time what he curses and denounces at
other times ; and he has said in his Word, ‘ Both thy
bondmen and bondmaids which thou shalt have shall be
of the heathen that are round about you ; of them shall
ye buy bondmen and bondmaids, and ye shall take
them as an inheritance for your children after you, to
inherit them for a possession: they shall be your
bondmen forever.’ (Lev. xxv. 44-46.) None of your
antislavery and abolition in the Bible, but there we
have God’s charter, signed, sealed, and delivered;
our rights guaranteed by the great I Am forever.
Abraham the friend of God, Jacob his intimate com-
panion, and David his beloved, all held slaves; and
Jesus, ﬁnding the institution of slavery everywhere
through Palestine, never said one word against its
continuance. Paul'not only recognizes slavery, but
regulates it, when he says, ‘ Servants, obey in all
things your masters, according to the ﬂesh; not with
eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in singleness of
heart, fearing God.’ Masters are to give unto their
servants what is just and equal. No word of denun-
ciation of the institution, nothing of abolition; but
the right of the master is recognized, and the duty
of the servant prescribed.”
On this, as on all practical questions, the Bible is
double-tongued, and is therefore no true moral guide.
What, then, shall the traveller do? Is there no
pole-star in the heavens, ﬁxed immovably, while
around the shifting lights revolve? Is man left to
tread the wilderness in midnight darkness, with noth-
24 _ WHAT Is RIGHT ?
ing to dispel the gloom around his tortuous pathway
but the ﬂash _of a meteor, or the uncertain light of the
ign'isfat'uis? There is a pole-star for the mariner, a
highway for the traveller, with daylight to guide him,
and men need not drive on shoals, ﬂounder in bogs, or
move slowly in darkness with fear and trembling.
THAT Is RIGHT WHICH Is FOR HUMANITY’S BENEFIT; THAT
IS WRONG WHICH Is OPPOSED To THE WELFARE OF THE
HUMAN RACE. It is not presumable that we can add
to the happiness or diminish the enjoyment of God;
but our deeds constantly inﬂuence ourselves and our
fellows for good and evil. To know what actions
are productive of good or evil, we need to use our
judgment, aided by all the light that science can
bestow.
Let us try by this rule the various questions that
have come before us. Is it right or wrong to use in-
toxicating drinks? The basis of all intoxicating drinks
is alcohol: it is this in them that'makes them intoxi-
cating. Rum and brand)r contain a large quantity,
while beer and hard cider contain but little. What is
this alcohol? we inquire of science ; and the answer
is, an acrid poison. Then intoxicating liquors are
poisonous in proportion to the alcohol that they con-
tain, and as such are at war with the healthy opera-
tions of the human system. The man in health who
uses them violates the law that governs his physi-
cal organism; and no amount of prayer or Bible read-
ing can absolve the sinner from the consequences of
his deeds. The headache that admonishes the mod-
erate drinker, the diseased body that the drunkard
carries with him continually, are much more effectual
texts than “ Thus saith the Lord,” in Bible or in Koran.
WHAT IS RIGHT ? 25
Texts are they written in an ever-living language,
understood by men of every tongue.
Intoxicating drinks are injurious to those who use
them; at war with the health of the body and strength
of the mind; stimulating to physical and mental ac
tivity for a time, it is true, but using the strength of
tomorrow to-day, and demanding for its use a fearful
interest, that soon bankrupts the foolish borrower.
Hence we apply our rule, and decide that it is not
right to use intoxicating drinks. “But your rule,”
says an objector, “leads no more to unanimity of
opinion than the Bible. Men who do not make the
Bible their guide differ in opinion on this subject as
much as those who do.” To those who are governed
by it, it does. Multitudes never investigate the sub-
ject : - some who do have a strong appetite for intoxi-
cating drinks that hinders clear vision. As people
become intelligent, opinion on this subject. becomes
' more unanimous, and there is no doubt, that, event
ually, the use of these drinks will be abandoned.
Is one day holier than another ‘2 The conﬂicting
testimony ‘of so-called holy books can never give a
reasonable answer to this question; but N ature’s am-
ple and consistent page contains a satisfactory reply.
I Work for six or eight hours daily on my farm, and
note carefully the condition of my system on the va
rious days of the week. I do this for a whole year;
and I ﬁnd that labor agrees with my physical and
mental constitution on every day of the week. Fri-
days are no more consecrated to rest by Nature than
Saturdays; Sundays than Mondays. The corn I plant
on Sunday ‘grows as well as that planted on Monday;
the rains refuse not to fall. upon it, nor the sun to
26 WHAT 1s RIGHT ?
shine upoii it. On every day the grass grows, the
Water ﬂows, gayly blows the breeze, the sap climbs up
the trees. Sunday puts no brake on the worid’s
wheels; but the sound of the rushing sphere comes
humming into the church on Sunday, as. into the
synagogue on Saturday. Nature knows no red-letter
days. i _
The man who invented the sabbath evidently sup-
posed the World to be ﬂat. When the sun Went down,
it was night all over the world; and, when he rose, day
was everywhere. N ot otherwise could all the people,
of the world observe the same portion of time. At‘
six o’clock on Sunday evening, the Christian minister
in this country gives out his text, “Remember the
sabbath day to keep it holy,” and solemnly denounces
the violators of the holy day who do their own work,
and obey not the divine record; and at the very same
time his Christian brethren in China are swinging
their axes, driving their planes, and wielding their
hammers, for it is Monday morning with them. If we
would but climb the mountain, sun ourselves in the
daylight, and let the wind blow the cobwebs out of
our eyes, we might read this truthful Scripture, “All
days are thine, man: use them for thy good.” No
tyrannical monarch sits in state, watching with scowl-
ing brow the little boys who play on Sunday, striking
one with lightning, and drowning another.
There is a time of rest marked by Nature, which
none can disregard with impunity. It is when the
sun sinks, and the curtain of night is drawn around
the World ; when
“ The daisies have shut up their sleepy red eyes,
And the bees and the birds are at rest."
WHAT Is RIGHT 7 27
Then sleep, like an angel, closes the laborer’s eyes,
and his soul wanders off into heaven. Abstain from
sleep to-night, and to-morrow you feel faint and lan-
guid. Try it to-morrow night, and the pain you will
suffer will teach you the necessity of obeying the laws
that Nature makes. It is said that Napoleon’s sol-
diers, in the retreat from Moscow, slept on the march.
So Well does Nature provide for obedience to her
commands, that disobedience is almost impossible.
This is the only sabbath that Nature imposes: all
others are of man’s manufacture.
Indiscriminate intercourse between the sexes pro-
duces the foulest diseases, and its mental and moral
effects are most disastrous. Polygamy debases wo-
man, and degrades and brutalizes man. If one man
appropriates to himself a dozen wives, he is a tyrant,
and they his slaves. If many men were to do it,
many of their brethren would be robbed of the hap-
piness that ﬂows from congenial companionship with
woman. Monogamy is evidently the law of Nature;
and when two congenial souls are truly united theirs
is the kingdom of heaven.
What are the effects of slavery? Does it elevate
mankind‘? Is it a blessing to the race? Its very
defenders acknowledge that it is a curse. In conse-
quence of it, comes to the white man idleness, that
eats away his manhood like a canker-worm; cruelty,
that enthrones the beast in his soul; and fear, that
holds a dagger before his eyes continually: to the
colored man, a prison-house for his mind, from which
the light of knowledge is carefully excluded; a stag
nation of soul that breeds pestilence and crime. It
is accursed, let it die, says Nature ; and die it will.
28 WHAT Is RIGHT ?
For want of this principle by whicu to distinguish
right from wrong, the world is most sadly cursed.
We have artiﬁcial virtues and artiﬁcial vices without
number. Men are trained to believe that certain ac‘
tions are right, nay, imperative, that have no, tenden-
cy to beneﬁt the doer or his neighbors; while they are
trained to carefully abstain from doing what would be
of decided beneﬁt. ‘
The faculty of conscience is blind, and never en-
ables a man to know whether actions are right or
wrong: it only induces us to do that which the judg-
ment has decided to be right. The Hindoo devotee
holds his closed hand above his head in a ﬁxed posi-
tion till the nails grow through his hand, and the mus-
cles of his arm become so rigid that it is impossible
to bend it. The torture thus inﬂicted upon the body
he is taught to believe is so much virtue placed to
the account of his soul; and his conscience assists
him in bearing the pain. The Mohammedan dervise
dances and howls by the hour, not because his dan-
cing and howling beneﬁt either himself or others, but
to propitiate God, and obtain favors from him. We
need not travel far to ﬁnd instances of a somewhat
similar kind in what we are pleased to call an “en-
lightened land.”
Here is a baby held in the arms of a gentleman,
who utters some words over it, as if for a charm, and
then sprinkles water in its face till it cries; all parties
looking on with the greatest seriousness.
It is winter, and cold in the extreme. A hole has
been cut in the ice, and in the water stands another
gentleman, a crowd of lockers-on surrounding the
spot, attracted by the singular spectacle. He dips
WHAT Is RIGHT 7 29
overhead twenty or thirty people, two-thirds of them
women or girls; and with stiffened clothes and chatter-
ing teeth they make their way to some neighboring
house. Who is beneﬁted? The water is no purer,
the people no cleaner, the gentleman no warmer, the
world no Wiser.
A hundred people are gathered ina Christian place
of worship. It is communion-day. The minister
discourses about a young man who was put to death
more than eighteen centuries ago, who, he says, was
God. He then hands to them cups .ﬁlled With Wine,
and plates containing pieces of bread, and tells them to
eat and drink; assuring them, as they do, that they
are eating the ﬂesh and drinking the blood of this
young man Who died so long ago, though the bread
was made by the baker, and the wine is generally
some villanous compound concocted by the wine-mer-
chant.
Artiﬁcial virtues that are no virtues, that make no
soul Wiser or better, purer or happier, take the place
of manliness, intelligence, ahd use. Human beings
meet by thousands, and cry to deaf gods; they build
sumptuous temples, and employ men to retail to them
ancient fables, While they sternly reject living and
important facts.
Artiﬁcial vices go side by side-With artiﬁcial vir-
tues. ‘Your hired man is a Catholic. It is Friday, and
the church says no meat shall be eaten. A round
of beef is on the table; Patrick has been laboring
hard, and hunger has shortened his memory; out
after cut disappears, till the thought ﬂashes like light
ning into his mind,-— it is Friday 1 Down drop knife
and fork, and remorse of conscience supplies the re-
30 WHAT Is RIGHT ?
mainder of the meal. On Sunday he is off to confes~
sional. He kneels, “O father, I have committed a
great sin.” ——“ What is it, my son ? ” says the priest,
who thinks of nothing less than murder. “I ate some
beef on Friday.” The priest prescribes alight pen-
ance, and away goes Patrick rejoicing, while he rolls
over a large quid of tobacco, and chews with double
force for joy. It is all right to chew tobacco; but to
eat meat on Friday —.— What a deadly sin 1
A company of Methodists have met in the base-
ment of the church at class-meeting. The leader
‘asks them one by one how it is with their SOll'lS, till
he arrives at a poor widow, left with four young chil-
dren and a heritage of woe. She tells with trem-
bling voice of her many shortcomings: she does the
things she ought not to do, and leaves undone the
things she ought to do; she begs an interest in their
prayers, that she may grieve her God no more by
wandering from him, but move steadily on to Zion
with her face thitherward. What has this poor soul
done? What are the sins that she has committed,
the remembrance of which overwhelms her like a
ﬂood? Fatigued with hard labor for herself and
darlings, she slept without ﬁrst praying, and thought
of her children in the morning before she thought of
her God. She heard a dull, prosy sermon last Sun-
day, and went to sleep (the best possible thing she
could do under the circumstances); and, bearing the
burden of such artiﬁcial sins as these, she goes mourn-
ing all her days.
Thousands are made miserable by their violation
of commands that they were never under any obliga
tion to ol sy, and, on the other hand, are ruined by
WHAT Is RIGHT ? 31
disobeying What Nature commands, of which they are
generally ignorant.
Let us study the effect of our actions upon our-
selves and our neighbors; and what conduces to true
permanent happiness let us perform. Here are the
ignorant; let us enlighten them by all the means in
our power. Here are our neighbors, suffering, dy-
ing; let us assist and relieve them. Man needs our
assistance, and all that we can give. Blessed is he
that applies his life to this work! In this World he
has peace and joy, and in the world to come the happi-
ness that legitimately springs from Well-doing, and that
cannot be separated from it.
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MAN’S TRUE SAVIOURS.

A Dz'smurse,
DELIVERED IN MUSIC HALL, BOSTON, MASS.,
BY
WILLIAM nENToN.
WELLESLEY, MASS. :
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY.


1882.
MAN’S TRUE SAVIOURS.
A Dz'scam/se,
DELIVERED IN MUSIC HALL, BOSTON, MASS.,
BY
WILLIAM DENTON.

WELLESLEY, MASS:
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY.
1882.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872,
BY WILLIAM DENTON,
In the Oﬁce of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
save men in this sense?
MAN’S TRUE SAVIOURS.

“ WHAT must I do to be saved?” said a trembling jailer
to his prisoners, eighteen hundred years ago. Since that
time, millions, with tearful eyes, have asked the same ques—
tion; and even to-day multitudes pause for the reply. The
answer given to the jailer was, “ Believe in the Lord Jesus
Christ, and thou shalt be saved ; ” and the answer given
by Paul and Silas then is the answer generally ‘given by
Christian clergymen to inquirers now.
Webster says that “ save ” means “ to preserve from injury,
destruction, or evil of any kind.” Does believing in Jesus
To believe is to take for true what
is told us by another. Will believing that Jesus was born
of a virgin, that he performed wonderful miracles, that he
died on the cross, or rose again, that he was the son of God,
or God himself, or anything else respecting him, — will this
preserve men from injury, destruction, or evil of any kind?
What are the evils that aﬂiict mankind to-day, and from
which we need to be saved? There is none greater than ig
norance: it is the proliﬁc parent of innumerable ills, — oi
poverty, crime, and misery, that can never be told. The
ignorant man walks through the world blindfolded, but
with all the conﬁdence of one who can see. He is always
“ liable to fall down precipices and into pits, and is sure to
3
4 MAN’s TRUE sAvIouRs.
choose a blind guide. Ignorant parents bring into the world
children that, by virtue of their generation, can never be
healthy or wise, but must be a burden to themselves and
their friends till death releases them. The ignorant farmer
knows not how to treat his land, and his meagre crops only
half satisfy the needs of his hungry family. The ignorant
king makes the land mourn on account of his folly; and
ignorant priests keep the multitudes who trust them constant
slaves to grovelling superstitions. Ignorance ﬁlls our luna-
tic asylums, almshouses, hospitals, and jails: it is, indeed.
the fruitful soil in which vice of all kinds ﬂourishes, and
produces its baueful crops. Men drink intoxicating drinks,
and boys learn to chew tobacco, because they are ignorant
of the bad effects of these practices on the human system ;
and half the licentiousness of the world would be removed
were the perpetrators aware of the suffering that invariably
follows.
Will believing in Jesus save us from ignorance? Will it
reveal to us aknowledge of our physical and mental systems,
and their relation to the external world, so that we may
reap the enjoyment that springs from a life ordered in har-
mony with natural law? Then, blessed faith! it shall be
the ﬁrst thing inculcated in the nursery ; and a college pro-
fessor, destitute of this, will lack the most essential qualiﬁ-
cation. Locomotives shall carry those who inculcate it on
every train: balloons shall drop the saving creed, printed
in all tongues, over all lands, and telegraphs ﬂash the intel-
ligence as wide as the race.
Alas! Jesus himself was ignorant: so ignorant of the
effect of the use of intoxicating drinks, that he not only drank
them, but, if we are to believe one of his biographers, he
even made them for other people to drink. He had such an
incorrect idea of the size of our planet, that he supposed he
had seen all the kingdoms of the earth from the top of a
MAN’s TRUE SAVIOUBS. 5
Syrian mountain; and was so ignorant of the inviolability
of natural law, that he believed and taught that prayer could
transport mountains from one locality to another. He never
seems to have thought that the fabulous stories of the Old
Testament were other than divine truths, and imposed them
upon his unsuspecting believers. One of the greatest ex-
pounders of the Christian faith, that prince of believers,
Paul, says that be counted all things loss for the excellency
of the knowledge of this same Jesus. Writing to the Cor-
inthians, among Whom he had preached, he says he deter-
mined to know nothing among them, only Jesus and him cru-
ciﬁed; and then declares that “ the wisdom of this world
is foolishness with God,” and that “ the Lord knoweth the
thoughts‘ of the wise, that they are vain.” It is evident
that Paul’s belief in Jesus, instead of leading him to increase
in knowledge, only led him to despise it. It is true that he
recommends believers to grow in knowledge ; but it is the
knowledge of Jesus Christ: and how much ignorance will
such knowledge dispel? 'He who grows only in the knowl-
edge of Christ must be ignorant of what it is most impor-
tant for him to know.
The Christian sentiment of more modern times is repre-
sented in one of Wesley’s hymns :.--
“ Nothing is Worth a thought beneath,
But how we may escape the death
That never, never dies.”
That man’s mind must be poorly stored with information,
who is forever thinking about how he may escape an impos-
sible death.
Take Christians as a body, and how ignorant of natural
science they are! They seem to have been inﬂuenced by
Paul’s advice, “ Beware, lest any man spoil you through
1*
6 MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs.
philosophy ; ” and it is notorious that generally in the same
proportion as a man becomes a philosopher does he become
spoiled for a Christian. Christianity arose on the world
like a baleful star; and the long night of the dark ages set
in, that it took the invention of printing and the revival of
philosophical literature to disperse. Christianity burned the
books of the Greek and Roman philosophers, and would
have burned the philosophers themselves, had they been liv-
ing and not recanted. When Christians are intelligent, it
is where surrounding conditions have made them so, and
in proportion to their outgrowth of the original spirit of
Christianity. Belief in Jesus, then, does not save from ig-
' DOI‘RHCG.
Poverty is a great calamity. When it is so great as to
produce hunger, it masters the man, possesses him, and
sends him into society a human wolf. When it exists in less
degree, it prevents a man from buying books, wearing good
clothes, living in a comfortable house, and compels him fre-
quently to dwell in an unhealthy neighborhood. It presses
a man to the earth under its iron heel, and crushes, too oft-
en, the manliness out of him: it fetters the soul, stultiﬁes
the intellect, makes men mean, and keeps them so.
Will belief in Jesus cure men of poverty? Where could
we ﬁnd a poor believer if this was true? Jesus himself
was poor, and very poor. He says, “ The foxes have holes,
the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has not
where to lay his head.” He was dependent, indeed, during
the latter part of his life, upon the charity of his friends.
When a tax was demanded of him, a miracle was wrought,
so the story goes, to obtain the paltry amount, which the
scanty purses of Jesus and Peter were unable to furnish.
Indeed, the early followers of Jesus were poor almost to _a
man, and consoled themselves by saying that God had
chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith. and heirs
MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs. 7
of the kingdom. If the present believers in Jesus were to
believe in him implicitly, and obey him fully, they would
be equally poor. If they were to cease to labor, lay up
nothing, imitate the birds, and take no thought for to-morrow,
how long would it be before poverty would have every one
of them in its grip? Jesus exclaims, “ Woe unto you that
are rich ! ” and one of his poor followers, James, echoes his
cry; while Paul says, “ Having‘ food and raiment, let us
therewith be content.” What a poverty-stricken people We
should be if these statements were generally believed, and
the commands of Jesus and his apostles obeyed! If we
took no thought for food and raiment, we should soon be
hungry and naked: if we did not lay up for ourselves when
young and healthy, we should become paupers when old and
inﬁrm; and if we were satisﬁed with food and raiment,
where would be our railroads and locomotives, our steam-
ships and telegraphs? Who would own a microscope or
telescope? and in what condition would be the arts and sci-
ences? It has only been by disbelieving Jesus, disobeying
these commands of his, and practising the very opposite,
that Christian nations have obtained the magniﬁcent results
of modern civilization. Believing in Jesus, then, does not
save men from poverty.
Disease is a great and wide-spread evil. It shrouds man’s
life with gloom; it turns the blessings of nature into deadly
‘curses ;‘ its venom rankles in the heart, dims the eye, palsies
the hand, and binds the tongue. The diseased, it is said on
good authority, actually outnumber the healthy; and in
consequence of this, misery, like a dark cloud, comes be-
tween millions and the sun of happiness that should shine
upon all.
Will faith in Jesus bear away our inﬁrmities, and make us
whole, as the faithiof the woman is said to have done, who
but touched the hem of his garment? What a boon to the
8 MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs.
aﬂ‘licted! We will, indeed, cast medicine tothe dogs; and
quacks, apothecaries and doctors, who tinker the human
system, may mourn for the days that are gone: Jesus shall
be our great physician, and a world of his healthy believers
shall swell to the heavens their song of praise. But the
ﬂying pestilence heeds not even the blood of Jesus on the
door-post: it enters and destroys the chosen people no less
readily than it does the Egyptians. Sickness lays his hand
on the’Jesus-believing saint as heavily as on the Jesus-re-
jecting sinner; and, if there is any difference, the odds seem
to be on the wrong side ; for, as Solomon said of the coneys,
Christians are “feeble folk.” They read in their oracles,
“ Bodily exercise proﬁteth little ; ” “ Whom the Lord loveth
he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth ;”
and, if true to their faith, they bow and kiss the rod that
smites them, and neglect their bodies in this world that-
. they may save their souls in the next. Christians are,
no doubt, more healthy than special classes that might be
mentioned; but nowhere near as healthy as those who,
having outgrown Christianity, regard it as a duty they owe
to themselves to learn the laws of health, and to live lives in
obedience to them. Fevers burn Christians, and agues chill
them; colds visit them, and consumption feeds upon them ;
and their salvation, instead of placing a barrier between
‘them and the enemy, like a spy in the camp, invites his ap-
proach. The preachers of the Christian gospel are espe-
cially a weak, puny, sickly set of men : a robust man among ‘
them is an exception. After laboring “in their Master’s
service” for a few years, they are generally broken down,
and require trips to Europe or the “Holy Land” to re-
cruit- their health. The more sickly of them rely upon
doctors to heal their bodies, as their church-members rely
upon Jesus for the cure of their souls, and generally with
as little success.
MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs. 9
Some of the ancient Christians, it is true, believed that
Christianity included a remedy of disease; hence James
says, “ Is any sick among you? let him send for the elders
of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him
with oil in the name of the Lord ; and the prayer of faith shall
save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.” What an
easy, cheap, and expeditious way is this ! But where is the
Christian that believes in ‘it, and practises accordingly?
He sends for the elders only when they happen to be phy-
sicians, and then has more faith in their pills than their
prayers, and in internal oleaginous applications rather than
external; for the experience of long ago has demonstrated
the uselessness of the practice that James recommends.
Death is spoken of by Christians as the “the king of
terrors,” at whose approach the strongest fear and tremble.
When men become subjects of King Jesus, does he deliver
them from this potentate? Does he, at least, relieve them
from all fear of what is inevitable? Then Christianity-is
is still a boon, and its system of salvation worthy of accep-
tation; for life has little charm for that man who has con-
tinually before his eyes the fear of death. Jesus, the'object
of the Christian’s faith, died young: he could neither deliver
himself from death, nor from the terror that it inspired.
Hear his prayer, in prospect of approaching death : “ If it be
possible, let this cup pass from me.” It was not possible;
and in the anguish of his soul he exclaims, “ My God ! my
God! why hast thou forsaken me?” Unable to deliver
himself, how can he deliver his believers? 'S'o overcome
by terror at the prospect of his own death as to “ sweat, as
it were, great drops of blood,” it is not surprising that the
believers in him tremble at the skeleton grim. Some
Christians, it is true, die without fear, and some with
courage, hope, and even joy; but we have no evidence
that this is owing to their belief in Jesus, since it is true of
10 MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs.
believers in all religions and in none. There is, indeed,
good reason to think, even from the admissions of Christian
ministers themselves, that unbelievers, as a rule, have much
less fear of death than the majority of Christians. “ In all
my experiences,” says the Rev. Theodore Clapp, of New
Orleans, “I never saw an unbeliever die in fear. I have
seen them expire, of course, without any hopes or expectations,
but never in agitation from dread or misgivings as to What
might befall them hereafter. It.is probable that I have
seen a greater number of those called irreligious persons
breathe their last than any other clergyman in the United
States. . . . When I ﬁrst entered the clerical profession, I
was struck with the utter inetﬁciency of most forms of Christi-
unity to afford consolation in a dying hour.” And this is
what we might reasonably expect. Most Christians believe
in a God who is angry with the wicked every day, —- one who
will damn a soul for one sin unrepented of ; ' they believe in a
devil of almost inﬁnite power, and a hell of torment unutter-
able, to which the best of them are apt to feel that they are
liable; while the worst that the unbeliever can fear is an
eternal sleep, in which he will know no more than the violet
which blooms on his grave. Your salvation, then, Christian,
saves neither from death nor the fear of it.
Fire, when it obtains the mastery, is an evil to be dreaded,
and any salvation from its ravages would be gladly received ;
but the Christian’s belief does not save him from them. The
ﬁre licks up the very churches with its ﬂaming tongue, and
consumes alike the dwelling of Christian and inﬁdel; and
insurance societies are just as needful to the one class as to
the other.
Is the believer in Jesus any safer in a thunder-storm for
his belief? See that church-steeple shattered, and the
minister in the pulpit struck dead ‘upon his knees ;° while
in awe his Christian brethren whisper, “Mysterious Provi—
deuce I ”
MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs. 11_
The ﬂoods are no respecters of persons: Christians drown
as readily as their unbelieving neighbors, under like circum-
stances. Cast a Christian and an inﬁdel into the sea: which
will sink ﬁrst? The one who knows not how to swim ; and
there is more salvation from drowning in a cork than in the
faith of the one or the inﬁdelity of the other. In what re-
spects, then, 0 Christian? does belief in Jesus, whom thou
callest Christ and Saviour, save thee at all? “ Our salva-
tion,” replies the Christian, “is from sin, from the wrath of
God, and from eternal torments; it concerns not itself with
sickness, poverty, ﬂoods, ﬁres, and such trivialities, but with
things of eternal moment.” If the salvation by Jesus is
indeed a salvation from sin, we will welcome it. From sin !
from lying, stealing, intemperance in all its forms; from
anger, bitterness, and all uncharitableness; from jealousy,
revenge, and all meanness; from war and all its horrors;
from crime and all its results: what a salvation that would
be ! I know that Jesus is said in Matthew to have received
his name of Jesus, which means saviour, because he should
save his people from their sins; but where are the people
that he has saved? Can those who call themselves Chris-
tians be in reality his people? Jesus himself acknowl-
edged that he was not good. When one called him “ good
Master,” he said, “Why callest thou me good? there is
none good but one, that is God.” John, the beloved dis-ci-
ple of Jesus, says, “ If we say that we have no sin we de-
ceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” It is evident,
then, that he did not consider himself to be saved from all
sin. The Christians of to-day universally confess them-
selves to be sinners. In the Episcopalian church they re-
peat every Sunday morning, “ Almighty and most merciful
Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost
sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires
of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws:
12 MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs.
we have left undone those things which we ought to have
done, and we have done those things which we ought not to
have done ; and there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord,
have mercy upon us miserable offenders.” Very similar are
the confessions of Christian clergymen of all denomina-
tions, reiterated from the pulpit every seventh day; and the
believing brethren, in whose name they pray, devoutly say,
“Amen.” And, in doing so, they acknowledge the state-
ment to be correct. But what worse is an unbeliever than
this? Some of them are not as bad. All Christians pray,
“ Forgive us our trespasses,” as Jesus taught his disciples to
pray; and it is evident, by his doing so, that he did not be-
lieve that their faith in him would save them from commit-
ting sin, as the confessions-of modern Christians show its
helplessness in their case. Where is the Christian that is
saved from sin, or that even professes to be? Should any
man claim to be, and he a married man, let his wife
be questioned “separate and apart” from her husband;
and if she be truthful, her statement will prove the worth-
lessness of his claim. Indeed, Christians seem to take
pride in confessing what great sinners they are, and un-
blushingly sing, what can only be true of one of them, —
“I the chief of sinners am;
But Jesus died for me.”
The very‘reason why they should not be sinners at all, accord-
ing to their theology. What merchant will credit another
the sooner because he is a Christian, or place more conﬁ-
dence in him when making a bargain? Some have done so
only to ﬁnd themselves grievously disappointed. We are
surrounded by believers in Jesus, men and women, who pro-
fess to have been born again, and passed from a state of na-
ture into a state of grace, who profess to have been saved by
MAN’s TRUE sAvroURs. 13
this great salvation ; but where are those that never lie, nor
prevaricate ; who never take advantage of another in a
bargain ; who are never angry, nor sulky, nor greedy, nor re-
fuse to help the needy; who are temperate in all things, ——
never use tobacco or intoxicating drinks, nor injure their
bodies by any indulgence? Where are those that are never
bigoted, intolerant, or uncharitable, and whose consciences ab-
solve them every evening, so that they have no need to pray
“ Forgive us our trespasses,” for they have no trespasses to
be forgiven? The Christian church, with all its pretensions,
cannot furnish a single one. What, then, are we to think of
the statement that Jesus saves men from sin?
Christianity did not save the South from slavery, Where it
was commenced and carried on by Christians and Christian
ministers, whose hands were strengthened by their Christian
brethren of the North: the one forged the fetters and ap-
plied them, the other riveted them, and cursed in the name of
Jehovah all who attempted to break them; while most of
those who wrote and lectured against slavery were men
whom the church branded as inﬁdels.
Belief in Jesus does not save men from War and cruelty.
Christian nations have been notoriously ﬁghting nations ; and
Christian wars have been among the most cruel and bloody.
“There are no wild beasts as ferocious as Christians who
differ concerning their faith,” said the heathen in the fourth
century ; and if we are better now, it is due, not- to the superi-
ority of our faith, but to the advance which the best types of
our race present, in accordance with the operation of natural
law. “ What a dreadful picture,” says Dr. Dick, “ would it
present of the malignity of persons who have professed the
religion of Christ, were we to collect into one point of view
all the persecutions, tortures, burnings, massacres, and her-1
rid cruelties, which in Europe and Asia, and even in the
West Indies and America, have been inﬂicted on conscien-
2
14 MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs.
tious men for their ﬁrm adherence to what they considered
as the truths of religion!”
It must be confessed that, if some of the teachings of J c-
sus were obeyed, war would be impossible ; but when he de-
clares that the punishment of a false faith will be damna-
tion, and that damnation everlasting ﬁre, that man must be
more than mortal who believes. and is not led in some degree
to persecute those whose faith is in his opinion erroneous.
Christianity does not save from intemperance ; for, while
men almost universally believed in Jesus, where the evil
was, it grew till it overshadowed the land. It invaded the
pulpit, and dragged to untimely graves hosts of the strongest
Christian believers. The ﬁrst temperance paper was pub-
lished by Joseph Livesay of England, who was what is
called an inﬁdel; and it was not till outsiders had done the
heavy work, and they saw a prospect of assistance from it,
that Christians took much interest in the temperance move-
ment. The Bible is the bulwark of moderate drinking, and
the example of Jesus one of its principal supports.
Christianity does not save from bigotry and intolerance:
no people in our country are as bigoted as Christiah believers ;
and it is no wonder: Jesus looked forward to the time when
he should sit on the throne of his glory, and say to those who
had neglected the believers in him, “Depart from me, ye
cursed, into everlasting ﬁre.” If he had possessed the power,
he would evidently have given his enemies a taste of earthly
ﬁre, as so many of his followers subsequently did. Paul
was charged with bigotry to the lips, and fulminates his
anathemas like a pope’s bull; and even the loving John
would have turned Theodore Parker out of his house in the
name of Jesus, as the Boston Christian bigots tried to pray
him out of the world.
~ The religion of the despised Nazarene, peaceful while an in‘
fant, became a ﬁghting bully as soon as it could use its ﬁsts.
MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs. 15
It imprisoned, banished, and burnt; it inaugurated war for
the religious opinion’s sake, and deluged Europe and Asia
with blood. When this was over, dungeons were ﬁlled, racks
invented, and the fagot burned the refractory sceptic that
milder means failed to convert. Do not suppose that this
spirit is extinct: a revival of orthodox religion is a revival
of uncharitableness and hate. Then men think most of its
damnatory creed: their hatred of inﬁdelity and the inﬁdel is
proportioned to their love of souls. Here is a prayer that
was offered in the Young Men’s Christian Association of Bos-
ton, only a few days ago, and reported in the “Boston Her-
ald!” “ Lord, if that inﬁdel that brother C. told us about
is at work this morning writing his tracts, Lord, paralyze his
arm!” Who cannot see that this praying brother would
have paralyzed the arm himself, if he had possessed the
power?
Lying clings to Christian nations as creeds do to Christian
churches. Leading Christians are notorious falsiﬁers for
God: their religious tracts and books abound with calumnies
against unbelievers, —- sophistry and special pleading that
would have disgraced a Roman lawyer in the days of Cicero ;
and it is no wonder that they practise occasionally on their
own account what they so frequently do for their religion
and their God. I
It may be said, that, although Christianity does not save
men from all sinning, it still does much to restrain them
from vice; and this cannot be denied. Mohammedanism
does the same thing : it restrains its believers from the use of
intoxicating drinks. Professors of the Christian religion are
frequently restrained by it from the commission of such sins
as the church denounces. But, on the other hand, the church
upholds sins by virtue of its belief in Christianity. It was
thus that it upheld slavery, and to-day upholds woman’s deg-
radation. It has two vices peculiarly its own: it robs man of
16 MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs.
one-seventh portion of his time, which it generally employs in
idleness or superstition. It has invented a sin which it calls
sabbath-breaking, and spends more time and effort to pre-
vent men from committing this imaginary crime than it does
to hinder them from doing what justice universally condemns.
The bigotry and intolerance so generally manifested by it in
proportion to its inﬂuence have made it the greatest engine
ever invented to fetter the human mind; and it is only as its
power decreases, and the soul is liberated from its inﬂuence,
that the large-brained races of the world attain to those re-
