The new dispensation at the dawn of the twentieth century ...

Front matter

LIBRARY. OF CONGRESS.

Chap. _i Copyright No.

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CHAPTER I. It does move. — Galileo

If the world did not move, there would be no progress, and everything would remain in statu quo. But the fact that the world does move, is something that every one perceives and realizes. Humanity is rapidly progressing. It is moving constantly onward and upward. In human affairs things have changed greatly within a hundred, nay, within fifty, or even twenty-five years. However, the change will be found more striking if we go back five hundred or a thousand years.

In no direction have changes been more pronounced than in the domain of religion. A few hundred years ago, in all civilized lands, as well as in lands that are not civilized, the domain of religion embraced all the affairs of civil and domestic life. To a very great extent, the daily life of the people was taken up with religious observances. To eat, to sleep, to dream were all religious affairs. Eating was particularly a holy proceeding, and the devotee really believed that his god was present and shared with him in the repast ; and hence, this being the prevailing idea, the food was divided, a part being reserved for the family and the remainder being sacrificed or given to the gods. Fire was also sacred, and some living coals were constantly lying upon the family

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hearth ; and if by some accident the fire became extinguished, the event was looked npon as calamitous in the extreme. For the people in those days, in such a case, the god of the family had departed, and they felt themselves abandoned.

For the ancient Greeks and Romans, a people as cultured and advanced as ourselves, every family, every house, had its own gods. But with us the case is different. We have but one God — the God of the universe. He is everywhere in general and nowhere in particular. But we might as well have no Grod, for we never can find him when an emergency arises and his presence is most needed. Among the ancients, the dead were always regarded as gods, and religion originally, in all countries, was simply worship of the dead, or the adoration of ancestors. China to-day has no other gods and no other religion. Of a God in our sense they know nothing. The dead are always regarded as living, existing, though invisible. For them the tomb is the home of the dead ; it is their final resting place. This was and still is the prevailing idea in Egypt. It was a common thing among the ancients, as it still is in some countries, for food to be left regularly for the dead and for libations to be poured upon the graves. The people fully believed that the dead must be fed as well as the living. The ancients worshiped everything that was known to be old.

De Coulanges truly says, in his work entitled "The Ancient City " : "In time of peace and in time of war religion intervened in all the affairs of men. The soul, the body, private life, the repast, the feast, the assemblies, the tribunals, the combats, all came under the power and authority of religion." No great undertaking was entered upon without making certain sacrifices and invoking the aid of the gods. Indeed, this is no uncommon thing in modern times ; nations frequently in-

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voke the aid of God, especially when triey feel that they have entered upon an undertaking that is more than usually hazardous. But how much assistance is ever obtained from such a source in these cases, remains a matter of dispute.

Among the ancients there were no affiliations with strangers ; the stranger was not recognized as having any rights at all. His gods were not their gods. This was particularly true of enemies. According to the ideas that prevailed a thousand or two thousand years ago, an enemy had no rights, and if beaten or captured, he was killed without compunction and without formality. We have to-day precisely the same ideas with regard to •criminals and convicts — but we will change them some day or other. At present we are not able to perceive that we have any relations to them, or that they are even entitled to fair treatment at our hands. To shoot a murderer, a robber or a thief caught in the act is, even at this late day, supposed to be rather meritorious than ■otherwise. The Bible inculcates such doctrines as these. It teaches that usury is wicked, except where the stranger is the victim. " If a thief be found breaking up and be smitten that he die, there shall no blood be shed for him. 1 ' — Ex. 22:2. In other words, the thief has no rights, and he gets what he deserves, according to our Holy Scriptures. That is what the English thought some years ago, and so when they caught a thief they hung him with very little ceremony.

