Dissolution of the trio

Preface

The author of this work was a member in good standing of the Methodist Episcopal Church for over thirty years. He left the church with the best of good feeling towards all.

The effect of the change has produced in him an enlargement of the heart to that degree that all the world can now stand inside of it and still be room for more.

For further introduction and explanation of the work the reader is respectfully referred to its contents.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Paganism of the Old Testament 9

II. Footprints of Paganism in the New Testament . 21

Chapter I. Paganism Of The Old Testament

It seems incredible that men of intelligence and education in this enlightened age will assert that they believe the whole Bible is inspired. Even Christ himself asserted to the contrar}'. He says (Matt. v. 38), "Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you. That ye resist not evil" ; this and several other articles he repudiates which were written in the law of Moses and declared to be the command of God (Lev. xxiv. 20).

It is not supposable that Christ ever repudiated anything that God inspired to be written, or that He commanded ; therefore it is evident that some things got into the Bible outside of inspiration. "We are perfectly familiar with the logic of the clergy, that these things were inspired under law as a contrast to grace. But it is only a sample of their elastic theology. God is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, and His principles never change ; neither did Christ ever change anything authorized by Him. But He told the Jews they had made the word of God of no effect by their traditions. It is not at

10 PAGAKTSM OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

all probable that He enumerated all the traditions in the Bible ; if He had, He would have spoken of one in Deut. xiv. 21, which says, "Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself : thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in th}' gates, that he may eat it ; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien : for thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God."

"A pretty mess of pickles" for a holy people to be caught in, selling diseased meat to strangers under the guise of divine inspiration ! If that is a divine principle, it is just as good to-day as ever, and perfectly in order to sell beef that died of pneumonia, or pork that died of hog cholera. Are God's children so depraved that they will believe snch vile scandal of their Heavenly Father, and charge God with being the authority for such wickedness? If any one thinks such a charge is no reproach, let them charge some wealthy man with it and publish the charge, and see how kindly the man would take to it ; and providing the charge to be true, see how kindh' the state would take to the man. Shame npon the man or woman accepting such slanders of God's character ! even though the angel Gabriel proclaimed them, as Paul says some things are not to be believed though angels teach them. Is there no protection? Must the holy name of God be smirched by vile tradition simply because the libel has been sandwiched into Divine Revelation.

But orthodoxy would have us believe that God reforms from a condition of bestial savagery under law to one of the highest traits of pure character under grace.

'' Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that liath known man by lying with him. But all the women children [girls] that have not knowD a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves" (Num. xxxi. 17, 18), per order of Moses.

" And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain" (Deut. ii. 3dt). This was a part of Moses' report to the children of Israel of their war record. Now to sum up this matter : it was simply Pagan vs. Pagan, and Moses and his tribes fought other Pagans on exactly the same principles that other Pagans fought them, and the principles were exactly the same that Christ condemned as not belonging to God. Terah, the father of Abraham, was a Pagan ; Abraham was a Pagan ; Isaac was a Pagan ; Jacob was a Pagan ; and the twelve sons of Jacob were Pagans : they had their sacrificial altars which the prophet declares God did not authorize (Jer. vii. 22).

Abraham, though in a certain sense a reformer and an advanced thinker in his day, to that degree that he dropped the worship of images and had some advanced ideas of the spiritual character of God ; yet the Paganism of sacrificial belief adhered to him as leaven from the old pagan lump : he still imagined God must be patted on the back and stroked the smooth way to keep Him in good humor, and, like his pagan contemporaries, he fancied that human blood and that of the dearest relative was the most acceptable and effective to keep down His ire. This fanaticism preyed upon his mind until he resolved to offer his own son upon the sacrificial altar ; when at the cruel moment of execution his heart failed him, and he excused his failure by substituting a ram.

But the devilish example had done its work as a precedent, and it has cost the life of many a darling child in consequence. It cost the life of Jephthah's daughter and sanctioned the custom among the Jews of casting their children into the fire to Moloch. Its effects have continued down through the ages and penetrated even our boasted civilization, in which several cases of childsacrifice have been recorded, the last of which was the well-known Freeman case of Pocasset, Mass. When he plunged the fanatical knife into the vitals of his sweet little daughter. Freeman had the same instrument for communicating with God that Abraham had, which was the imaginings of his own thoughts.