sults of enlightenment in which now even Christianity
makes its boast.
The salvation that is said to come from a belief in Jesus
is not a salvation from sin, — nothing can be much more cer-
tain; and we still ask, What ‘does Jesus save men from?
“ From the wrath of God?” Does your God then become
angry, —he whom you believe made worlds more numerous
than drops of water in the ocean by the word of his mouth ;
he who is perfect in love, a perfect father, and we his chil-
dren? I know men that would be ashamed to be angry, -—
men who would blush to have their wrath excited by a man
their equal; and yet you believe in a God who is angry,
and angry with man! It cannot be so. But if so, what
makes God angry? You tell me it is sin ; for your scriptures
say that God is angry with the wicked every day. But you
confess every day that you are wicked: how then can you
be saved from the wrath of God? If you are telling God
the truth morning and evening, you are a sinner; and the
book in which as a Christian you believe declares that the
soul that sinneth shall die ; it also declares that “ the wrath
of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness
and ungodliness of men,” and asks, what should be to you
a solemn question, “ If the righteous scarcely be saved,
when shall the sinner and the ungodly appear?” Your God
MAN’s TRUE SAVIOURS. 17
must hate you if you are a sinner; so that your salvation
does not even save you from the wrath of God.
“ But our faith enables us to appropriate the merits of J e<
sus, so that we receive the reward of his perfect obedience.
Jesus is called the Lord our righteousness; for, though we
can do nothing that is acceptable to God, we clothe ourselves
by faith with his virtue, and he becomes all in all to us.”
Can it be that I understand you? You may injure both your
body and your soul by licentious indulgence ; but, by exercis.
ing faith in Jesus, God will reward you for his chastity: you
may lie and steal, since these vices are human; but only
believe, and you appropriate the divine honesty and veracity
of your Saviour, and all is well! What a gospel of rascality
is this ! What a comfortable doctrine for the man who wishes
to excuse his shortcomings, and escape the just penalty of
his misdeeds. No wonder that immorality ﬂourishes wher-
ever it is preached. Under its inﬂuence men are content to
confess themselves ‘sinners every Sunday, and trust in Jesus
to save them ; while they are just as content to go on sinning
during the week: for the Sunday confession must be made,
and the Sunday trust exercised, at all events. But it is cer-
tain that nothing can be more false-than thisudoctrine. Paul
' truly says, “ Whatsoever a man soWeth, that shall he also
reap.” Nothing more true, as our daily experience demon-
strates. No man can break 'a physical law, and another
bear the consequences‘, nor can any man sin, and Jesus suf-
fer the penalty for him; nor did he suﬁ‘er it eighteen hun-
dred years ago in anticipation of the offences the Chris-
tian sinner would commit in coming time. Jesus had no
merit to spare: fanatic as he was, he felt and acknowledged
his own deﬁciency; and the structure of ‘the universe forbids
any appropriation of the merits of another.
But we are told that the salvation that comes by faith. in
Jesus saves us from eternal torments. But what evidence
2*
18 MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs.
is there that any such torment exists? The very lightning
that in its fury knows no respect of persons; the bounteous
rain that distributes its blessings upon all ; the smiling moon,
peeping into the fevered face of the debauchee; the sunshine,
looking through the gloomy bars of the prison, and whisper-
ing hope to the doomed criminal, —— that gilds alike the gallows
and the church-vane with its glory ; the calm evening, cooling
the sultry air, lighting the lamps in the hall of night, and bush-
ing the birds, that saint and sinner may sleep : all teach the
absurdity of this orthodox fable. Should there be any eter-
nal torment, the Christian is as likely to suffer it as any, if
his Bible in which he trusts is to be credited. It is only those
who obey the commandments of Jesus that have a right to
the tree of life, and may enter through the gates of~pearl into
the celestial city. But Christians do not obey them. They
resist evil; they lend, hoping for something; they judge;
they lay up treasures on earth ; they take thought for to-mor-
row; and act in all respects as if Jesus had never said a
word in reference to these subjects. Jesus teaches that they
only are founded on the rock, who obey his teachings: all
others are to be swept into perdition, when the tide of God’s
wrath shall ﬂow over a ruined world. In no wise is there
any hope for thee, Christian: thy salvation is a sham, thy
great physician a quack ; the only diseases that he cures be-
ing imaginary ones, that faith in him has produced.
The Christian doctrine of salvation is built on the Chris-
tiaii doctrine of damnation; and the doctrine of damnation
rests upon the doctrine of original sin; and this upon the
story of man’s fall from a condition of original purity and
goodness. But of this story science may be said to have
proved the utter falsity. Geology has settled the question
as far as our planet is concerned. It has not fallen from an
originally perfect condition to one in which volcanoes belch,
storms howl, earthquakes heave and engulf, and ferocious
MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs.’ 19
beasts devour. Geology proves that, in all these respects,
the world has improved, and is to-day a better abode for
human beings than at any past period in its history. Ar-
chaeology, a younger sister of geology, has in like manner
proved that man has not fallen from a state of sinless per-
fection to one in which lying, stealing, drunkenness, and
licentiousness characterize him; but that, from the condi-
tion of a savage, he has climbed during ages to the civiliza-
tion of the present. The opinion held by those who have
made archaeology a study is well represented in the address
of Lord Dunraven to the Cambrian Archaeological Associa-
tion: “ If we look back through the entire period of the past
history of man, as exhibited in the result of archaeological
- investigation, we can scarcely fail to perceive that the whole
exhibits one grand scheme of progression, which, notwith-
standing'partial periods of decline, has for its end the ever-
increasing civilization of man, and the gradual development
of his higher faculties ; ” and in the statement of Sir John
Lubbock, in the closing chapter of the “ Origin of Civiliza-
tion:” “Existing savages are not the descendants of civ-
ilized ancestors. The primitive condition of man was one of
utter barbarism; and from this condition several races have
independently raised themselves.”
Archaeology has demonstrated that chiliads of years be-
fore the world was made, according to biblical chronology,
man in England, Scotland, France, Belgium, and Europe
generally, was a savage. The remains of his cannibal feasts
which have been found show the amazing distance that he
has since travelled on the road to perfect manhpod. \Vhat
' lifted him out of this'pit, and gave to the world'the architec-
ture of Egypt, the art of Etruria, the poetry and philosophy
of Greece, the morality of Gautama and Confucius, and the
jurisprudence of Rome? All this long before Jesus was
born, and probably before a chapter of the Bible was writ-
20 ' MAN‘s TRUE sAvIoURs.
‘ten. That advanced man which advanced the planet, his
dwelling-place, for millions of years before his foot trod it.
What pushes the tree on from the ‘sapling, struggling for
existence, to the towering pillar of living beauty? The
spirit in the tree, pushing, urging day and night, and that
never allows it to rest. What carried the earth upward
from the monotonous wilderness of heated rock to the
ocean-bearing, lake-gemmed, mountain-crowned planet of
to-day? and life, from the polyp of the sea-bottom to the
creaking frog and the thinking man? The all-controlling
spirit, never resting, never far away, as inseparable from the
universe as a man’s soul is from himself; and this, in the ﬁrst
rude men, carried them on, awakened thought in their souls,
lit a ﬁre of love in their hearts, whispered of heaven in their
ears, and to-day reveals to them a condition of perfection to
which humanity must yet attain, and for which the best men
are daily striving. '
Man, then, has not fallen: the foundation of damnation
and the necessity for orthodox salvation is gone. God did -
' not make a pure fountain, allow the Devil to poison it, and
then compel the whole human race to drink of it, and at the
same time threaten them with eternal torment if they should
manifest its evil effects.
But if man did not fall from an originally pure condition,
then he did not receive from that fall that never occurred
a corruption of his nature, whereby he is “ inclined to evil,
and that continually.” I never can remember the time
,when I was not inclined to good, when I did not love truth,
honesty, temperance, purity, manliness; and I do not be-
lieve that I was an exception in this respect. I believe this
to be the general feeling of all men. The protest which the
soul makes against absurd forms, useless ceremonies, and
false notions, is mistaken for opposition to virtue and good-
mess. I cannot say that I was naturally fond of Sunday '
MAN’s TRUE SAVIOURS. 21
it was the most- melancholy day of the week; nor did I
take much delight in sermons, —— not because I disliked the
goodness inculcated in them, but because there was so little
in them attractive to my youthful mind. The goodness that
supports asylums, that establishes schools, that founds tem-
perance, peace, and antislavery societies, that calls for justice
to woman and to the laborer, and that overthrows tyranny,
is the goodness of human nature, that throbs with more or
less intensity in every breast, and which Christianity osten-
tatiously claims for itself; while it conveniently passes over
to the credit of what it calls “ the world” the evils which
are its own legitimate fruit.
Are Mohammedans less temperate than the Christians
who tempt them with intoxicating drink? Are Hindoos less
honest than British Christians, who have stolen from them
their country, and who enrich themselves by impoverishing
the inhabitants?
But we are told that all persons do wrong; that is, they
knowingly violate natural law. I grant it; but if that
proves original sin, it will not be at all diﬂicult to prove
original virtue. All persons do right; and they do right ten
times where they do wrong once. No man was ever known
to tell more lies than truths, or to be for a longer time angry
than good-natured. The fact is, that human beings are born
neither in virtue nor sin, but capable of both; and, with
each succeeding age, man’s ability to master his animal pro-
pensities increases ; and he thus grows into virtue, as he does
toward perfect manhood, for which he started at the begin-
ning, but to which he cannot attain without the time essen-
tial for that growth.
If the doctrine of original sin is false, then the notion that.
God doomed the race to endless perdition on account of a con-
dition resulting from it, is false. Man was never lost, nor in
danger of being lost: that in his history that looks most like
22 MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs.
it, is his belief of such a fable. The damnation from which
Jesus is supposed to save men only exists in the imagina-
tion of those who believe in this soul-enslaving superstition.
When I ask for the evidence on which the faith in eternal
damnation rests, I am pointed to the Bible, which I am told
is God’s word. Before believing such a doctrine on the
statement of the Bible, you ought to be as certain that the
Bible is true as that your head is on your shoulders. The
very fact that the Bible teaches it is sutﬁcient evidence that
the Bible is untrue. Where, 0 Nature, my mother! dost
thou teach such a horrible doctrine as these ignorant chil-
dren of thine are blasting men’s souls with? Not in the
south wind, that sweeps over the land to-day with life and
beauty following in its path. Out of the cold arms of win-
,ter springs the land ; the loosened streams are leaping from
the hills with musical cadence ; the green grass is peeping,
the buds are swelling, and the long-silent birds are pouring
their melody into our souls. How these voices give the lie
to this howling blasphemy 1 Thou sun, that turns the world
over and warms it into life, that kisses the cheek of the cot-
tager’s child, and smiles on the beggar as sweetly as on the
pompous bishop, that lights— up the malefactor’s cell as glori—
ously as the cathedral: thou preachest a gospel in which no
such soul-harrowing dogma is found!
The headache of the drunkard is but the voice of Nature
saying to him, “Do thyself no harm.” The burn of the
child is painful ; but the pain teaches it a lesson that it needs
to learn: and, if the burn is so severe that it must die, Na-
ture wraps her arms about the little one, sends it into a pre-
cious sleep, and wakens it for a start in a higher life.
How could damnation be the penalty for man’s doing
what, by virtue of his very constitution, he must do? Man
was as certain to sin as a green apple is to be sour ; and time
and favorable conditions are as necessary to cure him as to
ripen and sweeten the apple
MAIv’s TRUE sAvIoURs. 23
But if men were never liable to damnation, the necessity
for evangelical salvation never existed. God never allowed
the Devil to rend the world ; and there never was any need
for his son to come from heaven to patch it. God never
hurled the world into the pit of perdition with his right
hand; and there was, therefore, no necessity for him to
lower the rope of salvation down with his left, for the lost
wretches to seize by faith. Men never were far from God ;
and they consequently need no one to bring them nigh.
They were never damned, nor in danger of it; and ortho-
dox salvation is as unnecessary as a lightning-conductor in
a coal-mine.
The method by which God is supposed to save men
through faith in Jesus shows monstrous absurdity and
cruelty on the part of God who offers it, and great un-
manliness on the part of those who accept it. Man, the
ﬁnite, has sinned against an inﬁnite God: he has broken
his most holy law, and God justly consigns him to eternal
torments ; and it is only by an exercise of his inﬁnite mercy
that a way of escape has been provided. So much ortho-
doxy assumes. It is evidently false; for nothing can be
more unjust or unreasonable. All men sin everywhere, and
have always done so: it is, therefore, evident that wrong-
doing is inevitable. What God could punish men, and,
above all, eternally punish them, for doing what, in the
nature of things (and these he hadhimself made), all of them
must do? Tie up your b'oy’s legs‘, and flog him till his back
is gory, because he does not run six miles an hour; keep
him without food for three days, and then kill him because
he steals a crust from your pantry: and you are a kind,
considerate parent, compared to a God who makes men
with a strong (liposition to do wrong, permits a devil to tempt.
them, and then annexes the penalty of eternal damnation to
the crime of wrong-doing.
24 MAN‘s TRUE sAvIoURs.
God is angry with the sinner; the wrath of his indigna.
tion boils: with the sword of vengeance in his hand, he is
ready to strike the fatal blow. Just as the glittering blade
is about to descend, the innocent Jesus appears on the stage.
“ Spare, oh, spare the sinner l ” says Jesus. “ Only on one
condition.” “ Name it,” says Jesus. “ Thou must die in his
stead, or myjustice can never be satisﬁed.” “ I will : let the
blow descend.” God plunges the sword of his justice into the
heart of Jesus, and then receives the sinner to his bosom
graciously, and he goes on his way, singing,—
“Jesus has paid the debt we owe,
And God is satisﬁed.”
To save man by such a plan, supposing it to be possible,
is to sink him in meanness and degradation. So instinc-
tively do men scorn it, that mesmeric excitements, under
the name of revivals of religion, are got up to overcome this
natural repugnance. We have sinned, — such is the doctrine,
—- and arejustly subject to punishment ; but an innocent being
offers to bear the penalty, if we will believe in him, accept
him, and bow down to him. “ No, thank you, Jesus, no:
I much prefer to bear the consequences of my own trans-
gressions, that I may learn the lesson from them that Nature
inculcates, and whose tendency is to make me wiser and
better. There may be men who wish to dodge the conse-
quences of their deeds: they may accept your offer, but I
cannot,—still less if, in accepting it, I am at the same time
to accept of you as my master.” If to hell I must go, I will go
a free man, and with that sense of manhood that ‘must trans-
form the pit of perdition into paradise.
I charge this doctrine with being not only false, but
dreadfully pernicious. If Jesus bears away the consequences
of our guilt, takes our place, washes us in his blood, so that,
MAN’s TRUE SAVIOU'BS. 25.
though black as ink, we can in an instant be made white as
snow, why should we struggle for purity? why should we
wrestle with temptations daily, and strive earnestly to live
lives in harmony with our ideal of manhood? Faith in J c-
sus must be of inﬁnitely more importance than faithfulness
to principle: to obtain the cloak of his righteousness, and
skulk under it, and be credited with the merit that belongs
to another, becomes much more important than to live
a righteous life; and thus the church, by its acceptance
of this doctrine, makes men satisﬁed with a tenth -rate
morality, and puts off the day of the world’s redemption.
What, then, shall we do to be saved? Evils are around
us like mosquitos in July: like blood-hounds whose scent
can never be baffled, they dog our footsteps. Not a soul
but needs salvation from them: how shall it be obtained?
Let us see what has saved us in times past.
Once man trod the wild, a naked savage : the sun scorched
him by day, and the cold wind chilled him as he lay on the
branches of a tree at night. The sleet fell upon his bare
breast, and, melting, ran in streams to his feet. He
searched the woods for wild fruit, and dined on acorns,
crab-apples, wild plums, and chestnuts, or roots that he
scratched out of the ground. At times he outran the wild
rabbit, sucked itslwarm blood, and ate its quivering ﬂesh,
nor thought of better fare. What saved him from this piti-
able condition? What taught him to build a house, clothe
himself with beﬁtting garments, and thus bid deﬁance to the
elements? Nature, that brought man into existence, did not
launch him on the ocean of life without a pilot or charts, '
merely promising to supply them at some future time. She
did not send Jesus with a beacon-light four thousand years
afterwards, and make the success of millions of vessels
depend upon their ability to see what to most of them in the
nature of things was invisible. ‘The ﬁrst man carried his
‘ 3
v 26 MAN’s TRUE SAVIOUBS.
saviour in his soul, and no man since has ever been destitute ;
and just in proportion as men have attended to this saviour
have they been delivered~ from evil, saved from sin and suf-
fering, and led into truth and right, and the heaven that in-
variably accompanies them. By using his mental powers,
man learned to spin and weave, and make for himself gar-
ments for all seasons and all weather ; it was thus he learned
to fashion the wooden club, the hammer and ax of stone,
then of bronze, and lastly of steel; to fell the trees, to dig
the stone, to burn the lime, and rear his household home:
and, in process of ages numerous, the naked, houseless
savage was transformed into artistic man. And all this
long before Adam rose or fell, before the Snake was cursed,
or the Bible Saviour promised.
In the times of old, man wearily wandered over the
earth: if he wished to go a hundred miles, every step had
to be taken by his own feet. He climbed the rugged moun-
tain steeps, waded or swam the streams, threaded his Way
through the wilderness, and with bleeding feet and exhausted
body arrived at his destination. He saw the wild steed, and
increasing intelligence taught him its use : with a stem of a
vine for a bridle, he mounted, and with exultant spirit
bounded the country over. As his intelligence further in-
creased, he levelled the hills, ﬁlled the valleys, bridged the
streams, united distant lands by highroads and railroads,
over'which ﬂies the locomotive, outstripping the eagle in its
ﬂight.
Where we now assemble, and hundreds of thousands'ﬁnd
ample subsistence, a hundred savages would have starved
three hundred years ago. Take a glance backward and
view this region as it was. The beasts of the chase have
ﬂed ; deep snow covers the ground, and hunger dwells in ev-
ery miserable hut; hollow-eyed men and Women look into
the wan faces of their famishing children, who vainly cry for
MAN’s TRUE sAvIoURs. 27
food; the last bone is picked, the last scrap of skin roasted
and eaten; death calls them one by one, and with returning
spring the prowling wolves pick their bones. - What saves
us from such a fate to-day? Our increased intelligence.
This taught us to plow, to sow, to reap ; and over our broad
land waves bread for a world. The salvation of orthodoxy
never produced a blade of grass nor a grain of wheat: it is
as powerless to stay the hunger of the savage as it is to
quench the deep thirst of the enlightened soul.
Ignorance on'ce covered the land like a pall, and Nature’s
preachers discoursed for ages to deaf souls. The thought, as
it slowly rounded itself in man’s brain, had no power of pro-
jection from the mind that gave it birth, but lay there
shrouded, and died with its possessor. By the development
of his inherent nature, man grew into speech ; formed signs
for sounds ; shaped the reed, and then the feather that dropped
from a passing bird’s wing ; from the waving ﬂag by the river-
side ﬁrst, and then from a nation’s tatters, brought forth paper,
and made the wisdom of one the property of the many. He
ransacked the sunless caves, and brought to light the iron and
the lead, and formed the printing press, the multiplier of
thought, the long-wished-for lever that moves the world.
In his infancy, man was terriﬁed by eclipses that swallowed
the day, and comets Whose ﬁery hair streamed over the even-
ing sky, and portended to him most fearful calamities. He
saw in storms, tornadoes, volcanoes, and earthquakes, the
presence of angry gods or devils, whose wrath could only be
turned away by bloody and cruel ceremonies. Science
soothed and comforted him: she put into his hand the tele-
scope, and brought these monsters of the sky into his home,
tamed them, and they became agreeable visitants. She has
not destroyed storms, volcanoes, and earthquakes; but she
has taught us how to foretell storms, informed us where
earthquakes are most likely to occur, and pointed out the
natural causes that produce them. i
28 MAN'S TRUE sAvIoURs.
There was a time when war was man’s universal trade,
and its curses came to every door; when whole regions
were ravaged, and neither age‘ nor sex was spared. Man’s
growth in intelligence and benevolence has assuaged its hor-
rors; made distant nations acquainted, and united them by
the bonds of commerce; -has given them peaceful pursuits,
and promises in time to destroy all war, and usher in the
reign of universal peace.
Man’s intelligence does not enable him to cure all sickness ;
but it does better, it teaches multitudes how to prevent sick-
ness, and will ere long instruct all, as it has already, by the
discovery of anaesthetics, robbed pain of its terrors.
What is it that saves us now? It is a summer’s evening:
a dark cloud rolls its sable folds over the sky. Who shall
save us from the bolt launched apparently for our destruc-
tion? It strikes :~ we are stunned ; but that slender rod saved
us : along it the ﬁery ﬂash descended harmless to the ground.
Franklin is our saviour, and science instructed him.
The rain descends in unremitting showers; the heavens
seem dissolving, and threaten to wash the land into the sea.
The rivers rise: down go madly the rushing waters ; away
the piers of the bridge are swept; the bridge itself swings,
sways for an instant, and is gone, -— its timbers are hurrying
down the stream ; the toll-house still remains, a frail island in
the rushing river. But the waters are rising, they are washing
away its foundations. See that boy on the house-top, wav-
ing his handkerchief; a woman at the window, looking at
the angry waters, and wringing her hands in despair;
hear the hoarse cries of the father, as he calls for help!
In vain ‘is faith : prayers, psalms, hymns, Bibles, can
do nothing; neither the virgin nor her son can aid the per-
ishing family, and we shudder as we see what must be their
fate. But here comes a boat, rowed by strong arms. They
are saved! Children, mother, father: all are saved just
MAN’s TRUE 'sAvIoURs. 29
as their home goes dashing down the boiling ﬂood. What
saved them? Science and benevolence. Science, that taught
men to build the boat, and benevolence, or kindly feeling,
which is the heritage of humanity, of which no church has
a monopoly ; which the people called wicked by the orthodox
often manifest more strongly than those they consider most
pious: these were the saviours of this family, as they are the
great saviours of mankind.
It is night: the last lamp .has shut its eye, and calmly the
stars look down on the sleeping city. Wrapped in soundest
slumber we lie, as the hours unconsciously ﬂy. We are
aroused by clanging bells: what a glare lights up the
room! Hear the tramp of hurrying feet in the street below,
and that most fearful cry of Fire ! ﬁre ! lVe follow the rush-
ing- throng. There is the building : how the ﬂames lick it with
their ﬁery tongues, and then leap as if in ecstacy above their
victims. How well it is, we think, that all have escaped!
But they have not. Hear those screams, louder than the
crackling ﬁre : it is a mother’s voice, —— “ Save, oh, save my
child! ” The ﬂames, like ﬁery serpents, are on every side,
ready to devour her, and there is no prospect of escape.
“ O God,” she cries in her anguish, “ save my child!”
Hearts throb, and eyes are dim with tears. What is that
rising through the smoke? A ladder! I hear the oath of
'the ﬁreman, though I cannot see him, as he calls to his
men. It is placed against the devoted building: the hose
from a steam ﬁre-engine play on each side of the window, -
and heat back the ﬂames ; and the arms of the kind-hearted,
though rough-handed and rough-tongued, ﬁreman bear
mother and baby ‘in safety to the ground amid the joyful
shouts of the delighted spectators. They are safe! What
saved them? Prayer‘ in her’1 case was powerless as the
breath that uttered it: the salvation of the Christian, if
trusted in, could but have paralyzed the arm of endeavor.-
8*
30 MAN’s TRUE SAVIOU RS.
What church would'open its doors to the ﬁreman that saved
her? What future awaits him, if orthodoxy is to decide?
-Yet he was a saviour: science aided him, benevolence
impelled him. Intelligence and love : man’s great deliverers
in every age. They have cured a thousand ills under which
we suffered in the past, and promise to cure or relieve. all
that remain. .
Science has sunk wells in the desert, opened fountains by
hundreds in the sandy waste, and made it blossom as the rose.
It has dug mines innumerable, and brought up blessings from
the ﬂinty bosom of the earth. It has clothed us, heated our
apartments, and shorn winter of its rigor. It has robbed_
the small-pox, that terrible scourge, of its horrors ; cleansed
our cities, and said to the dreaded cholera, “ Touch not my
children, and do those who obey me no harm.” Aided by
benevolence, it has reformed our prisons, and banished the
tortures that were so prevalent when the church ruled the
land, and the Bible was regarded as the fountain of all law.
They have entirely changed the character of our insane
asylums. Wretched creatures are no longer chained in
bare rooms, and left in nakedness, ﬁlth, and cold, to howl
and scowl their miserable lives away, as they were, not a
hundred years ago; but are treated with better sense and
greater kindness, and generally restored to their friends in
the possession of health of body and soundness of mind.
By railroads and steamships, science is uniting us with
all mankind in bands so ﬁrm that war can never sever.
Already we are shaking hands with China and Japan: the
barriers are falling that our mutual ignorance erected, and
in time we shall become so well acquainted with other
nations, and our interests be so inseparably connected with
theirs, that war will becomeaimpossible.
By physiology, science is ‘teaching us daily the laws
of health, and supplying us with motives to obedience; and,
MAu’s TRUE sAvIoURs. 31
wherever its instructions are heeded, the average duration
of human life is increasing. By geology, it has enabled us
to discard the old biblical fables of the earth’s and man’s
creation, and shown us the orderly development of organic
beings during ages of which the Jewish cosmoganist never
dreamed. And by phrenology it has revealed to us the
cause of the strong propensities to wrong-doing which some
persons possess ; and thus, by placing a double guard where
the danger was greatest, much evil has been nipped in the
bud. In demonstrating to us that the basis of all intoxica-
ting drinks is alcohol, and that this is an acrid poison, it has
saved countless thousands from drunkenness and all its
attendant evils, and it will in time banish it from the earth.
Science, or knowledge, does more: it robs death of its
terrors. It has revealed to many of us a spirit in all organic
existences, and its conscious, continued existence in man;
and comforted millions, by giving them the absolute assu-
rance of life after death has destroyed the body. It says to
the mourner, “ Dry up your tears: they are not dead, but
born anew into a higher life. The earth claims the body;
but that which you loved, the spirit that animated it, is yet
in existence, and you shall meet again.” It reveals no hell,
it tells of no devil, and shows the impossibility of both. It
preaches no forgiveness, it is true ; but it shows the possibility
of outgrowing the effects of wrong-doing, and how to enjoy,
by right-doing, the bliss that invariably ﬂows therefrom.
What is it, my brother, that curses you, and from which
you wish to be delivered? There are but few evils from
which a man cannot be saved in this life ; and all that this
life fails to cure, the next will, in my opinion, accomplish.
"I am poor: my poverty troubles me.” Give me your
hand, my brother: I have been just where you are, and I
can sympathize with you. You can be saved. ‘ If there had
been as much pains taken in Boston to save men’s bodies as
32 MAN‘s TRUE SAVIOURS.
there have been to save their souls, you would not be poor.
But you must never remain where you are. Cursed is the
man who is poor; but doubly cursed is the man who is
.content to be poor. You must be economical; and I will
not ask you to be more so than I have been. Stop tobacco
chewing and smoking instantly. “My tobacco only costs
me three cents a day.” Yes: but three cents a day is
nearly eleven dollars a year. Stop that glass of lager bier:
there is no value in it to you, and it costs money, which
you cannot afford. Let rich men waste money on such
folly if they choose: you must not do it if you would con-
quer poverty. Drink no.longer tea and coffee. “Why,
you would take away all my comforts,” I hear you say.
When you have ceased from the use of them, you will ﬁnd
that it was the use that made the appetite for them, and
caused them to appear necessary. Hot water, and milk and
sugar taken with it, as with tea and coffee, is more whole-
some, cheaper, and in time you will like it just as well.
Cease eating rich cakes and lard-crusted pies; live simply ;
buy nothing because it is fashionable. You may save, the
poorest of you, by strict economy, ﬁfty dollars a year. Buy
with that a piece of land (if you had what is justly yours,‘
you might get it without buying). Build a house of your
own on it as soon as possible, if there are no more than two
rooms in it: I have lived in a house with one, and know the
happiness of the man who has a foothold on this planet, and
a home that does not belong to another.
You are sick, and that makes you unhappy. But what a
blessing it is that the best of medicines can be had for
nothing; and if you have vitality enough left, they can cure
you. If not, you will be better without your body; and
death will relieve you from its burden. Exercise in the open
air, sunshine, pure water, plain food, --these are the medi-
cines I recommend to you: the medicines you buy of the
apothecary are generally as useless as they are dear.
MAN’s TRUE SAVIOURS. 33
You are a drunkard. I do not despise you. I do not
tell you to wash in the blood of Jesus; for if you could you
would be no cleaner, and the same quantity of whiskey would
make you just as drunk. You must abandon all intoxica-
ting drinks, from brandy to hard cider: that is the only
way by which you can obtain salvation. In time all taste for
these drinks will die out, and you will be a free man. This
remedy is infallible, and as good for prevention as it is for
cure. It has saved every man that fairly tried it, and its
beneﬁt has been incalculable.
You have large amatioeness, and at times this passion is your
master. Do not suppose that you are the only man in the
world in the same condition. This passion is the strongest;
for only by its exercise can the race he perpetuated. But
you must not allow it to master you. The man, the essen-
tial man, the reasonable man, the moral man, must be the
master; and this can be done. You must be temperate in
all things: abandon tea, coffee, tobacco in all its forms,
and intoxicating drink in every shape. The use of these
increases the power of the animal propensities, while, at the
same time, it weakens‘the will and obscures the judgment.
Pepper, mustard, spices, and all condiments, if used at all,
should be used very sparingly. Never read books that appeal
to amativeness, and arouse it. Work hard, so that sleep will
overtake you as soon as your head reaches the pillow. Do
not loiter in bed after you are awake in the morning, -— not
even on Sunday. Have Worthy objects of thought, and they
will banish unworthy ones. If you are unmarried, and
over twenty years of age, ﬁnd a suitable companion, and
marry: a good wife is worth more to most men than a
thousand Christs.
“I am ignorant, and wish to be saved.” The man who
knows he is ignorant is on the highroad to knowledge.
You feel what the wisest and best have felt, and you have
84 MAN’S TRUE SAVIOURS.
no need to be discouraged. Resolve to learn a little daily,
and your acquisitions in a few years will surprise you.
Read, but be sure to write; think for yourself; make some
branch of knowledge a specialty, and give a little time to it
daily. One thing well learned will give you a taste for many
others, and help you to learn all others ; and you will not be
ignorant in all respects, whatever you may still be in many.
“But, Ifear to die.” Cheer up: that is the last thing
that should trouble you. Find a good medium for com-
munication with the spirit world, and you can receive evi-
dence, as thousands have done, of the existence of your
friends, with warm and loving hearts, enjoying existence
more than they did while here. Death will lead you to them,
and make you one of their number ; and when you are
satisﬁed of this, your fear of death will be gone, and you
will be saved. ' '
“ Is Jesus then a saviour in no sense?” All good men, and,
in fact, all men, are, to a certain extent, saviours. The man
who gives a hungry man a dinner saves him in one sense;
the woman who stands by her friend in sorrow, and comforts
her in aﬁietion, is also a saviour. The Wagoner who gave
the young girl his great coat on a wet night, --he too was a
saviour. Little is said about them ; but there are thousands
of women who are saving men, children, and other women,
daily and hourly. To call this fanatic of Nazareth the
saviour of the world is to do injustice to the noblest of man-
kind. What a grand list is the list of saviours. Moses,
Jesus, Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, Plato, Watt, Joan of
Arc, Fulton, Arkwright, Herschell, Thomas Paine, Theodore
Parker, Fanny Wright, Humboldt, John Brown,IGarrison,
Phillips, and hosts of others. To many of them we owe
vastly more than we do to Jesus; and justice has yet to be
done them in the more intelligent future.
Science and benevolence, in all ages, have done the work
MAN’S TRUE SAVIOUBS. 35
of salvation, and orthodox religion and superstition have as
constantly claimed the credit. “ We have done it ! ” exclaim
these impudent charlatans. “ See that dashing locomotive,
with a thousand passengers at its heels 1 We fashioned him
with our hands, breathed the air of life into his iron body,
a and started him on his World-wide mission. We gave wings
to the telegraph, life to the printing press; and by us the
world has advanced to the noontide of glory.” The fact being,
that they lay dozing in the darkened church till the scream
of the engine and the galvanic shock of the telegraph awa-
kened them to a knowledge of their existence. Take from
man all that science has done, and leave him all that ortho-
dox Christianity can do apart from science, and what would
he be? No house to shelter him ; no garment to clothe him ;
no machinery to assist him. The great universe a sealed
book: himself’ little more than a blank on one of its pages.
In a cave he would sleep; and when the sunbeams shone
therein he would waken to recite his prayers to the Mumbo
Jumbo of his creed, who grumbles in the thunder, and shows
his anger in the oak-splitting lightning.
If science and benevolence are our great saviours, let us
cultivate them.
“ Science is a child as yet; but her scope and power shall grow,
And her triumphs in the future shall diminish toil and woe.”
Let halls of science be multiplied, and opened on Sunday,
free for all. Let us have lecturers dealing in facts, rather
than priests dealing in fables. Instead of Bible societies and
tract societies, let us have societies for the distribution of
knowledge on which the soul can feed, and by which man
can make the most of his present position. Let people un-
derstand the glorious truths of astronomy; and let telescopes
be as plentiful as Bibles. Let the truths of geology, which
Q
36 MAN’s TRUE SAVIOURS.
are destined to supplant many of the fables of theology, be
familiar to all. Let every child be taught a knowledge of
its own body, and its relation to food, drink, air, light, &c. ;
and thus will the ravages of disease be stayed, and a foun-
dation for long life and happiness secured. Let the produ-
cers of the world’s wealth be secured the product of their
labor, and let all idlers be compelled to work or starve ; let
Fashion die, and Use and Beauty take her place, and the true
millennium will be here. The fever-breeding swamps will be
drained, and fruitful gardens take their place ; where the
reed and the ﬂag grow, the apple, the pear, and the peach,
shall ﬂourish; the wild woods will fall, and stately palaces
for humanity rise. The slave of capital shall stand erect, a
man, and rejoice in the fruit of his labor, and the prison for
the felon will be no longer needed. The pope and the priest,
the king and the captain, will be loved and feared and hated
no more. War will only be known in history, and Love
shall be at home in every bosom.
__