In olden times, the world was filled with spirits, and it was impossible, especially in the night time, to go anywhere without incurring the risk of encountering some one of these nocturnal wanderers. Ghosts and spirits of every kind, both good and evil, angels, demons, devils and witches, are not as common and as troublesome now as they were, but there are plenty of them left even at the present moment. However, intelligent and sensible

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people are rapidly coming to the conclusion that there are no such things as spirits, either living or dead. People latterly do not consult the auguries as the old Romans did. They keep no fire burning on the altar, and most of them have no altar for that or any other purpose ; and as to feeding and worshiping the dead, they do not even find time to mow the grass and weeds that cumber the graves of their ancestors. That is the difference in people and the times. Very few now believe that the grave is really the resting place of the dead, or that the survivors can be of service in any way to their relatives and friends after death has removed them. There is very little religion at the present day, and such as we have is extremely attenuated and of a very worldly character. People who have practically ceased to believe in a God cannot properly be said to possess any religion.

It may be noted, in closing this hasty review of wor- - ship and devotion, that religion is simply what people believe ; and, again, what peoples believe is merely so many phases of religion. Among the Greeks and Romans, as we have seen, religion was not only the chief thing, but almost the sole thing that received serious consideration. The people believed that they were surrounded with gods, as our people not many years since believed they were surrounded by spirits, demons, witches and angels, both friendly and hostile. Their whole life was governed and controlled by fear — fear of displeasing some patron god. If they displeased their deity, they imagined that they would be abandoned and that serious harm would certainly befall them. We that live in this godless, riteless age of ours can have no idea how fully and how deeply religion entered into all the affairs of life, both civil and domestic, among the ancients. Nothing was done or attempted without first consulting the gods in order to learn what the oracles declared, or to

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ascertain what the omens indicated. We know very well at this late day, that all the wonderful work which was done, as the ancients supposed, by their gods, was done by proxy. It was all the work of common men who were concealed behind the scenes. The people were duped and fooled, as people are duped and fooled to-day. We know very well that there are no communications from Grod, or the gods, and no Grod, or gods, from whom communications could come. So there are no mandates that come from the state, and there is no state from which mandates could come in the first place. Men, common men, conduct the whole business in both cases, that of the gods and that of the state. Men are the oracles ; men are the gods; men are the state. Men send forth the commands, and men lay down the laws in all cases.

While it is true that our greatest changes have taken place in the domain of religion, changes nearly as noticeable and quite as important have taken place in other departments. In fact when people change their views on matters of religion, they will necessarily change their views finally on all the affairs of life. A great change has taken place in matters that pertain to the family. The wife for centuries and centuries has held the position in the family of the faithful and obedient servant. The father, or the husband, has been alone the lord and master. The children have been looked upon as mere things — they have had and they could have no rights. Even the right to live was in many cases denied them, when the father had too many children or had those that he did not consider worth preserving. In such cases they were promptly disposed of in any way that was found most convenient. They were often sold into slavery. The father was alone worshiped ; he was the god, or at least the high priest of the family. The father was the original type of all our kings and sov-

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ereigns. Even God himself was simply a father ; he was the creator and procreator of ns all, and men owed obedience to God simply because he was their father. As a matter of course, the being to whom men owe life or existence is the one to whom they owe practically everything. If men had not been begotten, they would never have been anything. That is the theory at least in this case of the father and the child. The family was looked upon as a crop which had been raised by the father, and therefore it properly belonged to him exclusively.

In no field have there been greater changes in the sentiments of men than in those regarding punishment for offences. tJntil the last few decades, life was held at a very low estimate, and a man was sent to kingdom come for what we would now consider a trifling offence. In England not longer than one hundred years ago, there were one hundred and seventy offences for which a man might be tried, convicted and finally hanged.

It is not long since men not only believed in kings, but they really imagined that they were infallible, just as they had been taught in their childhood that the father of the family was infallible. As rulers were looked upon as gods, everything that they did or commanded was deemed to be necessarily just and proper. No one would for a moment allow himself to get into a controversy with a god, and as kings and rulers were gods, all their acts, their decrees, orders and ordinances were regarded as holy, and as such they were unhesitatingly obeyed.