The pretence of the patriarchs, that they had any other means of communication, shows that they were not above the common pagan notions and lying customs of their day, as indeed their own history bears record. Like all reformers, these reformers only went to the limit of their advanced light, still retaining fragments of the old Paganism, and thus they transmitted to posterity the horrors of their bloody altars which adhered to their national constitution until they were destroyed by Rome ; and whether the Jews ever return to Palestine or not, they can never again run another divine slaughter-house.

Solomon, the world's greatest bigamist and libertine, dedicated the Hoi}- Temple to the sacrificial tune of " Ruddygore," intonating the music with the voices of twenty - two thousand bellowing oxen in the agonies of death, and the bleating tongues of one hundred and twent}^ thousand inoffensive creatures that furnish to man a large share of the benefactions of life (1 Kings viii. 63).

This horrid scene of brutal barbarism is looked upon by the present Christian Pagan with pleasant approval ; while they gather from it authority for their blood-stained theology. But alas ! it symbolizes too well the bloody slaughter-house of the dark ages, whose sacrifice of human victims bears the historic record of one hundred and fifty millions. Imagine, for a moment, the undulating melody of these intonating voices in the dedication of this vast dispensational temple ; the groans, the moans, the shrieks, the death-rattle of this colossal army of human victims, and then listen to this righteous prophecy: "There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down" (Matt. xxix. 2). Thank God for at least one inspired prophecy !

The production of all trees and plants comes through the same process of root-and-seed development they did six thousand years ago. Hence corn taken from a mummy case said to be three thousand 3'ears old, germinates and grows by the same laws of vegetation that corn raised last year does.

In these days, when we wish to make a legend, a fable, or a tradition, we plant a lie and raise the fruit, because we know that a lie is the only seed or root that will produce these specimens ; and, like the mummy corn, they grow from the same seed and root and by the same process they did three and six thousand years ago, and the fruit is the same it was then ; namely, a lie.

In the words of Paul, these ancestors have " changed the truth of God into a lie."

By planting abundant seed in thriving soil, they raised the generous crop of legends, traditions, and fables recorded in the Old Testament, and succeeded in attaching them on to a credulous posterity as facts.

" Ye have made the word of God of none effect by your traditions," had reference to the written traditions in the

Old Testament, which were mixed up with the truth. There are some things there that all classes recognize as truth, but they are so interwoven with fable that they nullify the whole mass as long as they remain in this mixed condition. The same is true also of the New Testament. The word of God is truth tvherever it is founds and is not necessarily written in Bibles or spoken by priestcraft ; and much of it has never yet been either spoken or written.

These ancestral patriarchs were onl}^ Pagans dwelling among Pagans, differing in no living principles from any other Pagans, except in a few crude ideas of the Deity, but nothing that made the slightest practical difference in their characters. Lying, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was practised as a virtue of expediency ; and with the twelve sons of Jacob it was a matter of business, — who were a set of heartless freebooters. That they did not murder their own brother was no fault of theirs : they fully intended it ; and this was the condition of pagan Israel when they went down to pagan Egypt, and were slaves to those Egyptian Pagans for more than four centuries. Whoever Moses was, he was raised and educated in the royal family of pagan Egypt : he was imbued with the double mixture of Egyptian and Israelitish superstitions, and Joshua was of the same character ; and if both of them were not given to lying, then we must admit that God was the author and commanded those inhuman butcheries of little children (of whom Christ says, ''of such is the kingdom of heaven"), and authorized the selling and giving of diseased meat to strangers and aliens ; for both of them claimed that these things were the authorized command of God. Now this statement of theirs was a slander of the holy name of Divine Love, whose iinqiialified couiumnd is to '' love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to tliem that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you " (Matt. V. 44).