EL- ‘
2715"
ll 'Ettmusmm'rr N0 FINALITY;

§piritnalism .gupzrinr tn Qﬂbriatianitg.
BY WILLIAM TON.
WELLESLEY, MASS. :
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY.
1882.


CHRISTIANITY NO FINALITY;
I
on,
Spiritntalism guprriut tn @Flgristiauitg.
' BY WILLIAM DENToN.
WELLESLEY, MASS.:
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY.
1882.
CHRISTIANITY NO FINALITY.
WE surpass the ancients in almost every department
of literature, science, mechanics, and art. Among the
Greeks and Romans, not more than one in a hundred
could read and write, and among the ancient Jews still
fewer. Charlemagne of France, the greatest of Chris-
tian kings, about a thousand years ago, never knew
how to write. Very few of the French clergy knew
how to read, and scarcely any to write ; and, in Eng-
land, the condition of the people was no better. Now
a man so ignorant in this country is a rarity. Where
there was one author two thousand years ago, there
are a hundred now; and our schools and colleges
contain thousands in the embryo. Then a book as
large as Shakspeare’s works could only be written by
the unremitting labor of a year; now a dozen men
will turn out a thousand in a day. Six hundred and
ﬁfty thousand “ New-York Tribunes ” are printed every
week; each containing as much matter as the New
Testament: to write them as they did then would re-
quire the labor of a thousand men for twelve years.
It took a fortune in those days to buy a few manu- .
scripts; now a peasant has a library that a Roman
emperor would have envied.
a
4 CHRISTIANITY NO FINALITY; OR,
In astronomy, we have advanced from the childish
guesses of the Hebrews, and the only less wild conjec-
tures of the Greeks, to the magniﬁcent works of the
Herschels, and the splendid and all but demonstrated
theories of La Place. The little world made by the
Jewish Jehovah in six days; that had ends, and was
ﬂat; that rested on pillars, and was established so that
it could not be moved, —-is gone ; and in its place we
have the grand old earth, born of the sun in the eter-
nity of the past, rushing through space sixty times
faster than a ball from the mouth of a cannon. In
place of the stars that were made on the fourth day
after the creation of the earth, to assist in giving light
upon it, and that occasionally fell when Jehovah shook
the heavens, we "have millions of blazing suns, some of
them a thousand times larger than the centre of our
system ; and, compared with them, we ﬁnd our planet
to be but a drop in an inﬁnite ocean. We have de-
ciphered the hieroglyphics on the rocks, in which the
history of our planet is inscribed (a history all unknown
to the men of the past) ; have called up from their long
sleep the hosts of organic forms which ﬂourished during
the geologic ages ; and wrested from Nature her deep
secrets, hidden for so long from the most scrutinizing
gaze. Physiology, phrenology, chemistry, sciences
unknown to the world two thousand years ago, are
blessing us daily with their beautiful and useful reve-
lations; and the future is big with promise of new
sciences to be born, new realms yet to be discovered,
explored, and appropriated.
I am told that the Pyramids of Egypt are superior
to all modern structures, and that they demonstrate
how much the art of the'ancients was superior to that
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR TO CHRISTIANITY. 5
of the moderns. But let a hundred thousand men be
employed for thirty years, as they were to make the
great Pyramid, with the appliances of modern mechan~
ics and art, and they would pile up a mountain like
Chimborazo, whose giant crest the traveller views at a
distance of a hundred miles. For every art supposed
to be lest, we have made a hundred; and new ones
are starting up daily.
We have to-day better houses, better heads, conse-
quently better brains and better minds, better books,
better governments, than the ancients, and why not
a better religion? Having advanced in every other
direction, why not in this ? Are we to march forward
in science with excelsior for our motto,-looking upward,
and ever climbing to the untrodden heights; and, in
religion, are we to be constantly looking over our
shoulders, or groping in some mummy-pit over the
musty records of the past, deciphering mouldy parch-
ments, and mourning over mutilated manuscripts, as
if God had left his word to the mercy of some spread-
ing fungus or nibbling rat?
“ Why should we see with dead men's eyes,
Looking at W'as from morn till night ?
When the beauteous Now, the divine To be,
Woo with their charms the living sight ? ”
As the race has advanced from its primitive barbar~
ism, it has made for itself better and better religious
forms, corresponding with its advancement. Feti-
chism was once the best form of religion, when men
worshipped trees, stones, beetles, snakes, and more
disgusting objects still.
6 CHRISTIANITY NO FINALITY. OR,
“ Then a crocodile served as a reverend lord,
And the leeks that we eat were the gods they adored.”
The soul of man could not always thus grovel: some
primitive Moses, Jesus, or Luther, denounced, doubt-
less, as a heretic and inﬁdel, scouted the snaky gods,
and turned men’s attention to the heavens. “ There,”
said he, “is the beautiful sun: what more glorious
object of worship can you have ‘2 This makes our day ;
its absence, gloomy night; under its benignant reign
spring up grasses, ﬂowers, fruits, and all hearts are
cheered.” Listening to him, they abandoned the old
gods, danced in circles at early morn, and chanted
. hymns of praise to the god of day. Heroes who had
slain wild beasts, and destroyed neighboring tribes
who were their enemies, in turn also became gods
to be adored: their deeds were emulated by their
worshippers; and the exaggerated stories of their
exploits were handed down from generation to gen-
eration.
Judaism at length became possible, better than
some of its predecessors; for it gave to its adherents
the unseen God, “the Creator of the heavens and
earth,” in whose name a valuable moral code was in-
culcated, and the more ﬂagrant crimes sternly de-
nounced. But this God, though invisible, was in human
shape; stern, revengeful, passionate, and, at times,
terribly cruel. The Jews were his children beloved ;
the Gentiles, his illegitimate offspring, whom the Jews
were commissioned by him to destroy whenever they
interfered with their convenience or pleasure.
As men’s minds expanded, the Jewish God, and the‘
ritual founded in his name, could no longer command
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR '1'0 CHRISTIANITY. 7
their respect. Jesus inaugurates a new era, and su-
persedes Judaism, as the dawn does the light of the
stars. God is the Father of the human race: the sun
that shines on all, the rain that drops so impartially
on all, are the ﬁt emblems of his unbiassed love. The
burden of superstitious rites and ceremonies, the offer-
ing of sacriﬁces, the sabbaths, and the yearly pilgrim-
ages, are abolished. Faith in Jesus, and obedience
to his simple doctrine, are all that the new religion
demands. '
But is Christianity, even as Jesus taught it, a ﬁnal-
ity? Did this Galilean mechanic exhaust the Infinite ?
Has Nature no deeper secrets than he revealed? Did
he climb higher than mortal can ever again rise ? Did
he alone know the way of life, and are we doomed to
walk implicitly in his footsteps, or forever go astray?
So thought the‘Jew of Moses; so thinks the Turk of
Mohammed, and the Mormon of Joseph Smith.
We dream not that we have approached the Infinite
in any other direction. Ask the best musician if he
has exhausted the possibilities of his science and art,
and he will tell you that we have but ascended to the
clouds ; and the inﬁnite heaven of harmony lies beyond,
yet to be scaled, and yet to be enjoyed. The geologist
knows that we have but deciphered a few torn leaves
of a mighty volume, whose unread lore will feast ex-
plorers for ages to come. Ask the astronomer if the
last star in the ﬁrmament has yielded to him its secrets,
and the heavens have no more to reveal, and he will
tell you that he is but a babe. who has made the ac-
quaintance of a few pebbles on the shore of the ocean,
whose unfathomable waters spread illimitably around
him. What would be thought of the man who should
8 CHRISTIANITY N0 FINALITY; OR,
attempt to anchor us where our present attainments
are in these sciences? He would be justly regarded as
a fee to the human race. Was Jesus greater in reli~
gion than Newton and Herschel in astronomy, than
Lyell in geology, of Humboldt in general science ? We
certainly have no evidence of it. If we are to rely
upon the New-Testament record, and we have no other,
his deﬁciencies, and that of his religion, are most
manifest.
‘It is, in the ﬁrst place, most sadly deﬁcient in the
ability to give to the sceptic any evidence of life beyond
the grave. Judaism, it is true, was more deﬁcient: it
lacked even hope. Job says (Job vii. 9), “As the cloud
is consumed and vanisheth away, so he that goeth down
to the grave shall come up no more ; ” and certainly, if
man does go down to the grave, he comes up no more:
but man does no such thing. And David (Ps. cxlvi. 4) :
“_ His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth ; in
that very day his thoughts perish.” And Solomon
(Ecol. iii. 18-22) : “ I said in my heart concern-
ing the estate of the sons of men, that God might
manifest them, and that they might see that they them-
selves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons
of men befalleth the beasts; even one thing befalleth
them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they
have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminenee
above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place ;
all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who
knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the
spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth ?
Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better than
that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is
his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR TO CHRISTIANITY. 9
be after him ‘3 ” So said the grossly material Solomon,
who drank the cup of pleasure to the dregs, and then
called it bitter. I suppose it was in this spirit that he
married seven hundred wives, and took three hundred
concubines, the result of which he gives us in his
despairing words, “ All is vanity.”
Christianity, it must be acknowledged, is far in
advance of this. By the mouth of Jesus, it exclaims,
“In my Father’s house are many mansions: I go to
prepare a place for you, that, where I am, there ye may
be also.” Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still live, and
Moses and Elias appear on the mountain, and talk.
Paul says,“ To be absent from the body is to be present
with the Lord,” and “If our earthly house of this tab-
ernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a
house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
Blessed words ! — how many sinking souls they have
buoyed when the billows had well—nigh gone over them!
What hosts of hearts they have gladdened, as they trod
the dark valley, with no light but the star of Chris-
tianity to cheer them! Let us thankfully acknowledge
the good of the old, though we prefer the new: the
light of the stars is joyously accepted before the morn-
ing breaks.
But how little comfort the doubter obtains from
these! How meagre the evidence of future existence
which the Christian can give to those who dispute it!
“ How know you, my brother, that you will live when
this body dies; that there is a bridge that spans the
broad, dark chasm of death?” We pause for his
reply. “ Jesus died, and rose again triumphant; and,
because he lives, we shall live also.” —-“ But how do
you know that Jesus rose from the dead ? ” -—“ We have
10 CHRISTIANITY N0 FINALITY; OR,
the testimony of those who saw him after his resurrec-
tion,--the disciples with whom he brake bread after
he rose, who saw, conversed with, and even handled
him; the ﬁve hundred brethren who saw him at once,
and never doubted his triumph over death and the
grave.”--- “ But where do you ﬁnd all this‘? ” —“ In the
New Testament.” In vain the sceptic looks for what
would justify such an extravagant statement. Here
are accounts by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and
the merest mention in the Epistle of Peter, and,
besides this, absolutely nothing from any one pretend-
ing to be an eye-witness of these occurrences. Let us
examine what we possess. How much of it would
be taken in a court of justice?
Mark’s Gospel appears to have been transcribed from
previous records; and we have no evidence that the
writer ever saw Jesus, either after his death or before.
Even Orthodox commentators do not pretend to know
when his Gospel was written, or what Mark wrote it.
“ Of Mark, little, certainly, is known,” says Albert
Barnes the Orthodox commentator. Again: he says,
“He was not an apostle or companion of the Lord
Jesus during his ministry.” We cannot, therefore,
accept his statement: it would be ruled out of court
at once.
Luke does not profess to have been an eye-witness
of any of the events that he relates: he merely pro-
fesses (Luke i. 1) to set forth, in order, a declaration of
what was most surely believed among the Christians
of that time; and his statement can do but little
more in establishing the resurrection of Jesus than
the statement of a Ohristian’s belief in it at this day.
The Gospels of Matthew and John are, however,
SPIRITUALISIII SUPERIOR TO CHRISTIANITY.
believed by most Christians to have been written by
the men whose names they bear, who saw Jesus before
his death, and after he rose from the dead; and
who are, in every respect, competent witnesses. This
can never be proved; but, for the sake of the argu-
ment, we will grant it.
Let Matthew be examined. “ Matthew, did you see
Jesus of Nazareth die?”—“I did not: when the
multitude came with swords and staves to take Jesus,
we all forsook him, and ﬂed.” -— “ What was done with
his body ‘.7 ” -— “Joseph of Arimathea buried it in a new
sepulchre in his garden.”-—“ Who went to the sep-
ulchre on the ﬁrst day of the week? ” —“ Mary Magda-
lene and the other Mary” (Matt. xxviii. 1). “ What
did they see ‘3 ” —“ An angel, who said, Fear not ye ;
for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was cruciﬁed.
He is not here ; for he is risen, as he said. Go
quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the
dead ; and, behold, he goeth before you into Gali-
lee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you I ” —--
“Did these women see Jesus on that occasion?” —
“ They did: as they were going to tell the disciples,
they saw him, held him by the feet, and worshipped
him ; and he said, ‘ Go tell my brethren that they go
into Galilee, and there they shall see me.’ ” ——“ What
‘then ? ” —“ Then the eleven disciples went away into
Galilee into a mountain where J esns had appointed
them; and, when they saw him, they worshipped him :
but some doubted ” (Matt. xxviii. 16, 17).
Let us look at Matthew’s testimony for a moment.
An angel tells the two women to go quickly and tell
the disciples of Jesus that he is risen from the dead,
and goes before them into Galilee, and that they shall
12 CHRISTIANITY N0 FINALITY; on,
see him there; and, on their seeing Jesus, he adds,
“ Go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee, and
there they shall see me.” What was meant to be con-
veyed by these commands ? That Jesus was on his
way to Galilee, and that he did not intend to see them
till he should see them there; then that the disciples
went at once to Galilee, and there ﬁrst saw Jesus.
Nothing else can be fairly gathered from them.
“ Now, John, let us hear your testimony. Did you
see Jesus of Nazareth die ‘? ” —-“ I did: I was standing
near his mother, looking on at the time.”
“ Who went to the sepulchre' on the ﬁrst day of the
week ‘2 ” —“ Mary Magdalene.” —“ What did she
see? ”—“ She saw no one, but found that the body of
Jesus was gone.” — “ What did she do ? ” — “ She ran
and told Peter and me; and we ran to the sepulehre, and
found it to be as she had told us; and then we went
home.” —-“ What became of her ‘3 ” —“ She remained
there weeping; and, looking into the sepulehre, she saw
two angels who asked her why she wept; and, after tell~
ing them, she turned and saw Jesus, but thought he was
the gardener, but, on his speaking, recognized him. He
said, ‘ Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my
Father ; but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I
ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my
God and your God.’ ” —- “ What did the disciples do? ”
-— “ They remained in Jerusalem ; and the same day, at
evening, all but Thomas being in an upper room for
fear of the Jews, Jesus appeared to them and made
(them glad. Eight days afterwards, he appeared to
them again in the same place; and, Thomas being
present, satisﬁed him also of his resurrection from the
dead.”
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR TO (UUZISTIANITY. 13
From John, then, we learn that Jesus appeared to his
disciples in Jerusalem on the same day that he rose
from the dead, and satisfied all but Thomas of his res-
urrection ; but, according to Matthew, when the ‘eleven
disciples saw him in Galilee, some doubted. This must,
therefore, have been before he was seen in Jerusalem;
for they could not have doubted in Galilee if they had
previously been satisﬁed in Jerusalem. To make
Matthew’s statement and J ohn’s even appear to agree,
the disciples must have ﬁrst seen Jesus on the menu-
tain at Galilee, and then at Jerusalem: but, to do
this, they must, when Mary Magdalene and the other
Mary gave them the imperative word of Jesus, have
gone at once to Galilee, and returned to Jerusalem in
time for the evening’s appearance on the same day;
which would involve a journey of at least a hundred and
twenty miles, to say nothing of climbing the moun-
tain. But those were not days of railroads, steamboats,
nor even stage—coaches; and we see at once, if their
other discrepancies had not satisﬁed us, that these pro-
tended eye-witnesses are deceiving us. In court, they
would be in danger of trial for perjury.
Although we have granted that Matthew wrote the
gospel attributed to him, there is good reason to be-
lieve that he never did Write a word of it. Could he
have seen Jesus, as John represents, on the very day
that he rose from the dead, in an upper room at Jcru~
salem, and yet have represented that Jesus was first
seen at Galilee, at least sixty miles off, and never have
said a word about his appearance at Jerusalem ? It is
impossible.
“ What have we left, then ? ”— “ The ﬁve hundred
who saw Jesus at once.” -- “ Who are they? Where
14 CHRISTIANITY N0 FINALITY; on
is their testimony ? ”-— “ Nowhere: Paul says that ﬁve
hundred brethren saw him at once.” Very different,
indeed, from the testimony of these ﬁve hundred, no
name even of one being given.
We have, beside this, the testimony of Peter, who is
supposed to have been an eye-witness ; but it amounts
to little. All that he says is, God “ hath begotten us
again to a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus
Christ from the dead; ” and “ God raised him up from
the dead.” And this is absolutely all from those pre-
tending to have known Jesus when alive. Paul
evidently knew nothing of him personally. If some
of those who saw Jesus doubted,—-the very disciples,
while looking upon the face of their risen Master, —— well
may the sceptic doubt to-day, with nothing but such
meagre and contradictory evidence before him as this.
On what a slender thread this momentous doctrine has
hung! Man’s strong desire for immorta.ity has led him
to clutch at any straw to save him from the abyss of
nothingness in which death threatened to plunge him,
or such testimony as this never could have. been
accepted.
But suppose that Jesus did rise from the deadi he
rose with his ﬂesh, blood, and bones,—-a proper physical
man. He says, “ A spirit hath not ﬂesh and bones, as
ye see me have.” He ate broiled ﬁsh and honeycomb ;
showing that he was actually the same being after
death as before. But we can never rise in this way:
- our friends have perished, if this is the only resurrec-
tion possible. Some lie in trenches in the bloody ﬁelds
of the South, and their decomposing remains give ver-
dure to the palmetto that waves over them: some
sank into the turbid Mississippi, with the vessels they
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR TO CHRISTIANITY.
bravely defended: others were lost at sea, and sharks
became their living sepulchres ; or were burned up in
houses and ships, and the particles of their bodies
have been wafted over the globe on the wings of a
thousand winds. They have become parts of other
human bodies; and how can these ever be recovered
and re-animated? It cannot be, in the nature of things.
If we had no other evidence than this, well might we
weep on the death of our friends, as those who have no
hope! Christianity, then, utterly fails to give to the
seeptic any evidence of life beyond the grave. When
he asks for evidence on the most important question
that the soul of man can consider, it is silent as a skel-
eton, or chatters but to reveal its imbecility.
Spiritualism is, in this respect, almost inﬁnitely su-
perior. Christianity rests on faith, spiritualism on
knowledge. The one is a historical statement, the
other a living fact. Christianity says, “ Blessed are
they'who have not seen, and yet believed; ” thus offer-
ing a premium for blind faith. Spiritualism says,
“ Come hither, ye sceptics: hear, see, feel, and know
that your departed friends still live ; and, because they
live, receive the assurance that ye shall live also.”
The riddle of the universe is read, the mystery of
ages is revealed ; the question that we have been ask-
ing with tearful eyes for long millenniums is answered
in the affirmative, and we are men for the ages to
come. Tell the Indian it was not all a delusion that
his medicine—man taught him: the Indian lives where
the pale-face interferes not with his domain, and the
hell of the Christian is unknown. There is a paradise
for the Mohammedan better suited to his soul’s needs
than the one promised by Mohammed to the faithful.
16 CHRISTIANITY NO FINALITY; 012,
What Socrates hoped for, Jesus taught, and Paul be
lieved, we know. Death is swallowed up in life, joy<
ful life.
Who are the witnesses? No long-dead Peter,
Matthew, or John, but living men and women, who can
be questioned. N ot three or four, of whom some may
have been doubters; but unnumbered thousands,
spread over the broad land, some of whom may be met
and cross-questioned every day. Not merely the igno-
rant and superstitious, like the ﬁshermen of Galilee,
who seem to have been prepared for any story, however
marvellous, but sceptics like the Owens, Hare, and
Elliotson; such men and women as Thackeray, the
Howitts and Halls, Dr. Ashburner, Lord Lyndhurst,
Alfred B. Wallace, Epes Sargent, Prof. Gunning,
Prof. Mapes, Drs. Hallock and Brittan, William Lloyd
Garrison, Archbishop Whately and hosts of others,
many of whom were convinced notwithstanding the
strongest prejudice against it. Ministers. in Orthodox
pulpits have seen and believed, and preach now with a
power on the subject of future life such as Chris-
tianity never could give. Sceptics the most deter-
mined have found their scepticism melting like snow
before the sun of this truth.
Intelligent witnesses indeed we have, numbering
hundreds of thousands, whose word upon any ordinary
subject would be taken at once; and, if the fact of
spiritual intercourse cannot be established, it is in vain
to attempt to establish any very remarkable fact by
human testimony.
Christianity is ct miraculous religion. The earth
and man are miraculously created ; the earth will be
miraculously destroyed; and man will miraculously
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR To CHRISTIANITY. 17
die, since the constitution of man at ﬁrst was such
that he would not have died if God had not cursed
him. He is to be miraculously raised from the dead
by the miraculously begotten and resurrected Jesus.
Future life is consequently miraculous: “It is the
gift of God;” and those only can live to whom it is
given.
All this is sadly out of joint: it fails to harmonize
with what we know of Nature in the past, and hence
we may fairly presume that it does with what is to be
in the future. Men are learning that the earth came
to be as it is by the operation of law, and man came
in like manner. As his life here came naturally, so
comes his life hereafter. The spirit lives when the
body dies, by virtue of its nature: it cannot do other-
wise. Immortality is not the gift of a jealous Jehovah,
who may, in a ﬁt of anger, withhold it, and drop us into
nonentity : we live as the sun shines, because it is its
nature.
It is no wonder that a religion so interwoven with
miracle miraculously changes all persons at death, so
as to destroy their individuality, and give future exist-
ence not to the same individuals, but to the beings into
whom they have been thus changed. Heaven is the
miraculous home of the righteous few, hell the mirac-
ulous prison for the wicked many. The good alone
are to be admitted to heaven; no unclean thing can
enter it: but, since all men are partly good and partly
bad, all who enter there must be so changed as to be
quite different individuals. What wife would recog-
nize her quick-tempered husband, what husband would
know his fretful wife, when two immaculate angels
had taken their places? Where are the good fit for
z
18 CHRISTIANITY NO FINALITY; on,
the heaven of the New Testament? From Abel, who
was slain because he was more righteous than his
brother, to Washington, the patron saint of America, ‘
there never was a good man,--never a man who did
not lie, who did not at some time become angry, who
was not envious or jealous or mean. If none but the
good go to heaven, then it is as empty as an Orthodox
church on week-days, and God is a king without a
subject. Nor are there any bad men: from Cain, who
murdered his brother, to Arnold, who tried to murder
his country, there never was a man all'bad, —- one in
whose heart pity never dwelt, from whose purse char—
ity never drew a cent, nor pity from his eye a tear;
who never spoke the truth when it was possible to lie,
nor said a kind word or did a good deed during his
miserable life. If none but the bad are sent to hell,
that is just as empty as heaven.
A religion that teaches such a doctrine as this can-
not be a ﬁnality. Science in this nineteenth century
says to Miracle, “Away, hag of the night!” and she
hides her deformed countenance. We have rent the
veil of miracle that hid from us the orderly operations
of Nature, and everywhere we see law and its manifes-
tations; and, in harmony with that, we also see that
men must be themselves, if there is to be any future
life for them. All human beings are mixed : the
sheep are not destitute of hair and heard, and might
be at times mistaken for goats; the goats are not
without wool, and some have a striking resemblance
to sheep. From the best man to the worst, there is an
inﬁnite gradation; and Omnipotence itself can draw no
line between the bad to be doomed to a Christian hell,
and the good doomed to a Christian heaven. The
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR TO CHRISTIANITY.
natural consequences of our misdeeds, in a realm
without miracle, cling to us, -— as much a part of us
as our memory ; and not even God can rob us of the
fruit of our good actions, ours to enjoy while life en-
dures. At one blow, away go the Christian’s hell and
heaven : they are foreign to the universe ; and in their
place we have a spiritual realm for all, where the
good-deer can rejoice in the society of the philan-
thropic, and with them lay plans for humanity’s bene~
lit, and where the evil-deer may learn the folly of his
ways, cease to do evil, learn to do well, and reap the
reward of well-doing.
The temporary nature of Christianity is plainly in-
dicated by its indorsement of the Old Testament. Jesus
was never able entirely to outgrow the prejudices of
his Jewish education. “ One jet or one tittle,” says he,
“ shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be ful—
ﬁlled.” “ The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat:
all, therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that
observe and do.” As if the doctrine of these Jewish
law~expounders was all divine I Jesus refers to the old
stories of the Jewish Bible as if he believed them ; and
he evidently did : and even takes the marvellous tale of
Jonah for true, and refers to prophecies of himself in
the Old Testament which certainly have no existence.
It is no wonder, when Swedenborg, in many respects
a superior man to Jesus, was never able to shake off
the biblical shackles in which his sectarian education
had bound him.
Christianity, therefore, indorses the Old Testament,
and drags around this shockingly offensive corpse, that
is a stench in the nostrils of all intelligent and unprej—
udiced people. It takes this old bottle of Judaism, and
20 CHRISTIANITY NO FINALITY; on,
puts into it the new, and in some respects better, reli-
gion of Jesus, and, in consequence, destroys its ﬂavor,
and renders it unﬁt for our acceptance.
Following in their Master’s footsteps, the Christians
of the present day not only indorse the Old Testament
and its absurdities, but also the New Testament, with
some absurdities greater than the writers of the Old
ever dreamed of. To be wiser than the Bible is to the
true Christian impossible: to teach that it can ever be
superseded is blasphemy. It is his chart; and by it he
will be guided, though his judgment tells him that it
is wrong a thousand times a day.
What would be thought of the geographer who should
found a class in geography based upon the old atlas
of Ptolemy; every one of the class signing a declara-
tion that Ptolemy’s atlas was constructed by God him-
self, and contained all of geography that it was neces-
sary for man to know ? What progress could they ever
make? How they would ﬁght against every new. geo-
graphical discovery, and denounce every discoverer as
a heretic I What an arch inﬁdel Columbus would have
been regarded by such a class in his day 1 Thus it was,
in the time of Galileo, with the Bible believers. No
sooner did he discover in the heavens what could not
be found in the Bible, than he was cast into prison as
a reward for his superior knowledge. To-day, such men
as Darwin, Vogt, Huxley, and Spencer are looked upon
with suspicion, and denounced, because they have dis-
covered new realms that the Bible does not describe,
and that make it evident that a great deal which the
Bible does describe is false. They have learned that
Nature is inﬁnitely wider than the Bible writers ever
dreamed, and exceedingly different from their repre
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR TO CHRISTIANITY.
sentations; and they may expect to be cursed by all
who have sworn to be no wiser than the men of two
thousand years ago.
We must say to the Bible, “ Henceforth you take your
place by the side of all other books. We are not to be
deceived by your expanded size, your embossed covers,
nor your gilded leaves. You must be content to be
treated as we treat Milton’s ‘ Paradise Lost,’ Shaks-
peare’s ‘Plays,’ and Bunyan’s ‘ Pilgrim’s Progress.’ ”
And to Jesus, “ You can no longer be our master.
We do not object to you as a brother or a teacher: as
such we will place you with Socrates, Plato, and Con~
fucius,— just as good men in their way as you were in
yours. You must not come between us and Nature,
our mother, _-just as much ours as yours. The man
who pretends to possess a monopoly of Heaven’s favors,
and, in the name of God, lords it over his fellows, is
either self-deceived or an impostor; and in either case
is a very poor guide.” To the Jewish Jehovah, “ You
are as truly an idol as the gods denounced in your
name: they were the work of men’s hands, and you of
men’s brains. You never made the world, or you
could have informed us how you made it. Neither you
nor your Son ever redeemed the world, for it is not
redeemed ; and the deliverance that has come to it has
come in a very different channel from yours. You
have long enough been a stumbling-block in the world‘s
pathway: we move you to one side, that the car of
progress may advance.”
The indorsement of the divinity of the old Jewish
records has been the curse of Christianity from its com
mencement. It prevented the disciples of Jesus from
preaching it among the Samaritans and Gentiles during
I
22 CHRISTIANITY N0 FINALITY; 01:,
the lifetime of its founder; and, had it not been for the
partial emancipation of Paul, it would have strangled it
at its birth. It has produced a continual warfare bc~
tween it and science, which will without doubt end in
its death. It curses Unitarianism and Universalism
to-day. They are trying to run with heavy Jewish
shackles on their legs and this ponderous Bible on their
backs. Brethren, drop your Bibles ; if they cannot go
alone, leave them behind: snap your Jewish shackles;
unite with all who are laboring to beneﬁt humanity,
taking and giving the utmost freedom: then failure will
be as impossible as success is now.
With the indorsement of the Old Testament comes
the acceptance by Christianity of the Jewish Divinity;
and I know of no worse feature of it than this. Origi-
nally the idol of a petty tribe of sheep and cattle
breeders of J udea, Jehovah became the God of Abra-
ham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their descendants. As they
extended their domain by force of arms, so extended
the kingdom of their Divinity, and his name became
a terror to the nations round about; while the Jews
credited him with all that their superior knowledge,
craft, and cruelty enabled them to accomplish. The
common sentiment of the Jewish nation at an early
period is well exempliﬁed in a song attributed to Moses,
and which occurs in the ﬁfteenth chapter of Exodus:
“ He is my God, and I will prepare him a habitation;
my father’s God, and I will exalt him. The Lord is a
man of war: the Lord is his name.” In accordance
with this, they called him “ the Lord of hosts,” or, in
other words, the Lord of armies, and the “ Lord mighty
in battle.” A similar sentiment was shared in by the
nations round about them, who had each divinities
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR TO CHRISTIANITY.
that they worshipped and prayed to, and to whom
all their victories were ascribed.
What has the soul of the universe to do with this
petty, jealous, vacillating, malignant, cruel idol of the
Jews ‘3 The spirit that shines in the sun ; that throbs
in the heart of the distant nebula to form solar sys-
tems, as it- does in that of the unborn child to form
the man; that, out. of the ﬁery hell of the world prime-
val, has developed plant, ﬁsh, reptile, brute, and man.
and is urging the world on in that grand career of
progress whose magniﬁcent future may be estimated
by its mighty past,--what relation is the sacriﬁce—
loving, roasted-oxen-smelling deity of the Jews to
this spirit? No more than Jupiter or Juno.
Jehovah is a being who cursed the earth and the
entire race because the ﬁrst pair fell, when he knew
beforehand that they had not the ability to stand;
he found the World of one language and of one speech,
and, in a ﬁt of jealousy lest they should build a tower
to heaven and invade his domain, cursed them with a
thousand different tongues, so that they could not un-
derstand each other’s speech ; he tempted Abraham to
murder his own son, and, when he showed his readiness
to commit the infamous crime, be blessed him, and
represents him as the best man upon earth, because
he was most willing to do the worst deed. He is a
God that transmuted a woman into a pillar of salt,
because she looked back upon her burning home, and
lingeringly left her friends to perish; who hardened
Pharoah’s heart so that he should not let the people
of Israel go, and then slew millions of innocent
Egyptians because he was so hard-hearted that he
would not let them go; he gave to the Jews the grand
24 CHRISTIANITY N0 FINALITY; 01:
charter of death, —no Camanche chief’s war-speech
was ever worse, -— “ Thou shalt save alive nothing that
breatheth.” He has sent all mankind into the world _
with a strong disposition to do evil; he allows the
Devil and his agents to tempt men, and thus make
them worse than they are naturally, and then has so
arranged matters, that, if they persist in doing what
he calls evil, he will plunge them into a den of woe,
from which there is no escape, but from which the
smoke of their torment is to ascend for ever and
ever. And we are told that it is our duty to love this
monster that the Jew made and the Christian has
remodelled. Tell the captive pining in his dungeon
to love the tyrant that placed him there; tell the
slave to love the master who has robbed him of his
rights since he began to breathe, and whose back is yet
bloody from the blows of his lash ; tell the mother to
love the ﬁend who has slain her darling, and now
gloats over her agony. As impossible is it for us to
love this Devil-creator, this plaguer of the human
race, this framer and jailer of hell, and tormentor
of the damned. Reason will not, cannot, call him
father; Love shrinks with terror from his presence;
and Justice says, “ Let him die, for he is unworthy to
live.” The gods of silver and gold, of iron and brass,
will perish; the gods of wood and stone shall be no
more, and their worshippers shall be ashamed of their
folly : and so shall this grim, blood-besprinkled, eter-
nally hating and torturing Jehovah die, and a mil-
lion ransomed souls join in swelling to heaven his
funeral-hymn.
The transient character of the Christian religion is
clearly manifested by its intolerance. J esus said, “ He
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR To CHRISTIANITY. 25
that believeth and is baptized shall be saved : he that
believeth not shall be damned;” and, so saying, he
opened the doors of persecution as wide as the Chris-
tian faith. He sowed the seed that fruited in creeds
and curses, prisons, chains, blazing fagots, and all the
horrors of the Inquisition; he created hell, and placed
it in the hands of priests to curse the world for ages.
“ If men are to be damned for a wrong faith,” says the
conscientious Christian, “ we must do our best to pro~
vide them with a right faith, and to prevent the spread
of what may damn them; and, since persecution will
do this, we must persecute. Better by far to burn one
man here, than that a thousand should burn hereafter.”
Calvin, who burnt Servetus, acted most conscientious-
ly, I have no doubt; for his course was in perfect har-
mony with his faith. If the apostles had possessed the
power, they would, doubtless, have exercised it in a sim-
ilar manner. Hear Paul: “ If any man love not the
Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema maranatha.”
Behind that lie thumb-screw, rack, and gibbet. Again :
" If any man preach any other gospel unto you than
that ye have received, let him be accursed.” In other
words, “ Damn every man that preaches not our gos-
oel ; ” which is a literal translation of his curse. Even
the gentle John, the preacher of love, says, “ If there
come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive
him not into your house, neither bid him God speed.”
And the next step is easily taken, and legitimately fol-
lows: “ Take him into your prison, and thus prevent the
dissemination of his ‘ damnable heresies,’ ” —- a New-
Testament phrase, born of intolerance. As Christian—
ity denounces the most fearful penalties for unbelief,
so has it been the most persecuting and intolerant of all
26 CHRISTIANITY No FINALITY; 01:,
religions; and those among Christians who are farthest
from this, as the Unitarians and Universalists, are
farthest from primitive, genuine Christianity.
As soon as Christianity became strong enough to
wield the sword, in harmony with its faith, it com-
menced a crusade against philosophy, and established
a reign of terror over all who dared to think otherwise
than as the church directed. Draper says of the Chris-
tian Church in the reign of Constantine,“ They de-
nounced as magic, or the sinful pursuit of vain triﬂing,
all the learning that stood in the way. It was intended
to cut off every philosopher. Every manuscript that
could be seized was forthwith burned. Throughout
the East, men, in terror, destroyed their libraries, for
fear that some unfortunate sentence contained in any
of the books should involve them and their families in
destruction. The universal opinion was, that it was
right to compel men to believe what the majority of
society had now accepted as the truth; and, if they
refused, it was right to punish them. No one was
heard in the dominating party to raise his voice in be-
half of intellectual liberty.” Certainly not: this would
be to tolerate another gospel, and open the door to all
heresy, which might be the cause of eternal misery to
millions. The belief that our future destiny is to be
decided by our faith, so strenuously insisted upon by
Christianity, has made Christians the most relentless
persecutors the world has known. The pagan Romans,
who never supposed that a false faith would damn men,
were tolerant of all religions that did not interfere
with the State. Since the religion that denounces
most vehemently and threatens the most terrible tor-
tures has the greatest advantage among the ignorant,
SPIRITUALISIII SUPERIOR TO CHRISTIANITY. 27
who can fear when they cannot reason, Christianity
spread, crowded out and destroyed paganism and phi-
losophy, set up its tortures, and for centuries applied
them. It is true that Christians do not so persecute
to-day: but the reason is evident; they are more intel-
ligent, and have less power. By the operation of irre-
sistible law, the world has advanced, and superstition
has been left behind in the march ; and thus Christian—
ity and its intolerant spirit are fast being superseded,
and they shall rule the world no more.
Christianity favors sectarianism and priestcraft. In
Judaism, the priest is the most imposing ﬁgure: dressed
in his sacerdotal robes, he is the visible manifestation
of the deity, and commands the reverence of all wor-
shippers. Jesus called himself Lord and Master, and
his followers have not been slow to imitate him; and,
if the priest is not the great I AM, he is the little I am,
and heathen all who reject the gospel he preaches.
He prays in the name of the congregation, whom he
calls “ my people: ”' “ We thank thee, O God,” “ we
beseech thee ; ” and most of his people think that he is
much nearer to God than themselves, so that, when
sick, they send for him to pray, his prayers are so much
more potent than their own. A man in the Christian
church is a man bound to be no wiser than its creed,
no broader than its intolerant spirit, no better than its
impractical founder. As soon as he attempts to be any
of these, the church’s anathema is fulminated against
him: he has committed the sin unpardonable.
I hail spiritualism as a deliverer from this priest—
craft, this ecclesiastical bondage, an opener of prison-
doors to the captives, and the usherer in of. a new era
for humanity. Here is no Moses communing with
28 CHRISTIANITY No FINALITY; 0R,
God, who shows him his glory, but tells him to keep
back the crowd, for, if they break through, they shall
perish; no Jesus, the true door, denouncing all who
enter some other way as thieves and robbers; no pope '
extending his pedal digits to be embraced by the sets of
superstition; not even a priest to say “ my people: ”
for communion with the. spirit-world is open to all
classes,-‘—children of seven and old people of seventy.
Peasants who never read a line are as highly favored as
college-bred professors; and the sinner, in this respect,
is as highly favored as the saint.
We have sects enough : why multiply them? Too
long have we allowed men who never had any more
authority than ourselves to drive down the stakes and
enclose us within a creed-made fold. Luther found
the pasture bare, or nothing left but bitter weeds;
the streams soiled by the feet of millions and the im-
purities of ages: he looked over the pale, saw the
fertile prairie in its virgin beauty, the best of pastur-
age, living streams ﬂowing through it, and said to
the hungry, thirsty, dog-bitten crowd, “Out where
the living waters ﬂow, and the pastures illimitable
invite us to the feast.” And out went a host, but only
to drive down new stakes and enclose another ﬂock.
Wesley broke down the ecclesiastical barrier, and took
the liberty to look for better fare; but no sooner had
he found it, than the stake-drivers were set to work,
the ﬁeld enclosed, and the sheep solemnly warned
against straying outside of the fold, where the wolves
lurk to devour the straying lambs of the ﬂock. Hav-
ing taken the ﬁeld for ourselves, we must allow all
others the same privilege. Do not imagine, that,
because we have outgrown Christianity, we have
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR T0 CHRISTIANITYZ 29
attained the highest and best of which the race is capa-
ble; that we have learned it all, and may henceforth
embody our views in a creed,'build our churches, and
stand at the door and bark at all outsiders. We have
done little more than master the alphabet of knowl-
edge: its literature is all but unread.
Organizations we must have for work: let them be
a thousand times multiplied. We must unite, or do
but little of what is so much needed: but let it be a
union of free men, not for the extension of a sect, but
for the enlightenment and upbuilding of mankind; in
that ﬁnding our satisfaction and sufficient reward, and
rejoicing in all movements that aid this, by whoever
made. Sectarians look at every thing as it affects their
sect: if it will help that, then they will assist it; if it
will injure their sect, however much it may beneﬁt
the race, “ Curse it!” they cry : “ for it blesses not
us!” Thus the strongest sectarians have been the
most deadly fees of progress.
We must stand where we can rejoice at all progress :
whatever blesses mankind cannot but be worthy of our
regard. We shall herald instead of denouncing re~
form. We shall aid temperance, labor—reform, social
science, human suffrage, and all other progressive
movements: they are agencies operated by the mem-
bers of our grand church of humanity. We shall
unite with those who do not recognize existence after
death: they are our brethren also, -- many of them
most noble and true, who have stood by the truth
amid obloquy, reproach, scorn, and bitter persecution.
I can belong to no church that excludes them or any
others who are honestly laboring to beneﬁt the race.
Spiritualists need carefully to guard against making
30 CHRISTIANITY N0 FINALITY; 0R,
spirits authority. The world abounds with lazy
people, who do not wish the trouble of making up their
minds, and are glad to have spirits do this for them.
What the spirit says is swallowed as unadulterated
gospel ; and one idol, the Bible, cast down, only that
another many-headed monster may take its place.
Nothing can relieve us from the necessity of thinking.
We must allow nothing to take us off the solid ground
of reason, or growth is impossible.
Nothing can absolve us from the obligations of
morality, the duties which we naturally owe to our-
selves and others. We must prove that we have a
better religion by living better lives. When ecclesias-
tical bonds are being snapped, people are sometimes
ready to discard even the authority of Nature herself,
and disregard the laws upon obedience to which our
own and others’ well-being depend. Spirits cannot
prevent the consequences of wrong-doing from falling
upon the head of the guilty ; and a spiritualist sinner
will be made to suffer as certainly as an Orthodox
good-deer will be rewarded. With increasing intelli-
gence, we shall learn that the wisest man is he who
knows the most of what Nature teaches; and the best
man, he who most faithfully reduces her lessons to
practice.
Our vessel is aﬂoat; the sails are set; heaven wafts
a prosperous gale. Science is our compass, Reason
our pilot, and angels point the way. Already the
goodly land appears in view. See its sunny slopes!
We can even hear its music in faint tones, as it comes
wafted over the breakers. There stand the friends
that in youth we loved, on whose cold graves we
dropped a tear. They beckon to us 1 N 0 dark cloud
SPIRITUALISM SUPERIOR T0 CHRISTIANITY. 31
obscures our vision ; no mist like a curtain hides from
us the home of the soul. We do not say, “ I hope to
join you, if God will but help me for the sake of
Jesus; ” but we boldly say, “ Ye, my brethren, live
and love, and we shall live and love also ' ”
‘a


THE GOD PROPOSED
OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION:
3 ﬂatten,
GIVEN IN MUSIC HALL, BOSTON, ON SUNDAY
AFTERNOON, MAY 5, 1872.
BY
WILLIAM IQENTON.
WELLESLEY, MASS:
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY.


Price Ten Cents.

1882.
THE GOD PROPOSED
OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION:
3 Nature,
GIVEN IN MUSIC HALL, BOSTON, ON SUNDAY
AFTERNOON, MAY 5, 1872.
BY
WILLIAM DEN TON.
W ELLESLEY, MASS:
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY.
1882.
fl - \
1.2," ,1.’
'\ I‘
Carafes-k‘ fw’ ' "- J’
_ _ ‘u:
i-Wwt'v
a .
THE GOD PROPOSED FOR OUR NATIONAL
CONSTITUTION.