But on these and many other matters people have come to have improved views and advanced notions of their own.' They have almost discarded religion, because they find no use for it in ordinary life. Even God has become a negative quantity, and the state, a strictly human contrivance, is taking the place and doing the work that belonged formerly to God exclusively. At

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this late day, no one thinks of feeding God, and few deem it important to adore him, or to offer up sacrifices to appease him. In fact very few seem to have any nse for God in any way. Most men have lost all confidence in the Supreme Being, and they do not ask him for favors, because they have learned that prayers and petitions are unavailing. A wonderful amount of self-confidence seems to prevail among men at the present day, and everybody imagines that he is capable of attending to his own affairs and running his own business without receiving assistance or direction from any unknown God. It is true that churches have been and are being built, and they are being used, but not strictly for the worship of God. It is true that churches were used for that purpose formerly, but that was quite a number of years ago. In the churches of the present day, we do not exactly worship the golden calf, but we do worship the golden candlesticks and the golden church organ. We do not sing praises unto God, as formerly, but we hire star performers to sing praises unto the congregation at so much per Sunday. To tell the plain truth, there are many who believe that God has not been inside of one of our churches within the last quarter of a century. At least we have never heard of a person who has seen him there, or even heard his voice. It is probable that he has gone "to walk in a tent or tabernacle," as he did of old. No, people do not go to church to worship God or commune with him. They go there to take comfort and enjoy themselves. This fact is so patent and so well understood, that churches are never expected to draw a crowd unless they are rendered attractive in some worldly way. Sometimes it is the eloquent and glibtongued preacher that fills the pews and loads the contribution plate ; and sometimes it is the star singer or the saxophone. God himself, in his pristine simplicity,, has ceased to be an attraction, and for that reason latterly his

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name never appears on the bills. Indeed, God's name is rarely mentioned in any connexion, except when oaths are uttered.

But if people's minds and their views of things can change as has thus far been indicated, during a century or so past, why should they stop where they are and advance no farther ? It is not to be supposed for one moment that they will. A people that have gone so far will not rest contented until they have gone farther ; a people that have risen so high and observed so much as they have will never be satisfied until they have taken still loftier nights and made still greater discoveries. Men who live at the close of the nineteenth century can have no conception of the advancement that will be made in the domain of thought during the twentieth that is now dawning.

It would seem that religion, like superstition, belongs to an age of obscurity and ignorance. People always worship unknown gods, and they worship them solely because they fear them and dread their power. As people become older, more advanced, more enlightened and better acquainted with the ways and workings of nature, they find less and less use for religion. They fear less, they worship less, they sacrifice less. As men become stronger, they find less and less use for God ; they depend more upon themselves and upon their own unaided efforts. Finally, as they gain more and more light, they come to see that there is no God of the universe, in any proper sense, at least so far as the common affairs of life are concerned. So long as God dwelt among men, consoled them in their troubles and aided them in their contests, he was a real, living God, and there was some sense in worshiping and adoring him. But that was in early Bible times. Long since God withdrew from the society of men ; he is seen and heard no more ; he cannot be approached, he cannot be moved, he cannot be

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propitiated, he cannot even be discovered. Such a God might as well not exist, and it is for this reason that the age has become practically godless. Worship has been found to be worthless, useless, powerless, and therefore it has generally been discarded or rejected. We continue to have houses of worship, it is true, but they are places of worship only in name. It is a common phenomenon in human affairs for men to continue forms, ceremonies and observances long after they have lost their force and significance. The seal on some legal documents and the oath taken in case of affidavits are illustrations in this direction. We are doing the same thing to-day in matters of religion. The Romans and the Greeks did the same thing in the closing days of paganism. They kept up pagan forms, and observed ceremonies of various kinds long after they had lost all confidence in both the ceremonies and the gods.

The death knell of religion was sounded when Martin Luther nailed his famous theses on the church door at Wittenberg. Protestantism never was a religion— it was, as the term implies, a protest against religion. Religion is something that thrives so long as people do not study and inquire. Religion is the one plant that cannot endure the light. Faith is man's chief reliance only so long as he is struggling in darkness. Religion is not opposed to reason ; it is independent of reason. Religion is a matter strictly of belief, and belief is not necessarily associated with reason. AYith ignorant men, belief is stronger than it is among those who are enlightened. Reason makes men doubt and hesitate ; ignorance renders them confident and contumacious.