\Yhen men have done such high-handed lying, what would they not do ? and who could expect such men to give true statements of facts of anything? and these are the men from whom we receive the fables about the creation. Now the question is, Where did they get them? Did they borrow them from Egypt, or from their own ancestry, or did they make it up ? If they borrowed it from Egypt, it was pagan ; if they got it from their own ancestors, it was pagan, and handed down from Terah, through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the twelve cut- throat sons, and the generations of Egyptian bondage of four hundred years ; but if they made it up, it was fable, and was an imitation of pagan theology ; and the whole account is just as absurd, silly, and revolting to common sense as any other pagan story that brings the smile of sarcasm and sneer of scorn to the Christian.

But whether they made it up or borrowed it, it is very evident from other Scripture that they made up the great mass of theh* cumbersome religious rites and ceremonies.

"For I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices" (Jer. vii. 22). This statement b}' the prophet not only shows that Moses did a lot of theological manufacturing, but it smites to atoms all that nonsense about a typical sacrifice, pointing to a vicarious atonement and substitutional righteousness, and shows that all the animal slaughter for thousands of 3'ears by the wholesale was all a gratuity on the part of them that inaugurated and executed it, and was never required of them ; but on the contrary, the whole of it was offensive to God.

"I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at 3'our hand, bring no more vain oblations ; incense is an abomination to me" (Is. i. 11, 12, 13).

'' I will take no bullock out of thy house, or he goats out of thy folds : for every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains : and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee : for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or of goats?" (Ps. 1. 9, 10, 11, 12, 13).

These texts show that the children of Israel were indebted to Paganism, and not to God, for their burdensome system of blood and cruelty, and they had the same vulgar sense of them that the heathen of whom they borrowed them had ; to wit, that God sniffed the fumes of their savory meat-offerings, and His wrath was appeased ; that God was hungry and needed to be fed, hence the multitude of sacrificial offerings ; just as all Pagans feed their gods. But as God was to Israel spirit, and invisible, they must spiritualize the food by burning, and send it up in vapor, the same as Chinamen burn rice and money for their departed friends and gods ; and their conversation, like that of all Pagans, was entirely relevant to their sensual ideas, when they talked of God's smelling sweet savors and relishing these feasts of their preparing. And so these infallible proofs of the pagan origin of their rites and ceremonies runs all through the Old Testament. That the}^ inherited their Mother Goose fables of the creation, the antediluvians, the flood, and other fables from a common pagan ancestry, there is no room for doubt ; and the fact that every pagan nation to-day holds substantially the same traditions, handed down from time immemorial, is collateral evidence of the fact.

Having established the fact from its own premises that much of the Old Testament is borrowed Paganism, we will not spend more time and space in further pursuit of the subject ; although, if all the facts were brought out in proof, it would of itself make a large volume, as it is a voluminous mass of mixed principles.

Not that we wish to deny that there is divine inspiration in the Old Testament ; on the contrary, we believe there is, and that there always has been, divine inspiration in all ages, and that inspiration is more marked at the present time than it ever was before, and God is gradually but surely shaping the world into the conditions of divine perfection. But not through the instrument of the Church. She is like the ignorant mariner who thought he had outsailed the north star, and lost his point of compass.

The Church parted with her north star on the eve of her embarkment on the ocean of time, and has since boxed her compass by the milky way of numberless stars, being blown about by various doctrinal winds, and drifting into the straits of confusion with a bark laden with fuss and folly, and chartered for Purgatory, — a harbor not down on the map ;' while the evening star (of truth) she parted with so long ago has become the bright and morning star.

The great effort of inspiration and burden of prophetic solicitude was to lift Israel above and out of Paganism, and through Israel to liberate the whole world ; and hence the ceaseless antagonism of the prophets to their idolatries.

But when their great prophet and reformer appeared, they were so thoroughly imbued with the Paganism of their fathers that they were condemned as old bottles, too rotten to hold new (ideas of reform) wine ; old garments too seedy to patch : consequently the old pagan bark of Israel was abandoned for a new system of principles founded upon the rock of divine character, having the truth for their base, and the attributes of love, wisdom, and universal beneficence as the resulting product, instead of bestowing all upon a favored few, with the privilege of enslaving the many.

But this new Jerusalem, unfortunately, soon fell into the power of another Paganism worse than that of Judaism.