IT is said, that, “ once upon a time,” the frogs were
desirous of having a king. On looking around for a
suitable individual, they spied a fat ox feeding in the
meadow. Admiring his majestic appearance,they sent a
deputation to wait upon him, and ask him to accept the
position. The ex, nothing loath, strode down to the
marsh, and was properly installed king of frogdom.
His happy subjects crowded around him to present
their congratulations ; but, unfortunately for them, as
he moved his ponderous body to return the compli-
ments that were croaked from every side, beneath his
royal hoofs lay a dozen of his loyal subjects crushed
to the earth. Too late they discovered that an ex,
though a ﬁne-looking animal, is no ﬁt monarch for
frogs.
Before we think of placing a God in the Constitution
of these United States, it must be well to examine the
character of the individual proposed for the position,
or we may ﬁnd ourselves in the condition of the frogs
in the fable; death following every step of our God,
and we powerless to stop the destruction.
8
4 " THE eon PROPOSED
Up to the present time, I have heard of but one God
who has been proposed for the highest of all ofﬁces in
the gift of the people; and that is the Christian’s God,
whom Jesus declared to be the God of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob. The God, then, that we are asked to make
the God of these United States, is Jehovah, the God of
the Jews, whose sayings and deeds are recorded in
their so-called sacred books and in the Christian Scrip-
tures, from which we can, fortunately, obtain a knowl-
edge of his actual character. It is furnished, if we are to
believe what these books say, by himself and his friends,
it is true ; and this must be taken into account, as we
may suppose them to represent him in a more favorable
light than the facts will really warrant.
Moses gives us a portrait of him that is very beauti-
ful: “ He is the Rock; his work is perfect; for all his
ways are judgment ; a God of truth and without
iniquity, just and right is he ” (Dent. xxxii. 4). What
an excellent example to place before the ofﬁcers of our
government! Of himself he says, “ The Lord God is
merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in
goodness and truth ” (Exod. xxxiv. 6). Who could ob-
ject to such a God as this ? He needs but to be known
to be loved, but to be heard to be obeyed. It may be
well, however, to see whether his deeds correspond with
his words. Men accepted for what they claim to be, and
State-prison convicts are patterns of all excellency.
It may possibly be so with gods. Let us see.
Jehovah informs Adam (Gen. ii. 17), that, if he
shall eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, in the
day that he eats of it he shall surely die. But, instead
of dying in that day, Adam lived more than nine hun-
dred years afterward. Could Jehovah have made a
FOR oUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. 5
mistake? That is,of course,impossible. Did he really
intend to deceive the man? Was not some other kind
of death meant? If truthful in every other respect,
we will give him the beneﬁt of the doubt; but, if other-
wise, we shall suspect him, to say the least.
According to the sixteenth chapter of 1st Samuel,
J chovah told Samuel to go to Jesse the Bethlehemite,
and anoint one of his sons, whom he had provided for
king over Israel, in the place of Saul. But Samuel
replies, “ How can I go ‘2 If Saul hear it, he will kill
me.” Saul was king, and he would kill the man who
thus sought to put another man in his place. Now,
mark the advice of Jehovah : “ And the Lord said, Take
a heifer with thee, and say, I am come to sacriﬁce to
the Lord.” Was it for that Jehovah wished him to go ?
N 0 such thing; but to anoint David king. What was
he to take the heifer for? To deceive Saul, and thus
escape the consequences of his deed by lying. You
may call that a white lie. The crime of lying consists
in the deception practised ; and in this respect it was as
black as any lie. The difference between that and an
ordinary lie is, that it was a mean,'cowardly lie. The
man who tells an out—and-out lie stands on his feet
when he tells it; but the man who tells a lie like that
crawls on the ground like a snake. I have no respect
for cowards,be they men or gods. How much better
it would have been for Jehovah to say to Samuel,
“ Tell the truth, and I will attend to the consequences ” l
or, better still, “ If you are afraid to do what I tell you,
let it alone, and I will ﬁnd a more courageous man ” !
If we are to have a constitutional God of the United
States, I think it will be generally acknowledged that
he should be a truthful God. I know that politicians,
1"
6 THE eon PROPOSED
as a class, care but little about truth, unless it can be
made to subserve their purposes. I know that par~
tisan newspapers, especially just before election, care
as little about truth as a hungry hyena does about
grace before meat. I know, also, that many priests
and orthodox tract-society managers are not very
scrupulous about lying, when they think it will help
“the Lord’s cause.” This I know: but the body of the
people love truth; feed on lies only because the truth
is withheld from them; and, if they are to have a na-
tional God, want, as they must surely need, a God of
truth; one who will neither lie himself, nor induce
others to lie. I object to Jehovah, then, as our God,
because he is a liar.
After the separation of Abram and Lot, Jehovah told
Abram to walk through the length and breadth of the
land of Canaan, and said, “ All the land which thou
seest, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed forever”
(Gen. xiii. 15). He made this promise still more deﬁ-
nite subsequently by saying, “ Unto thy seed have I
given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great
river, the River Euphrates” (Gen. xv. 18). The
promise made and sworn to by Jehovah to Abraham
was repeated to Isaac and Jacob. How was it ful-
ﬁlled? Abraham himself never received a foot of it
(Acts vii. 5). Nearly ﬁve hundred years passed away
before his seed commenced the conquest of the prom-
ised country ; and so slowly did it proceed, that it was
not till nearly four hundred years after this that even
Zion, the stronghold of Jerusalem, was taken from the
J cbusites (2 Sam. v. 7) ; and less than four hundred
years after this the kingdom of J udah was overthrown by
Nebuchadnezzar (J er. lii.). To-day the nine thousand
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. 7
Jews that dwell in Palestine are foreigners; and they
may see what the promises of Jehovah are worth, and
how little dependence is to be placed upon his word.
Even in the latter part of David’s reign, and that of
Solomon’s, when the country of the Israelites was
most extended, the northern part of the promised
territory was in the hands of the Phoenicians and the
Syrians, while the southern part was held by the
Philistines and the Eygptians.
“From Dan to Beersheba,” which designated the
length of Canaan, even near the close of David’s reign
(2 Chr. xxi. 2), is only about a hundred and forty miles ;
while the distance from the river of Egypt to the Eu-
phrates, the land promised to the seed of Abraham, is
between ﬁve and six hundred miles. The little that the
Israelites did possess was only for a few years at a time,
ﬁtful occupancy of a small territory, obtained by theft
and murder, only held by continual ﬁghting, and
which they have lost possession of for more than two
thousand years. This Jehovah, who thus swore to
the fathers and lied to the children, is the very last of
all gods to be chosen by a people who love truth, and
desire it to become universal.
The same Jehovah lied to David and his descend-
ants, lied plainly and unequivocally. In the 89th Psalm
we read, “I have made a covenant with my chosen,
I have sworn unto David my servant, Thy seed will I
establish forever, and build up thy throne to all gen-
erations.” And again, “His seed also will I make to
endure forever, and his throne as the days of heaven.”
But the most deﬁnite promise is this : “ If his
children forsake my law, and walk not in my judg-
ments; if they break my statutes, and keep not my
8 THE eon PROPOSED
commandments; then will I visit their transgressions
with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes. Never~
theless, my loving-kindness will I not utterly take from
him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail. My covenant
will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of
my lips. Once have I sworn by my holiness that I will
not lie unto David. His seed shall endure forever,
and his throne as the sun before me. It shall be estab-
lished forever as the moon, and as a faithful witness
in heaven.”
If the sun had endured no longer than David’s
throne, we had never been ; and, if the moon had been
no better established, we had never seen it.
Long after this, when there seemed to be danger of
the utter destruction of the kingdom of Judah, the
promise is repeated to Jeremiah (Jer.xxxiii.17): “Thus
saith the Lord: David shall never want a man to sit
upon the throne of the house of Israel; neither shall
the priests the Levites want a man before me to offer
burnt-offerings and to kindle meat-oﬁferings, and to do
sacriﬁce continually.” Again he says, “ If ye can
break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the
night, and that there should not be day and night in
their season; then may also my covenant be broken
with David my servant, that he should not have a son
to reign upon his throne; and with the Levites the
priests, my ministers.”
Let us see how these unconditional premises, from
the God that would not lie to David, were fulﬁlled.
David reigned about forty years, then Solomon forty ;
but his son Rehoboam lost the government of ten
tribes, which were ruled over by J eroboam, a man in
no way related to David. And the kingdom of Judah,
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. 9
as the government of the remaining tribes, Judah and
Benjamin, was then called, lasted under the dynasty of
David about four hundred years, till Nebuchadnezzai
destroyed Jerusalem, carried the people into captivity,
and destroyed “ the throne of David.”
What kind of a forever is ﬁve hundred years?
When Jehovah told Jeremiah that David should
never want a man to sit upon his throne, he must
have known, that within ten years, at the outside,
there would be no throne of David to sit on. It is said
that he who will swear will lie; and it appears to be
as true of gods as men. Where is the throne of David
to-day, that was to be as the sun before Jehovah‘?
Where are the Levites offering burnt-offerings? and
where are they doing sacriﬁce continually ?
The condition of the Jew among us, which has been
appealed to as a proof of the truth of the Bible, is
one of the strongest evidences of the untruth of J eho-
vah. Destitute of a nation, destitute of the ceremoni-
als of his ancient faith, he shows us the sad conse-
quences of the trust of his race in the promise-making,
but no less promise-breaking, Jehovah, who has ruined
one nation, and whom traitors to freedom are inviting
to ruin this country also, — the only refuge for the God-
cursed of all lands.
Some children lie in their infancy, but, when their
reasoning faculties become active, see the impropriety
of it, and thenceforth speak the truth; but Jehovah
does not seem to improve in this respect with age.
I ﬁnd Paul stating (2 Thess. ii. 11), that, because
certain people would not receive the love of the truth,
God should send them strong delusion, that they
Should believe a lie, that they all might be damned.
10 THE eon PROPOSED
The God that Paul believed in was Jehovah ; and, be-
cause people do not love the truth, be will lie to them,
that they may believe the lie, and be damned! How
much love of truth has that Being _who adopts such
lying measures? how much justice has he who lies
to people, and then damns them because they believe
him? and how much propriety is there in putting
this lying Jehovah into our national Constitution?
Bad as was the treatment that the Jews received at
the hands of Jehovah, it was the best ever vouchsafed
by him to any people: for he is a partial God; and I
bring this as another objection against him. He
chooses Abram, out of all the Arab chiefs of his time, to
be the father of his peculiar people; he loves Jacob
rather than Esau, and that before either of them is
born, “that the purpose of God, according to election,
might stand,” as Paul tells us. He chose the Israel-
ites from all the nations of the earth, delivered them
from Egypt by a series of most astounding miracles,
blew a passage for them through the Red Sea, fed
them with bread from heaven, and sent quails by the
million, caused water to spring from the solid rock,
and for forty years never allowed the clothes on their
backs nor the shoes on their feet to grow old or worn.
He says, “ The Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a
special people unto himself, above all people that are
on the face of the earth” (Dent. vii. 6). And again:
“You only have I known of all the families of the
earth” (Amos iii. 2). The peaceful and industrious
Chinese, the philosophic Hindoos, the intelligent and
religious Egyptians, the brave Assyrians, and the artis-
tic Greeks, Jehovah never knew; for them he never
cared. In the darkness, a thousand million of God’s
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. 11
neglected sons groped through the centuries ; but
this handful of Israelites, his beloved children, lived in
a blaze of divine glory, and were permitted, nay, com-
manded, to butcher their brothers who would not be-
come their slaves, and bow down and worship their
little-souled and partial God ; and those who are mov-
ing for the Jehovah amendment in the Constitution
not only worship this unjust Divinity, but seem to be
desirous to compel their more enlightened and more
manly neighbors to worship him also.
This country justly prides itself upon its general
intelligence. The few do not shoot up like pines, and
the many squat like toad-stools. The average culture
of the people of the Northern States, at least, is proba-
bly as great as or greater than that of any other country
on the globe. If we are to have a God for our nation,
he should be an intelligent God, or how can intelligent
people respect him? I object, then, to Jehovah, because
he is an ignorant God, -- so ignorant of geography, that
he does not know either the shape of the earth or its
size, and supposed that a forty-days’ rain would drown
it (Gen. vii. 11). He knows so little of astronomy, that
he supposes the earth to be the universe, to which the
heavens hold the same relation as a curtain does to a
bed (Isa. X1. 22). He thinks the stars are “ set ” in
this stretched curtain ; and when he shall roll it up, as
he threatens to do at some time, he supposes the stars
will fall to the earth (Isa. xxxiv. 4; Rev. vi. 13). He has
so little knowledge of the number of species of animals
on the globe, that he supposed Noah could preserve, in
a box about ﬁve hundred feet long, less than one hun-
dred broad, and about ﬁfty high, seven of every kind of
bird, male and female, and two of every other kind of
12 THE eon PROPOSED
animal, and provisions for them for twelve months;
one-fourth of which could never have got into it.
He is so ignorant of zoiilogy, that he tells the Israel-
ites they must not eat the hare, because it chews the
end (Lev. xi. 6),-—a thing that no hare does; thus
mistaking a rodent for a ruminant. He knows so
little of geology, that he supposes the earth was made
less than six thousand years ago, and brought into a
condition similar to the present in less than a week ;
and is so ignorant of the history of man, whom he pre-
tends to have made, that he supposes all human beings
descended from a single pair, who were made long
after the valley of the Nile was occupied by civilized
people; and then, to crown his imbecility, threatens
man with damnation unless he believes that of which
he fails to give him sufficient evidence. There is not
a boy of fourteen years of age in any New-England
grammar-school who does not know more than this
J cwish Jehovah is represented in the Bible as know-
ing; and a man so ignorant would be a laughing-stock
to his whole neighborhood. The Hottentots of Africa
might debate whether a God as ignorant should be
admitted into the constitution of their government;
but the men who propose him for the United-States
Constitution are the deadliest enemies of intelligence.
As a nation, the United States has been a grand
success. The fathers of our country undertook to
form a republic uncursed by kings and government
priests ; where all men could have liberty of conscience,
for all religious faiths should be equal in the eye of the
law. They sought to make a home for the oppressed,
the king-cursed, the poverty-stricken, of all lands ; and
they did it. We undertook to rid the land of slavery,
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. 13
that it might be in spirit, as in name, the land of the free ;
and we have done it. Much remains to be done to
make this country what the wisest and best desire: and,
if we are to have a God for the country, it should be one
who has been successful; one in whom we can have
conﬁdence that he will help us to succeed in carrying
out still needed reforms. I object, then, to Jehovah,
because he has utterly failed in nearly every thing that
he has undertaken. Hell only exists in consequence of
the failure of heaven. The very ﬁrst human beings that
Jehovah made failed so utterly, that he cursed them
almost as soon as they were out of his hands. The
world that he had made, and pronounced good, was
such a dead failure, that it grieved him at his heart, and
he destroyed it, and tried it over again with scarcely
any better success. He chose the Israelites, that they
might be a holy people unto him ; yet they turned out to
be the vilest of wretches, and made him so angry, that
he cursed them in his wrath, and destroyed them in his
fury. Mankind failed so utterly, that he left heaven to
saw, them; and for this purpose became a Jewish baby,
and subsequently a carpenter and a preacher ; allowed
men to kill him, and then sent his disciples unto all the
world to tell people that they might be saved by believ-
ing the story. Yet so bunglingly did he manage the
whole matter, that not one in ﬁfty of the world’s pop
ulation since that time has ever believed the account ;
and the more intelligent people become, the less in-
clined they are to believe it, and the more certain they
are to be damned, -- the very fate from which Jehovah
professes to have undertaken to deliver them,--and
the myriads of hell’s victims are to howl his failure to
all eternity.
2
14 THE eon PROPOSED
Shall we suffer a God who so mismanages his own
affairs to manage ours ? Obey such a God as this, and
we should soon be in the condition of his chosen people
when they wished to return to the Egypt they had ﬂed
from, or as they were when he sold them into the hands
of N ebuchadne‘zzar.
One reason of J ehovah’s want of success may be that
he is vacillating, —- lacking that strong will, governed
by intelligence, which moves toward its object without
ﬂinehing, because wisdom has determined the course
marked out to be the best.
“ It repented the Lord that he had made man on the
earth, and it grieved him at his heart” (Gen. vi. 6).
it is therefore presumable, that, if he had known how
he would turn out, he never would have made him.
After leading the Israelites into the wilderness, they so
provoked him, that he declared he would smite them
with the pestilence, and disinherit them; and would
have done it, apparently, had not Moses expostulated
with him, and led this vacillating Divinity to“ repent
of the evil that he thought to do unto his people ”
(Exod. xxxii. 14). Moses saw, that, if he did this, his
reputation among other nations would be destroyed;
and, on presenting this view of the matter to Jehovah,
he appears to have seen the wisdom of the suggestion.
A prime-minister often knows more than a king ; and
a prophet, we see, may be more intelligent than the
God that sends him.
Jehovah sent word to Hezekiah, “ Set thine house in
order ; for thou shalt die, and not live ” (Isa. xxxviii.).
But Hezekiah, as many others would have done, felt
as if he would rather live than die: he said, “ Remem-
ber now, O Lord! I beseech thee, how I have walked
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION.
before thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and
have done that which is good in thy sight. And
Hezekiah wept sore.” This appears to have led
to a reconsideration of the matter on the part of J eho-
vah, and he sent word to him that he had lengthened
his days ﬁfteen years.
We read that the Ninevites at one time offended
Jehovah greatly, and he sent Jonah to announce to them
their unconditional destruction. Jonah was unwill~
ing to go ; and it required a three-days’ residence in
a whale to make him obedient to the heavenly voice.
When “ he reached Nineveh, he went through the
streets crying, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be
overthrown.” But, at the preaching of this foreign
prophet, the whole city repented, and fasted, and
“cried mightily unto God; ” and then God repented,
and concluded to spare the repentant city, regardless of
the feelings of Jonah, who thought he was badly used.
If Jehovah knew the end from the beginning, he must
have known that the N inevites would repent, and the
city be spared; and I think Jonah had just ground
of complaint in being sent there with that lie in his
month.
What conﬁdence can we have in a God who is
grieved at his heart at the foreseen consequences of his
own actions, and undoes in a day what it took him
more than a thousand years to accomplish, and then,
after it is over, promises that he will not do it again?
(Gen. viii. 21.) '
I object to Jehovah’s name in our national Con-
stitution also, because he is a male God, and neither
has, nor ever had, any female associated with him in
the divine government. He is a stern father, chas<
16 THE eon PRorosEn
tising in anger every unrepentant son. But where is
the tender-hearted mother, that with a kiss receives
the erring child to her bosom, and melts him into re-
pentance with her tears? God the Father, God the
Son, God the Holy Ghost ; three unmarried males, con-
stituting a monkish trinity, from all eternity to all
eternity. I object to him (them) as utterly unﬁt to
reign over us, and especially when women shall have
their political rights ; and the day cannot be far distant.
This is the God who thunders in the ears of the ﬁrst
woman, “ Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he
shall rule over thee ; ” who made man ﬁrst, and woman
only because man needed somebody to help him; who
set a trap for humanity, and baited it so that human
nature could not resist the temptation, and then cursed
all women because the ﬁrst one went into it. A
heavenly mother would never have cursed all her
daughters with pain on account of the trivial fault of
the ﬁrst; nor would she ever have made the penalty
for their misdoing unutterable woe forever. If we
are to have a God in the Constitution of the United
States, it must be a God in whom the sexes are equally
represented, or our Government will be as one-sided
as the Bible. It is altogether too much so now.
The fate of the Jews,who trusted in this Jehovah, should
forever prevent us from following their example.
The Lord, we are told, delivered Israel out of the
hand of the Egyptians, broke the yoke of their bond-
age, and became their guide to the land of promise.
So near was it, that a man could have walked there in
a couple of weeks; but, under the guidance of Jeho-
vah, it took them forty years, and only two men arrived
there who started from Egypt. So disgusted were
FOR oUn NATIONAL CONSTITUTION; 17
the Israelites with the conduct of their God,\that they
desired to return to Egypt, preferring the slavery of
Pharaoh to that of Jehovah. Nay, they even made a
golden calf, and worshipped it in preference, and said,
“ These be thy gods, 0 Israel! that brought thee up
out of the land of Egypt.” And there is no doubt that
the calf had as much to do with it as Jehovah. But
Jehovah was so angry, that be caused the Levites, who
were just as guilty as the rest, to murder three thou-
sand of the people in consequence (Exod. xxxii. 28).
When their descendants arrived at the promised
land, they were compelled to ﬁght for many years in
order to obtain possession of what Jehovah promised
to give them. Whenever they failed in battle, it was
because Jehovah was angry with them, of course; and,
whenever they succeeded, it was because he helped
them. But his help seems to have done them but lit-
tle good. This is the way that he served them, as he
himself has recorded for our instruction: “ The anger
of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he delivered
them into the hands of spoilers, and he sold them into
the hands of their enemies round about, so that they
could not any longer stand before their enemies.
Whithersoever they went out, the hand of the Lord
was against them for evil; and they were sadly dis-
tressed ” (Judges ii. 14, 15).
“ The Lord strengthened Eglon, king of Moab, against
Israel.” “ So the children of Israel served Eglon, king
of Moab, eighteen years ” (Judges iii. 12, 14).
Shall we, who have just liberated our slaves, put
this Jehovah into our Constitution, who thus kid-
napped a whole nation, and sold them for slaves?
“ The Lord sold them into the hand of J abin, king
31:
18 THE eon PROPOSED
of Canaan,” “ and twenty years he mightily oppressed
the children of Israel.” And so continues the dis—
graceful reeord. Out of three hundred and thirty
years, in the time of the Judges, when Jehovah was
their king, they were slaves, in the hands of their ene-
mies, for one hundred and eleven years, or more than
one- third of the time. We are told, it is true, that all
this happened because the children of Israel did evil
in the sight of Jehovah, and because they would not
obey his commands; but when we read (Judges xiii.
1) that “the Lord delivered them into the hands of
the Philistines forty years,” the explanation is in—
sufficient. In forty years, in a state of bondage, there
could have been very few alive of those whose sins
drove them into captivity; and what kind of a God can
that be who kept innocent millions in slavery for the
fault of a few? A sensible man would have modiﬁed
his commands in the ﬁrst place, or taken such measures
as would have led the people to see that it was to their
interest to obey them. As Jehovah did neither, he
proved his unﬁtness to rule over the Israelites, and
his inﬁnite unﬁtness to rule over us.
On one occasion Jehovah sold them into the hands
of the Philistines and the children of Ammon, who
sorely oppressed them, so that they cried unto him.
But he replied, “Ye have forsaken me, and served
other gods: wherefore I will deliver you no more”
(Judges x. 13). But even this was a lie ; for the very
next chapter tells us that the Lord delivered the chil-
dren of Ammon into the hands of Jephthah, and they
were subdued before the children of Israel. But the
poor wretches were only delivered for a few years, to be
sold again into the hands of their enemies by their
Godly owner.
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. 19
The Israelites did much better in the reigns of Saul,
David, and Solomon, than at any previous time; for
they had less to do with Jehovah, or rather with his
priests, and more to do with men who understood their
needs and attended to their supply. But their whole
history, from the exodus to the destruction of J crusa-
lem, is one long, bloody trail down the ages.
Make Jehovah God of these United States, and let
the people become obedient to his commands as they
would be explained by his priests, and our history
would be like theirs, and this paradise of liberty be-
come a Pandemonium of tyranny, a plague-spot on the
face of the earth.
A man may be known, it is said, by the company he
keeps ; and why not a god ? Judging Jehovah by this,
I cannot but regard him as utterly unﬁt for the olﬁce
to which his American friends are so desirous of ele-
vating him.
He is “ the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
Abraham is styled in the Bible “ the father of the faith-
ful, and the friend of God ; ” an Arab chief, rude and
hospitable, but crafty, superstitious, licentious, cow-
ardly, and cruel. Twice be induced his wife to lie for
him; and in both cases Jehovah cursed the men to whom
she lied, but never rebuked either her or Abraham.
He turned another wife with her child into the wil-
derness, where, according to the story, she would have
perished, had not an angel saved her ; and he receives
more credit from Jehovah for his willingness to mur~
dcr his son than for any other deed of his life.
Of Isaac we know but little; but, like his father
Abraham, he was cowardly, lying, and selﬁsh, putting
his wife’s chastity in hazard to save his life ; though, as
“-
20 THE eon PROPOSED
the event proved, there was no danger whatever. The
blessing that he gave his son in his old age shows the
character of the man. Part of it reads, “ Let people
serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over
thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to
thee.” That is essentially Jewish and J ehovistic.
Isaac had the same feeling for his pet son that Jehovah
had for his pet nation.
Of Jacob we know considerable: he was an especial
favorite of Jehovah: he loved him, if Paul is to be be-
lieved, even before he was born, and gave him, through
life, many signal instances of his favor. Yet he was a
liar, cheat, slaveholder, polygamist, and essentially
mean man. He lied to his father, most shamefully
lied, and in a way that showed him to have had large
practice. He cheated his brother and his uncle ; and
when his sons murdered the men of a whole city, and
took all the survivors captive, this is what the selﬁsh old
stock-raiser said: “ Ye have troubled me to make me
to stink among the inhabitants of the land; . . . .
and I shall be destroyed, I and my house.” No re-
buke for the horrible crime committed, no word of
pity for the widow and orphans; but, “ I shall be de-
stroyed, I and my house.” “Ye have troubled me.”
If they had not troubled him, and he had been in no
danger, it is evident that the deed would never have
troubled him.
Yet this is the man whom Jehovah blesses, and with
whom he converses ; to whom he makes splendid
promises, and with whom he wrestled a whole night,
and lost, Jacob obtaining a blessing, which appears to
have been the prize, though at the expense of a dis-
located thigh.
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. 21
Another of the favorites of Jehovah was Moses, a
man, apparently, of a good deal of mental ability for
the time in which he lived, and proud of his nation,
yet crafty, liarslnexactiug, and blood-thirsty. He mur—
dered an Egyptian, ﬂed to Midian, married the daughter
of a Midianite priest, and lived there for forty years.
One might suppose that he would have had some re-
spect for the people of this land of his adoption. Yet,
on the journey through the wilderness, he sent an
army against Midian, that slew every man, but saved
alive the widows, babies, and girls. As they returned
from the massacre with the weeping captives, Moses
meets them, and cries out, “Have ye saved all the
women alive ? Now, therefore, kill every male among
the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known
man by lying with him: ” the girls they were to keep
alive for themselves. What Camanche chief ever
committed a greater atrocity than this ? And yet he
was one of Jehovah’s favorites, talking with him for
hours together as familiarly as one man talks with
another.
After the death of Moses, Joshua became the leader
of the people. His public life was that of a marauder
and human butcher, who seems to have had no more
pity than a hungry tiger. For years, at the head of
a band of cut-throats, he went through Canaan among
a peaceable people, destroying their cities, killing men,
women, and children, and distributing their wealth and
their country among his followers. “ The Lord,” we
are informed, “ was with him wherever he went ; ” and
the result is told in the bloody record: “ They utterly
destroyed all that was in the city [Jericho], both man
and woman, young and old, and ex and sheep and
22 THE con PROPOSED
ass, with the edge of the sword.” And again : “Joshua
drew not his hand back until he had utterly destroyed
all the inhabitants of Ai.” So friendly was Jehovah
with this man, and so much sympathy did he have
with him, that on one occasion,when the people of
the country united to defend themselves against this
godly marauder, and were repulsed, and the daylight
failed, as Joshua pursued the ﬂying host, Jehovah
stayed the sun in the heaven for about a whole day
that the massacre might be complete, and rained down
great stones from heaven upon the poor wretches
who were ﬁghting to save their families and their
homes.
I question whether the whole world’s literature pre-
sents a bloodier page than that of the tenth chapter of
Joshua: -—
“ And that day Joshua took Makkedah, and smote
it with the edge of the sword ; and the king thereof he
utterly destroyed, them, and all the souls that were
therein.
“And he smote it [Libnah] with the edge of the
sword, and all the souls that were therein: he let none
remain in it.
“ The Lord delivered Lachish into the hand of
Israel, which took it on the second day, and smote it
with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were
therein.”
Then follows a list of other cities whose inhabitants
were butchered, from the helplessly old to babes at
the breast; and the document ends: “ So Joshua smote
all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of
the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he '
left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that
son OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. 23
breathed.” There is good reason to believe that some
who are clamorous for God in the Constitution desire
just such a God as this. In a fair intellectual strug-
gle, they acknowledge that they are no match for their
opponents; but with soldiers, muskets, cannon, and
this Israelitish Moloch, on their side, they would leave
none remaining, “ as the Lord God of Israel com-
manded.”
There is another man of God who must not be for~
gotten in this connection, --the Jewish Hercules, Sam-
son. An angel of Jehovah foretold his birth. When
he was a child, Jehovah blessed him. On the occasion
of his marriage, he wagered thirty changes of raiment
with thirty young men that they could not ﬁnd out
the meaning of a riddle which he propounded to them.
Having lost, the Spirit of Jehovah came upon him,
and he went down to Ashkelon and slew thirty men,
stripped them, and gave their garments to the young
men (Judges xiv. 19).
Can those men who desire Jehovah to rule over this
nation have read these passages? If they have, do
they believe them ? If they do, how dare they present
this gamblers’ companion, and instigator of murder,
for our acceptance and worship?
On another occasion “ the Spirit of the Lord came
mightily upon him.” We naturally look for some cor-
iesponding lordly deed; and we ﬁnd it. He found
a new‘ jaw-bone of an ass, and put forth his hand
and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith. We
should like to know what the nine hundred were doing
while he slew the ﬁrst hundred. A man a minute
gave him sixteen and a half hours of steady murder.
There stands the butcher; here lie his victims; and
24 THE eon PROPOSED
he exclaims, “Heaps upon heaps, with the jaw-bone of
an ass have I slain a thousand men.” But now he is
sore athirst: his long, unremitting labor has made him
faint, and he is ready to die: unless he can obtain
water, he must perish. What is he doing now ‘? kneel-
ing! praying I Can it be possible that such a murder-
ing wretch as that can pray ? Certainly : he has a God,
the very image of himself: it is Jehovah. Listen to his
prayer : “ Thou hast given this great deliverance into
the hand of thy servant; and now shall I die for thirst,
and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised? ” J eho~
vah heard the prayer of his faithful servant, and from
the bloody, battered jaw-bone ﬂowed water, that
quenched his thirst, and his spirit revived.
Then comes J ehovah’s great friend David, of whom
he said, “ I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man
after mine own heart, which shall fulﬁl all my will”
(Acts xiii. 22). He must have seen what a noble
man he was destined to be. After the death of David,
Jehovah says of him, “ My servant David, who kept
my commandments, and who followed me with all his
heart, to do that only which was right in mine eyes ”
(1 Kings xiv. 8). He was fearless, ﬁrm, generous at
times, pious, and poetic: but he was guilty of almost
every crime; and it is quite safe to say that no crimi-
nal as great as he lives in any civilized country to-day.
When he was not more than sixteen years of age, he
murdered two hundred men to please his prospective
father-in-law, and mutilated their persons in a way
that would disgrace a man-eating savage (1 Sam. xviii.
27).
He was captain of a gang of banditti ; and in return
for the hospitality of the king of Gath, to whom he
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. 25
ﬂed when Saul pursued him, killed the inhabitants of
a whole city with whom that king was friendly, leaving
not a soul alive, lest they should tell the tale of his
villany (1 Sam. xxvii. 9-12). And yet, after this,
he says, “The Lord rewarded me according to my
righteousness ; according to the cleanness of my hands
hath he recompensed me ” (2 Sam. xxii. 21).
This reminds me of an epitaph that I once saw in
Wales over the grave of a prize-ﬁghter and drunken
scoundrel : —
“A man so true, there are but few,
And diiﬁeult to ﬁnd;
A man so just, and true to trust,
There is not left behind.”
But this was when David was a young man: perhaps
he repented, and became a changed character, in his
riper years.
In the latter part of his life, Rabbah, a city of the
Ammonites, was taken ; and David “ brought forth the
people that were therein, and put them under harrows
of iron and under axes of iron, and made them pass
through the brick-kiln ; and thus did he unto the cities
of the children of Ammon” (2 Sam. xii. 31). To
ﬁnd the equal of such a cruel wretch as this, we need
to read the annals of the Fiji Islands.
But he certainly repented before he died. Not he:
he had nothing to repent of. Jehovah acknowledges
that he had done but one wrong deed in his whole
life (1 Kings xv. 5) ; and that he had repented of long
before. With his dying breath, the hoary sinner ad-
vised his son Solomon to kill the men whose lives he
had sworn to spare.
a
26 THE eon PROPOSED
Time fails me to tell of Rahab the harlot, who saved
her life by betraying into the hands of murderers her
own city; of J ephthah, who offered up his daughter a
burnt-offering to Jehovah; J ael, who murdered the
fugitive king, after receiving him hospitably into her
tent; of Ehud, who slew the king of Moab, and who
said, as he plunged the dagger into him, “I have a
message from God unto thee ;” of J ehu, who slew the
seventy innocent sons of Ahab, his whole kindred and
his priests, and of whom Jehovah said he did what was
in his heart; and a host of lesser liars, thieves, and
murderers, who are spoken of in terms of praise by
Jehovah.
There is scarcely a man or woman mentioned in the
Bible, with whom Jehovah was friendly, whose life
was not stained by crime that would, in this day, send
a person to the State-prison or to the gallows.
Even the prophets of Jehovah, who are generally
supposed to have been patterns of all excellency, were
far from being models of virtue. Samuel was a liar,
as we have seen : he both murdered, and urged others
to murder; and found fault with Saul because he saved
the lives of kings whom he had captured. Elijah calls
down ﬁre from heaven, and kills men with no more
concern than if they had been ﬂies (2 Kings i.).
Elisha curses children in the name of Jehovah; and
bears tear forty-two of them (2 Kings ii. 24). Jeremiah
never scruples to lie when the king advises him
(J er. xxxviii. 27); and some of his prayers are only
second to the witch-curses of David. Hosea buys an
adulteress to live with him (Hos. 1. 8), after having
illicit intercourse by command of Jehovah with a pros-
titute. Is this the kind of God, a companion and
ron oun NATIONAL CONSTITU rIoN. 27
abetter of liars, thieves, and murderers, whose name
is to be placed in the Constitution of our country, and
whose character is to be upheld as a model of all ex—
cellency ?
I object to J ehovahin our Constitution because he
is ﬁerce, jealous, cruel, vindictive, and even malignant.
We might as well be lost souls in the hands of a ter-
menting Devil as to be the subjects of such a God.
Moses describes Jehovah correctly: “ The Lord thy God
is a consuming ﬁre, even a jealous God” (Dent. iv. 24).
The writer of Hebrews has a similar opinion: “ God is a
consuming fire.” Watts, the Christian poet, draws his
portrait for us : ---
“ Adore and tremble; for our God
Is a consuming ﬁre:
His jealous eyes with wrath inﬂame,
And raise his vengeance higher.
Almighty vengeance; how it burns !
How bright his fury glows !
Vast magazines of plagues and storms
Lie treasured for his foes.”
Nor is this portrait overdrawn. Jehovah himself,
by Jeremiah, says, “ I myself will ﬁght against you
with an outstretched arm, even in anger, and in fury,
and in great wrath.” N o wonder the poor Jews suffered
under such circumstances. To Moses he says (Dent.
xxxii. 22), “ A ﬁre is kindled in mine anger, and shall
burn unto the lowest hell ; ” and again, to Jeremiah,
“Ye have kindled a ﬁre in mine anger, which shall burn
forever.” If we heard a man talk so to his children, we
should set him down as passionate, revengeful, unrea~
sonable, and utterly unﬁt to be a parent. It is much
less excusable in a God. Shall we make this eternally-
28 THE con PROPOSED
angry and inﬁnitely-furious Jehovah Lord of these
United States?
The deeds of Jehovah are in correspondence with
his words. He commences his career by a ﬁt of curs-
ing, of which woman obtains the largest portion. He
follows this by drowning the entire human race be-
cause their conduct did not meet his approbation, and
thus made himself king of murderers, who takes the
life of the world as a human murderer takes the life
of a man.
When he sent Moses to Pharaoh to tell him to let the
people go, he said, “ But I will harden his heart, that
he shall not let the people go ” (Exod. iv. 21): and then
we are told that “ the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart,
so that he would not let the children of Israel go out
of his land ” (Exod. xi. 10) ; and because Pharoah did
not let them go, when he had so hardened his heart
that he would not, he murdered the ﬁrst-born of his
entire nation.
There is a State-prison at Charlestown, where several
hundred prisoners are held. Pres. Grant sends a let-
ter to the superintendent, commanding him to let the
prisoners go; but, before the letter reaches him, he
surrounds the penitentiary with a guard of several
thousand soldiers, who have strictest orders to allow no
prisoner to go out. The superintendent receives the
letter of the President, but, owing to the guard, is un-
able to set a single prisoner at liberty. “ What! will
you not let the prisoners go?” writes the President:
“ then I will show you my power, and make you glad
to let them go.” He hangs the oldest son of the super-
intendent in front of the prison, in sight of the heart-
broken father and mother, as a punishment for his
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. 29
disobedience. Can anybody imagine the horror with
which such a crime as this would strike the heart of the
country? Multiply this by a million, and you have
some idea of the crime of Jehovah.
Shall we make this greatest of wrong-doers a God,
and our God ? Forbid it, says humanity ; and it must
be forbidden.
When Jehovah came down on Mt. Sinai, he said to
Moses, “Charge the people, lest they break through
unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish,” -
as moths die when they ﬂy into the ﬂame: so Jehovah
is a ﬂaming ﬁre, and the people must be kept out, or
they will perish. The precaution was a necessary
one. When the ark of Jehovah was sent from the
land of the Philistines back to J udaea, the cattle that
drew it went into a ﬁeld near Bethshemesh. The
Bethshemites were apparently inquisitive, and thought
this a good opportunity to see what was in an old box,
of which they had frequently heard; but, had it been
Pandora’s box, it could not have been more deadly.
Jehovah was very angry at their intrusion, and slew
of the men of Bethshemesh ﬁfty thousand and seventy !
This God can wink at lying, theft, murder, licentious-
ness, and praise the men who are guilty of these
crimes ; but, when inquisitive people look into one of
his chests, he strikes tens of thousands with death.
Shall we place the name of this almighty Bluebeard
in our national Constitution?
In the ﬁfteenth chapter of the First of Samuel, we
are informed that Jehovah told Samuel that he re-
membered what Amalek did to Israel when he came
up from Egypt: that was, remember, four hundred
years before. For this he tells him to command Saul
3*
30 THE eon PRorosEn
‘to smite Amalek, and utterly destroy man, woman,
infant, and suckling ; and, because Saul did not wholly
execute the horrible command, Jehovah was angry
with him, and repented that he had made him king
over Israel. .
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, nearly three
hundred years since, an immense Armada left Spain to
conquer England. Suppose Jehovah should command
Queen Victoria to kill every man, woman, infant, and
suckling in Spain because he remembered this, and
that she went with an army and did as she was com-
manded, but saved the king of Spain alive, and that
Jehovah was angry because she had not killed him
also: it would not be quite as bad as the conduct of
Jehovah to the Amalekites; for they were a hundred
years farther removed from the crime said to have
been committed by their fathers.
Was viler deed than this ever done in the name of
the child-devouring Moloch ?
In the time of David, there was a three-years’ fam-
ine in the land. David inquired of Jehovah what was
the cause ; and Jehovah answered, “It is for Saul and
his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites”
(2 Sam. xxi.). Here is a strange story. Saul slew
the Gibeonites; and for this God torments a whole
nation by famine in the days of David. What can be
done? Saul is dead, and probably damned. David
asks the Gibeonites how he can make an atonement
for the crime done by Saul, and they reply by asking
him to hang seven of Saul’s sons. David hangs two
sons of Saul, and ﬁve grandsons,——-the sons being his
brothers-in-law, and the grandsons his step-sons ; and
after that we are piously told that God was entreated
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION.
for the land. After the seven innocent men were
hung, Jehovah caused the famine to cease: his thirst
for blood was satisﬁed.
Bad as are the representations of Jehovah in the
Old Testament, those of the New are inﬁnitely worse.
Jesus, it is true, calls him “ our Father; ” and we are
told by John that “ God is love: ” but such a father!
and such love! Jesus, whom we are assured is the
representative of Jehovah, tells us that those who be
lieve not in him are to “ be damned ” (Mark xvi. 16) ;
and those who have not administered to him in the
person of his believers are to go “into everlasting
fire prepared for the Devil and his angels” (Matt.
xxv. 41). Again: he tells us that “ all who do iniquity
shall be cast into a furnace of ﬁre, where there shall
be wailing, and gnashing of teeth.” There the doomed
wretches, according to the apocalyptic seer, are to
“drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is
poured out Without mixture into the cup of his in-
dignation ; and they shall be tormented with ﬁre and
brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in
the presence of the Lamb, where the smoke of their
torment ascendeth for ever and ever ” (Rev. xiv. 10) ;
where, as good Dr. Watts so beautifully expresses
._, __
l“, “ Tempests of angry ﬁre shall roll
To blast the rebel worm,
And beat upon his naked soul
In one eternal storm.”
Jehovah made this hell of horror. Before him stand
earth’s millions, more numerous than her sand-grains.
He calls up the few, the chosen few, who were mean,
ignorant, or sycophantic enough to worship him, —- not
32 THE eon PROPOSED
one in a thousand: to the rest he turns, and, with a
voice that shakes the distant stars, he roars, “ Depart.
ye cursed! ” Down drop the myriads, —- men, women,
fathers, mothers, beautiful maidens, noble men; the
sweetest poets, the best of mechanics, the boldest
navigators; painters whose creations have gladdened
the eyes of many generations; musicians who have
made the air more melodious for all time ; true believ-
ers, miscalled inﬁdels, who have broken the shackles of
priestcraft and superstition from the limbs of millions,
-— down they go into that lake of ﬁre, to hear J ehovah’s
laugh re-echo through the caverns of the damned, and
his voice saying, “ I told you in my Word that I would
laugh at your calamity, and mock when your fear
came.” And to all eternity the jailer holds his cap-
tives, and applies his tortures; for “their worm dieth
not, and the ﬁre is not quenched.”
This revelation of Jehovah we owe to Jesus, who,
we are told, is Jehovah in another form; and he
frequently anticipates the time when he shall execute
his wrath upon the helpless victims that shall stand
before his blazing throne.
The fact is, that this Jehovah is the idol of a Syrian
mountain-tribe, that has been foisted upon the rest
of mankind under the penalty of eternal torments, and
modiﬁed from age to age, but his worst features re—
tained even to our own day. I arraign him in the
name of the millions who are held by him in spiritual
bondage; in the name of the freemen of America,
whose enslavement is sought by the incorporation of
this tyrant’s name into the charter of our liberties.
Away with you, hideous monster, in whom meet the
worst vices of the barbarous people who made you.
FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION.
and the ignorant and fearful who still believe in you !
You may do for God of the wolves that prowl over our
Western prairies and hunt down sick buffaloes, or the
hyenas that make night hideous in your Holy Land.
Your name may properly be inserted on the black'ﬂag
of every pirate vessel, between the death’s-head and
the cross-bones. Inﬁnite tyrant, king of miscreants,
woman-curser, soul-tormentor, destroyer of the world,
architect of hell, inventor of its tortures, and supplier
of its eternal ﬁres, go with your co-partner, the Devil!
You belong to the ignorance, brutality, and lust of an
age long past. Go to the hell to which you have so
long consigned the best representatives of our race!
and may your name and history alone remain for a
warning and a lesson to all generations!
I am told that Jehovah was the ‘highest ideal of the
Divine that the Israelites could form at the time. I
do not object to this : so Zeus was the highest ideal of
the Greek, and all Hellas united to do homage to
their god of gods. Shall we incorporate Jupiter with
our Constitution, or acknowledge that he is god because
an intelligent people once regarded him as such ‘3'
I have generally argued as if the Bible was a record
of facts, and its God a reality. Most of you know bet-
ter. The Bible is no more of an authority to you than
the Book of Mormon. To you its God does not exist,
and you may therefore think he is perfectly harmless.
You may remember that the Greeks besieged Troy
for weary years in vain, but at length accomplished
by stratagem what they could not do by force of arms.
They made a large wooden horse, and ﬁlled it with
armed men, and retreated to a distance as if they had
broken up the siege, and patiently waited for the re-
34 THE GOD FOR OUR NATIONAL CONSTITUTION.
sult. The Trojans, ﬁnding their enemies gone, came
out of the city, and soon spied the harmless wooden
horse. “Let us draw it into the city,” said they. It
was done; but, that night, out issued the armed men,
opened the gates to their companions, who had re-
turned, and Troy fell.
This God may seem to be a very harmless.fellow,
since he is only a thought god or a paper god; but,
admit himinto our Constitution, and out will come the
army of ﬁfty thousand priests that are hidden in his
bowels, the gates will be opened to our enemies, and
religious freedom be no more.
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ORTHODOXY FALSE,
BY
WILLIAM DENTON.
WELLESLEY, MASS. :
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY.
1882.

SPIRITUALISM IS TRUE.