Unbelief was not the effect of Protestantism. It was the cause. Luther himself was only a phenomenon. As a development, he merely marked the tendency of the age. Luther was by no means the only independent thinker of the sixteenth century ; he was simply the

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boldest, bravest of tliem all ; he was the one who was firmest in his convictions and most inflexible in his purposes. What he resolved to do he would do, though the heavens fell. He dreaded the Devil, and yet he resisted him to the last. His was a powerful agency constantly kept in action by the sole force of an idea. He was not pious in the proper sense of the term, but he was upright ; Luther was at least no impostor. He had powerful friends ; they were men in authority, and that made a vast difference in his case. Without the support of such friends, he would have been burned long before the time when his career finally ended.

The moment people began to read and inquire, the moment they began to ask questions, that moment the decline of religion began. Religious observances have continued down to the present time simply because there are so few people who find the time and have the inclination to study and inquire. They find it so much easier and so much more comfortable to hire men to do their studying and thinking for them that they eschew serious inquiry altogether. Men formed the habit of depending on the priests centuries since, and a habit once formed and firmly established is not easily overcome. This is the reason, and the only reason why we have, even among cultured people, what may be called a similitude of religion to-day.

And here we might explain that there is not such a radical difference in religions as many people might suppose. They differ in forms, ceremonies and externals, but in principle they are practically the same. They are all alike the product of fear ; they all come from the dread of the unknown. Worship in all of them consists in making sacrifices to spirits or agencies that they never see, and about which they know absolutely nothing. Men sacrificed to their gods in the past just as people buy patent medicines so freely to-day. They hope they

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may do some good. The history of all religions has been precisely the same, whether pagan or otherwise. The cultus has been kept up by an interested set of men and women called priests and priestesses. All religions have their Levites. These Levites wax fat on sacrifices made to the gods, and they make quite a comfortable living oat of the devotions of their fellow men. It is so to-day ; it was so two thousand, perhaps ten thousand, years ago. If we had no ministers, religion would decline and disappear in short order. No one would have any interest in keeping the subject alive.

It must not be forgotten that the Christian religion, like paganism, is simply a form of idolatry. In fact it is well known, as a matter of history, that Christianity in the early centuries was nothing but paganism in a modified form. The pagans worshiped spirits which they had never seen and which they did not know. They gave them names and forms to suit their own tastes and fancies ; and Christians have been doing the same thing down to the present time. Indeed, it is impossible to worship any being unless we give that being a name and a form. When our God ceased to have a place and failed to assume some definite shape, he ceased to be a God, and naturally enough his worship steadily declined. Men cannot worship a formless spirit with success, anv more than they can worship a shadow. God the Father has now gradually vanished into thin air, and the real God that men have been worshiping for some time is God the Son. Christ was possessed of a heart, and he appeared in the human form. Christ became as one of us, and we can adore or worship such a being with some sort of consistency. So Christians worship saints and angels, as the pagans did. The Catholics worship Mary, the mother of Christ, regarding her in the light of a goddess. This is sensible, to say the least, because saints and angels are more or less tangible or conceivable crea-

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tures — but, after all, it must not be forgotten that this is only another form of idolatry. All worship is, and necessarily must be, idolatrous in character.

All religions are alike in promulgating the doctrine of humility and submission. The spirit they develop or cultivate is a slavish, cringing spirit. Instead of teaching men to depend upon themselves and upon their own exertions, they teach them to obey and worship some higher being — first, a being called God, and afterward some king or master. The devotees of all religions prostrate themselves, because they know and feel that they are slaves. Not one of them holds up his head and deports himself like a man. People who really believed that they were made in the image of God would not act in any such manner.