Pagan Rome grafted their own tree on to the root of Israel's Paganism, and sandwiched the germ of the new world (the doctrines of Christ) between the two Pagans, mutilating its beauty and glory and nullifying its priceless virtue in their efforts to fit it to the two old stumps. But, thanks to God, the eternal vitality of the new shoot has outlived the decay of the other two corrupting systems of rot and rust, and is now putting forth its shoots in the world's springtime, with the blessed assurance of a glorious summer succession where old wives' fables of talking snakes, women made of ribs, the multitude of earth's beasts, birds, and reptiles separating themselves out in pairs, and repairing to a small boat not sufficient for a fractional part of them ; making rainbows for a covenant testament or witness ; the sun taking orders from man whether to move on or stop, to give sanction to butchering women, and little children who constitute the kingdom of heaven ; men living in whales' bellies three days, with no air to breathe or power to sustain life ; men or gods born of virgins, unsired by man ; the dead raised to liCe from the grave of four days' decay, and the benefactor executed for the deed ; and a thousand and one pagan falsehoods, will not be tolerated, and where superstition will find no soil.

All nature is an eternal witness against the Old Testament account of the creation ; for nowhere in the universe can an instance be found where God began at the top to build down, but the reverse in every case. God, man, beasts, birds, fishes, and all nature invariably, without one single exception, begin at the base and build up ; therefore man never was in a higher condition than he is now, but like all the rest of creation he has gradually developed from a lower order up to the present condition. As Paul says, '^ first the blade, then the ear, afterwards the full corn in the ear." What would one think to plant corn and find the full corn in the ear before the blade appeared, and then have the blade grow afterwards ? He would be obliged to think that God had departed from His old-time custom.

The claim set up by Christendom, that the Israelites were saved by looking forward by faith through their sacrifices to Christ, is false ; for in the first place, none of them had such an understanding ; but, like all other idolaters, they believed in the virtue of their ceremonial rites to set them right before God. The idea of a coming Saviour to save the soul never entered the mind of an Israelite. The highest thought they ever expressed of Him was the Messiah, the Hebrew word for anointed^ which mennt nothing more to them than a king. Furthermore, God

PAGANISM OF THE OLD TESTAJVIENT, emphatically denies being the author of those ceremonies and sacrifices. They were entirely gratuitous and superfluous on their part (Jer. vii. 22).

We have thus briefly considered a very limited number of the many things in the Old Testament that give indisputable proofs of pagan origin, not caring to extend the subject farther than is absolutely necessary, in order to introduce in relative order the subject of Paganism in the New Testament ; for it is not Jews, but Autichristians, we are contending with.

PAGANISM IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 21

CHAPTER 11.

FOOTPRINTS OF PAGANISM IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.

The most subtle ignorance in the universe is educated ignorance, or knowledge based upon false premises.

An education that must eventuall}^ be unlearned is worse than no education.

A lie, in order to be a success, necessitates its beingaccepted on faith, without evidences ; while the truth stands on the evidences of incontrovertible facts.

Hence the requirements of pagan sophistry, with all its marvellous tales of great signs and lying wonders, granting no option but to believe the improbable, or eternally perish. Upon this shifting sand-bed of heathen mythology is reared the complicated structure called Christianity, with all its intricate machinery and master-manipulators, who strut in the proud consciousness that they know all that can ever be known, because they received it from their pagan ancestry nearly two thousand years ago.

There are two opposing elements, representing principles of two opposite poles, running counter to each other, entirely through the New Testament, like two giant foes in " mortal combat," whose only terms are " death to the vanquished."

These principles appear in the form of broken fragmeiits of beautiful sentiments, apparently wrested out from classic discourses, and interspersed with pagan twaddle, representing a mass of irreconcilable contradictories in which one class of statements are constantly giving another class the lie.

While we see conclusive evidence of divine authorship in the New Testament in the superior character of some of its principles, flashing out brilliant rays of divine light, revealing doctrines that for glory and beauty transcend the highest thought of human conception, sentiments that bear the inscription of the divine address in the credentials of their principles, they come swooping down to us like a troop of white-winged messengers, proffering us their sacred service to bear us up to the bosom of a loving Father, and the family circle of a common brotherhood of which Jesus the Christ stands at the head.