ORTHODOXY FALSE,
SINCE
SPIRITUALISM IS TRUE.
BY
WILLIAM DENTON.
WELLESLEY, MASS. :
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY.
1882.
ORTHODOXY FALSE SINCE SPIRITUALISM
IS TRUE.
EVERYBODY has heard of the witty saying of Sydney
Smith, “ Orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy the
other man’s doxy.” But this is not what I mean by
orthodoxy, when I say orthodoxy is false since spirit‘
ualism is true. I mean the peculiar religious doctrines
taught by what are called the evangelical churches,—
those who take the ground that the Bible is the inspired
word of God; that man is totally depraved, and born
to do evil continually, in consequence of Adam’ s trans-
gression; who believe in the eternity of torment to
which he thus became liable, and from which he can
only be saved by belief in Jesus, the second person of
the Trinity, through whose merits the true believer
escapes the pit of woe, and passes through the pearly
gates into the New Jerusalem, there to sing the praises
of his Redeemer forever. The orthodox, therefore, in-
clude Catholics, Orthodox Quakers, Methodists, Bap-
,tists, Presbyterians, and a host of others.
We are in daily communication with the spirits of
the departed, some of whom never belonged to any
religious organization, never attended church, believed
not in Jesus as a Son of God, and the Saviour, never
professed to be born more than once, and were there
a
4 ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE.
fore orthodoxically wicked; yet we ﬁnd they are in no
hopeless prison,—
“Where sinners must with devils dwell,
In darkness, ﬁre, and chains.”
They are swimming in no shoreless brimstone lake,
with waves of damnation rolling over their guilty
souls; they are not crying for a drop of water to cool
their scorched tongues; they are not even advising
their friends who are still on earth to believe the
doctrines of orthodoxy, and obey its requirements, that
they may improve their condition when they pass to
the land of souls.
But some of our departed friends were members of
orthodox churches: they did believe in Jesus as their
Saviour; they were baptized in his name ; they believed
themselves mysteriously born again, and died in the
faith, with the full prospect of the heaven that had been
preached to them, as a reward of the righteous, from
their infancy. We now converse with them, and ﬁnd
them to be just such persons as we knew upon earth,
save that their orthodoxy has been terribly shattered.
They confess to us that the religious views that they
held here were altogether contrary to the facts as they
ﬁnd them there, and that orthodoxy is as wrong as its
name is right. They ﬁnd no golden city with gates
of pearl, no God seated upon a great white throne, no
Jesus at his right hand, no twelve subordinate thrones
upon which his ﬁshermen disciples sit, judging the
twelve tribes of Israel. There are no eye-full beasts
guarding the throne, and crying, “Holy, holy, holy!”
day and night; nor elders forever throwing down their
crowns, while the crowd look on in holy admiration.
ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 5
Thus we ﬁnd that hell and heaven alike depart; and
orthodoxy, dressed in crape, goes weeping after them.
No more can the orthodox poet picture, as ‘did Pol-
lok in his “Course of Time,” the sinners’ abode : -—
“ Wide was the place,
And deep as wide, and ruinous as deep.
Beneath, I saw a lake of burning ﬁre,
With tempest tossed perpetually; and still
The waves of ﬁery darkness [strange darkness that] ’gainst the
rocks
Of dark damnation broke, and music made
Of melancholy sort; and overhead,
And all around, wind warred with wind, storm howled
To storm, and lightning, forked lightning, crossed,
And thunder answered thunder, muttering sounds
Of sullen wrath. And, far as sight could pierce,
Or down descend in caves of hopeless depth,
Through all that dungeon of unfading ﬁre,
I saw most miserable beings walk;
Burning continually, yet unconsumed;
Forever wasting, yet enduring still;
Dying perpetually, yet never dead.
Some wandered lonely in the desert ﬂames:
And some in fell encounter ﬁercely met,
With curses loud, and blasphemies that made
The cheek of darkness pale ; and as they fought,
And cursed, and guashed their teeth, and wished to die,
Their hollow eyes did utter streams of woe.
And there were groans that ended not, and sight!
That always sighed, and tears that ever wept
And ever fell, but not in mercy’s sight.”
This was the hell of orthodoxy. It has cooled down
considerably since this was written. It was once as
ﬁery as the primeval earth, when white-hot billows
rolled along its breast; but it cools so much more
rapidly, that our children may expect to ﬁnd it a very
6 ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE.
comfortable place of abode. All will yet learn that
no worse hell exists than earth makes: the soul’s con‘
dition, wherever that soul may he, produces hell or
heaven, if we still make use of the names. If any
thing has been demonstrated by the unnumbered
communications received from the spirit-world within
the last twenty years, it is this.
Since the hell of orthodoxy is false, man was never
in danger of it, and he never needed any Jesus to
save him from what never had an existence. Jesus,
then, is no Saviour in the orthodox sense: no salvation
came by him. He was no more sent of God than
Patrick’s baby, born yesterday; for the necessity of his
being sent did not exist. He was no more the Son of
God than Socrates who preceded him, John Brown I
who came after him, or we who criticise him; no more
a Saviour than Socrates and Plate who shine like stars
in the pagan heavens, or Garrison and Phillips who
shine in ours to-day,- all of these men far in advance
of Jesus in many respects.
The whole plan of salvation indeed, as taught by
orthodoxy, is essentially unreasonable, mean, and un—
manly: it will not bear the light of rational investiga-
tion for a moment. The whole human race had
become, by the sin of the ﬁrst pair, exposed to eternal
torments, and were of themselves utterly unable to do
one good deed, or think one good thought. They had
no power to elevate themselves from the horrible pit
in which they are born, none to save themselves from
the terrible consequences of their crimes. In this lost
condition, God, in his great mercy, formed the plan to
save us through the merits of his well-beloved Son,
who knew no sin, but became a sin-offering for us,
oarsonoxr FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 7
that we might be made the righteousness of God in
him. He suffered in our room and stead. Our chase
tisement was laid upon him, God treating him as if he
had been guilty of all human crime; and we, by faith
in him, are treated by God as if we had lived his life
of perfect goodness. We have no virtue; but the
virtue of Jesus is attributed to us. We deserve
nothing but hell, -- even the best of us ; but, by some
godly hocus-pocus, we are to be conjured into heaven.
We are ﬁlthy, vile, abominable; but, as the old
Orthodox hymn says,—
“Jesus, thy blood and righteousness
My beauty are, my glorious dress:
Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head.”
What a contemptible piece of business is this!
Where is he, possessing the soul of a man, that would
wish to sneak into heaven under the cloak of Jesus
(and such a cloak I) when he knew in his own soul
that he had no right to be there? Instead of lifting
up his head with joy, a decent man would hang his
head, and blush for shame. Suppose that robe of
“ blood and righteousness ” should be torn from
his back, and he revealed in his hideous nakedness!
The heaven of orthodoxy must be one of poltroons,
and spiritless, fawning sycophants, who chant forever
the praises of Him who cheated the Prince of Darkness
of his due, and opened a palace of bliss for hell-
deserving sinners, who, for the privilege of entering,
must bow and sing glory to him who redeemed them
forever. Such a scheme could never have been devised
in America: it smacks of the despotism, the servility,
8 ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM I‘RUE.
and the meanness of the Old World of kings, my lords,
serene highnesses, and grand seigniors. The true, un‘
biassed soul intuitively scorns it. It says, “If I have
done deeds worthy of hell, then to hell I will go, and
bear its penalties like a man, asking no odds of the
torturing gods. Let me pass for what I am (cloaks
for hypocrites and cowards) : I desire no heaven that I
have not won, and I fear no hell that I do not
deserve.” The man who deserves heaven will have it.
He carries the key to its gate in his soul, and needs
no Jesus to indorse him. Give us justice, and what
more do we need in the universe ? All the sin of all
the men that ever lived never deserved the pain of an
orthodox hell for a single day; and any being that
could be unjust enough to make it should be the ﬁrst
to suffer in it.
Reason cannot but reject this whole “ scheme ” of
salvation. Finite man is guilty of an inﬁnite offence
against God. He incurs by this means a debt that in~
ﬁnity alone can pay. All earth’s treasures cast into
the balance weigh not the millionth of a feather; the
brightest jewels of heaven move not the balance one
jot: only the exchequer of a God can furnish the
means to pay the mighty debt we owe. What shall
be done ? If the debt is not paid, hell and its eternal
torments await every sinful soul. At length, Jehovah
plans the wondrous scheme : Jesus, one with the
Father, “ very God of very God,” as the Athanasian
Creed calls him, comes down to this abode of guilty
wretches. He is born of a woman,-— a pure and spot
less virgin, lives a perfect life, preaches the gospel of
the kingdom, works the most wonderful miracles, is
despised and rejected of men, spat upon, buffeted, and
ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 9
is cruciﬁed, the just for the unjust. He bore man’s
sins, suffered in his stead, washed out with the blood
of a God the damning spot of guilt in God’s book of
justice, paid the inﬁnite debt we owed ; and God can
now be just, and the justiﬁer of him that believeth in
Jesus.
What a medley !—- God is the creditor; yet God, in
the person of his Son, pays the debt. Man is the
debtor: the debtor is poor, and cannot pay one cent of
the inﬁnite amount he owes. God, in a voice of thun-
der, and with a look that strikes terror to the guilty
sinner’s heart, demands payment of the debt, and
holds his glittering sword ready to cut him down un-
less the sum is paid. Man, in an agony, looks up, ex-
pecting the blow to descend. But now God’s pity is
moved for the trembling wretch. “ You cannot pay,
I know,” says he ; “ but the debt must be paid to the
uttermost farthing. How else can my justice be satis-
ﬁed? Now I think of a plan ; ” and, taking a full purse
from his pocket, he hands it to the sinner, who‘returns
it to his creditor. God pockets it with a satisﬁed air.
The debt is paid; justice is satisﬁed; and the sinner
may now be justiﬁed. And this is the wonderful plan
of salvation that angels desire to see into. Blind
must that soul be that cannot see through -it! Man
was so wicked before Jesus came, that God could by
no means pardon him; but he kills God, and thus
crowns his wickedness, and God is graciously pleased,
when he pleads the merits of Jesus, to forgive him,
receives him into his house, and calls him his son!
Yet, now that the debt is paid, and full satisfaction
given, not one in ten receives the beneﬁt: the great
body of the human race must languish forever in
hell, eternal prisoners for debt.
10 on'rnonoxr FALSE, S_PIRITUALISM TRUE.
The God whom we are told declares that he will by
no means clear the guilty, and that every man shall
be rewarded according to his works, is, by this salva~
tion, represented, not only as clearing the guilty, but
predicating this clearance upon the sufferings of the
innocent, and rewarding them, not according to their
works, but their belief in the works of another.
The cruelty of God cannot be surpassed: he is, ac-
cording to this salvation, the veriest Shylock: “ I will
have the due and forfeit of my bond, though every
soul that I have made in deep damnation endless
sink.” At the same time, he has made them so beg-
garly poor, that they cannot pay. The sword of his
justice, red-hot, can only be cooled in the blood of his
innocent Son; and he is even yet to wreak his ven-
geance upon the great mass of mankind, who with good
sense refuse to accept such a useless, contradictory,
irrational, and unmanly system.
The God who made this plan must have less judg-
ment than an intelligent school-boy, less conscience
than a pettifogger, and less mercy than a Confederate
prison-keeper. Hear what Watts, the orthodox poet,
says of him,- .
“ Our God appeared consuming ﬁre ;
And Vengeance was his name.
Rich were the drops of Jesus’ blood
That calmed his frowning face,
That sprinkled o’er his burning throne,
And turned the wrath to grace.”
What a monster !
No wonder that men and women love Jesus, pray to
Jesus, and sing, --
“Jesus, lover of my soul,
Let me to thy bosom ﬂy.”
ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 11
God is furious as a chafed lion; Jesus, gentle as a turtle-
dove: God is the jailer; Jesus, the deliverer of those
that are bound: God is the heartless Jew, saying, “ I
stay here on my bond ; ” Jesus, the gentle Portia, sug-
gesting to him, “Mercy is twice blessed: it blesseth
him that gives, and him that takes.” Yet both are,
after all, the same individual. It would seem as if
such a story could only have been received on the
principle that it is right for God to do what would be
infamous in a man ; and that what in us would be utter
folly may be in him superlative wisdom. And, when
a man comes to that conclusion to-day, he will be
prepared to kiss the pope’s toe to-morrow. It needs
but the fearless exercise of reason, and such gods will
be speedily cast into the limbo where he the defunct
deities of Greece and Rome.
But, if Jesus is no Saviour, there is no forgiveness
of sin to those who trust in him or pray to him. Put
as much faith and trust in a rubber doll, and there is no
doubt it would be equally efﬁcacious in removing guilt,
and sending the rcpcnting sinner home rejoicing.
“ But I have felt it here,” replies the Christian, placing
his hand upon I his breast. Yes, I have no doubt:
that is just where I supposed you felt it. But the
Mohammedan feels it here; and who saves him? The
Catholic after confession, the Mormon, and the Bud-
dhist, feel it here; and who saves all these ? You ought
to know it in your brain. The judgment is of inﬁnite-
ly more importance than the feelings in such matters,
and, when properly cultivated and unbiassed, will lead
you into truth.
The believer in J csus is not saved from sin : he is
not even saved from the filthy habit of tobacco-chew-
12 ORTHODOXY FALSE, bPIRITUALISM TRUE.
ing, as any church-sexton will tell you; and, on com-
munion-days, you may see those who have been
cleansed in the blood of the Lamb take the quid out
of their months, that they may put the body of Jesus
in ; and he then suffers a worse fate than he did on
Calvary. The Christian believer is not saved from
ignorance, bigotry, sickness, poverty, or, indeed, any
evil ; and all professions of this character result either
from ignorance, or an intention to deceive. Salvation
by Jesus is a delusion; and the sooner we see it and
proclaim it, the better for mankind.
But if these orthodox doctrines are untrue, then
the Bible, on which they rest, is untrue. It teaches the
existence of an “ everlasting ﬁre prepared for the
devil and his angels,” —a “ lake that burns with ﬁre
and brimstone ; ” and, if the Bible~writers had been
acquainted with the article, it had doubtless burned
with petroleum also. The orthodox heaven is the
heaven of the Bible: its God-man is he who says,
“Before Abraham was, I am,” and, “ He that hath
seen me hath seen the Father.” It is the Bible that
represents Jesus as the Saviour; and by its texts, ham-
mered like nails, every Sunday, into rickety souls,
orthodoxy is still supported, and scares its victims from
the exercise of their reason, or cajoles them into the
support of its delusions.
Man does not go down to the grave at death to come
up no more, as the Bible declares; neither does he
sleep in the dust till awakened by a great trumpet-
blast, as the Bible also declares. There will be no
judgment-day, with a great king reviewing all nations,
divided into the two classes, righteous and wicked; for
there are no such persons, all people being partly good,
on'rnonoxv rALsE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 13
and partly bad. Our friends that departed are neither
dead nor asleep: they live and love, and come to us,
teaching us that the life of the future is but a continu-
ation of that of the present, and altogether different
from the gloomy and unnatural views of it given in the
Bible, which must cease, before long, to be regarded as
authority by a single thinking soul.
You tell me that the Bible is the text-book of our
churches; it is read in our schools, recognized in our
courts of justice, and reverenced even by our men of
science. Yes; and it was the text-book of all slave-
holders from New Jersey to Texas; it was reverenced
by Constantine, the bloody tyrant of the fourth cen—
tury, and is reverenced to-day by nearly every criminal
that our prisons hold. The less that is said about the
reverence that men of science have for it, the better.
The reverence that such men as Agassiz, Dana, Daw-
son, and others, have for it, is the fraternal greeting of
J oab, who speaks peaceably to Abner, but smites him
under the ﬁfth rib, so that he dies: a kiss is on their
lips, but a dagger in their hands.
We cannot do otherwise than discard the Bible as
authority; and, should it be retranslated and amended
a thousand times, it would still be the same. It
abounds with the grossest fables ; it tells the ﬁlthiest
and bloodiest stories; it contains bad grammar, bad
logic, innumerable contradictions, bad science, and,
what is worse, bad morality. It has been the bul-
wark of slavery, woman’s degradation, bigotry, and re-
ligious persecution, in every age, and blasts every soul
that submits with unquestioning reverence to its
teachings. Under the direction of orthodoxy, it has
made Jesus a highwayman, who clutches men by the
14 oRTHoUoxY FALsE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE.
throat, and demands, “Your soul’s life, or belief in
my doctrine.” And we have been so cowardly as to
allow him to parade our highways, and throttle our
citizens, almost without cxpostulation, because he lets
loose the hound of public opinion upon those who
refuse to yield to his outrageous demand.
Jesus must come to us as a philosopher does, and
present his reasons for the faith that he demands ; he
must place his doctrine before us as a merchant does,
his wares, and we must judge for ourselves whether
they are worthy of our acceptance. What should we
think of the merchant who demanded that we should
close our eyes before we purchased his goods? We
should naturally conclude that they would not bear
examination, and that he wished to cheat us. When
a-man says to us, “ He that believeth not what I teach
shall be damned,” he is attempting to close the eyes
of our reason ; and we need to be doubly cautious in
receiving what he presents. “ So much of your doc-
trine as appears to us to be reasonable, Jesus, we will
accept; and, if you are a sensible man, this is all you
can desire: if you are otherwise, we are not to be
troubled by you.”
The day of unqucstioning acceptance, of childish,
gaping belief, is forever over. We say to Moses,
“ Come with your old stories of God-planted gardens;
of God-created innocent people, who did not know
good or evil till they had partaken of a mysterious
and forbidden fruit; of wonderful walking and talking
snakes; of the ark that saved ten times as many as
could get into it: we will receive you as We do the
Arab'with his “ Nights’ Entertainments,” and Swift
with his stories of the Liliputians and Brobdingnagians
ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 15
One is as reasonable as the other. Men are as likely
to be forty feet high as to be nine hundred and sixty
nine years old. You are just as welcome as they.
Your tales can go with those of “ Sinbad the Sailor,”
the “ \Vonderful Lamp,” and the “Forty Thieves,”—
no worse thieves than the Israelites after they had been
forty years under your tuition. You saw God as
Aladdin saw the enchanted garden. You talked with
him as really as Aladdin with the geni, and received
the tables of stone from him just as truly as Sinbad
picked up the precious stones in the Valley of Dia-
monds. But you must not expect of us any more
than this. You cannot make us believe that you talked
with the Universal Soul ; that he engaged you to
make the fantastic fooleries for your tabernacle, and
sat upon a shittim-wood box, and chatted with you by
the hour,* and permitted impertinences from you that
a king would not permit from his prime-minister.
We tell you plainly that you state, what, in the nature
of things, must be false, and what, if any man should
declare to-day, his neighbors would consider him in
consequence deranged or an infamous liar.”
We will give the Bible a place with the Koran, the
Talmud,the Book of Mormon, the Vedas and Shasters,
Swedenborg’s works, and Davis’s Divine Revelations,—
no more from God than they, and no more to be taken
as authority than they.
But if the Bible of orthodoxy is false, so is the God
that it reveals,—— Jehovah, the great object of religious
worship in the churches all over this broad land. The
Jewish Jehovah is no less an idol than the Beelzebub
of the Philistine, or the Jove of the Roman. The one
* Exodus xxv. 10, 22.
16 oRTEonoxY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE.
is just as blessed as the other; the one is just as much
our Maker as the other. If the man who worships
Jupiter is an idolater, the man who worships Jehovah
is equally so. If the temples of Jupiter were the
fanes of an idolatrous people, then the steeple—crowned
churches of orthodoxy are the temples of idola-
trous worship; and the ministers who ofﬁciate in their
pulpits are but priests at the altar of the one great idol.
A prayer offered to Jupiter is just as good as a prayer
offered to Jehovah: “ O Jupiter! father of the gods,
and lord of lords ; then who created the heavens and
the earth, and man to dwell upon it: we beseech thee
to hear our prayer, and give heed to the voice of our
supplication. Thou wert the god of Remus and Rom-
ulus, the god of Caesar and Seneca, and thou art our
god,and we will worship thee. Thou wert with thy
people, the Romans, and subdued all nations upon
earth to their sway ; thou gavest them dominion from
sea to sea, and from Rome to the ends of the earth.
0 Jupiter! be with us as then wert with them ; subdue
our enemies before us; let thy spirit, and the spirit of
thy wife Juno, descend, and dwell in our hearts, and
abide with us forever. Hear us and help us. Give us
of thy light, thy wisdom, and thy power, that we may
serve thee with our whole souls while here, and be ﬁt
ted to enjoy the heaven of the gods hereafter.” Why
is not that as good as ninety-nine hundredths of the
prayers offered in our orthodox churches? It will as-
cend just as high, and be just as effectual in bringing
a blessing down. Jove is as nigh to them that call
upon him as Jehovah; and we are as much his off-
spring as we are the children of Him whom Paul
calls the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
ORI‘HODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 17
What has the Soul of the universe to do with that
being who cursed Adam and Eve, and Eve more than
Adam, for doing what, with the nature he had given
them, they could not help doing ‘2 — a being who curses
on account of them every child born into the world.
Is the Soul of the universe related to Him who walked
about in a garden, and, like children playing at hide-
and-seek, called out, “Adam, where art thou? To
Him who wrestled with a tricky Jewish stock-breeder
for a whole night, and only escaped from his hands by
putting his thigh out of joint ?
What have we to do with a being that turned water
into blood, made lice out of dust, ﬁlled the land of Egypt
with ﬂies and frogs, and at length murdered more
than a million people, because Pharaoh did what he
had predetermined that he should do, and so hardened
his heart that he could not avoid doing ? — a being
who gave a country already occupied to a nation who
had no right to a foot of it, and made every man in
that nation a murderer that they might conquer and
possess it ‘3
Was it the Soul of the universe that tempted Abra-
ham to slay his cherished son, and, when the infatuated
patriarch took up the knife to perform the dreadful
deed, sent his angel to stay the murderous hand, and
said, “ In blessing I will bless thee, and in multiply-
ing I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven,
and as the sand which is upon the seashore. . . . And
in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed
because thou hast obeyed my voice ” ?
What a pious old saint to be sure ! -— ready to commit
a murder because a voice commanded him. Human
nature, and the God within, should have led him to
2
l8 ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE.
reply, “ I won’t touch the lad for you nor the uni-
verse; and I despise you for asking me to do such an
infamous deed.” When men set up such a great
bloody idol as this for a God, it is our duty, as recipi—
ents of clearer light, to overthrow it, and deliver the
world from its curse.
Neither Elohim nor Jehovah created the earth and
the heavens in six days, nor in sixty millions. He did
not make man about six thousand years ago ; for man
has been here a hundred times as long. He did not
curse man with death; for death was in the world ages
before man made his appearance. In short, he never
did any thing, for he is not; and his worshippers are
as truly idolaters as those whose condition they deplore.
But I am asked, “ How is it that men of well-
developed minds and cultivated intellects have bowed
down to this God, and accepted the religion that in-
culeates his worship? \Vhy is it, that, among the
most intelligent people of this planet, Jesus is re-
garded as the Saviour, and Jehovah as the God and
Father, of all?”
The mass of the people ask only that a thing shall
be popular. If they ﬁnd a faith in existence in their
country when they arrive,— and where is the country
destitute of one ?- ninety-nine out of every hundred
draw it in as they do their mother’s milk. When
grown to the age of understanding, how diﬁ’icult to
deliver ourselves from the inﬂuence of early training,
and still more, perhaps, to resist the psychologic inﬂu-
ence of the masses surrounding us! As the magnet-
ism of the earth causes every poised needle to point to
the north; so the inﬂuence of a people’s faith bears on
every individual, and tends to bring each to the same
ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 19
opinion. But few are able to withstand its power.
Of a thousand born in Arabia, there is not, probably,
more than one who thinks of questioning the popular
faith,—-“ There is one God, and Mohammed is his
prophet.” Tell them that Mohammed was like other
men, except that he was more shrewd and more
fanatical, and they exelaim at once, “You inﬁdel
dog!” The more intelligent say, “If you have no
respect for our prophet, have some for these indispu-
table facts: Mohammedans number to-day one hun_
dred and thirty millions. Established six hundred
years after Christianity, our religion has supplanted it
in its original home. It has overspread, not only
Arabia, but Persia, Turkey, Palestine, a large portion
of South-eastern Asia, and half of Africa. When all
Christian countries were buried in the ignorance of the
dark ages, then science ﬂourished only where our
religion fostered it. Can you not see the hand of God
in such a career? and is it not evident that Moham-
med was indeed what he proclaimed,— the prophet of
God?” We cannot see this, of course. Neither can
I see the hand of God in the career of Jesus, nor in
Christianity since his death. When Christianity was
ﬁrst taught, Jesus was expected to be seen “coming
in the clouds” every day, to reward those who believed
in him, and punish all who rejected his gospel. What
more natural than for the multitude, who desire to be
on what seems the safe side, to accept this simple faith
in Jesus, which promises such unspeakable blessings
here and hereafter, and deliverance from the terrible
woes denounced against the unbeliever? When the
multitude have accepted a certain religion, 110w few,
even of men of science, have backbone enough to
20 ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE.
reject it, when at heart they despise the creed that
cramps them! Humboldt is content privately to sneer
at orthodoxy, but never publicly attacks it. Agassiz
states what falsiﬁes the Mosaic story, and evidently
disbelieves it, and yet so writes as to lead people to
think that he credits its fables. Miiller, the linguist,
shows conclusively, that he has outgrown all faith in
the miraculous inspiration of the Bible; but his posi-
tion keeps him from boldly declaring the fact. It is
not bearing false witness to say, that at least three-
fourths of the scientiﬁc professors in England and
America have no faith in Christianity as a miraculous
religion; but their position is such, that very few dare
to be true to their inward convictions.
But I am asked, “ How could Jesus have attained
the lofty position that he at present occupies, how
could he have commanded the veneration of the
wisest and the best for nearly two thousand years, if
he was not indeed the Son of God, and the Saviour
of mankind?”
The time in which he was born was one of igno-
rance and superstition; faith in miracles was almost
universal; and but little knowledge existed of the
operations of natural law. The whole Jewish nation
was looking for the Messiah ; and this was just the soil
in which he might be expected to spring up. How
many who believe in Jesus in America would accept
as a Son of God, and a miraculous Saviour, the man
who could present no better credentials than Jesus
did?--his mother denying that he was his reputed
father’s son, the only evidence to show that he was
not illegitimate being such as dreams furnish. He
lives for thirty years, but does scarcely any thing
ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 21
worthy of record: he picks out for his disciples
twelve illiterate and superstitious ﬁshermen, who ap
pear, from the record, to have been ready to believe
any thing that their master told them. When the
sceptical very properly ask him for a sign, he abuses
them by calling them an evil and adulterous genera-
tion. Should a man perform all the miracles that
Jesus is said to have performed, how many believers
would he have now ?- not one-half of those who saw
him do them. Circumstances favored the-claim of
Jesus, just as they favored Mohammed, and as they
favored Gautama. Jesus was not the ﬁrst, by a hun-
dred, who had called himself the Christ, or was so
considered by others ; and, after his time, there were
“ Christs many.” How could Gautama be the centre
of attraction to thousands of millions (four hundred
millions now living), if he was not what the Buddhists
believe him to have been,-—a god, and the savior of
mankind ? How came such gods as Zeus, Jove, Her
cules, Bacchus, and Esculapius, to be worshipped by
the master-intellects of Greece and Rome for ages ? —
beings that never existed at all, yet commanded the
heart’s adoration of thousands of millions of the wisest
and best of their time. Do you, Protestant, suppose
that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was any more than a
dark-eyed, chatty Jewish maiden, who, going barefoot
to the well at Nazareth, captivated the mechanic,
Joseph, as he worked on the roof of a neighboring
house? Yet read the Catholic prayer-book, and see
the adoration paid to their queen of heaven, the
mother of God, whom millions beg to intercede for
them.
When a man asks me to accept Christianity because
22 ORTHODOXY rALsE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE.
of its widespread power and inﬂuence, I say to him,
Why not turn Buddhist? Christianity numbers two
hundred millions of believers; but Buddhism has a list
of four hundred millions. ' If the fact contained in the
ﬁrst ﬁgures makes Christianity the true religion, and
Jesus the Son of God, then Buddhism must be doubly
true, and Gautama twice as much God’s son.
Jesus was a man who taught many beautiful and
excellent lessons; a man who sympathized with the
poor, and denounced their tyrants, but at the same time
taught many lessons that were neither true nor beau-
tiful; a man who displayed overweening self-esteem,
and who was much more desirous that men should be-
lieve in him than that they should be true to them-
selves. He is no more our master than George Fox,
John Wesley, or Joseph Smith. We do not therefore
exhort men to “ stand up for Jesus,” but to stand up
for humanity that needs it. Man has been trampled
upon, his reason denounced, his selfhood cast down,
that an idol might be elevated upon it. Jesus is the
Christian Juggernaut. In India, the devotees throw
their bodies before the idol: in Christian countries,
they prostrate their souls before theirs ; and Jesus in
his triumphal car, drawn by his blinded followers,
encouraged by his priests, rides ever over them. Let
a man offer his reasonable protest against this idolatry,
and he is at once denounced as the vilest criminal ; the
orthodox bloodhounds are put upon his track, and their
bayings tell how gladly they would hunt the heretic to
death if they only had the power, as they had before
intelligence muzzled them.
All these false, then is orthodoxy false. These
churches of the living God, so called, are shams every
ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 23
one ; and the ceremonies performed in them the veriest
child’s play. What has the Soul of the universe to
do with their pompous prayers, their silly rituals, their
sprinklings, dippings, and‘ port-wine sippings, called
holy sacraments? what to do with their begging, be~
seeching, sometimes howling prayer-meetings? their
mesmeric revivals, in which the hallucination of one
is communicated to the many, and a foolish consistency
leads men to cling to it for life ‘.P God has no more to
do with all this than he has with the shoe-shops of
Massachusetts, or the printing-offices; and it would
be just as proper to call a ball-club the club of God as
a hundred ignorant orthodox believers God’s church.
It is high time that the pretensions of the high priests
of a no better than pagan mythology were scouted, and
a true estimate made of their sanctity, knowledge, and
power. Professing to know God, they are the most
ignorant of him, for they do not study Nature by sci-
encc, which alone reveals him ; pretending to teach men
the way to heaven, they close the door against the very
angels who come to reveal it.
Spiritualism is to aid greatly in delivering us from
orthodox tyranny and idolatrous man-worship, leading
men to the God and Saviour within that each possesses,
to the salvation that comes by the exercise of our own
powers, and to the heaven for all, of which no Peter
keeps the key, and to which the name of Jesus is no
“ Open, sesame.” Think of the time and energy wasted
in praising Jesus, praying to Jesus, preaching Jesus,
and the labor and money squandered in spreading
abroad fantastic statements concerning this man, over
the world, instead of giving people a knowledge of
themselves and the laws of the universc,—-knowledgc
that concerns us every day.
24 ORTHODOXY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE.
But orthodoxy has seen its greatest triumphs ; and its
day of prosperity is over. Its feeble stars are paling
in the light of the new morn that greets humanity.
It is already ashamed of its hell, -- a phantom conjured
up in the days of ignorance by some undeveloped soul,
who, in deep malignity, wished that those who had of—
fended him here might be inﬁnitely tortured hereafter.
The brimstone and the smoke are indeed gone; the
Devil, the dusky jailer of the pit, is dead. And what
becomes of orthodoxy then? Hell has been the ﬁre
whose heat created nine-tenths of the steam that ran
the machinery. Take the ﬁre of hell out of a revival,
and then try to keep it up ! You might as well think
of running a locomotive by crowding the ﬁre-box
with ice-blocks. No ﬁre, no steam ; no steam, no mo-
tion ; the orthodox train at a dead stand-still. How
many missionaries would wander into foreign lands to
preach the story of the cross, if Jesus does not save his
believers from hell ? How long would Christian
churches be crowded to listen to dry-as-dust sermons,
and nod over mile-long prayers, if the hearers did not
imagine, that, in some way, this helps them “to escape
the jaws of hell ” ?
Orthodoxy is doomed, and is powerless as its God to
avert its doom. And why should we mourn? It scat-
ters its hymn-books, pious tracts, and Bibles, but stands
at the door of our public library, and refuses on its
market-day (Sunday) to open, and admit the hungry
souls; for that might diminish the attendance at its
temples. It would thus stand at the door of heaven,
if it had the power, and admit none but the bigots
who can pronounce its Shibboleth. It would “ circum-
navigate the globe to disturb the creed of a single beg-
onrnonoxv FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE. 25
gar ; ” but it would not stir a step to break the chains
of four million slaves, and cursed, in the name of J e-
hovah, all who did : but, when inﬁdel abolitionists made
antislavery popular, it joined in the cry for freedom,
and new demands that all the credit of the slave’s free-
dom shall be given to the “ church of the Lord Jesus
Christ.” It imprisoned Galileo ; it murdered Bruno;
it slandered and belied Thomas Paine, and still repeats
its calumnies and lies; it burned Michael Servetus;
it hung the Quakers, who were less orthodox than its
creed; it imprisoned Abner Kneeland, and compels our
children to listen daily to the reading of its Jewish
story-book, that it claims contains the will of “ God
Most High.” If its prayers had been of any avail, it
would have murdered Theodore Parker : it did its best,
and now sits, and gnashes its teeth at those it is no
longer able to tear. It dooms Dickens to damnation,
because his heart was too large, and his intellect too
clear, to accept its dogmas, and by his presence there
makes its hell so much more attractive than its heaven.
He had his faults, who is without them? but none
one-half as bad as the bigotry of the reverend Maw
worms that anathematize him. “He was no Chris‘
tian,” say the bigots. Let us hope that he was not.
He was something very much superior,-- a man of sur~
passing genius and world-wide humanity, whose name
will be blessed when orthodoxy will be a by-word
among all people.
What, then, have we to do with orthodoxy? Shall we
give our money to raise its proud steeples? shall we
send our children to its Sunday schools to have fetters
fastened upon their limbs that it will take years to
break? shall we pay for pews in its heathen temples,
26 oRTHoDoxY FALSE, SPIRITUALISM TRUE.
and reverence its false gods? If all who are reform-
ers at heart would assert their individuality, we should
soon see the good time that we hope for. Don’t go
ducking and bowing, cringing and crawling, through
the world; believing in Nature, and sacriﬁcing to J c-
hovah; believing in individuality, and yet paying
priests, and building their “ joss—houses ! ” We can
do inﬁnitely better. ' '1
Our God is N ature—father, mother. As near to thy
child, hard-handed mechanic, and thy child as dear to
God, as the infant Jesus was when he lay on the breast
of Mary. On his broad bosom we shall be borne be-
yond death to the glorious world of the hereafter,—
life there a continuance of life here, a spiritual blos-
soming of what this life has been but the bud.
We can make no compromise with orthodoxy hence-
forth and forever. Ours is a new religion, a new God,
a new heaven, and a gospel which is destined to make
a new earth. We do not blame the people who have
accepted the old (they probably did the best they
could) ; but these old skeletons shall not reach their
bony hands out of their mouldy sepulchres, and drag
us in to chatter with them. Ours the living present ;
ours the sunshine and the song of birds, the sound of
purling brooks, the joy of the living world ripening in
God’s smile, —- the vestibule of heaven.
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I
THE POGASSET TRAGEDY
THE
% Eiscnursr.
BY
WILLIAM DENTON.
W’ELLESLEY, MASS. :
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY. .

LEGITIMATE FRUIT OF CHRISTIANITY.


1882.
THE POCASSET TRAGEDY
LEGITIMATE FRUIT OF CHRISTIANITY.
g Eiscnuraz.
=1
WILLIAM DENTON.
VVELLESLEY, MASS. :
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY.
1882.
Com-se- *, 1879,
8! WILLIAM DENTOI.
F .
r
- M151
THE PO CASSET TRAGEDY
THE LEGITIMATE FRUIT OF CHRISTIA 1rITY.