If we had no religion, we should have no slaves, no property in any form ; or at least there would be no foundation for the claim to hold slaves or to own property. The less religion there is in the world, the more rapidly will freedom advance. It must be remembered, however, that the gods never trouble men, never punish men, never even threaten men. It is the interpreters and intermediaries, the Levites, acting in the name of the gods, that are the direct or indirect cause of most of the oppression experienced at the present day. They are the ones who make the most out of the disturbance, and what they do in most cases is done from motives of pure selfishness. The object generally kept in view is personal aggrandizement. Indeed, we know, at this late date, that there are no gods, and it is a sham and a fraud to pretend for a moment that such beiDgs exist. The people are misled and deceived by the cunning managers who, with their artful contrivances, remain hidden behind the curtain. It is these managers — not spirits by any means, but live men — that are the source and cause of all the trouble. They are the ones who seek to live,

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and who do live, on the delusions of mankind. They are mere artists, sleight-of-hand performers, and nothing more. It is so in religion, and so in affairs of state. Eeligion has become merely a piece of mechanism, with cogs and wheels and power to run it ; and the state is managed on the same principle.

Gralileo was right — the world does move. The world has moved for thousands, perhaps millions of years ; and the sun has risen and set, and risen and set, regularly and constantly during all that time. Shall we, in our self-sufficiency and supposed wisdom, now declare that the world will not continue to move, and the sun will not continue to rise and set, as before ? Shall there be no change in the sentiments of men hereafter ? We remember what wonderful revolutions have taken place in the creeds and customs of men in the past. Shall there be no such revolutions in the ages to come ? Have we reached the point of perfection at last ? Has the printing press lost its power, and must the mind of man remain inert and unprogressive forever ? Is there something in the faith of mankind that is sacred and immutable, something that criticism cannot reach, or if reached, something that it cannot possibly assail ? If so, what may it be ? If there be something that the world always has believed, always must believe and always will believe, it is time that its existence were made known, so that its claims might be acknowledged and its value duly appreciated. The author does not believe there ever was such a truth.

What is embodied in this chapter, together with what is contained in the Introduction, might be called the statement of the author's case. The foregoing pages will enable the intelligent reader to form a fair idea of the positions taken in the work ; and if he has perused them carefully, he will be able to understand and estimate properly what is spread out more elaborately, if not more convincingly, in the pages that follow.

Chapter II

And the Lord gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God. — Ex. 31:18.

The laic of Moses does not concern us, and we are not to look to the examples in the history of the saints, much less of the kings, to their faith, and to God's commandments. — Luther.

Very few at the present time regard the Bible as really a sacred book, or as a book that is essentially different from many other books, which contain, as the Bible does, together with many good things, many other things that are open to objection. It conld not be called in any literal or actnal sense the word of God, for we know that there is not, and never has been, a God that could communicate with man, or any such being with whom man could communicate in any way, by wireless telegraphy or in some other manner. What we have been calling the word of God all along we now know is really the word of men, ordinary men like ourselves. No doubt the writers of the chapters contained in the book felt themselves inspired, just as men feel themselves inspired at the present time. If men actually thought the Bible was a holy book, essentially different from all other books, they would handle it more tenderly, and they would hold it in higher regard than they do other books. But as it is now, we treat it as the commonest and most

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uninteresting of works. It is the cheapest book in market ; we can buy a whole Bible containing all that God ever wrote, all that it is pretended that he wrote, and a great deal more, for a few shillings ! Everybody considers the binding and the paper of much greater importance than the contents of this Holy Book ! And yet it is well known that the binding and the paper are two things that God never had anything to do with. No one pretends that God was ever engaged in the binding business. The Jews who sincerely believed in the sacredness of the Scriptures read their sacred scrolls and handled them as if they actually believed that they contained a message direct from God. Our practice is different.

Assuming, as men seem to do, that the Bible is an ordinary book, being the production of ordinary men, we are at liberty to judge of it and criticise it as we would other books. What value it has depends solely upon its intrinsic merits, and the supposed character and standing of its various authors has nothing to do with the question. It is well known that the Bible is not a complete book, but merely a collection of writings, without anything like order, system or plan. It is quite impossible that such widely varying teachings and such contradictory doctrines as that book is known to contain could ever have come from any one source. It contains no code that might be called either legal, religious or moral. It does not teach men either how to live or how to die. It is simply a disorganized mass, chaotic in all respects, a confused jumble of important and unimportant matters all commingled together. What is taught in one chapter and one verse is contradicted in another chapter and another verse ; while in several cases large portions are repeated with little or no variation. It is a curious fact that the authorship of no one chapter of that great book is positively known ; who wrote this