YOU ha ve all heard the story, for it shook the peo-
ple of this land as the wind shakes the aspen-leaves;
yet we need to hear it again and again. It is a text
from which sermons need to be preached wherever
Christian superstition reigns; and New England, I
am sorry to say, is largely under its sway.
On the ﬁrst day of last May, in the hamlet of
Pocasset, in the town of Sandwich, Charles F. Free-
man, a conscientious Christian, a good husband, and
a kind father, by direct command of God, as he said,
deliberately killed his daughter, nearly four years of
age, as she lay sleeping in bed; the mother of the
child consenting to the horrible deed. He held the
knife suspended for some time, expecting that God
would stay his hand; but, as he did not, the knife
descended, and the deed was done. On the after-
noon of the next day, he called a number of his Chris-
tian brethren and neighbors together, and told them
what he had done, showing them the body of his
child. ‘ On being asked how he felt the next morn-
ing after the murder, he replied, “ Glorious! at peace
with God and all mankind.”
3
4 THE POCASSET TRAGEDY.
WVhen Mrs. Freeman was asked by the jailer, when
she was connnitted, whom she and her husband had
murdered, she said, “ Our child. But we did not call
it ‘ murderz’ we called it a ‘ sacriﬁce.’ ” —- “ Did you
know that your husband would kill the child?” her
questioner said. “I knew he would if God did not
stay his hand; but I believed he would.”
\Ve hear of murders frequently; for the whole
world is raked for its crimes every day, and the
papers present us with the murders for our news-
breakfast. But they are murders of anger, of jeal—
ousy, or for money or lust. But this was a religious
murder,—a murder committed by a well-meaning
man, uninﬂuenced by hate or lust, and in obedience
to the dictates of his conscience. It was a religious
murder; and it is this that renders it so worthy of
our consideration. It was the direct fruit of the
man’s Christian creed; and only the common sense
and the natural morality that we possess as human
beings save us from similar deeds of horror in every
town of the land.
Freeman’s belief, that the Bible is the infallible
word of God, was the ﬁrst step toward the commis-
sion of his crime. No man in our country today
could possibly commit such a deed, unless he believed
in the divinity of the Bible. He read the story of
Abraham and Isaac, that God commanded the old
man to murder his son, whom he dearly loved, by
making him a burnt-offering; and that, because he
took the knife to slay his son, God blessed him above
all men then living, and made him also a blessing to
unborn millions. In the New Testament he found
both the faith of Abraham and his works extrava-
THE POCASSET TRAGEDY. 5
gantly praised, and this murderous deed singled
out for special commendation. There he is called
“faithful Abraham ” and the “ friend of God.” He
read also that God spared not his own Son, but deliv-
-ered him up to be killed; and he believed these
things, as people are taught to believe them in every
Christian church in the land. Atrocious murder thus
became associated in his mind with God, faith, duty,
happiness, and glory. ‘Why should not God speak to
him as he did to Abraham? Why not command him
to kill his darling girl whom he loved, as he com-
manded Abraham to kill the darling boy that he
loved? Might not God send an angel to stay his
hand, and thus show that he is still a miracle-working
God? or, if not, could he not, would he not, raise his
child from the dead, even as he raised his own Son
from the tomb? Freeman, it is probable, reasoned
in this way; and with a faith in the Bible and its
God, ﬁrm and unwavering, it is not surprising that
he should. The murder of his child was the result;
and the reason why more persons do not perform
similar deeds is, they have less faith and more com-
mon sense.
F reeman’s belief in the miraculous was the second
step toward his crime. “How could a man believe
that God would work a miracle? The day of mira-
cles is past,” says a Christian believer. l/Vho told
thee that the day of miracles is past? Is Jehovah
dead, who blew a canyon through the heart of the
Red Sea, and took the Israelites over on dry land, a
wall of water on each side; who made the sound
of rams’. horns more powerful than dynamite, and
blew down a eity’s walls, that his beloved children
6 THE POOASSET TRAGEDY.
might murder the peaceful inhabitants; who put
more force in the hair of Samson than there is in a
ten-horse-power engine; who muzzled the hungry
lions, that they might not devour the praying
prophet; who provided a comfortable habitation
.in the belly of a ﬁsh for the runaway Jonah, where
he lived for three days; who raised the widow’s
son, and burst the barriers of the tomb for the cruci-
ﬁed One? N 0 Christian can reject this Jehovah and
his mighty deeds: he is the God of Beecher and
Talmage, of Moody and Comstock; and he is the God
of Freeman, as he was the God of Abraham and the
Canaanites who preceded him. When did he cease
,to interfere in human affairs? Do not all Christians
believe that he answers their prayers, and works
daily miracles for their benefit? Every Christian
prayer asks for the performance of a miracle, or it is
a mockery. Listen to the prayers offered every Sun-
day in our Christian churches: “ O Lord! bless the
poor and the needy; open thy storehouse, and supply
them from thy abundant fulness. Bless the sick and
the afﬂicted ; comfort those that mourn; lift up the
down-trodden; stem the current of inﬁdelity that is
ﬂowing through the land; save the intemperat/e, and
revive thy work.” For such prayers to be answered,
miracles must be worked; and the'resurrection of a
child to a miracle-worker can be no more difﬁcult
than. the healing of the sick or the salvation of the
drunkard. Every Christian minister sows the seed
daily, which in Freeman grew, and bore deadly fruit.
But Freeman not only believed in the Bible and
in miracles: he also believed, that, when God com-
mands a crime to be committed, it is right, or he
THE POCASSET TRAGEDY. 7
never would have murdered his child. If a man had
told him to stab his child, he would have regarded
him as a monster of wickedness; but he never seems
to have thought that it would be just as wrong for
God to command him to do wrong as for man. If
he had believed that God told him to commit adul-
tery, or to steal or get drunk, it is evident that he
would have done any of these deeds with a perfectly
clear conscience.
It is easy to see where he learned this “devil’s
doctrine.” The Bible-writers generally held the idea
that God could do no wrong, or that whatever he
did was right because he did it. For one man to
drown another is a crime: for God to drown a world
——men, Women, and innocent babes—by the million
is perfectly right. “Thou shalt not kill,” is the
command given to the people, and he who violates
it is to be put to death: but the Israelites, by the
command of Jehovah, make a business of man-killing
and baby-butchering; and they are still his peculiar
people, and their bloodiest crimes are pronounced
praiseworthy deeds. “Thou shalt not commit adul~
tery,” reads the command, and there is no people far
enough advanced to have written law that does not
regard adultery as a crime: but the Lord tells Hosea
to commit fornication and practise adultery, and,
like Freeman, he never questions the propriety or
the right of what God commands ; he hires a prosti-
tute and bribes an adulteress to live with him, and
then writes a book, and tells the whole world what
he has done, as Freeman called in his neighbors to
tell them of the deed he had committed. Strange to
say, instead of the disgust which Hosea’s deed would
8 THE PooAssET TRAGEDY.
naturally excite in an unpolluted soul, here, in intel-
ligent America, ministers read this record of obscen-
ity and infatuation, and call it the word of. God; and
the man who refuses to bow to this indecent idol is
denounced as an inﬁdel.
If wrong is right when God does it, or ‘commands
it to be done; if crime is virtue when he practises it,
-—a devil might be as good a god as any: all that he
needs is Omnipotent power. And this is just what
the doctrine has led men to believe. It has put a
monster as heartless as a millstone on the throne of
the universe. He hears the wail of billions of damned
souls, as they rise from the infernal pit, like the
roar of a tempest; and he laughs at their calamity,
as he listens complacently to the adulations of the
saints who have been bathed in the blood of his Son.
That the people have not become demons by the
preaching of such a doctrine is because humanity is
vastly superior to orthodox Christianity, based as it
is on the brutality of the past. \Vhen it overpowers
humanity, as it did in the case of Freeman, it shocks
even Christians to see the fruit of the tree their
fathers planted, and that they have watered and are
still assiduously cultivating.
There was still another reason for Freeman’s crime:
Christianity, in which he believed, and Judaism,
its parent, are bloody religions, and familiarize men
with such sacriﬁces as ‘that which Freeman supposed
God demanded at his-hands. They present as an
object of worship a god who delights in blood. The
ﬁrst acceptable sacriﬁce that Jehovah received was
the blood of innocent lambs. He had no respect to
‘Jain and his offering, which consisted of. fruits of
THE POCASSET TRAGEDY. 9
the ground; but to Abel and his bloody offering,
“ﬁrstlings of his flock,” he had respect. His tem-
ple was a slaughter-house; his priests were butchers;
his altar was daily blood-besprinkled; and almost
every worshipper came with an offering of blood
to propitiate this brutal divinity. There is perhaps
no nation in existence that has a bloodier code than
the old Jehovah law of the Jews. More than forty
transgressions are to be punished with death. Men
were to be “ cutoff” for offences of the most trivial
character, and were treated as if they were of no
more value than cabbages. He demanded as an
atonement for the sins of the human race the blood
of his only Son; nor will he save men to-day, unless
they plead that blood, and rely upon it for salvation.
His very dress, according to the revelator (Rev.
xix. 13), is a vesture dipped in blood. His promise
to the righteous is, that he shall “ wash his feet in
the blood of the WlCliGt ” (Ps. lviii. 10). What
wonder that the religions established for the wor-
ship of such a blood-loving monster should be bloody
religions, and the believers in them guilty of bloody
deeds?
The Bible is a book of blood. As Mr. Pentecost,
an Orthodox Boston revivalist, says, “ If you should
take a little camel’s-hair pencil, as I have done, dip
it into a bottle of carmine ink, and pass it lightly
over those passages of Scripture from Genesis to
Revelation that make reference to blood in connec-
tion with all that refers to salvation, forgiveness,
redemption, sanctiﬁcation, glory, and every thing of
that kind, you would be astonished to see how red
your Bible would look.” And he adds, “ If you
10 THE POCASSET TRAGEDY.
should cut out every thing associated with blood,
there would be no salvation left at all.” And the
poor, simple soul never seems to have thought that
he could give no stronger testimony against the
Bible than this, no better evidence that ‘it was
Written by men largely imbued with the barbarous
spirit of a cruel age, and that it is utterly unsuited
to the more cultivated and moral time in which we
live. "_
Mr. Moody, too, another orthodox evangelist, in
his sermon on “ The Blood,” says, “ If you read your
Bibles carefully, you will see the scarlet thread run-
ning through every page of them. The blood com-
mences to ﬂow in Genesis, and runs on to Revelation.
That is what God’s book is written for. Take out
the scarlet thread, and it would not be worth carry-
ing home.” According to Mr. Moody, then, the
Bible is a channel for a stream of blood to ﬂow
through: it was made for that very purpose, and
without the blood it would be absolutely Worthless.
Can any man state its utter worthlessness in stronger
language than this?
‘We can imagine we hear an ancient Canaanite
boasting, as they doubtless did, “ ()ur religion is the
most bloody of all religions: that is what makes it
superior to them. Our god, Moloch, has more chil-
dren sacriﬁced to his honor than any other god.
The cries of one burning baby no sooner cease, than
those of another begin. Let us glorify the name of
Molochl for he is the king of gods.” Such a boast
would have been as reasonable then as Mr. Moody’s
is now.
W110 are the people that delight in blood? Sav-
\
THE POOASSET TRAGEDY. 11
ages like those of F eejee, who boast of the number of
human bodies that they have eaten; barbarians like
the Ashantees, who offer sacriﬁces of human victims
to their gods every three weeks. “The think most
about blood, talk most about blood, and, if they could
write, would write most about blood? The truthful
answer is, savages and barbarians. Listen to the con-
versation of the lowest classes of people, and you hear
“blood,” “bloody,” every few sentences. The scar-
let words appear with a profusion that should delight
the heart of a Moody or a Pentecost. NVhat people
of Europe take the greatest pleasure in deeds of
blood‘? The Spaniards, and they are least enlight-
ened of all Europeans. The most intelligent Chris-
tian sects—such as the Unitarians and Universal-
ists—say the least about blood: the most ignorant
say the most. The most ignorant ministers, and
those with large animal propensities, are the men who
preach sermons on “The Blood,” and assure us, as
Mr. Moody does,1 that “any religion which makes
light of the blood is of the Devil,” and, “if any man
preaches against the blood, he is doing the Devil’s
work.” “Devil”? Can mortal conjure up a worse
devil than this blood-besmeared God of thine, whose
wrath could only be assuaged by the death of his in-
nocent Son, and who will torture eternally, as then
sayest, all who are not washed in his blood? Any
man doing what then callest the Devil’s work might
be proud of his employer and his business when he
compares himself with those who are trying to lead
men to worship this soul-tormentor and monster of
iniquity
i Moody's Sermon on The Blood.‘
12 THE POCASSET TRAGEDY.
Judaism began with a bloody and indecent rite,
that of circumcision; and it no wonder, when
Moses insisted upon circumeising his son,-—since
God “sought to kill him ” because he was uncircum-
cised, ——that his common-sense wife, Zipper-ah, called
him “a bloody husband.” This disgusting practice
in the 17th chapter of Genesis is called “God’s
covenant,” and every man-child that has not been
circumcised is to be “cut off: ” so that every male
Jew was certain to be mutilated or murdered.
The ﬁrst thing done by Moses at the establishment
of Judaism at the foot of Mount Sinai was to
sprinkle the people with bullocks’ blood (Exod.
XXlV.). Fitting inauguration of this sanguinary reli-
gion! The Jewish priests, professcdly by the com--
niand of God, were all bedaubed and sprinkled with
blood when they were consecrated. Thus reads
Exod. XXlX. 20, 21: “ Then shalt thou kill the ram,
and take the blood and put it upon the tip of the
right ear of Aaron, and upon the tip of the right- ear
of his sons, and upon the thumb of their right hand,
and upon the great toe of their right foot, and sprin-
kle the blood upon the altar round about; and thou
shalt take of the blood that is upon the altar and of
the anointing oil, and sprinkle it upon Aaron and
upon his garments, and upon his sons and upon the
garments of his sons with him.” This was not a
preparation for the circus or the amphitheatre, as we
might suppose, but for the tabernacle and the worship
of the blood-loving Jehovah.
When they were consecrated, their principal busi-
ness seems to have been to satisfy the thirst of J cho-
vah for blood. Every day they were to kill a bul-
THE POCASSET TRAGEDY. 13
lock and two lambs, beside the individual offerings
that were presented, the blood of the victims being
sprinkled upon the altar. On the sabbath a double
offering was made, an extra quantity of blood being
needed for a holy day. At the new moon, at the
three great festivals, the great day of atonement,
and the feast of trumpets, generally two bullocks, a
ram, and seven lambs were sacriﬁced. YVhen a sin-
offering was made, the blood was sprinkled seven
times before the veil of the sanctuary, some put on
the horns of the altar of incense, and'the rest poured
at the foot of the altar of sacriﬁce. The Jewish
priest-s must have been bedabbled with blood worse
than most slaughterers, and the altars of Jehovah
bcsmeared with gore.
wWhen Solomon’s Temple was dedicated to the
worship of Jehovah, we are informed that there
were offered twenty-two thousand oxen and a bun-
dred and twenty thousand sheep. Hear the bellow-
ing of the cattle, the bleating of the sheep, the
dcath-thuds of Jehovah’s butchers! See the pools
of blood, the temple-ﬂoor bespattered with gore, the
red stream constantly ﬂowing around the altar and
down into the brook Kidronl- ‘Watch the dying
struggles of the animals, the varying emotions as
they mirror themselves on the faces of the assembled
multitude, where the sickening smell is almost over-
powering, where the smoke is constantly ascending
in a place that has no chimney, and is grimy as a
smithy! This is where bloody men offer bloody sacri~
ﬁees to a bloody God, whom our forefathers accepted
in their ignorance, but whom we and our children
have cast off forever. . He is a ﬁt idol only for naked
14 THE POCASSET TRAGEDY.
savages who have not yet abandoned the practice of
eating their enemies.
It is easy to see why women never oﬂiciated as
priestesses among the Jews: their sensitiveness rcn-
ders them unﬁt for such brutal ceremonies; and, if
women had established the Jewish religion, such cere?
monies would certainly have formed no part of it.
The apostles and the New-Testament writer's
generally were Jews, and believers in the blood
religion of their countrymen. It is not surprising
that they clung to the idea of blood atonement, and
saddled on Christianity the barbarous divinity that
their countrymen had so long worshipped. “lVith-
out shedding of blood,” says the author of Hebrews,
“there is no remission.” “l/Ve are justiﬁed by his
blooc,” says Paul. In Peter We read, “Redeemed
with precious blooc .” Christians, it is true, have
discarded the butchering of bullocks, goats, and
sheep as a religious ceremony; but they have retained
the God in whose name the butchering was done:
and their religion is the direct offspring of that of
the blood-besmearers of J udea, and retains much of
its brutal character.
It is only necessary to read the popular hymns
which are sung in orthodox Christian churches to
_ discover abundant evidence of this. Watts says, -—
“ ’TWas he who cleansed our foulest sins,
And washed us in his richest blood.” ‘
What senseless stuff men will sing in the name of
1 77
religion I “ Cleansed our foulest sins. Suppose
one of them was drunkenness: what would it be when
1 Watts’ and Select Hymns, book i. hymn 61.
THZE POCASSET TRAGEDY. '15
it was cleansed? We cleanse a garment; but we do
not cleanse the dirt that is on it: neither can a sin
be cleansed. “ And washed us in his richest blood I ”
Blood is about the foulest of all ﬂuids in which a
man could be washed; and, instead of cleansing him,
he could'hardly be so ﬁlthy, but it would make him
Worse. I/Ve may be told that it is to be understood
,in a spiritual sense. But why clothe spiritual ideas
in such ﬁlthy language? What can be the spiritual
meaning of washing in blood? Such language may
suit a cannibal or a savage, who delights to dabble
in the blood of the man or beast he has slain: it
belongs to a brutal past, and is out of place in a
civilized community. It is no wonder that it leads
at- times to such bloody crimes as the Poeasset trage-
dy. The wonder is that such crimes are not tenfold
multiplied.
I quote again from \Vattsz—
“ Here at thy cross, my dying God,
I lay my soul beneath thy love,
Beneath the droppings of thy blood.”1
Think of a soul lying beneath a cruciﬁed, dying,
blood-dripping God! Can ﬁlth and folly farther go ?
Then we have Cowper’s popular hymn, sung in
every orthodox church in the land : ——
, “ There is a fountain ﬁlled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that ﬂood
Lose all their guilty stains."
‘We have only'to attempt to realize it, and its
horrible, as well as incongruous, character becomes
1 Watts’ and Select Hymns, book ii. hymn 4..
16 THE POCASSET TRAGEDY.
apparent. What kind of a fountain can it be whose
only supply is the veins of a man? But suppose the
supply suﬂicient: we have a fountain spouting blood!
--a sight which would drive away every reﬁned and
sensitive person at once. Around this gory fountain
are the black-robed priests of Jehovah, plunging in
ﬁlthy sinners, that they may be cleansed!
Such hymns as these, sung in our popular churches,
keep constantly alive the idea of a God who .is grati-
ﬁed by bloody sacriﬁces, and who might be expected,
therefore, to command a man to murder his child.
WVe naturally inquire, WVhat led the Jews to offer
sacriﬁces, and form their religion of blood, which
Christianity has only modiﬁed? At an early period
in the history of the human race, every man was
compelled to be a shedder of blood. Constant strug-
gle with the wild beasts around him was the price
of existence. Lions, tigers, bears, and hyenas lurked
in the caves ; and-personal encounters with them were
of common occurrence. WVe know also that inferior
and superior races occupied the land at the same
time, and combats were frequently taking place
between them. Long after this, petty tribes were
continually at war, never meeting without a ﬁght,
when the bodies of the slain were eaten by the
murderers and their friends, and sometimes as a
religious sacrament. Is it any wonder that the
religions born in such a time, the offspring of the
minds of such people, were religions of blood? In
those days, if one man did another a great injury, an
atonement could only be made by blood; for the
morning of love had scarcely dawned upon the be-
nighted earth. Among the Bedouins and other
THE POCASSET TRAGEDY. 17
Arab tribes, any one within the ﬁfth degree of rela-
tionship to a murdered man might legally kill the
murderer. “l/Vhoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man
shall his blood be shcc,” is the old law of blood-
revenge, as given in Genesis; and in Num. xxxvi. 33
it is reiterated in another form: “ The land cannot
be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but
by the blood of him that shed it.” Even where the
death of an individual among the Israelites was
caused by accident, the person who caused it was
compelled to flee to a city of refuge, and was only
safe within its boundary.
Among people in such a moral condition the re-
ligions of blood were born. As man demanded
blood before he could be reconciled, so the god
whom he fashioned in his own likeness demanded
blood. His wrath could only be turned away when
the offender, or some one accepted in his place, had
bled.
There was another motive' to human sacriﬁce
that operated with many in the world’s childhood.
Man desires to obtain the favor of the unseen pow-
ers. He cannot give them any thing, for they are
invisible; but he can consume objects in the ﬁre,
thus render them invisible, and then the invisible
powers can appropriate them. Thus he burns the
best fruits of the ‘soil, and the ﬁnest animals of his
ﬂock; and he fancies the deity hovering over the
burning beast, and smelling the “sweet savor.” As
man was better pleased with the smell of some sub-
stances than others, his god must also be; and hence
he offers incense, burning odoriferous gums and bal-
sams, such as olibanum, ‘benzoin, storax, and myrrh.
18 THE POGASSET TRAGEDY.
The more precious the offering, the greater favor
from the gods might the offerer obtain. There was
nothing too good for the god to receive: so there
was nothing too precious for the offerer to sacriﬁce.
In consequence of such ideas, human sacriﬁces were
common among barbarous nations, and among some
who had advanced to a considerable degree of civili-
zation; religious institutions being always the last
to yield to the demands of progress.
Before the time of Mohammed “ black-vested
priests were wont every seventh day to sacriﬁce chil-
dren on the sacred stone in the Kaaba to Hobal the
Creator.” The Mexicans, at the time when America
was discovered, offered up thousands of victims yearly
to their cruel divinity; and the Spanish chroniclers
inform us that they saw a temple-ﬂoor incrusted with
human blood a span deep. Theinistocles, before the
battle of Salamis, offered up three Persians as victims
to the gods. The Romans, according to Livy, during
a time of great distress, according to direction in the
Books of the Fates, offered up for a sacriﬁce a Gallic
man and woman, and a Greek man and woman, to
appease the angry gods. The Canaanites, the ancient
dwellers in Palestine, offered sacriﬁces of animals in
a similar manner to that practised by the Jews, and
also human'sacriﬁces, principally those of ﬁrst-born
male children, since they were dearest to the offerer.
The human sacriﬁces took place annually at the great
festivals of expiation, and at the beginning of impor-
tant enterprises. “ The Canaanites,” says Lenormant,
“ were remarkable for the atrocious cruelty that
stamped all the ceremonies of their worship and the
precepts of their religion. No other people ever
THE POCASSET TRAGEDY. 19
rivalled them in the mixture of bloodshed and de-
bauchery, with which they thought to honor the
Deity.” He quotes Creuzer, who says, “ Terror was
the inherent principle of this religion. All its rites
were blood-stained, and all its ceremonies were sur-
rounded by gloomy images." The Phoenicians, who
were Canaanites, carried the practice with then to
Carthage, whicli they founded; and children were
sacriﬁced there down to the time of Tiberius. The
Greeks and Romans in vain endeavored to abolish the
cruel rite.
It is easy to see where the Israelites obtained their
brutal and bloody ceremonies, and the practice of
child-sacriﬁce, which was not unfrequent among
them. Their own statements show that they prac-
tised the cruel rites of the Canaanites. We read in
the 106th Psalm, “ They (and it is the Israelites to
Whom the writer refers) sacriﬁced their sons and
daughters unto devils, and shed innocent blood, the
blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom
they sacriﬁced unto the idols of Canaan.” The sac-
riﬁce of children was continued among the Jews even
to the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Jeremiah says,
“ They have built the high places of Tophet . . . to
burn their sons and daughters in the ﬁre ” (J er. vii.
31). Ezekiel declares that they slew their children
to their idols (Ezek. xxiii. 39). He even declares
‘that they caused all the ﬁrst-born to pass through the
ﬁre, or, in other words, offered them as a sacriﬁce to
Moloch, the ﬁre-god (Ezek. xx. 26). I/Ve learn from
2 Kings xxiii. 10, that Josiah “deﬁled Tophet ” in
the Valley of Hinnom, so that no man might sacriﬁce
his son or his daughter to Moloch: so that child-sac-
20 THE POCASSET TRAGEDY.
riﬁce must have been practised in his day in the i111’
mediate neighborhood of Jerusalem, as it had been
long before. Manasseh and Ahaz, kings of Judah,
sacriﬁced their children to Moloch, as we learn from
Kings and Chronicles, in the same place; and, if the
kings did such things, what must have been the con-
dition of the nation? _
In the last chapter of Leviticus we ﬁnd human sac-
riﬁces even regulated by law. “No devoted thing
that a man shall devote unto the Lord, . . . both of
man and beast, shall be sold or redeemed. Every
devoted thing is most holy unto the Lord. None
devoted, which shall be devoted of men, shall be
redeemed, but shall surely be put to death.” And,
in accordance with this law, J ephthah offered up his
daughter a burnt offering to Jehovah.
Abram was evidently a Canaanite, though it is
claimed that he was originally from the Chaldean
city of Ur. His very name is Canaanitish, and so is
the name of his brother Haran; and his father must
have been a Canaanite to give them such names.
The Hebrew language. was that of the Canaanites.
Circumcision was an ancient Canaanite rite; and it is
evident that the religion of the Israelites was but a
modiﬁcation of the sanguinary religion of Canaan.
Jehovah was but an ancient idol whom the Jews
accepted for their special God, and of whose prowess
they were continually boasting. “Jehovah,” says
Gesenius in his Hebrew lexicon, word Jaiwelz, “is a
word of very remote antiquity, perhaps of the same
origin with Jovis, Jupiter.” One of the names of
Moloch was J ao. Accepting the ancient idol as their
. God, much of the old character went with him, and is
still retained by most of his worshippers.
THE POCASSET TRAGEDY. 21
Abraham found, when he went southward in Ca-
naan, a Bethel, or house of God (Gen. xii. 8), the
very same God which be worshipped. The name
Jehovah enters into the composition of the names of
several places in ancient Palestine, names never given
by the Jews, and which show that Jehovah was a
Canaanitc idol, as he subsequently became a J cwish
and Christian one.
The Jew improved upon the ancient religion of
Canaan: but his religion was still brutal and bloody,
like its parent; and its civil inﬂuence is felt in Amer-
ica to-day. Jehovah is but a modiﬁed Moloch, and
Freeman’s child is one of his recent victims.
Abraham could never have been tempted to offer
up his son Isaac as a burnt offering, had such sacri-
ﬁces been unknown to him, though it- is probable
that his faith in the practice was too weak to allow
him to consummate the crime; and he slew a ram in
the place of his son.
As men outgrew barbarism, they became less and
less disposed to butcher human beings to placate their
deities, or to obtain favor at their hands. The gods
improved as the people advanced; and beasts were
accepted by them in the place of men, women, and
children. From the murder of human beings prac-
tised by their ancestors to gratify the gods, the
Greeks and Romans passed to the slaughter of choice
animals; and human sacriﬁces in the later days of
the republic were prohibited by the Roman senate.
The Jewish ceremonial law was established after
the people hadgenerallyadvanced to this modiﬁed
form of sacriﬁce; but the old idea still 1'61 1ained, that
the deity could only be placated by blood. The state-
22 THE POOASSET TRAGEDY.
ment in Num. xvii. 11 shows clearly this opinion
in the mind of the writer at that time: “ The life of
the ﬂesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you
upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls ;
for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the
soul.” The blood of a man was no longer necessary;
but blood was essential. The beast took the place of
the man or child, because increased intelligence and
morality no longer allowed men to consider murder a
religious duty.
With the introduction of Christianity came a
further modiﬁcation of the idea of atonement by
blood. It is no longer necessary to slay even beasts:
Jesus has died as an atoning sacriﬁce for the whole
world, and for all time. His blood shed on Calvary
is a continual atonement. The sinner’s blood need
not be shed on account of his transgressions, nor
need he shed the blood of his sheep or cattle; but
the wrathful Deity cannot be satisﬁed without blood.
As the high priest sprinkled the blood of the sacri-
ﬁced bull before the veil behind which Jehovah was
supposed to be, so Jesus, the sinner’s perpetual sub-
stitute, when the grim God frowns, sprinkles him
with his own blood. The frown disappears, and he
turns to the sinner with a smile of forgiveness on
his blood-stained face. Do you think this is a carica-
ture of orthodox Christianity? Turn to Dr. W'atts,
“ the evangelical poet,” and hear him sing, -—
“Well, the Redeemer’s gone
T’ appear before our God,
To sprinkle o’cr the ﬂaming throne
With his atoning blood.” 1
1 Watts’ and Select Hymns, book ii. hymn 36.
THE POCASSET TRAGEDY. - 23
Just as the Canaanites supposed that God’s wrath
could be appeased by the blood of a murdered child,
as the Jews thought that the blood of slaughtered
beasts rendered the Deity forgiving to his creatures,
so Christians generally believe that the wrath of
God was and is appeased by the blood of his Son, ----
all worshippers of the same deity in a similar man-
ner, though sometimes under different names. Hear
Watts again :—
“ Rich were the drops of Jesus’ blood
That calmed his frowning face,
That sprinkled o’er his burning throne,
And turned the wrath to grace.” 1
Such a God reminds one of the man-eating ogre
of- the nursery-tale, who smells his victim, and will
have his blood; and the people must have been in a
similar condition'of enlightenment when they framed
the'one as when they made the other.
To preserve the recollection of the atoning sacri-
ﬁce of Jesus, orthodox Christians generally have a
bread-and-wine, or ﬂesh-and-blood, feast once a month
or once in three months, called the Sacrament of
the Lord’s Supper. It reminds one of the sacra—
ment of the Aztecs, in which the blood of the
slaughtered victim was mixed with the ﬂour of
maize by the priests, and religiously eaten by the
people. The Persian priests at the Darun’s sacri-
ﬁce, in honor of Zoroaster, their law-giver, eat cakes
of unleavened bread, and drink fermented soma-
juice,-—an intoxicating liquor. Many who join in
the Christians’ blood-feast are very estimable people;
1 Watts’ and Select Hymns, book hymn 36.
24 THE POCASSET TRAGEDY.
but all such ceremonies are the heritage of a brutal
‘past, and their observance assists in keeping people
religiously in a barbarous condition. Our art, our
science, and our mechanics are of the present age;
our religion contains a large proportion of what
rightfully belongs to the prehistoric age, when men
were cannibals.
In one of the hymns sung in orthodox congrega-
tions at sacramental times is the following : --
“ Thy sacred ﬂesh our souls have eat;
’Tis living bread: we thank thee, Lord,
And here we drink our Saviour’s blood.”
That blood being some vile, concocted, drunkard-
making compound of the wine-merchant. In another
sacramental hymn we read, —-
“ At thy command, our dearest Lord,
Here we attend thy dying feast:
Thy blood, like wine, adorns thy board,
And thine own ﬂesh feeds every guest.” ‘
Cannibals could sing such hymns with gusto.
Men and women of intelligence should be ashamed
of them, and they should be ashamed of these ﬂesh-
and-blood feasts at which they are sung. If children
were trained from their infancy to believe that the
ﬁlthy and poisonous practice of smoking tobacco was
a religious duty, and pleasing to God, they would
meet in church, and puff this poison for incense just
as religiously as men and women join in these canni-
bal feasts, eating bread and drinking intoxicating
wine, and making believe that they are the ﬂesh and
blood of their cruciﬁed God.
1 Watts’ and Select Hymns, book iii. hymn 19.
THE POCASSET TRAGEDY. 25
Such practices associate dram-drinking and divin-
ity. They familiarize men with blood, unite murder
and religion, confound the soul of the universe with
the bloody Moloch of the Canaanites, and prepare
the way for just such a deed as this which has so
shocked the community.
I present, then, these four causes for Freeman’s
crime, and similar crimes from similar causes are far
from unknown: First, belief in the infallibility of
the Bible; second, belief in the miraculous; third,
belief that the necessity for right-doing can be set
aside by the command of a god; and, fourth, the
bloody and brutal character of the religion in which
he had been educated, and whose doctrines he had
accepted.
Had not Freeman believed in the infallibility of
the Bible, he would have read the story of Abraham,
and pitied the infatuation of an old man who fan-
cied that the Universal Spirit commanded him to kill
and roast his boy.
It was the echo of J ehovah’s voice that he heard,
as he read its revolting stories made sacred by his
Christian faith. Thou crimson Bible! whose barba-
rous pages have stimulated and sanctioned the mur-
der of millions; whose good lessons are obscured,
like the stars on a stormy night, by the clouds of bru-
tality, indecency, and superstition among which they
are hid,--the ﬁres of thy hell have shrivelled the
hearts of multitudes of well-meaning people, who
have tortured like demons those who diﬁered from
them about the meaning of thy obscure pages. Thou
hast forged the fetters which to-day ﬁrmly bind the
souls of Popery’s slaves and Protestantism’s dupes,
26 THE POCASSET TRAGEDY.
making them the tools of priestly tyrants, whose
reign depends upon the spiritual imbecility of their
subjects.
Had not Freeman and his wife believed in the
miraculous, they would never have thought that his
hand would be supernaturally stayed, or their slain
child raised from the dead; and the crime would
never have been committed.
Miracle is the dream of the idle: it is the philoso-
pher’s stone of the religious alchemists, who are seek-
ing by prayer to turn the lead of their want into the
gold of supply. To reap on this planet, we or some
one else must sow. If pumpkins could be raised by
prayer, there 'would not be much room for any other
crop. If God at certain times took special care of
the children of Christians, the poor little wretches
would fare hardly in this world. Few would feel
called upon to see for omniscience, to help omnipo-
tence, or provide for those who were in the care of
the all-provider; and, unless all was done by miracle,
whatever was done would be a curse. Do we sin?
Certainly. Then we suffer; and a world in which sin-
ners did not suffer would not be ﬁt to live in. Nor
is there any way under heaven to escape the suffer-
ing which wrong-doing produces. Cease to do evil,
and do well, are the only roads that lead to bliss. A
great deal is said about Jesus saving sinners; but the
man could not save himself from being cheated by a
pretending ﬁg-tree, nor from being entrapped by a
Judas, and hung by the Romans. And how can such
as he save any one?
Had not Freeman believed that wrong is right if
God commands it to be done, any voice that he
THE PocAssET TRAGEDY. 27
might have heard, or fancied that he heard, com-
manding him to commit a crime, could only have
been attributed to some vile source, and would have
died away unheeded.
The law of right must bind all. The more exalted
the being, the greater necessity for unswerving obe-
dience to its dictates. When the father says, “My
son, you must not drink liquor: it is a curse,” we
expect him to set an example of total abstinence.
How can the judge who is a thief rightfully sen-
tence a criminal for stealing? How could a god like
Jehovah, guilty of breaking nearly every command
of the Decalogue, with any justice sentence sinners
for violating them? “ In the name of justice, I pro-
test,” says the sentenced sinner. “ You have de-
nounced me for stealing. I can prove, from your
own book, that by your command the Israelites stole
a whole country, and made slaves of the wretched
inhabitants. You say I have committed murder,
and that is true; but you cannot surely condemn
me. Where I murdered one, you murdered millions.
I killed a few that I might get their money, which I
sorely needed; but you drowned a whole world, and
‘ are going to torment us forever only to gratify your
unreasonable and unjustiﬁable anger.” And what
could heaven’s potentate say in the presence of as-
sembled worlds? Under such circumstances, even a
god would be dumb.
Lastly, if Freeman had not been educated in a
religion of blood, like Christianity and Judaism,
which it indorses, the murderous images that ﬁlled‘
his mind and haunted him day and night would have
' been to him unknown; and his darling girl would
28 THE POCASSET TRAGEDY.
still have been a mother’s bliss, a father’s joy, as in
the days gone by.
When this man is tried, Christianity and Judaism
will be tried. Had not Freeman as much right to
obey what he believed, and still believes, was the
command of God, as Abraham had? If Abraham
is to be praised, and his faith commended, how much
more should Christians commend Freeman, who
trusted when Abraham failed! Many Christians
are crying, “ Hang him! Such a wretch as he is not
ﬁt to live.” Yes, gentlemen; but, when you hang
him, you hang Abraham and Jehovah, who were
equally guilty, and condemn your religion, which
was the parent of his crime. The causes to which we
have traced it, not only belong to orthodox Chris-
tianity: they are its very heart.
Let us not, however, suppose that what is thus
visible, and shocks us, is the greatest evil that is done
by this barbarous religion. The eruption on a man’s
face only reveals the disordered interior condition of
his system; and Freeman’s crime is only an outward
and visible sign of an inward and spiritual malady,
with which millions are afflicted. When a man
accepts the divinity of the Bible, he accepts its
malignant God, its torturing Devil, its everlasting
ﬁre, and its fanatical Saviour; and he cannot now do
this without doing violence to his soul, denying the
divinity within him, and in the end he is in danger
of becoming a criminal fanatic or (if specially intelli-
gent, and his interest binds him to the church) a
miserable hypocrite.
As certainly as we have outgrown the cannibalism
once practised by our forefathers, so shall we cut-
THE PocAssET TRAGEDY. 29
grow the bloody religions that now deﬁle and dis-
grace our land. Even some of the J evvish prophets
appear to have outgrown the blood religion of their
countrymen. Isaiah says, God delights not in the
blood of bullocks or of lambs or of he-goats; and
Jeremiah even declares that God never commanded
the Israelites concerning burnt offerings or sacriﬁces
(Jer. vii. 22), thus giving the lie direct to the au-
thors of the Pentateuch. The most intelligent and
exemplary Christians to-day have become sick of the
disgusting story of blood which enters so largely
into the discourses of those who are seeking to scare
people by the terrors of a ﬁery hell, and draw them
by the hope of a gold-paved heaven.
I call upon every thinking man and woman to aid
us in dethroning the sanguinary Jehovah, who burns
his children not for a few moments, as did Moloch
the Canaanitish infants, but ﬁendishly feasts on their
agony as “the smoke of their torment ascends for-
ever.” Aid us in destroying the bloody religion
taught in his name, which, despite the good lessons
occasionally inculcated by its ministers, is forever
dragging the people down to the brutalities of a by-
gone age. This religion makes woman a slave, and
represents every child as a born inheritor of eternal
torment, from which it can only escape by passing
- through its river of blood. By its doctrine of an
everlasting hell it paralyzes the intellect, appeals to
men’s fears, and beclouds their judgment. It wars
with, and frequently dethrones, reason; it pampers
pride, it beggars hope, it nurses despair, it curses the
thinker, and it damns the doubter. Its advocates
imprison the man whose arguments they can not
30 THE POCASSET TRAGEDY.
answer, and burn him when their power is equal to
their rage.
The spirit throbbing in every atom of the universe
is less adequately represented by Jehovah than it
was by Jupiter, and the advancing tide of knowledge
shall sweep away the one as surely as it has swept
away the other. Angry gods and tormenting devils
shall no longer haunt the dark world; for the sun
of science shall drive away the black night of super-
stition, and a rational and scientiﬁc religion shall
overspread the earth. “Then that time comes, the
fear of an orthodox hell and all hope of its Oriental
heaven, which none but a barbarian could enjoy, will
have equally departed; and in their place will be an
assurance of a natural life in the hereafter, the in-
evitable outgrowth of the life here, in a world where
progress operates, and presents a prospect of a life
of rational bliss to every human soul.
When this takes place, such crimes as that of Free-
man will be as impossible as the human sacriﬁces of
the ancient Druids, or the still more ancient cannibal
feasts of the early men of Great Britain and France;
and the world, as it looks back, will shudder as it sees
in the pages of history the bloody spectre that once
stalked through the land, and was known as the
Christian religion.

The following letter from the wife of Charles F.
Freeman to her sister shows us clearly the barbarous
nature of the religion in which she was educated,
and the true causes—and they are such as I have
pointed out—that led to the murder of her child.
POCASSET TRAGEDY. 31
The man has the stuff in him of which the noblest
heroes have been made; and he should be lauded
for his heroism, however much we may regret his
fanaticism.
The mother, in this letter, lays bare her throbbing
heart, and writes with a power and pathos that have
seldom been equalled, and that cannot fail to reach
every parent’s heart. We observe the struggle be-
tween human affection and blind faith—between
sound sense and Christian superstition — which
ended in the temporary overthrow of reason, and
the Pocasset tragedy.
COPY OF A LETTER WRITTEN BY MRS. CHARLES
FREEMAN TO HER SISTER.
BARNSTABLE, May 14, 1879.
MY VERY DEAR SISTER, —I received your letter yesterday.
Was very glad to hear from you. O sister! you do not know,
you can never know, the sorrow of my heart. Your letters are
all kind and full of love and sympathy, but my grief is so
much deeper than any you can know. I think that I feel as
Jesus must have felt when coming out of Gethsemane, when he
found his loved disciples sleeping, who had but a little while
before professed such love for him. They did love him, and
were faithful unto death for his sake; yet they never under—
stood, as did he, the agonies of that night.
\Vas ever sorrow like this sorrow ? Was there ever grief
like mine ? Did I not know the innocency of Charlie's heart,
and something of the terrible trial through which he passed
before he was willing to bear the test of Abraham’s faith, as
he felt called to it ‘B And did I not know he had faith. and was
sure God would stay his hand, as was Abraham’s, and no harm
should come to precious Eddie? O sister! if I did not know
all this, if our faith in God had not been so implicit, I should
be insane :_ I could not live.
32 POCASSET TRAGEDY.
You cannot know how much Charlie suffered, oh, how
much, night and day! and, when after getting no rest, in terri-
ble distress he told the Lord he would have the faith of Abra-
ham, this brought him relief. Had I thought it would not, oh,
how differently I would have done! But that awful require-
ment came again.
0 sister! it is a wonder my heart-strings did not break.
You cannot conceive of my agony. Our Father in heaven
must have known it. Why, oh! why, did he not answer our -
prayers ? WVe never prayed so from the depths of utter help-
lessness, that God would spare him this terrible trial and woe.
And God knew this was no choice of Charlie’s loving heart;
he knew how he loved his darling, to say nothing of those
terrible results that must follow, if he did not tell him it was
enough, and give him peace.
0 sister 1 why did he not, oh! why not answer our prayers?
Instead of that came that terrible requirement, “They that
have the faith of Abraham shall be blest with Abraham.”
He was blessed by God. It was counted to him for right-
eousness. Had it not been for him, we could have had no
Christ. . . .
When I found he had Abraham’s faith, knowing, as I did,
Charlie’s love to God and his family, and fear to doubt or dis-
obey God, —believing myself it was to be a test only of faith,
-- after using what reason I could against it, I left speaking;
but, oh ! how I prayed! I did not for one moment believe God
would take our darling, nor did Charlie.
O sister! we had too much faith, or it is mistaken faith, or
there is no God, or it is of God!
And when I went into the room afterwards, and found
Charlie hugging the little, lifeless form, 0 sister, sister! I
could not, could not tell you how we felt. He had promised
God, he had believed his word, and yet we were with death.
0h! where was the loving Father that pities those that fear
him? Then there seemed to be comfort. I cannot write you
all : it is too long.
But God could raise Eddie. Many of his apostles did; and
Jesus, was it not his will to take her, and then raise her to life,
and thus show a sleeping, cold Church that there were some
POCASSET TRAGEDY. 33
who had faith in God, and that the God of Israel lived, and so
save those who know not what is truth?
Oh! the joy of my Eddie risen, how priceless! ‘Would it not
more than repay our suiferin gs ‘B And what power and glory it
would give in the Church of God! Charlie had done all that
God required: surely God would justify.
I have waited, and believed that Eddie would rise, that she
must; but it has not been, and we are here. Our Eddie dead!
-our Mildred a stranger! All our bright hopes shattered in an
instant, — can it be by a mistaken faith ‘I O sister! you knew
something how completely we had given all to God, that there
was in our hearts no idol of any thing we knew of; you knew
something of the sacriﬁce we had been called upon to make
for the sake of him who suffered the loss of all things for us,
and how we continually prayed for guidance. O sister! whom
will God lead, if he did not us ? Tell me if we have one
strand that is wrong. As I-look back, I cannot see how I could
be more devoted to the will of God. I am like a child led by
its mother to the very brink of a precipice, and left without
room to turn and escape; or a child terribly punished for doing
what, at fearful cost, it had thought to be the Father’s will.
I cannot collect my thoughts. Tell me, dear sister, if you have
found the truth, and where it is. How far can we trust God,
who has promised to lead us into all truth ? That not one step
shall slide, he will guide us with his eye, and uphold us with
his right hand; he will not suffer us to be tempted above what we
are able to bear, -- and many, very many more such promises.
I know they are conditional, —that we are to be his followers,
his alone; but have we not? Oh, show me where! I cannot
seem to get hold of any thing; but yet_ I know I am drifting.
Oh, God is love I I will, I must have faith. Oh, bring me into
light, dear Father! Charlie was so sincere in his act and life,
that he still believes that God will manifest and justify him.
Oh, that he might! but I cannot see how he can. I can only
see we were misguided, but none the less sincere. We are
indeed in utmost need; and our prayer is still, 0 Father, show
us the way! HAT'I‘IE.
BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS
ISSUED BY THE
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WELLESLEY, MASS.

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Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price. Liberal allowance to agents
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,SERMON
FROM .
SHAKSPEARE’S TEXT:
I “ Entrants in trees, bucks in the running trunks,
Summits in stunza'anh gnarl in chug thing.”
-\
‘ DELIVEREDIN MUPSIC vHALL, BOSTON, MAss,
BY
WILLIAM. pENToN.
. . WELLESLEY, MASS:
“ , JIDENTON rUBLIsHING COMPANY.
; ~ 1882. s *


SERMON
1' ROM
SHAKSPEARE’S TEXT:
“ Enngucs in trrzs, tanks in the running trunks,
.Ssrmnns in stunts, uni! goal! in elm-g thing.”
DELIVERED IN MUSIC HALL, BOSTON, MASS.,
BY
WILLIAM DENTON.
WELLESLEY, MASS. =
DENTON PUBLISHING COMPANY.
' 1882.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872,
BY WILLIAM DENTON,
In the Oﬁce of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
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A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE’S TEXT,
“ Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”

MY text will be found in the play of “As You
Like it,” Act II., Scene 1:—
“And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
Shakspeare was a mental Argus, whose hundred eyes
nothing could escape. Men see by their brains still more
‘than they do by their eyes; and his were brains so devel-
oped that they enabled his eyes to see what mortal
had never beheld before. He was a walking polyglot,
with as many'tongues as eyes; what his eyes beheld,
his tongues had the ability to speak, --ability how
rare! He peered through the palacewalls and beheld
the secret deeds of kings ; and there was no dungeon
so dark but his eye beheld the prisoner. He saw, too,
the thought of each ; he heard their uttered fancies;
he beheld their aspirations, and embodied them in
glowing language that speaks to every heart. In him
a
4 , A SERMON FROM SELAKSPEARE.
the silent trees found utterance, the babbling brooks
discoursed in rational speech, and the very stones
cried out With eloquent tongue.
Nature, the ready-helper of genius, bowed to him,
and opened wide the door of her domain for his obser-
vance and appropriation. She whispered her choicest
secrets into his ear, and found him a worthy listener, -—
a true man, who proclaimed them aloud for the beneﬁt
of the world.
I can fancy William Shakspeare, after rambling by
the banks of the ﬂowing Avon, and watching the pel-
lucid stream ﬂow over its pebbly bottom, and the trees
bending lovingly over it, returning to write,“ And this
our life, exempt from public haunt, ﬁnds tongues in
trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,
and good in every thing.” Let us, this afternoon, hear
these tongued trees, read the books that are in the
running brooks, listen to the sermons that the stones
dispense, and ﬁnd and appropriate the good that
dwells in every thing. .
It is autumn. We lie upon the velvet sward, and
watch the squirrels skip. Grand old trees, lordly
possessors of the soil, how I love, you! You lift your
myriad hands to heaven, and wave your tinted banners
in your joy, as if a wintry wind could never blow.
Generations'of leaves have ﬂourished, dropped, and de-
cayed around you ; but there you stand, renewing your
beauty from year to year. You have put down your
radiating roots deep into the soil, have sucked up by a
million months the nourishment needed for your
growth, and transformed the gross, dark mould into
A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE. 5
the regal garments you wear; and, though the storm
has swept'many a time around you, you have only
knit your hearts the ﬁrmer, and soared daily nearer
and nearer to heaven. Beautiful! trees, eloquent-
trees! we listen to your tongues, and we learn your
lessons. So stands the true man: rooted in the earth,
watered by its springs, fed by its soil, but using these
only as a means to climb into the spiritual realm
above him; shedding old opinions, false notions, bar-
barous creeds, as a tree sheds its leaves; but his ﬁrm
heart grows but the ﬁrmer in the right, his aims the
purer, new and true opinions take the place of the old,
and he climbs year by year nearer and nearer to perfect
manhood.
Down drop the acorns around us. What magical
globes are these! The Chinese carve, with admirable
skill, half-a-dozen ivory globes one within the other;
but what are they to this forest-containing acorn?
Folded within this shell is that life which makes the
future tree, its leaves, its blossoms, its fruit, and the
untold millions of its descendants; an artist lies sleeping
here that may beautify a thousand worlds that are yet
to be. So the truth, spoken or written, is a seed
endowed with perpetual lite, and the power to educe
new truths and bless the world forever. Error is a
stake driven into the ground. Every drop that falls
tends to rot it, every wind to blow it down. All nature
conspires against it; and its destruction is. certain.
How these trees struggle upward for the light!
How they “ shoulder each other for the sun’s smile ! ”
Why are these crowded trees so tall, so straight, and
1*
6 A SERMON FROM sHAKsPEARE.
their trunks so small ‘3 Every thing is sacriﬁced for
light. The last words of the dying Goethe are their
motto, —-“ Light, more light ! ” Listen to that tongue,
my brother, and learn. Let thy motto be, “ Up to the
sunlight!” What are riches, broad lands, magniﬁcent
house, honor, fame, when they go with an ignorant,
undeveloped soul? Men squat and spread like toad-
stools under the dripping trees in the twilight, instead
of soaring like pines to live in the sun’s continual
smile. .
See on these trees the effect of surrounding con-
ditions. Mark the one that has had light on every
side: how symmetrical, how beautiful is that tree! It
is, as the poet says, “ a thing of beauty and a joy for-
ever.” But mark that tree shaded on every side but
one,—-uneven, warped, lopsided: toward the light it
grew, toward the shade it refused to grow; and it
would rather grow crooked than not at all. Far from
it is the beauty and grace that go with the proper con-
ditions for development. Here is an eloquent tongue.
Tupper says, “ Scratch the rind of the sapling, and the
knotted oak will tell of it for centuries to come.”
There is a distorted ash, whose ugliness makes the
raven croak, as it ﬂies over it. The hoof of a ﬂying
deer trampled it into the earth when it was a tender
sapling, and it will bear the brand of it while life lasts.
That criminal you clutch by the throat, policeman, and
strike with your billy, —- he, too, was trampled upon in
his infancy; nor is the hoof of society off him yet.
Lift him up, give him a chance: room for him! air for
him! sunshine for him! So much is assured: in the
A SERMON ERoM SHAKSPEARE. 7
great hereafter, he shall have the chance for develop-
ment that he never had here. This crabbed old
woman, gnarled as a knotty oak, slanderer, liar, thief, —
she, too, came to be so by causes. Once she was a
smiling, prattling baby, the joy of her mother’s heart,
dearer to her than a cherub from paradise. She grew,
she was tempted, fell, was trampled under the feet of
the scrambling crowd of onrushing humanity. Charity
for her! light for her! heaven for her, too, where all
wrongs are at last to be righted, and the crooked made
straight!
There is another tongue in these trees that dis-
courses patience. The slower the growth, the ﬁrmer
the tree, and the more enduring the wood. “ See me
grow,” said the squash to the oak; “ I shall cover a
rod while your feeble head is rising a single inch.”
So it was: the squash covered the ground for many a
yard, while the oak seemed an idler; but there stood
the oak in its majesty when hundreds of generations of
the squash had perished. The tree grows by steady,
persistent effort: so can you. Do not hurry, do not
idle; but steadily mount, and success, the highest
success, is yours. Go into the woods now: how silent
they are! Put your ear to the trunks of the trees ; can
you hear any thing? Not a whisper: they are still as
death; yet engines are pumping, and sap is rushing
through a million pipes to accomplish a most important
work. The mandate has gone forth: every tree must
be clad in velvet-green to greet the dawning spring;
and there is but a month in which to do it. All the
trees of the forest are busy preparing their new dresses
8 A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE.
in honor of the coming ‘queen. Suppose a thousand
young ladies were to be furnished with new dresses
within the next month: what an excitement would
there be! what a snipping of scissors, tearing of
cloth, running of sewing machines,--yes, and of talk-
ing machines too,——before all were provided! And
yet here are all the trees of the forest making their new
dresses without contention, without noise, without the
intervention of a French artiste, in the good, old-
fashioned style which can never be improved.
The storm goes howling by. What a noise! It
rouses the world! “Here am I: listen to me; see
what I can do! ” But when it is over, there lie a few
rotten trunks prostrated by its power. Without blus-
ter, or even sound, the million-columned woods arise,
and God’s ﬁrst and best temples are reared. It is not
the most noisy that accomplish the most. The armies
march, the music sounds, the cannons thunder. “ These
are they that do the world’s work,” says the crowd.
Some thinker in his silent study does more than they
all. Bonaparte bestrides Europe like a colossus: his
voice makes every throne tremble; all eyes are turned
to him, and all ears are dinned with his name; but
James Watt, obscurely laboring to perfect the steam-
engine, has done inﬁnitely more to change the face of
the world, to revolutionize society, and, above all, to
bless the human race.
Cut a tree down, and examine the rings of its
growth, and you will ﬁnd ah eloquent tongue that
gives the lie to many other tongues. The whole his-
tory of the tree, and of the times in which it ﬂourished,
A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE. 9
is indelibly written in the grain of the trunk. Twenty
years ago there was a cool, short, and dry summer:
here is the narrow ring that answers to that summer.
See that expanded circle: ﬁfty years ago there was a
warm, moist season ; and you see the result. Not a day
passed over this tree that has not left its record around
its heart, never to be forgotten, never to be erased. I
tell you, my brother, my sister, so is it with you.
Thus we build up the inward man day by day. There
is not an hour in your history that is not inwoven, in-
grown into the very constitution of your soul, that
does not exercise an inﬂuence on your destiny; and
there is nothing that can make it be as though it had
never been. I know how common it is for men to be~
lieve and teach that Jesus can wipe out, at one
stroke, and in a moment, the consequences of their
niisdeeds,-—that five minutes of prayer can remove
the dark stains of ﬁfty years of crime; but nothing can
be more false. Nature tells us this in the grand elo-
quence of these trees. Do you think that any amount
of waving on the part of the green leaves, this coming
summer, can remove the effect of the dry seasons long
gone by, and expand those contracted rings of growth
to full dimensions ? When conditions are unfavorable
for their proper development, where are the Christs for
the trees,-- to remove the scars, straighten the bended
trunk, and ﬁll out the lean circumference ? These very
tree-tongues give the lie to this orthodox fable, that
man can do wrong, thus‘ hindering his spiritual growth
and cramping his soul, and then escape the legitimate
consequences of that wrong-doing.
10 A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE.
Mark, too, the tendency in all trees to symmetry and
beauty, each of its own kind. Take that young tree
and hew off its limbs,--reduce it, if you please, to a
naked, crooked stick. What does it do? It commences
instantly to repair damages. The unsightly cuts are
salved with new bark; to the right grows a branch, to
the left a corresponding branch. A spirit of beauty
presides over it, and employs her agents to adorn it;
blossoms expand in their loveliness, fruit is developed,
and the tree stands at last as perfect as its more
favored neighbors. There is inherent in all nature
this tendency to symmetry and beauty. The clay-
stone no less than the crystal show it in the mineral
kingdom; the vegetable kingdom displays it from the
fucoid of the sea-bottom to the pine of the mountain-
top; and is man destitute of it? He is and is to be its
most glorious manifestation. Man, though king-curst
and priest-curst and God-curst, ——
“ Though sin and the devil hath bound him,”—
has yet within him that divine spirit which, in spite
of unfavorable conditions, shall push him onward to
excellence, toward perfection.
Were I to tell all that the trees have to teach, how
long would my sermon last? By what possibility could
it ever have an end? It seems to me, as I go into the
woods and listen to their tongues, that all other words
are needless. They are the most eloquent of preach-
ers ; and, listening to them, we can well afford to let
all others be silent. Multitudes who throng the piles
A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE. 11
of superstition on Sundays would be more blessed by
attending the green temples of Nature, and entering
into the spirit that breathes from every leaf.
I watch these trees, and see how they grow, day by
day, year by year, becoming larger, fairer, as the sea-
sons pass. But I am told that, when the tree arrives '
at its perfection,-— which all may attain in a few cen-
turies, like the stars when they culminate,—it begins
to sink, and nothing can arrest its decay and death. It
is resolved into its original components: it is gone as a
tree, -— entered into the dust from which it can never
more emerge. And yet, out of the very dust of that
tree up springs a new one, fairer and brighter for the
richness of the soil gained from the ashes of its prede-
cessor. Nor is that all. Extravagant as it may seem,
I have learned that there is a future life even for trees.
There is room enough in an inﬁnite universe for all
the trees that ever blossomed: somewhere they are
blossoming still. How much more shall there be room
for the men. They are all living still. A brighter sky
than weever saw bends over them; a more glorious
sun sheds his rays on their heads; the winds of beneﬁ-
cent conditions play around them. Development in the
grand future is their inalienable destiny.
But Shakspeare says there are “ books in the running
brooks;” and we must not listen too long to these
trees, or we shall lose the lessons that are contained in
those running brooks. Strange places to ﬁnd books!
No less strange, and quite as interesting, are the books
themselves that we ﬁnd in this alcove of N ature’s libra-
ry, free for all. There is a book on chronology, and a
12 A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE.
wonderful book it is: our longest chronological lists
are invisible when compared with this. At Niagara, -—
one of our brooks, —- you see an ocean of water pour-
ing over the solid limestone into the foaming abyss
beneath. At Queenstown, seven miles below, the cat-
aract once was ; and the deep channel between the two
shows what the water has accomplished, fretting the
solid rock through the ages. Though ﬁfty thousand
years were probably spent in the work, yet that is but
a day in the geologic calendar. But what is this, com-
pared with the record of other brooks? The Colorado
has worn a when three hundred miles long, and in
places more than a mile deep, and for a thousand
feet through solid granite.‘ Thousands of centuries
must have been employed in the work. These grand
brooks are older than Britain and the Druids, Greece
and Etruria ; older than the mummies ; ay, older than
Egypt itself, for it is made of the mud that one of these
brooks laid down ; older than the old serpent and the
Christians that made him; older than Noah and his
wonderful box; older, indeed, than the J cws and J c-
hovah,--“ the Ancient of days,”—-their handiwork,
or, rather, their headwork. These brooks have been
rolling for ages where they now are, doing the work
of the world, as they have prepared it for the habitation
of mankind.
There is avolume on perseverance in the brooks that
many might read with beneﬁt. There was a time
when the Gulf of Mexico extended to where Cairo in
Illinois now is; and the Mississippi, by patient perse-
verance, has ﬁlled up the Gulf to New Orleans; and it
A snnMoN FROM SHAKSPEARE. 13
is destined to annex Cuba to the United States, whether
Spain favors the annexation or opposes it. They have
carried to their graves in the ocean-depths mountains
innumerable, and are now engaged in ferrying down
all that remain. Not a day but they lay down part of
Mont Blanc and Mount Washington, Cotopaxi and
Chimborazo; and ere long, by their aid, the ocean
shall roll over the heads of the loftiest peaks. They
have made seven miles of fossilliferous rock, and formed
the grand continents, on whose surface we dwell; and
yet the process by which all this is accomplished is so
gradual, that but few are aware of what is going on
around them. There is a book on perseverance that it
will do you good to read, young man, young woman.
Never despair of accomplishing your soul’s earnest
wish. The very desire to be and to do indicates the
power to be and to do what you desire : a day may do
but little, but you have an eternity to operate in. A
drop a day would drain the ocean in time; and you
need never be discouraged.
I saw a silvery rill descending from the mountain ;
clear as crystal were its waters, as it leaped down with
tinkling feet on its mission of usefulness and love. “1
will stop its babbling,” said the Frost, as he laid his
cold hand upon it, icy as death; and it staggered and
grew still. “ I will bury it from sight,” said the Snow ;
and down dropped its ﬂeecy mantle and hid the rill
from my gaze. “Alas!” said I, “ for the beautiful
stream, the envy of the Frost and Snow has destroyed
it forever.” But while I mourned, the south wind
blew with genial breath, the sun looked through the
2
14 A SERMON FROM sHAKsPEARE.
craggy clouds, the bonds of the rill were broken, snow
and ice did but increase its waters, and away danced
its waters more merrily than before. On it sped ; and
wherever it went the trees arrayed themselves in their
greenest dresses, they lifted up their heads and waved
their banners in its praise; the birds sang to it in their
leafy bowers, and the ﬂowers kissed it with their sweet
lips as it ran. But the hills saw it, and they were
oﬁ‘ended. “ Why should we allow this vagrant to roam
at large,” said they,— “ this leveller, this underminer
and destroyer of all things old and sacred? Why
should we allow it to chafe our sides, and set at deﬁ-
ance the limits set in the days gone by? Let us unite,
and crush it forever.” So saying, they encircled the
brook in their close embrace, and presented a seem-
ingly impassable barrier to its further passage; and
again it was lost to my sight. But, though unseen, it
was busy as ever, searching every crevice, ﬂowing into
every cranny, to ﬁnd a passage through the frowning
hills. “ If I cannot get through, I must go over,” said
the brook. “Ah, ha!” laughed the hills; and they
clapped their hands, and said, “Listen to the little fel-
low. We have stopped his mad career; no more shall
he roam among the trees, and disport himself with the
flowers; no more shall he remove the moss-grown
rocks, invade our sacred retreats, and undermine the
foundations of ages: his work is done, his life is ended.”
But, inch by inch, and foot by foot, the water rose
above the woody sides of the hills ; and, reaching a val-
ley between two peaks, the hills saw, to their astonish-
ment, the despised brook, now swollen to a river, gc
A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE. 15
thundering down upon the plain with tenfold power.
On it flowed, daily broader, deeper, receiving acces'
sions from a thousand ﬂowing streams, blessing thirsty
lands, and administering to man’s welfare, till it poured
at last its majestic torrent into the all-embracing sea.
There is a lesson for thee, my toiling brother. Start-
ing from the mountains of truth-loving endeavor and
manly resolve, what though the world’s cold scorn falls
on thee, and the bitter winds of persecution blow
around thee, toil on, live to thy soul’s ideal. There
are noble hearts beating for thee, glorious rewards
awaiting thee. There are no obstacles too high for thee
to surmount; the greatest success of which thy soul
ever dreamed is guaranteed thee.
But Shakspeare says there are “ sermons in stones ; ”
and, while there is time, we must look at some of
these. You would never forgive me if I did not give
you some of these sermons. These “ hard-heads,” as
the bowlders have been called, are old heads and wise
heads, and no less eloquent. They preach the longest,
the truest, the wisest of sermons. These ministers of
Nature are expounding continually,—
With magical eloquence, day and night,
Dcnouncing the wrong, upholding the right, --
by the road-side, in the swamp, in the foaming stream,
I and the ploughed ﬁeld. They preached to the Indian,
as he stealthily stole by to shoot the door at the lick,
as they had done to the dumb savages, his ancestors,
who had not learned to form the rudest of implements
for the chase. These preachers never stammer nor
16 A SERMON FROM sHAxsPEARE.
cough; they never rave nor rant; they never lie. to
please a congregation, or for the glory of God, as I’m
afraid some of our gospel preachers do ; they never get
drunk nor blush for their record: they invariably tell
the truth, and that is just what we need ; and their bold,
outspoken utterances have spoiled a thousand barrels
of orthodox sermons in Massachusetts alone. Would
that we were more awake to their glowing utterances!
\Vhen Shakspeare was living, geology was unknown.
\Vhat wondrous sermons have been preached by the
stones since his time, that have set the world a-think-
ing! Werner, Hutton, Bakewell, Buckland, Lyell,
Mantell, Miller, and hosts of others listened to them,
took notes of their discourses; and their rough notes,
far from verbatim reports, have re-created the world,
and bid fair to re-create the next. How silly the Gen-
esical fable of creation appears in the light which their
utterances reveal,-—-the six days of fatiguing labor of
the Almighty Mechanic, dust-made grandfather Adam,
and bone-made grandmother Eve, the chatting snake,
and the cursing God ! In these sermons that the stones
preach, there is no God complacently congratulating
himself on the success of his week’s work, and, in a
few days, cursing like a demon because his plans have
been frustrated. ‘What a story is that to be rehearsed
in the nineteenth century, with the words of these stones
ringing in our ears! There rolls the ruddy planet, as
it came from the glowing furnace of the sun, a spirit
within its concentrated ﬁre-mist presiding over it, and
able to produce, when conditions permit, plant and
bird, beast and man. We see the solid rock, as the
A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE. 17
world cools, bare, black, and ﬂinty ; and below, the boil-
ing‘, turbid waters: from the deep, where the ﬁrst rude
forms of life appear, island after island emerges, lichens
cling to the rocks upon them, moss-like plants carpet
them, ferns fringe them, beetles hum over them, and
fishes go ﬂashing along their shores, or feed upon the
sea-weeds that spread over the waters their long gela-
tinous arms. Tree-ferns nnroll their fronds, club-
niosses upraise their columns out of the dense swamps,
lepidodendrons rear their scaly trunks, frogs hop along,
the margins of the lakes or vigorously swim in their
waters, while above them dragon-ﬂies ﬂit on gauzy
wings. Birds appear, rude, gross, stalking along the
shores, ﬁshing in the waters; reptiles swimming, div-
ing, crawling, basking on the rocks, roaming through
the woods, soaring in the air; mammals, huge and
whale-like, follow them, living in the waters; thick-
skinned monsters wading in the rivers, crashing through
the reeds; horses roam over the virgin prairies; deer
feed on the newly-developed grasses ; monkeys, the fore-
runners of men, feed on the luscious ﬁgs. Then comes
savage man, low-brewed, brutal, but human: within
him the science, the art of the nineteenth century, and
of a million centuries yet to be born ; and, at last, here
are we, the freest congregation in the freest city, in
spite of its fogyism, that our planet has yet seen, each
one swearing that he will not rest till he has made this
old world better than he found it.
This is one of the sermons the stones are preaching ;
and where it is heard, most other sermons are preached
in vain. Man has been advancing‘ from the start, as
2*
18 A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE.
the world had been for so many ages before him ; then
man never fell, and Jesus was never sent to raise what
the devil was never permitted to knock down. Good
and evil ﬂow from humanity by virtue of its nature;
the Devil is no longer needed, and his bottomless pit is
ﬁlled to the brim. Jesus descends from the throne of
his glory and takes his place on the platform occupied
by his brothers ; and we can say of a thousand living
men and women, a better than Jesus is here.
Here, too, is a sermon on progress. From ﬂuid ﬁre to
solid rock, from shapeless stone to symmetrical crystal,
from crystal to polyp, from this sluggish stomach at the
sea-bottom to the active ﬁsh, thence to the ground-tread-
ing reptile, ﬁrst tenant of the soil ; then life soars in the
bird, advances toward man in the brute, and reaches
him only to urge him on to higher and nobler posi-
tions. We are here with this inﬁnite past beneath us,
and an illimitable future above us, and ability within
us to climb the heights apparently forever. All this to
drop at death back to the dust from which life has as-
cended only by slow steps for millions of years ? We
are that we may be. All the past was that we might
' be in the present; and the present is that the future
may be superior to it. Progress is not dead, nor God
asleep. The ages have not sown that death or the Devil
might reap: neither hell nor the grave is the granary
of humanity. The everlasting arms are around us:
over the stream of death they shall bear us, and land
us in a sunnier clime.
But I must not preach too long from such sermons
as these, important as they are. Few geologists have
A SERMON ERoM sHAxsrEARE. 19
dared to tell the truth,-- reveal to the world all that
their science has taught them. Scientists, like theolo-
gians, are sad cowards. A great effort is made by many
of them to make these old preachers talk orthodoxi-
cally; but the effort is a dead failure. Though many
geologists seek with oblique vision to look upon old
dogmas and new revelations at the same time, yet
others are gaining courage to declare the whole coun-
se! of Nature.
The stones are preaching their sermons in the streets
of Boston to-day. Fort Hill is being cut down, and
interested people gather to see the gradual disappear-
ance of one of the interesting relics of historic times.
Go and see the old “ hard heads,” as they are scooped
from the soil by the steam excavator, or lie exposed
once more to the light of day along the lessening crest.
They are covered with marks and scratches. Not a
stone to which they were introduced but left its mark:
they tell us of the grinding ice-ﬁelds of the glacial
period, when a Greenland winter locked the sea and
buried the land; and you may learn from them that
we have only fairly started to explore the past of our
planet on which our present stands, and eternity will
be needed to read what the eternity of the past has
done.
But Shakspeare says there is “good in every thing.”
What an extravagant statement is this ! Right, IVil-
liam, right: you, too, were wiser than you knew. Good
in earthquakes, ground-shaking, rock-cleaving, city-
swallowing, life-destroying earthquakes? Certainly.
By earthquake throes the continents have been up-
20 A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE.
lifted, the mountains reared, and the world adorned.
We should never have been here in the glory of this
day, if our planet had not been swept by ﬁery storms
and shaken millions of times by the earthquake’s jar.
Their curses are inseparable from their blessings.
'Is there good in volcanoes, those fearful hells that
spout out glowing torrents that scathe and destroy,
and with their clouds of ashes envelop cities in ruin ?
Yes: these are the safety-valves of the globe. Weight
them down, as engineers sometimes do the safety-valve
of the steam-engine, and but a short time would suﬂice
to blow the crust of the globe to atoms.
Good in pain, that racks the nerves, that clouds the
mind,-— pain, the companion of sorrow, and herald of
death? Assurcdly there is. If we never felt pain,
long before we reached maturity our bodies would be
wrecks: a boy’s hands would be burned to cinders
before he was ten years old. The stomach would be
injured beyond recovery by our excesses, before We
were aware of our departure from correct living.
Pain is a guardian forever attending us : for the child
it is better than a hundred nurses. The mother’s eye
may wander from her charge; but pain never sleeps at
its post. The child, attracted by the glare, puts its
ﬁnger in the ﬂame. Ha ! it starts back with a sudden
cry. It has learned a lesson that can never be forgot-
ten. In a world without pain, not one human being in
a hundred could ever arrive at maturity. Pain, often
considered man’s enemy, is but an angel in disguise.
But there is certainly nothing good in pestilences,
that decimate cities and are the dread of nations? If
A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE. 21
no other good arose from them, they widen the streets
of our cities, cause arrangements to be made for sew~
erage, and cleanse and beautify the close and other-
wise ﬁlthy alleys. The general comfort arising from
all these may be traced in considerable measure to the
dread produced by those scourges of the human race.
The darkest features of some systems are often really
the best portions of them, when properly understood.
Ask a Protestant to name the darkest features of Catholis
cism, and he would probably say that portion of it which
binds' its members to life-long celibacy. Monk, nun,
and priest must never marry; or, if they do, they receive
the church’s ban. “ What a horrible system is this!”
says the Protestant. Not so horrible as it looks. These
monks, nuns, and priests are the most superstitious
members of the Roman church. And how fortunate it
is that their superstition dies with them, if true to their
vows ; and the most superstitious are the most likely to
be. Thus, when superstition culminates in the Roman
Catholic church, it is cut off forever. If the heretics
could pass a law, and make it binding, that the most
superstitious people should never marry, lest their
superstition should be inherited by their children,
what an outrage it would be deemed! Yet, thanks
to the blindness of the most intolerant of all Christian
sects, this is just what the church itself does; and
there is good here, where we had least reason to ex—
pect it. When a man becomes as fanatical as a Shaker,
he ought not to transmit his fanaticism to posterity.
How carefully the Shaker, by virtue of his faith, guards
against the possibility of it!
‘.22 A SERMON FRoM SHAKSPEARE.
But is there any good in war? There must be, if
Shakspeare is right; and I certainly think he is. Where
did we stand but ten years ago ? The North, a great
hunting-ground for slaves, and every man by law a kid-
napper; forty thousand preachers, and eighty thou-
sand merchants, on their knees, licking the dust at the
foot of the slave-power; the priests quoting scripture
in favor of and apologizing for the vilest of all crimes ;
and the merchants defending the practices, that they
might obtain 'the custom of the women-whippers and
baby-stealers. Where are they now? The red whirl-
wind of war has swept the whole brutal system from
the face of the land it insulted so long. Where now
are those godly Boston ministers who with pious faces
read their Bible-texts from the pulpit in favor of this
stupendous crime ? You can scarcely ﬁnd a man from
Maine to Mexico who dares lift up his voice in defence
of chattel slavery ; and the ministers are now hasten,-
ing to prove that they were always in favor of freedom,
and that Christianity has conquered and gained the
victory alone ! That war converted more than Chris-
tianity has done for a thousand years, and at the same
time converted the Bible.
The villains that applied the torch of rebellion to the
temple of our liberty expected to burn the fabric to the
ground; but, instead of that, away went rags and scraps,
hay and stubble, that blind priests and crafty politicians
had been gathering and piling for years around it. And,
when the smoke rolled away, there stood the temple in
its grandeur, and the golden statue of Liberty above all,
unharmed by the transient ﬁre, and unblackened by the
A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE.
smoke; and now, within that temple, stands a redeemed
people. This land has at length become in truth what
it was only in name, -—
“ The land of the free and the home of the brave.”
This grand stumbling-block out of our way, we take,
and shall henceforth keep, the foremost place in all the
world. When I ﬁnd war assisting so materially to bring
about such a condition of things, I cannot but agree with
Shakspeare, that there is “ good in every thing.”
“ But the Devil, you know, is all bad,” says my
orthodox brother. Bring him here and we will dis-
‘sect him, and I will show you that he has an angelic
kernel in his heart. A king who has ruled so long
over the largest population that was ever governed by
any one potentate, must have some redeeming traits.
It is only imaginary beings that are destitute of good.
A soul of good seems to be essential to a thing’s exist-
ence, destitute of which it must die, or rather, it never
could have lived. If there is a devil, there must be
good in him; but since, as the orthodox inform us,
there is no good in the Devil, it is evident that he does
not exist.
Good in death, -— the terrible curse pronounced by
Jehovah on all? Certainly, and the greatest of good.
Death, the sick man’s solace, the old man’s hope, the
good man’s friend, the slave’s release, the great uniter,
the twin of sleep, and the door of heaven. \Ve, as
spiritualists, see the good there is in death as no other
people ever did. We have come from the land of
24 A sERMoN FROM sHAKsrEARE.
shadows, the gloomy wilderness, peopled by devils and
lit by the ﬁre of lurid hells. Up we have come toIthe
“ delectable mountains,” fairer than those of which
Bunyan dreamed; and we revel in the rays of a sun
that never, never sets. The prospect is so clear that
we can see beyond the swift-flowing stream the loved
ones who have gone before; nay, we can hear their
cheerful voices, and know that it is well with them,
and must be well with us. In the light of this new
morning we can take death by the hand and say:
Thou art our benefactor, our unchanging friend.
Sent by a higher life on the most beneﬁcent of all
missions, when_our work is done on earth we will
greet thee with joy, and look into thine eyes with a-
smile; for thou shalt usher us into the company of the
immortal.
Is there good, then, in all that happens to man ? I
doubt not that we shall rise in the hereafter to where,
looking over all the chequered scene of earth’s uni
versal history, we shall exclaim, from the fullest assur
ance of its truth, All is well ! all is well!
0
w " L .L_ LIL” i ..L________ n%

2W5 I
.D‘ff. l
GOD, l
IN THE LIGHT 0F SGIENGE
AND COMMON SENSE,

WILLIAM DENTON.
mm ! /_-‘__,_
A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE BIJOU THEATRE, MELBOURNE,
DECEMBER 31, 1882.
-—s -<~>-:~—--
cIfdrlbourm: :
J. C. STEPHENS, PRINTER, 106 ELIZABETH STREET.
, -‘ 1883. ,A

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GOD
IN THE
Light of Science and Common Sense.
_——-n
“ THERE’s not a living man in all the earth but hath
G‘rod near to him as his own soul ; there’s not a woman
in the world but hath God nearer than the love in her
deep heart ; there’s not an infant in the world but hath
God near to it as the blood in its young veins ; there
are no souls forsaken of their God.”
“ Canst thou, by searching, ﬁnd out God? Canst
then ﬁnd out the Almighty to perfection? It is as
high as heaven, what canst then do ? Deeper than hell,
what eanst then know ? The measure thereof is larger
than the earth, and broader than the sea.” Words
put by the author of the Book of J ob into the mouth of
Zophar, the Naamathite.
It had been well if such thoughts had prevented men
from dogmatising about that of which the best informed
human beings can know but little. Very few of the
Bible writers, and very few of the religious teachers of
the present time, have manifested much modesty in
treating this subject. They tell us what God is, what
he has done from the beginning, and what he will do
for an eternity; they have fenced him round with their
creeds, they have been visitors in his council chamber,
and seem to look upon him as their special property,
very much as Barnum does on Jumbo.
2 Gen IN THE LIGHT or‘
But if at any time men might justly expect to know
the truth upon this, the greatest of all problems that
can be presented for human investigation, we certainly
may. If men ever had a right to speak or write upon
this question, we certainly have, for all questions that
concern humanity concern every one of us, and no
people that ever lived on the planet know as much
about the universe as do the people of the present
time.
Since the books of the Bible were written, the
universe in space and time has been more than a
million times enlarged. We have travelled on our
telescopic steeds over the illimitable celestial ﬁelds, and
have made the acquaintance of millions of suns that the
ancients never saw. Geology has opened to us the
doors of the Great Past, and we have explored its
chambers, that, like a universal museum, contain the
forms in which life has been embodied for many millions
of years. The men who lived before these grand
discoveries were made, were compelled to draw their
conclusions from that part of the universe with which
they were familiar; their knowledge of God was as
limited as their knowledge of the universe; knowing
nothing of what geology has revealed, they crowded
into a few days what had taken countless ages to
perform ; and all their ideas of God and his operations,
drawn from these false premises, were vitiated in con~
sequence. From the vastly higher stand-point that
we occupy, we take up the great problem of the ages,
and bring the light of science, and. reason informed by
science, to bear upon it.
The belief in a God or Gods is well nigh universal;
yet there must have been a time when it ﬁrst dawned
upon the human mind. The savage looked around
him, he beheld the sun that warmed and cheered him,
the river from which he drew the ﬁsh for his food, the
tree whose nuts satisﬁed his hunger, and his own body
more wonderful than all. And he said: “We make
our huts, our clubs and spears, and a great Maker
must have made all these things I see around me. He
made these bodies that shine above me; his mighty
seIENcE AND COMMON sENsE. 3
hand shaped these mountains and this ﬁrm earth, and
he, by his wisdom, fashioned man.” This was a very
natural thought. It was as sure to spring up in the
mind of man as the thought that the earth is ﬂat, and
that the sun rises and sets every twenty-four hours.
The Greek father of the Gods, the “immortal Jove,”
was only a magniﬁed man. Homer tells us :—
“ He rolls the thunder o’er the vaulted skies ;
Shakes his ambrosial curls, and gives the nod ;
The stamp of fate, and sanction of the God.
J ove, on his couch, reclined his awful head,
And J uno slumbered on the golden bed.”
Nor were the ideas held by the writers of the Bible
much superior to this. Jehovah was only a giant Jew,
and if the Jew had painted him, he would have had a
full board, and an aquiline nose. Adam hears his voice
as he walks in the garden in the cool of the day ;
Jacob wrestles with him all night ; he shows himself to
Moses, while he covers him with his hand. Isaiah sees
him with a dress on, for “his train” or skirts “ ﬁlled the
temple.” He labored for six days making the universe
and its occupants, and, at the expiration of the time,
rested and was refreshed. He made coats of skins, and
clothed Adam and his wife, after he had turned them
out of his garden into the cold world, and was so well
satisﬁed with the Egyptian mid-wives as to make them
houses. Those must have been indeed God’s houses.
Jesus believed in a personal God, who lived in heaven,
~sat upon a throne, and at whose right hand he expected
to sit; and even to-day a large proportion of Christians
expect to see a personal Divinity, to hear his voice, and
be welcomed by him to his palace of delights.
It is very easy to see, however, that this is not, and can-
not be,true. Of what use can feet be to abeing everywhere
present? He cannot possibly move from one locality
to another; he can neither come down nor go up, for
he is already both down and up; he can sit upon a
throne no more than a man can sit upon his own chin.
Christians also agree that God knows all things, and
knows them from all eternity. To such a being eyes
and ears are equally unnecessary. What could he see
4 GOD In THE LIGHT or
that he had not already observed? What could he
hear that he had not already heard? Nor could he
reason with a brain ; reasoning is only possible to beings
limited in knowledge, who desire to learn what is to
them unknown. Nor can an inﬁnite being have shape.
That only has shape which is bounded, for the boundary
constitutes the shape. To render shape possible there
must be space outside, but what can be outside of
inﬁnity? An inﬁnite little ﬁnger would leave no room
in the universe for the rest of the hand. How, then,
could there be a body? The notion of a God with a
shape, then, is evidently false, for if he has shape he is
ﬁnite, and cannot be God, if God is inﬁnite.
“ But cannot God, if he is inﬁnite, manifest himself in
shape?” If he does, it can only be that part of God
which exists in shape that can be seen, and that can
bear no proportion to the part that is unseen ; for the
ﬁnite must be inﬁnitely less than the inﬁnite; and
instead of seeing God under such circumstances, we
should only see what is inﬁnitely less than God.
But if God is inﬁnite, he is everywhere and every-
thing; for if he is not everything, he must be crowded
out by everything that he is not. God, to be inﬁnite,
must be not only in the sun, but he must be the sun,
or the sun takes up space that God does not, and he
lacks so much of being inﬁnite, and consequently of
being God. We must either abandon the deﬁnition of
God, which represents him as inﬁnite, and in that case
abandon the idea of universal Christendom, or we
must accept the doctrine that God is not only in all,
but is all.
It is evident that God is everything, even if we
accept the Jewish story of creation. Before anything
was created God ﬁlled the universe; he must have done
this if he was inﬁnite. He must have made the universe,
therefore, out of nothing, or out of his own substance.
But a universe full of God has no place even for
nothing. Creation could only, therefore, have been the
shaping of God in one form into God in another form.
But if God is all, then God is the universe, and the
universe is God ; and this, it seems to me, is the only
SCIENCE AND COMMON SENSE. 5
rational conception of God that we can entertain. All
the force in the universe is God’s force; all the life is
God’s life; all the truth is God’s truth; all the
thought is God’s thought. It follows that whatever is
true of the universe, is true of God, and whatever is
not true of the universe, is not true of God. God is
all we see and know ; and all that exists, which we do
not see and know ; the latter inﬁnitely greater than the
former. God is inﬁnite, for the universe is inﬁnite.
God is everywhere, for the universe is everywhere. We
cannot depart from God, for we cannot leave the
universe; nor can God forsake us, for the universe can
no more leave us than we can leave the universe, or a
man run away from himself.
We can readily see that many of the Jewish and
Christian ideas of God will not bear investigation. We
read, “ God created the heaven and the earth,” which
is very much like saying God created himself, which is
absurd, for heaven and earth is only a phrase meaning
what we mean, when we say the universe. Think of the
universe planting a garden, and walking in it in the
cool of the day! The God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob is no more reasonable than the universe of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Who gave these men
a monopoly of the universe? If God means the
inﬁnite and the eternal spirit, God the Father, God
the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are no more ap-
propriate than universe the father, universe the son,
and universe the Holy Ghost, which is no more appro-
priate than the mother universe, the daughter universe,
and the baby universe. God cannot he love unless
the universe is love. Love is, of course, included in
the universe, but so is hate and jealousy, envy and
revenge; and if God is any of these, he is all.
It follows, if the universe is God, that he knows most
of God who knows most about the universe; he who
knows least about the universe, is least acquainted
with God. Theologians, as a general thing, know very
little about God, for they do not study the universe,
which only truly reveals the divine. Geology that gives
such a wide view of the past, that has rescued from
6 GoD TN THE LIGHT OF
oblivion almost an eternity, is well ﬁtted to give us
enlarged conceptions of God, because it reveals to us
so much of the universe, and its operations. Here we
may see what has been done by the universe, the only
God, during hundreds of millions of years. Here is
no evidence of a personal Deity, no miracle-worker, no
achiever of impossibilities. The earth is rounded by
law, the same law that enspheres a rain-drop; the
rocks are formed by law, that which binds the particles
constituting the pebble holds the mountain masses
in its ﬁrm embrace, and composes the solid sides of the
warm-hearted earth. The same laws that govern life
today governed it then. Here are myriads of shells,
ﬁshes, reptiles, birds, and beasts that came into being
and perished before man’s appearance. Life, climbing
through them to higher forms, more man-like beings,
till it culminates in the men and women we behold on
the planet to-day. Were these forms made in mere
sport or wantonness, as a tavern-lounger whittles
nothings all day? I-Iad there been a God that could
transcend law, and for whose operation it was quite un-
necessary, why this waiting for its slow process, and
waiting for a hundred million years, as geology demon-
strates? A God waiting, as the blacksmith, who stands
by his forge till the iron is hot enough to be beaten into
shape, or a farmer till the winter’s snow disappears
before he can plough or sow!
There was no life on our planet till it had, naturally,
cooled to that state in which life was possible, and this
we know was many millions of years after it came into
being. As the planet continued to cool and improve, a
correspondingimprovement took place in the animals and
plants living upon it, and man only came after all the
natural steps had been taken from the simplest protozoa
to himself. Why not man on the boiling earth? or
why not the heated globe cooled by a word, and all
things made at once that could best subserve his
welfare? The reason evidently is that no power out-
side of nature exists in the universe, and only by the
operation of law can anything be accomplished.
SCIENCE AND common SENSE. 7
The being called God in the Bible, and worshipped
by so many millions in what are called Christian
countries, differs very widely indeed from the God
which nature reveals.
The Goal of’ the Bzble is Omnipotent ; he speaks, and it
is done; he commands, and it stands fast. At his
word, chaos ﬂies, and order from disorder springs.
Around the earth, a sunless, starless void extends in
every direction; but he speaks, and a myriad suns in
splendour shine, and around them planets in their order
roll. He needs no time, no instrumentalities; the
thought and the execution of it are instantaneous, and
impossibilities are unknown in his kingdom. He says,
“ Let the earth bring forth grass and trees,” and full-
grown trees nod to their full-grown neighbours, and
their rings of growth mark years that have never been.
Again, he says, “ Let the waters bring forth abundantly
the moving creature.” And instantly the hitherto
lifeless sea swarms with myriads of busy forms. Im-
mense whales gambol in the ocean, birds darken the air
that never before yielded to the pressure of a wing, for
what can refuse when omnipotence calls?
But since the universe or nature is the only God,
how different from this are the facts, as science reveals
them. Nature requires time to accomplish her work,
and must use instrumentalities. She cannot make grass
till she has ﬁrst formed the soil in which it may take
root. Nor can she form soil till rocks have been pro-
duced, whose worn down particles compose it; nor even
then, unless there be light and warmth to perfect its
organisation. She cannot give a tree the perfection of
a thousand years growth till the thousand years have
transpired. She can only attain the summit by faith-
fully taking all the steps that lead there. She cannot
reap till she has sown, and not then till the crop has
grown and ripened, and for everything accomplished by
her so much must ﬁrst be done.
If you say this limits God’s power, I answer I am not
responsible for the limitation. God’s power is limited,
because the power of the universe is limited. A sheet
of paper cannot be made with only one side nor a stick
8 GOD IN THE LIGHT OF
with only one end; a clock can never strike less than
one, and three times one can never be two, not even to
a God. Our ideas of God must conform to the facts of
nature, or they will be false, though sanctioned by all
the priests that ever officiated, or sacred books that were
ever written.
The God of the Bible loves Jacob rather than Esau
before either is born; he loves the Jews above all
people, and showers miraculous favours on them. He
feeds them by miracle, watches over them, ﬁghts for
them, guides them and delivers them, while he curses
all the nations round about for their sake.
Nature is no respeote'r of persons; all fare equally at
her hands; she has no well-beloved sons or daughters.
The frost that stiffens the ﬁeld-mouse in its nest freezes
the blood of the baby that was carelessly left in the log
cabin; ﬁre burns ﬂea and philosopher alike ; the
earthquake takes down prince and peasant at one gulp ;
the saint swinging his censer before the altar, and the
doomed malefactor in his cell. The sun warms every
man’s land, ripening rice for the Hindoo, and wheat for
the Caucasian, even expanding the narcotic leaf for the
tobacco-raising sinners of the Connecticut Valley. The
king has an idiot child, to the sad regret of a nation, the
cobbler’s boy is a world-blessing philosopher; not that
nature cared more for cobbler than for king, but he
drew more from her deep fountains that are open alike
to all. The infusorial point drinks its ﬁll of enjoyment,
and the “ rapt seraph” can do no more.
The Gods of the past were at times impatient; dis-
turbed by opposition, sometimes grieved, and at others
angry, and “ swore in their wrath.” Nature is sublimely
patient, calm and majestic. Above the earthquake’s
shock, and the volcano’s cloud, sit enthroned, unmoved,
undimmed the everlasting stars, ﬁt emblems of Nature.
For millions of ages she turned the ponderous globe
round and round; bathed it with sunshine, cooled its
fevered brow with her breath, and waited—oh, how
long she patiently waited—till life came, and then
watched and cared for it, while millions of years
passed like days, till the brute ripened into the man.
SCIENCE AND COMMON SENSE. 9
Nor did she curse or drown the speechless savage
because he was no philosopher. Philosophy is the
ripened fruit of humanity, and for it she is still patiently
waiting.
The drunkard at midnight howls his blasphemies
through the streets. How does Nature treat him?
She sends sleep, who puts her arms around him, and
gently lulls him to rest. He wakens in the morning
with a parched mouth and aching head, but this is only
a warning against his direst enemy. Nature punishes
not, for she knows no vindictiveness ; the evil conse-
quences that follow only follow as inevitable eﬁects, as
the stick is consumed when it falls into the ﬁre, or
the tree is riven by the lightning’s stroke.
God is, then, no majestic monarch sitting upon a
throne, and desiring the adulation of his abased sub-
jects, listening witha smiling countenance as they cry,
“ Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, heaven and
earth are full of the majesty of thy glory.” He can
be no personality, no more he than she, as properly
our Lady as our Lord. In him we live and move, and
have our being, and in us God lives and moves, and has
his being. He sees with our eyes, hears with our ears,
and thinks with our brains. We hear his voice in the
song of the blue bird, in the thunder of Niagara, and
the whisper of the evening breeze. We see his glory
in the sun that walks in majesty, the rainbow that spans
the heavens with its arch of beauty, and the dew-drop
that mirrors earth and heaven in its tiny glass. The
farmer beholds him in the springing blade, and the
gardener in the blushing rose, the mother in the smile
of her darling babe, and the husband in the love of his
trusting wife.
This doctrine destroys all orthodox theology, cuts it up
by the roots. Jehovah is gone—swallowed, as the rods
of the Egyptian enchanters were swallowed by the rod
of Moses. If Jehovah exists, he is a part of the
universe; and, since the true God includes the entire
universe, it includes him also. If he does not exist it
is well, and saint and sinner may rejoice.
10 GoD IN THE LIGHT or
Salvation by Jesus cannot be true ; men were never
lost, or in danger of being lest; they never departed
from God, and Jesus, therefore, could never bring them
nigh. The universe has too many sons for Jesus to be
an only begotten one. A mediator between God and
man is less needed than a mediator between the sun
and the earth, or between a mother and her child, and
is as impossible as it is unnecessary.
The theologian rears his brick and mortar establish
ment, and then says to the man who walks on Sunday
in the grand old woods,“Why don’t you come to the house
of God?” Is thy brick and mortar steeple house in any
sense the house of God that these woods and ﬁelds are
not? Show me the house that the lightning will
not strike, that the earthquake cannot throw down,
that needs no repairs and cannot be damaged, or com-
mences to repair its own damages as soon as made, and
I will show thee God’s house in the special, theological
sense. All houses are God’s houses, as all men are his
sons, and all beyond this is pretence.
By making God an individual, with human attributes,
men have linked his name in a special sense with their
little, and sometimes their very mean doings. The most
barefaced begging, church fairs, raffles, lotteries, guess-
cakes, and grab-bags, raise £6,000, and then a £12,000
steeple house is reared; an expensive organ is placed
in it, a fashionable preacher engaged, and the place is
styled God’s house; a gilded book, lying upon a velvet
cushion before the preacher is called God’s book, the
preacher’s talk is God’s word, or his gospel ; the people,
who pay to support the establishment, and make pro-
fessions of their belief in the doctrines taught in the
house, are called God’s people, and all the operations
connected with the house, the people, the preacher, and
the book, are styled God’s cause.
Show me the book that water will not wet, that ﬁre
cannot destroy, that is neither affected by mould nor
time, and I will acknowledge that it is God’s book in a
sense that no other is. The men and women that
water cannot drown, ﬁre burn, mosquitos bite, or powder
SCIENCE AND common SENSE. 11
blow up, and that no bullet can penetrate, may be God’s
people, but our planet has never seen them.
The old idea, the Christian idea of God, pampers
pride, and builds up a priestly aristocracy. Moses goes
on Mount Sinai to talk with God, and then he comes
down, and says: “ Here are the tables of stone written
by God’s ﬁnger ;” and thus the exceedingly faulty code
of Jewish morality is palmed on the world in God’s
name, and is painted on some of our Christian churches
today as the supreme moral law. “ He commands you
to offer sacriﬁces; it pleases him to smell the sweet
savour ;” and then there must be a class of men to do
this acceptably. Aaron is consecrated, and his sons,
and the people are burdened with the support of an
army of idlers, who pretend to go between the people
and God. They are a holy people unto the Lord.
So we have to-day in our land thousands of Christian
priests, who come between the people and God with
their prayers. They are the reverends, right reverends
fathers in God, whose prayers take the place of the
ancient sacriﬁces. God is thus set at a distance, only
to be approached through Jesus and his deputies, who
came to bring men nigh.
Here is the universe free for all. He sounds deepest
who has the longest line; he sees farthest who has the
best eye, and the best telescope; but the heavens show
him no more favour than they do the blind man, who
gropes along the pathway, staff in hand. What man
. can coax an extra sunbeam into his house, or shower on
his potato patch? When he can be found, we may
accept his claim to be a favoured child of the universe
—-—a well-beloved son.
What passes for theology is for the most part fancy,
wild and fantastic notions handed down from barbarous
times, and a proper study of the universe alone furnishes
us with the means to form a theology worthy of the
name.
We are told that God works miracles, but what is a
miracle? Something, it is said, that is done contrary
to the laws of Nature. But if our view of God is
correct, this is manifestly impossible. The laws of God
12 GOD IN THE LIGHT or
are but Nature’s methods of operation; and how can he
do anything contrary to his way of doing it? Whatever
is done by the universe is in accordance with its laws,
for its laws are but the way in which things are done.
The very fact that anything is done is evidence that 'it
is done according to the laws of the universe, and con-
sequently it can be no miracle.
Prayer, in the sense of asking God for special favours,
is ruled out by this view of God. Who would beg the
rain to cease, expecting an answer, or to the clouds, in
anticipation of a shower, to the rocks for geological
knowledge, or the stars for the truths of astronomy?
Clanst thou stay the sun’s ﬁery chariot with thy breath,
or lock the wheels of the rushing planets by thy en-
treaties ? The man that could overturn law by prayer
would be a veritable God-father, the God of all Gods.
Cursing God does not trouble him, praising God can-
not affect him. So far as the universe is concerned, the
ravings in the tavern are alike with the ravings in the
prayer-meeting. All men are God manifest in the
ﬂesh. We are all God’s people, all lambs of his ﬂock,
and his pasture is large enough for all that eternity can
produce.
“ Bat is there not a great Greater that made all
thinqs .7” What did he make them of? If he made
them of pre-existent matter, then matter is something
separate from him, and must equally have existed from
all eternity. We cannot conceive a matter distinct
from its form and extension, and these properties must
have been held by it eternally,if it existed eternally. Who
made them? If these could exist without a maker,
then all things else might exist without a maker. If
matter did not exist eternally, then God made all
things out of nothing, and before he began there was
nothing but himself, a solitary from all eternity. For
let him commence at any time to ﬁll the inﬁnite void,
there must have been an eternity before that, when God
saw nothing, for there was no light, and nothing to be
seen ; when he heard nothing, for there was nothing to
hear, and no air to convey the sound; when he could
not smell or taste, for there was nothing on which
SCIENCE AND COMMON SENSE. 13
these senses could be exercised. He could do nothing,
for there was nothing to be done, nor think, for there
was nothing to think about; and he must have been in
a worse condition than a jelly-ﬁsh in an idle ocean. Can
any reasonable man credit this ? What could have in-
duced him to commence operations after doing nothing
for an eternity.
Besides this by no means solves the difficulty. If we
accept a God, who made the universe, he must be
greater than the universe that he has made, and he still
remains to be accounted for. Instead of removing the
difficulty we have merely substituted a greater one.
What a wonderful eye that being must have had who
fashioned the eye of man! What an ear that being
must have that can hear the innumerable voices of the
. universe, and what ﬁngers he must possess who spread
out the heavens and fashioned the earth! If we are to
take the ground that all things must have had a maker,
this being must also have had. Who fashioned his all-
seeing eye? Who created his all-hearing ear, and built
up his marvellous structure? Are we told‘ that he is
the uncreated cause of all causes, the eternal, without
beginning and without end ? So is the universe, whose
existence is constantly being demonstrated to us, and
which, when accepted, relieves us from the necessity
of imagining a being, whose existence never can be de-
monstrated.
“But if we accept such a doctrine as that there is no
heavenly father, to whom we can go with all our troubles,
pour them into his loving ear, and receive his blessing.
Earth without him would be a dungeon, and heaven
itself be shrouded with gloom.” A father who would
allow his child to drown, when he heard his piercing
cries for help, and could just as easily save him as not
——a father that could see his child in a burning building,
and make no attempt to snatch him from the ﬂames,
that would allow some of his children to torture others
to death with excruciating agonies—what would such a
father be worth? What worse would it be to be desti-
tute of a father than to have such a father as this?
14 GoD IN THE LIGHT or
Here is a ship at sea with 500 souls on board ; infants
in arms, children that run about on deck, men and
women in their strength. A drunken sailor has gone
into the hold, and, while tapping the brandy cask, has
set the ship on ﬁre. The ﬁrst cry of alarm comes from
those who see the smoke rising from the hatchway.
Then comes the startling cry of ﬁre! ﬁre ! dreadful on
land, horrible at sea, a thousand miles from shore. See
the ﬂames climb the mast, and leap from shroud to
shroud! Out of their cabins rush the passengers, only
to see their terrible doom in these mounting ﬂames.
The boats are surrounded with ﬁre, and only one small
boat is launched, into which half a dozen sailors jump,
one of them the very man who ﬁred the vessel. Then
come the despairing, agonising cries of the doomed mul-
titude. Some pray, some curse; prayers and curses
are alike powerless to avert their dreadful fate; their
calcined bones go down with the hissing bull to the
Atlantic depths. Where was their heavenly father?
If there was a good God, the Father of the human race,
who cares for us as a father cares for his children, such
things would be of course impossible.
Here is a locomotive with a thousand passengers,
driving through the darkness of a stormy night. Fathers
hurrying home to their wives and children ; and in
homes far away loving hearts are waiting, and prayers
are going up to heaven that they may return in safety.
But a bridge that crosses a gulf has been swept down
by the wind, and there is a chasm! N ot a whisper from
our Father. How could you, O God? On rushes the
train, and down it sinks with every soul, and over them
rush the cold, unpitying waters. What father would
have allowed his children thus to perish?
“ But what a cold, uncomfortable doctrine.” Sup-
posing it to be so, I am not responsible for it. It might
be comfortable to be told that some good friend had left
you an immense fortune. Trusting in the statement,
you lavishly spend your money, and then discover that
you have been miserably deceived. You would not
thank the man who brought you the intelligence.
SCIENCE AND COMMON SENSE. 15
Suppose that God should act as a father would, what
would the result he? The drunken sailor ﬁres the
vessel, but God in his mercy blows the ﬁre out. He
could not do this for one vessel without doing it for all,
or he would be partial. Captains would know this, and
why, then, should they prefer sober sailors? why should
they exercise special care over their vessels and crew ?
If God cared for vessels, he must also care for houses.
Wherever his children were likely to be burned by ﬁre,
there would he be to save them. The consequence
would be that no particular care need be exercised by
the owners of buildings. God would be the universal
watchman, and carelessness, indifference, and drunken-
ness would be no more detrimental to the safety of a
building than caution, vigilance, and sobriety.
The wind has blown down the bridge, and God
whispers to the engineer, who stops his train before he
reaches the chasm. Let this be done for all trains, and
what would be the result?
The universe is better regulated, as it is for man’s
highest welfare, than it would be if a personal Divinity
cared for every man, and did for him what a father or a
mother would do for a child. The baby is born an idiot,
a curse to the family for a life-time, but idiots never
come without cause ; he was begotten when his father
was drunk, and inherited the beclouded reason of his
drunken progenitor. The law of inheritance by which
this is done has greatly helped to bring the whole human
race to its present exalted position. By its aid we ob-
tained a Shakspeare and a Newton, and by it earth is
eventually to be made a heaven.
If God cared for us as mothers care for their children,
-he must needs be mother, father, nurse, watchman,
policeman, physician, guide, insurance society, and
general factotum for the Whole human family. Why
should mothers or nurses watch over their children,
when God, with sleepless eye, looks after them? Why
should the policeman walk his rounds, when God will
not suffer his children to come to harm?
Were this the case, it would dry up the stream of
charity, paralyse the arm of endeavour, close the eye
16 0.01) IN THE LIGHT or
of watchfulness, kill sympathy, and reduce mankind to
universal babyhood.
It is absolutely certain that the universe does not
treat us as a father treats his children. What good
father would permit one of his boys to put the other on
a burning log-pile, and roast him to death ? Could we
believe either in his goodness or his fatherhood if he
saw the whole transaction, and never uttered even a
word of expostulation? What should we think of a
father who could look on calmly, and see four of his
sons bore out the eyes of a ﬁfth with red-hot irons, pull
his tongue and nails out by the roots, and pour melted
lead down his throat ? Might not that boy as well be
an orphan, as to havea father who cared as little for
him as that P
“ But,” we are told, “ God sees that it is best that he
should not interfere, as this would destroy men’s free-
dom.” But an omnipotent God could have made some-
thing else to be the best, and have thus preserved his
children from all this suffering. If God is so bound
that he must permit this suffering, in order that certain
results may be accomplished, then there is something in
the universe greater than he; that something is King,
and he is its subject, and ceases, therefore, to be God.
“ But Nature allows all these things,” of course,
because they cannot be avoided. The blossom must
precede the ripened fruit, and the fruit must be green
and sour before it can be ripe and sweet. Planets must
have a ﬁery birth, and, therefore, must be scarred by
volcanoes, and rent by earthquake throes as they pass
to maturity; and there is in the universe neither the
power nor the disposltion to turn aside to save a city
any more than there is to save an ant-hill.
Here is the moon doomed, by the absence of air and
water, to be a barren waste. Between Mars and
Jupiter a world has evidently been shattered to atoms,
and possibly all the beings that then existed upon it.
Meteoric masses, fragments of large cosmical bodies,
occasionally fall to the earth, as larger ones have fallen
in past times, and produced disastrous consequences,
and these show us what we call accidents belong to the
SCIENCE AND COMMON ss‘nsn. 1?
heavens no less than the earth, and that there is no
more miraculous exercise of power to prevent two
worlds from coming into contact than there is to prevent
two pebbles from striking together as they go rolling
down a stream.
“This view of God is terrible,” says one; “ it chills
my soul.” But if it is true, which would you rather
have? It is no more terrible than the truth; and it is
better to accept the truth than to go through the world
forever the victim of a fraud and a lie. But is it any
more terrible than the doctrine held by Christians? Is
a being who drowned the world purposely less terrible
than a universe, in which such a thing happens by the
operation of natural law? Accept the God the Bible
reveals, and we have a devil, as much worse than a com-
mon devil, as an inﬁnite tyrant is worse than his victim.
The old idea of God makes man a cowardly slave.
“ What are we that we should come into thy presence,
or lift up our eyes to the place where thine honour dwell-
eth.” Are the words that drop from the man’s lips, while
he kneels at the foot of the image that in his ignorance
he has set up. “ If thou hadst been just to mark, and
severe to punish,” he continues,“ we had been long
since in that place where hope never comes.” He makes
his God so high, so unnatural, so cruel, that a come-
between is necessary, and blood must be shed to obtain
his favour.
Taking the common orthodox view of God, if we are
defective, it must be because he has made us so. If
God is Omnipotent, he could just as well have made us
perfect as not, and we have the very best grounds of
complaint against him. We might justly pray, “ O
God, we are thy children, so thou hast informed us in
thy word; thou couldst have made us pure as angels of
light, and as happy continually as the sun is bright;
but then has made us subject to sin, and all its woe.
We, therefore,lay this at thy door. It is not anything
that we chose, but it is what thy decrees have brought
upon us. Thou has so constituted us that we are as
sure to sin as we are to breathe. We, therefore, lay all
lying, theft, adultery, drunkenness, and murder upon
is GOD is THE LIGHT or
thee, for if thou hadst not willed it, it never could have
been. O God, we pray thee to reform thyself, and
then the whole world will be reformed. Kill the devil,
or reform him. Shame upon a God who ever allowed
him to exist. Put out hell ; a God that cannot manage
the universe without a hell should abdicate the throne,
and allow a better God to take his place. Give every
child born into the world a good physical constitution,
and a large well-balanced brain. Open the door of
heaven for every human soul, and let it be a heaven as
good as a God can make, that we may have compensa-
tlalion for the great injustice we have experienced at thy
ands.
We would suggest to thee, O Lord, great improve-
ments that are needed in this world of ours. Make
fertile the frightful deserts, temper the climate of
Africa, and improve the appearance of its inhabitants.
Give us better weather in New England, and let there
be more sunshine in Old England; destroy the mos-
quitos, and kill the black ﬂies; let the weeds depart,
and give us good crops with less labour. Make the rich
bend' their backs to labour, and give the poor a respite
from excessive toil. Thou hast placed us upon a world,
O God, that might be very greatly improved. Give
us thy omnipotent power, and thy inﬁnite wisdom, and
in half an hour we would make a World so beautiful
that thou wouldst blush to think that thou hadst placed
man on such an unﬁnished mud-ball as this.”
Such a prayer might bring God to his senses, and
lead him to kneel and ask our pardon for the unneces-
sary misery that he had caused us.
But Gods of this description only exist in the ima-
ginations of the ignorant, and all things are as perfect
as the conditions under which they have been produced
would allow. It is in our ignorance that we have made
kings to rule over us, popes to think for us, priests to
pray for us, and gods to damn us.
But the world is growing wiser; we say to the king,
“Rule your mighty self, and you will probably have
enough to do.” To the pope, we say, “ Think for your-
self, old man; but whether~ you do or not, you cannot
SCIENCE AND coiiMoN sE'Nsij. ‘19
think for us. You are, doubtless, as infallible as the
swearing ﬁsherman, your illustrious predecessor and
patron saint. He on one occasion is said to have drawn
money out of a ﬁsh, and you draw it constantly from the
helpless people, who have been caught on your papal
hook.” To the priest we say, “ Pray for us no longer;
your prayers can no more change the order of the
universe, than the croak of a frog can cause the sun to
shine on us at midnight.” To the false gods that have
been palmed upon us in the name of this or that religion,
we say, “ You are as impotent to damn as you are help-
less to save. Here are we the children of the universe,
and we shall always be. It took the eternity of the
past to produce us, and we are for the eternity of the
future.”
You say God is inﬁnite. I say the universe is inﬁnite,
without beginning and without end. God, you tell me,
is omnipresent; it is certain that the universe is omni-
present, for it is all ; outside of which nothing can be.
God knows all things, so does the universe. Even what
some call dead matter recognises whatever takes place
in its vicinity, and can repeat it to the intelligent mind.
The universe is the ever-living, the originator of all
life, the fountain of all energy, the father of all love, all
hope, all intelligence, that liveth and abideth forever.
It is not Omnipotent, for there are things in their
nature impossible; but it can do all that is possible to
be done.
There is a sense in which the universe or Nature is
both our father and our mother, caring equally for all,
doing the best possible for all. The Inﬁnite has given
us life, knowledge, wisdom, love, and poured out bliss
for us like an overﬂowing fountain. Has given us not
only life, but future life, and all glorious possibilities.
More than father, it has done more than father could
ever do ; dearer than mother, the mother of all mothers ;
the love of our mother is only a drop out of her inﬁnite
heart. For millions of _years we shall climb the mount
of progress, and know more and more of the inﬁnite
mystery, forever revealing itself to the human soul.
20 con in THE LIGHT or soinivon AND common SENSE.
A universe without a spirit, an animating principle,
would be the corpse of a universe; and this is what
people have mistaken for it, and shrunk from it as they
would from a corpse, if it was set up to rule over them.
I believe in a universe, every atom of which throbs with
life and motion, and is guided by the highest intelligence.
These stars around us are suns, and these suns are the
fathers of countless worlds, that are not like any useless
drift weed, to be washed on an unknown shore; but
worlds steered by the inﬁnite spirit of humanity; and
not humanity a walking clod for seventy years, and a
rotting clod at the expiration of that time,but humanity
—-men and women—~with living souls, the highest em-
bodiments of this inﬁnite spirit. What urges blazing
suns to throw off ﬁery drops, that cool into stony
worlds? What causes them to blossom into life, and
life to advance through ﬁn propelled ﬁsh buried in the
waters, to scaly reptile basking on the rocks, to soaring
bird, and tree-climbing ape that fathers the ﬁrst rude
man? It is the living, guiding, governing spirit, never
for a moment absent from any part of the universe,
never breathed into man, or lower organic form, because
always present. This is the life of our life, the soul of
our soul; our father, our mother; and all people are
our brothers and our sisters, the offspring of this
spirit. Let us love them, help them, bless them, and
we shall receive a satisfaction that no worship of false
gods can give; and, after death—
“ The good begun by us shall onward ﬂow
In many a branching stream and river grow ; '
The seed that in these few and ﬂeeting hours
Our hands unsparing, and unwearied sow,
Shall deck our graves with amaranthine ﬂowers,
And yield ye fruits divine in heaven’s immortal bowers.”

J. C. STEPHENS, PRINTER, 106 ELIZABETH STREET, MELBOURNE.
MR. WM. DENTON’S
MELBOURNE LECTURES.

The following of .M r. Danton/s Lectures,
delivered in JVfelboztrize, are reported in
the “Harbinger of Light.”
THE PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH. September 1st.
THE NEW RELIGION. October 1st.
THE WAY TO BE HAPPY. November lst.
THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION. December 1st.
PROPHECIES OF THE BIBLE. January, 1883.
GOD, IN THE- LIGHT OF SCIENCE AND
COMMON SENSE. February, 1883.
W.-
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(4.) The Devil of Darkness; or, Evil in the Light of
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-J E HOVAI—I
THE BIBLE,
ENSLAYERS 0f WOMAN.
BY WILLIAM DE NTON.
L
Y
MANCHESTER:
REPUBLISHED BY E. W. WALLIS, GEORGE STREET, CHBETHAM HILL.

FARMERY 8i SONS, PRINTERS, TOWN HALL STREET, BLACKBURN.
TO THE READER.

HIS lecture, by WILLIAM DEN'roN, was printed in the Religio Philoso-
phical Journal, of Chicago, some years since. As it has not been
issued in pamphlet form I have taken the liberty to reproduce
it, believing that it is well worthy of preservation. A proportion of any
proﬁt derived from the sale of this pamphlet will go to the widow of Mr.
Denton.
In Eccles. vii, 27 and 28, the following base utterance is printed :--
“Behold ! this have I found. counting one by one to ﬁnd out the account
(which still my soul seeketh, but I ﬁnd not), 0ne(g00d)man among a thousand
have I found ; but a(g00d)w0man have I not found.” A libel upon woman-
kind of the grosscst character—yet it is said to be God’s Word ! Surely we
cannot believe that it is God’s opinion of his own work i The writer must
have kept bad company. A committee of ladies is being formed in America
for the purpose of examining and revising the bible in the interests of woman.
‘When they have done, we may look for some interesting results. The bible
has been dealt with by men so long and so often that it is a wonder
women have not taken it in hand before.
We may well ask though, what is the value of a book that needs so
much tinkering? \Vhen the women have revised it, and expunged some
more errors and wiped out its “ he-ness,” will it be any more the Word
of God than before ?
The abuse of the bible consists in putting it in the place of Truth as an
authority, and exalting it above the Divine Light—the voice of God in
the soul. We shall some day learn to use it rationally, as an aid to under-
standing past spiritual experiences, and sift the truth as grain from its chaff
of error. On this subject I commend to your notice my pamphlet on the
“ Use and Abuse of the Bible.”
Yours for Truth,
E. w. WALLIS.
as.
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JEHOVAH & THE BIBLE,
Enslavers of Woman.

A
Y
so unjust to women, and a lady, who overheard his question,
said, “ I can tell you, it is because it is a he-book.” Her
statement is both true and expressive. The bible is com-
posed of sixty-six different books, written by more than forty differ-
ent persons, and, as far as we know, every one a man. Two of them,
Ruth and Esther, bear the names of women, but they certainly were
not written by them. Supposing the bible to be inspired by God,
what can be the reason that he did not inspire woman to com-
municate a portion of his will? The Jewish and Christian
religious, founded on this he-book, are he-religions, onesided, and
very unjust to woman.
Jehovah, the god of this bible, is a he, who has no wife to
smooth his angry brow, or comfort him when he is “grieved at
his heart.” He is a heavenly father, but there is no heavenly
mother; he is an almighty king, but there is no Omnipotent queen;
he is a lord of hosts, but there is no lady of hosts ; the Lord is a
man of war, but though so much needed, there is no divine woman
of peace. Jesus, the only child of Jehovah, is a son. Why did
he not beget a daughter, who might right the wrong that the ﬁrst
woman is said to have committed? As God has no female com-
panion, neither has Jesus, on earth or in heaven, for “ the bride,
the lamb’s wife,” of the apocalyptic seer, is only a golden city.
The Holy Ghost, the comforter, is a he. “ When he is come,”
says Jesus, “ he will shew you all things.” Three male Gods, or
one male God in three male persons I This is unnatural, contrary
to the dual principle exempliﬁed in almost every department of
nature. It is bad for woman and quite as bad for man.
The Roman Catholic Church, perceiving this great deﬁciency,
elevated the mother of Jesus into the Queen of Heaven and the
l l ENRY C. WRIGHT once asked a friend why the Bible was
4
mother of God. The Shakers, too, saw the one-sidedness of the
bible theology, and hence their “ elect lady, Mother Ann," who
equally with Jesus is the Saviour of mankind.
Among barbarous nations, brute force is lord, and the strong
make slaves of the weak. Woman's position, therefore, in conse-
quence of her lack of bodily strength, is that of a slave, and man’s
that of a tyrant. The elevation of a people may be measured by
the position that woman occupies among them. The bible did not
make the ancient Jews unjust to women, but it reﬂects the
opinions of those semi-civilized people, and where it is accepted
as divine, its tendency is to cause a more enlightened people to
cling to barbarisms that they would otherwise, by natural develop-
ment, have outgrown.
The ﬂames of the bible characterizes it throughout. Three
angels appeared to Abraham and subsequently to Lot; they were
three males, for Abraham mistook them for men ; and so did the
inhabitants of Sodom. The angel that wrestled with Jacob is
called a man; and the angel that appeared to Menoah and his
wife was “ a man of God.” The angel that announced to
Zachariah the birth of John, was a male, and so was the angel who
was sent from God with a message to the mother of Jesus; the
angel that rolled away the stone from the sepulchre is styled a
“he,” and the two that appeared to the woman in the sepulchre
are called by another Gospel writer “two men in shining gar-
ments.” The four and twenty angelic elders, that the revelator
saw standing before the throne, were men, and so were the hundred
and forty-four thousand who stood next to them, crowding women
off to a considerable distance. I know of no single instance in the
bible, where the sex of an angel is indicated, that the angel is not
a male. The difference between the artists of to-day and the
prophets of old, is strongly shown in the bible text and the modern
engravings which illustrate it, in which angels are almost univer-
sally represented as females.
Woman has as little chance for justice among these masculine
gods, angels, and bible-writers, as the moon has to display its
glory in the glare of the sun; and we do not need to turn over
many pages of the bible to discover this. Man is created, the
beasts are all made, brought to him and named before woman is
thought of; and then there is no independent purpose in her
creation. the is to be a helpmeet for man, but who is to be a
helpmeet for woman P She is not independently made from the
p
')
dust but must owe to man the rib, which Jehovah transforms into
a woman. Suppose a woman had written the story of creation,
and represented the ﬁrst man as being made out of the ﬁrst we-
man’s rib ; would it not have looked suspicious, to say the least;
How many men would have believed the story? Why should
Woman believe the story? Man has so accustomed woman to
receive both law and gospel at his hands, that she scarcely dares
to think of doing otherwise.
Adam begets sons and daughters, and we have the names of the
sons, and some particulars of their history; but what were the
names of his daughters? Being daughters they were either un-
worthy of names, or the names were unworthy of record.
We have a long list of patriarchs—chief fathers from Seth to
Noah, and from Noah to Abraham, but where are the matriarchs,
the chief mothers’! They were evidently too insigniﬁcant to be
mentioned
When Abraham goes into Egypt, he tells his wife, Sarah, to say
she is his sister, which she does. and repeats the lie when they go
to Gerar. Woman, at that time, appears to have been as much
subject to man’s will as a Southern slave was to his master. Sarah
was subject to Abraham, and called him lord ; and the writer of
the First Epistle of Peter presents her as an example for the
Christian women of his time; he says: “the holy women of old
time were in subjection to their own husbands,” “ even as Sarah
obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, whose daughters ye are as long
as ye do well.”——(l Peter, 3-6.) How proud woman should be of this
great privilege! If ye do well ye shall be called daughter of her
who lied when commanded by her husband, and in subjection called
him lord. The Women who refuse to do this, in Peter‘s opinion,
would be ill-doers. Woman only does well, in the opinion of most
Bible-writers, when she consents to be a slave.
In Syria, in the age of Abraham, Lot, and Jacob, and among the
rude people of that country generally, woman’s honour, chastity
and even life, seem to have been at the mercy of man ; and the
gods these people made and worshipped were of course no better
than their makers. When the angels visited Lot in Sodom, and
the vile men of the place came to his door and demanded them, he
offered to bring out to them his virgin daughters, and says,“ Do ye
unto them as is good in your eyes.” He might as well have given
a lamb to a pack of hungry wolves, and say to them, “ Do ye to it
as is good in your eyes.” The young women never gave their con-
6
sent, we may be sure, to such an infamous proposal as this 3 but
Lot seems to have thought that he had as much right to dispose of
them as he would of his cattle or sheep. The story is probably
false since miracle enters very largely into it, but it shows the
position of the writer on this question, and doubtless reﬂects the
sentiments of the people at the time it was written. ‘
Abraham’s ﬁrst wife having no children, he took for his wife, or
concubine, Hagar, his slave, who had by him a son, Ishmael. Sarah
and Hagar quarrelled, as might be supposed, and Abraham turned
her with her child into the wilderness, where, according to the
biblical account they would have perished of thirst, had not an
angel shewed her a well of water. Abraham is represented as doing
this infamous deed at the express command of Jehovah. How much
truth there is in the story it is impossible to tell. A portion of it is
evidently false. Ishmael was at least sixteen years old at the time,
and yet it says, when the water was spent in the bottle, “ she cast
the child under one of the shrubs," for she did not wish to see him
die. (Gen. 21, 15-1 (3.) A young man sixteen or seventeen years
of age was no babe to east under a shrub. Yet, doubtless, the pious
patriarchs of old, whcn power and passion were masters, frequently
acted in a similar manner, and their Lord was supposed to be well
satisﬁed with their conduct.
lahan’s daughters appear to have been completely subject to the
will of their father. The elder of them, Leah, became Jacob’s wife,
though he did not love her, she being palmed upon him in the night
by the tricky Laban, tor Rachel whom he did love. In addition to
this, two hand-maidens were “given” to Jacob to wife, without
any intimation of the women having any choice in the matter. The
book of Genesis makes but little mention of woman, but what
it does say is very little to her credit. It is woman that is tempted
by the serpent, and tempted her husband, and on her Jehovah’s
most terrible curses fall. “ I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and
thy conception 3 in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy
desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Think
of a brutal God, with scowling countenance and ﬂashing eye,
fulminating his anathema upon the trembling, naked woman in tears
at his feet! Wretched woman l could she have had the faintest
conception of the horrible consequences of her fruit-eating, she
would doubtless have starved rather than have taken a bite. The
man who should wilfully curse one woman with the pains of child-
bearing for some trivial oﬂ'ence, we should regard as a monster of
7
wickedness. What shall we think of a God, who, according to this
story, curses every mother in the world 2
“He shall rule over thee,” is the prophetic curse. What pious
man would allow the words of his God to fall to the ground ‘2 The
British law, but a short time ago, allowed a man to whip his wife,
if the stick that he did it with was no larger than his little ﬁnger.
The man who rules must have a sceptre, and the Englishman's stick
was his sceptre, to make his wife submissive to his rule.
It is a woman that looks back and is transformed into a petriﬁed
pickle, a warning to women in all generations. Two women make
their father so drunk that he commits with them, on two consecu-
tive nights, the most beastly crime. Lot, dear, good man, knows
nothing about it,- he is the innocent victim of these vile women.
But if the women had been allowed to testify, our opinion about
“ righteous Lot,” as James calls him, would have been greatly
modiﬁed. It is a woman who induces Jacob to deceive his blind
father, and steal the blessing from his brother Esau.
Abraham believes the angel who promises him a son, but Sarah
incredulously laughs, and when taken to task for it by the angel,
denies it. Having lied for her lord, it has become easy, and she is
ready to practice on her own account.
Jacob s wives and concubines receive considerable notice. but if
a man should write about women in such a manner to-day, he
would be in danger of imprisonment for obscenity. Laban s
daughter steals her father’s images, and lies to prevent their dis-
covery. It is Tamar that seduces Judah, and the wife of Potiphar
that tempts the chaste Joseph, but in all these cases it is man that
relates the story, and all that woman has to do is to believe it and
be humble and submissive when she reads the disgraceful records of
her sex.
The Jewish laws, said to have been given by Jehovah, for the
government of the nation, correspond in their treatment of Woman,
with the sentiment which we have found among the people. If a
woman bore a man-child, she was unclean for seven days, and was
not allowed to go into the sanctuary or touch any hallowed thing
for nearly ﬁve weeks. This is bad enough; she must not. only
suffer the pain of child-bearing, not only care for the infant, but be
cursed for an imaginary uncleanness which she has contracted.
She has been guilty of being a mother. But this is not all ; if she
bore a maid-child she was to be unclean for fourteen days, and was
not allowed to enter the sanctuary or touch any hallowed thing for
8
nearly ten weeks. She has been doubly guilty, ﬁrst of being a
mother, and then the mother of a child that may be a mother. The
unavoidable inference from such a law is, that a maid-child is
naturally inferior to a man-child, and doubly pollutes the woman
that bears her.
In the 30th chapter of Numbers is a special revelation from
Jehovah to Moses in reference to woman, which clearly proves
that he regarded her as mentally inferior to man. If a man vows
unto the Lord, he must not break his word : “ He shall do according
to all that proceedeth out of his month.” But if a married woman
makes a vow and her husband hears it, he can make it void ;
“ Every vow, and every binding oath to aﬁ'lict the soul, her husband
may establish it, or her husband may make it void.” It is evident
that he who made this law supposed. that woman had not sufficient
judgment to know what it was proper to vow: and as a. parent
decides for the child what is best for it to do, so man is to decide
for woman. Christian women who believe that this came from
Jehovah can only consistently submit to the government of man.
For widows, the Jewish law made no legal provision. If a man
dies and leaves no son, the inheritance goes to the daughter ; but if
he has a son, there is no provision for the widow or the daughters.
If he leaves daughters, but no sons, the estate descends to the
daughters; if he leaves no child, the property goes to his brother,
who must marry the widow, or she must loose his shoe, in the
presence of the elders, and spit in his face—Den. 25 : 9. However
much this indecent conduct might gratify her hate, it put no money
in her purse, and left the man in full possession of what in reality
ought to have been her property. If the man has no brothers, the
property passes to his father’s brothers; and if his father has no
brothers, it goes to the nearest kinsman. Woman is rigorously
excluded, except in the case of daughters, when there is no son;
and the law was amended in consequence of a personal application
to Moses, by some of the strong-minded women of the time.~--
Num. 27th chap.
Can that law be otherwise than unjust that gives to a widow or
a sister no portion of the husband’s or brother’s property, while a
cousin, who is a man, may take all? Think of the condition of
the Jewish widow, who has sons and daughters. The estate on
her husband’s death given to her son or sons, and she left without
a home to toil or subsist on charity, while her daughters are glad
to become fractional wives of some rich Jew.
9
Men having had the making of the Jewish law in their own
hands, and women being entirely under their control, their interests
and rights were but little regarded. The man sold his daughters
for marriage ; he could give them as pledges or even sell them as
slaves. The Jewish soldier could lead off a captive woman, willing
or unwilling, married or unmarried; she was his slave, and her
‘consent was no more considered necessary than that of a sheep is
by a butcher. See Deut. 21 : 10. If he became dissatisﬁed with
her he could let her go, but could not sell her. What a privilege !
The law for Israelitish matrons was not much better than that
for captives taken in war. Deut. 24 : l. “ When a man hath
taken a wife and married her, and it come to pass that she ﬁnd no
favour in his eyes, because he has found some uncleanness in her
hand, then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give in her
hand, and send her out of his house.”
“ But, Moses, my husband is unclean ; he is a gluttonous man,
an adulterer and a drunkard ; I do not wish to live with him any
longer.”
What says Moses ‘l He shakes his head. “ You must bear with
him as well as you can, for the Lord has no message of deliverance
for you.”
Let every married woman of to-day send off her tobacco-chewing,
smoking, liquor-drinking, unclean husband, and there would be
such an exodus as the world has not seen since the day that Israel
went out of Egypt.
Women were never chosen to ofﬁciate in the temple ; priests are
continually referred to in the Old Testament, but pricstesses never.
In this respect the Jews were below the Greek and Romans, in the
temples of whose Gods women held honorable positions. The
sons of Aaron were important individuals, and Jehovah by especial
mandate attends to their needs ; but the daughters of Aaron appear
to have been important only as they furnished sons to minister
before the Lord. To this day women sit in the gallery of the
Jewish synagogue, and look at their lords below worshipping the
God of their fathers.
I do not wish to be understood as teaching that woman was
worse treated by the Jews generally than she was by the people
round about them at that time. In some respects her treatment
was probably better ; but it was far from just. Woman among
the Jews enjoyed a large amount of liberty ; she was not shut up
in a harem, nor was her face hidden when she appeared in public.
10
At times she exercised her prophetic gifts, and was consulted as
mediums are to-day. But the Bible found woman the slave of man,
subject to his will, her entire living in his hands, and its writers
never attempted to break her bonds or elevate her to her true
position.
The utterances of some women are given in the Bible, but most
of themfare quite unworthy of them, and but little in keeping with
their general character. The song of Miriam, the sister of Aaron,
is recorded in Exodus. Standing on the shore of the Red Sea, she
sees the tide roll over and swallow the hosts of the Egyptians.
Thousands of men, most of them innocent soldiers with wives and
children awaiting their return, overwhelmed by the waters, they
struggle and drown. N o pity moves the heart of the Jewish
maiden, but, leading the joyful procession of women, she strikes her
timbrel and sings, “Sing ye to the God, for he hath triumphed
gloriously , the horse and his rider hath be thrown into the sea.”
We have, too, the speech of J ob’s wife. Job is the soul of patience;
he is one who fears God and eschews evil 3 but he has a dreadful
wife. In spite of all that God allows the devil to do to torment
Job, he holds fast his integrity ; but J ob’s wife aﬁiicts him more
than the devil and his boils, and she advises him to “ curse God
and die.” If she had written the account, should we have regarded
Job as such a model of patience’?
In the book of Proverbs we have a prophecy that King Lemuel’s
mother taught him, and in it we ﬁnd the following : “ Give strong
drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine to those that be of
heavy hearts. Let him drink and forget his poverty, and remember
his misery no more.” It is certainly one of the worst lessons that a
mother could teach a son, and was most probably written by some
Wine-bibbing man.
The mother of Samuel offers a thanksgiving to Jehovah for the
birth of her child, and in it she says : “The pillars of the earth are
the Lord’s, and he hath set the world upon them.” Had she been
born in India, she would probably have said : “The great tortoise
is the Lords, and he hath set the world upon its back.” The one
as true as the other.
Those actions of women which are recorded in the Bible, and for
which they receive the greatest praise, are generally such as we can
only look upon with horror and detest-ation. Bahob, the harlot, is
praised in the highest terms both in the Old Testament and in the
New ; Paul praises her faith, and James praises her works. What
11
had this superlatively excellent woman done? When spies were
sent from the Jewish camp into Jericho, to learn how the city could
best be taken, they lodged at the house of Rahab : when she had
learned that the intention of the Israelites was to take the city
and murder the inhabitants, instead of denouncing them to her
townsmen and warning them of the destruction that awaited them,
she, upon promise of the lives ofherselfand family, hid them on the
roof, lied when men came to search for them, and, as the reward for
her infamy, was saved when the city was “utterly destroyed.” David,
who manifested the worst traits of her character, was the grandson
of this vile woman.
There is another woman who is landed in the Old Testament in
the highest terms. The angel of the Lord says: “Blessed above
women shall J ael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, be ,' blessed shall
she be above women in the tent.” What noble deed had this woman
done that God should send his angel to declare, and cause the
inspired penman to record to all ages, the blessing which he
pronounces upon this woman 2
Jabin was king of Canaan ,' and the Lord, we are told, sold the
children of Israel into his hands. After some time, Deborah, a
prophetess, who is said to have judged Israel at that time, stirred
up Barak, who gathered a host of people to war against their
oppressors. Sisera, the captain of J abin’s host, went against them
with nine hundred chariots of iron, but was defeated, and ﬂed on
foot for his life. He approached the tent of Heber, the Kenite,
with whom he was acquainted and on friendly terms. Jael, the wife
of Heber, saw him coming and met him in the most friendly manner,
saying, “Turn in, my Lord, turn in to me, fear not.” He did so,
and lay down, and she covered him with a mantle. He then asked
for water to drink, and she opened a bottle of milk and gave him
drink. “ Good soul ,’° he doubtless said to himself, “ I am as safe
here as if at home.” “ Now,” said he, “stand in the door of the tent,
and if any one asks if there is any man here, say no.” She doubtless
signiﬁed her assent, and with this hospitable, kind-hearted woman
for a guardian, he fell asleep. Is it for this she is praised, then?
Not at all; wait, watch her; she leaves her post and moves on
tiptoe through the tent. Now she is inside, and in her hand you
' observe a hammer, with which she draws out one of the large nails
to which the tent rope is attached ,' she softly approaches the
sleeping man, in her left hand the nail and in her right the work-
man’s hammer. He sleeps soundly, for he is weary, and conﬁding
"12
in the wife of his friend, he dreams of no danger ; but she places
the nail to his temple, and like a fury smites with the hammer j,
he bows, falls, and lies at her feet a corpse, and this foul monster
of wickedness is blessed above women, and handed down to be
admired of all generations. Would Plutarch have recorded such
an action with praise? Would Herodotus have landed such a
deed 2 If not, who are the heathens ‘5
But the New Testament, we are told, is woman’s grand charter
of freedom. There alone do we see woman elevated to her true
position, and by its inﬂuence has society been puriﬁed, and the
reign of justice inaugurated wherever it has been accepted as divine.
‘ It is true that there is much in the New Testament that is favour-
able to woman. Jesus was the friend of woman ; and if the
account of the woman taken in adultery be accepted as true, he
treated her in a delicate and generous manner. He seems to have
been far in advance of Paul in this respect. In those countries
where Christianity is the prevailing religion, woman is better treated
than in those where inferior religions are taught and accepted.
But the Germans, long before Christianity was born, had learned
to treat women with great respect, and, what Christians have not
yet done, admitted women to an almost equal share in their public
councils.
In the genealogy of Jesus, given in Matthew, reference is but
given to three women from whom Jesus was descended. The ﬁrst
is Rahal), the harlot, and, as we found, liar and traitor. The second
is Ruth, and the third Bathsheba, who committed adultery with
David, which resulted in the murder of her husband Uriah.
Jesus was never married, and in this respect, as an example for
humanity, he was very defective. He even favours celibacy, by
precept as well as example. His doctrine was that he who could
live without marriage had better so live—a notion at war with the
best interests of the human race.
Paul says, that he who marries does well ; but, unfortunately, he
says, he that does not marry does better. Contempt of marriage,
and a preference of celibacy, runs through the New Testament and
taints it. Woman is an unclean thing, that a man should have as
little connection with as possible. “ It is better to marry than to
burn ” in lust, is Paul's idea, and he seems to think that the only
reason, which can justify a union of the sexes, is for the purpose of
amative gratiﬁcation. It is true that he thought that the end of all
things was very near, and under this mistaken idea he may have
1‘3
counselled men against marriage, when he would not otherwise.
The author of the Book of Revelations sees 144,000 that sung a
new song before the throne, and followed the lamb wherever he
went 5 they are the immaculate, gathered from the world’s millions
of all ages and climes. When he enquires who they are, he is told
that they are those who have not deﬁled themselves with women.
The man who wrote that must have had a very low opinion of his
father and mother.
. Jesus chooses twelve disciples, but all of them are men ; he sends
out seventy to go before him, but there does not seem to have been
a woman among them. He found woman a bond-slave to Jewish
law and Jewish custom, and there is no evidence that he attempted
to break her chains. ~
Paul is, however, the king of woman’s enslavers, and his inﬂuence
for evil in this direction can hardly be over-estimated.
“The head of the woman is the man—(1 Cor. 11 : 3)—man is
the image and glory of God ; but the woman is the glory of the man.”
Man having made God in his masculine image, boasts that he is in
his image and glory. But suppose the woman should make a
goddess, woman would then be in her image and glory, and she
might look down upon inferior man, with as much propriety as
Paul does upon inferior woman.
Paul adds, “the man is not of the woman; but the woman of
the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the
woman for the man.” If he had studied nature instead of the
story of creation in Genesis, he might have learned that the sexes
were neither created before nor after the other, and that the woman
was no more made for the man than the man for the woman.
One of Paul’s worst commands is the following :—Eph. 5 : 22—
“Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the
Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is
the head of the church, and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore
as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their
own husbands in everything.” Can any slavery surpass that '1
They are to be subject, not in some things, nor in right things, but
in all things. Woman’s will, conscience, common sense, all are
wiped out at one stroke, when she accepts such doctrine as that for
divine. A woman’s husband is her Lord, and all that she can do is
to submit to his authority.
I think I see evidences in Paul’s epistles that the women in the
Christian churches did not willingly submit to be mere ciphers 3
i4
they wanted an opportunity to speak in the church, to teach, to
vote and exercise those gifts, which were common to them and
man. Against these early women's rights’ advocates he issues his
lordly command : —“ Let the women learn in silence with all
subjection. I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority
over the man, but to be in silence, for Adam was ﬁrst formed, then
Eve,” What reasoning! If any one but an apostle had said it,
not a soul but would laugh. Know you not, 0 Paul, that according
to your own Genesical story, ﬁshes were made before men, as we
certainly know that they were in existence ages before, should we
therefore go to school to the minnows Cl Baboons were here long
before bishops, therefore the reverends should be silent and let the
monkeys screech.
Again he says, “ Let your Women keep silence in the churches,
for it is not permitted unto them to speak ; but they are commanded
to be under obedience as also saith the law.” Such passages as
these I have quoted from Paul’s writings have made tyrants of men
and slaves of women, who have supposed that they were obeying
God, when they were sacriﬁcing their natural powers at the
command of a self-conceited, self-created apostle.
Some young widows in the church seem to have particularly
offended him. I suppose they knew the men better than
their sisters, ‘and were less ready to bow down at the word of
command 5 these he denounces vehemently. “ Having damnation,
because they have cast off their ﬁrst faith, and withal they learn to
be idle, wandering about from house to house, and not only idle,
but tattlers and busy-bodies, speaking things which they ought
not.” They might, with certainly as much justice, complain that he
spoke things which he ought not. There is an offensiveness in his
manner, that tells of church quarrels, on the subject of woman’s
rights, akin to some that are taking place in these days.
We may be told that Paul tells husbands to love their wives even
as they love themselves 5 but woman’s obedience is not made
dependent on man’s love 3 and it is quite possible for a man to love
his wife and yet be very unjust to her.
In the Christian church to-day, with triﬂing exceptions, woman
is treated in a biblical manner. She may ﬁt up the pulpit and
decorate it, but she may not preach in it 3 she may buy a Bible for
the minister to pound, but she must not expound it; she may collect
money, wandering through the mud and over a state; she may
stitch for weary months and preside over pious lotteries and
1'5
religious raﬂies, to procure means to build a church, and when it is
done, she has the satisfaction of knowing that her sex is forever
excluded from ofﬁciating in it. Woman should have justice, and
when she has, she will be an equal sharer with man in political and
ecclesiastical privileges ; she is naturally more moral and more
spiritual than man, and on many subjects is better ﬁtted to teach
him than he is to teach her. Ten million women in this country
are held in bondage by as many men, and they have been bound so
long, and the bondage has been sanctiﬁed by passages quoted from
a book, which they have been led to believe is divine, that most’ of
them do not desire to exercise their rights, but are willing to allow
men to rule them, as multitudes of slaves were willing that their
masters should rob them of their right to themselves.
The injustice done to woman in the Bible is reflected in our laws.
Even to-day in Massachusetts, with all the improvement made
during the last twenty-ﬁve years, if a married woman dies intestate,
the husband, if a child has been born alive to them, is entitled to a
life interest in all her real estate, and to the whole of her personal
property: but if the husband dies intestate the widow has a life
interest in only one-third of his real estate, and one-third of his
personal property 3 and she can have no interest in wild lands that
he may own. And, at the expiration of forty days after his death,
she must leave the house in which they have together lived, or pay
rent for its use. In England a man is allowed to restrain a wife of
her liberty, in case of any gross misbehaviour, and of course he is
to be the judge of what constitutes the misbehaviour. Most of the
laws relating to marriage, children, and property, in which the
rights of woman are involved, are unjust to her. Man made them
to suit himself, and they will only be just to woman when she has
an equal share in their formation and administration.
The tyranny that men exercise at home corresponds with the
Bible doctrine and the legal practice. A man has no more right to
decide what his wife shall wear, than she has to decide what he
shall wear. In matters of property a’ wife has a right to one-half
that is earned. Many men spend hundreds or thousands of dollars
for themselves or upon their horses and grounds, and never consult
their wives regarding the disposition of a dollar, but let a woman
spend ten dollars without consulting her lord, and grumbling, if not
a quarrel, is a common result. “ But men earn the money,” we
are told. How much money would they earn if they attended to
their children, watching by night ofttimes, and looking after them
‘:16
all day ‘I How much would they earn if they had to wash and iron
and cook and mend, and attend to the endless round of duties
that devolve on woman? Women as a rule work for more hours
than men, and ought to have the half of what is earned by the
labour of both.
All the avenues of knowledge should be opened to woman-—
schools, academies, colleges, and universities. The sexes should
never be separated in education ; it is a curse to both. Colleges,
like Harvard, are hotbeds of vice, and a soldier’s life and health are
more secure, in time of war, than the morals of a young man in
one of our so-called religious colleges. The presence of woman in
our colleges would end many of the barbarities that are now
practised and lead to the best results.
Where woman"s position is as low, as we ﬁnd it among most
barbarous tribes, an acceptance of the Bible as divine may elevate
woman’s position ; but its doctrines, with regard to her, are so far
from just, that where accepted, and their spirit carried into daily
life, they keep her in a subordinate position, make her the slave of
man’s lust, and keep her in that abject condition, which woman
holds in all Christian countries to-day.
Let truth and freedom and love bless all,
Though Bibles perish and churches fall.

A
W
[Mn Denton was a Yorkshireman, and originally a preacher among the
Wcsleyans. He emigrated to America, and became a distinguished scientist—
his principal study being geology.]

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