Running counter to all this, though interspersed with it, we discern a reverse order of principles of a gross material character, intensely subtle in their operation, seeking to overthrow by insinuating themselves into the very foundation of the divine order ; feigning aflSnity, and intermingling for the purpose of corrupting the whole mass ; introducing principles for doctrine that earthly courts would be impeached for practising, and of which devils might consistently be ashamed.

Unfortunately for the marvellous character of the New Testament, like that of the Old, it is the product of centuries of after-thoughts. Moses did not write the Pentateuch ; neither did Cin^ist write the gospels ; neither did the parties whose names are forged to them write them. The so-called apocryphal gospels and epistles have the apostles' and early fathers' names attached to them ; and one of them even claims to be an epistle of Christ's, showing that such kind of practice was very common in the early history of the Church. These books form a volume nearly as large as the canonical New Testament. Now, if the names attached to the spurious writings were forged, where is the barrier to their having forged the whole of them? All that constitutes the New Testament in its present form was written this side of the third century. No manuscript pretends to go behind that. It is more than evident that the true doctrines of Christ, as they came to the pagan mind, did not suit their depraved taste. Having the hereditary birthmark of transmitted idolatry for ages, they could not receive a natural religion resting upon fixed principles of eternal truth ; so they galvanized it, or idolized it, so to speak, mixing in enough of the Christ to give it seeming authority ; but at the same time keeping the idolatry the most prominent, and placing it in such a relation as to cause it to nullify the truth, and give idolatry the first place in the fundamental construction of systematic theology. In the words of Christ, they made '' the word of God [truth] of none effect by their traditions."

Starting with the first chapter of Matthew, we first come in contact with the dogma of immaculate conception, wherein is laid the foundation of a series of inordinate doctrines, all springing out of this subtle abomination, possessing the same unnatural character, and destined to go down with it. Opposed to this pagan fable stand the words of Christ to Nicodemus (John iii. 6), " That which is born of the Spirit is spirit ; and that which is born of the flesh is flesh." We see at once that these words are based upon the fact of eternal, inexorable law ; that flesh and spnit cannot cross with each other out of theh^ different spheres, any more than a man can cross with a fish. Spirit-begetting is a process of mind operating upon minds ; while flesh-begetting is a process entirely of matter operating upon matter, relegated to all animal existence.

There is an infallible rule by which to distinguish between the true doctrines of Christ and those of Paganism, as they appear in the New Testament.

For while the doctrines of Christ are invariably grounded in fixed laws as eternal as God, those of Paganism are as invariably laid in special violations and suspension of natural laws to satisfy the sensual, devilish, grovelling propensity for something inordinate, ghastly, supernatural, fearful, horrifying, mysterious ; in short, an instrument of torture to coerce, to be wielded in the hands of a few D.D.'s (said to be doctors of divinity ; but, as divinity never was sick, we conclude they stand for ''doctrines of devils"), to terrorize the legions of dupes that let out their thinking to be done by proxy, at the dear price of their own continued ignorance.

It is the same spirit that delights to look upon monstrosities, such as a fish with a human head, a doubleheaded woman ; half man, half bear ; to have a being half man and half God is the satiation of morbid depravity ; it satisfies the craving of that unnatural beast of inordinate desire for things opposed to natural laws, and never seems so pleased as when it sees law violated by some freak.

Passing on, we come to the following text (Mark viii. 12) : '^ And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and said. Why doth this generation seek a sign? Veril3% I say unto you, there shall no sign be given this generation." This text makes no qualification whatever, but simply states that no sign shall be given. But Matt. xii. 39, xvi. 4; Luke xi. 29, adds, '' But the sign of the prophet Jonah." This addition bears the unmistakable handwriting of the pagan forger in a double purpose, — to identify Christ with the indorsement of the fables of the Old Testament, and also to lay the foundation for the development of new ones in the New Testament. And here again we see the pagan "mark of the beast in its forehead"; i.e. the ideas of sensual mythology, in the seat of its intelligence, the head.

But according to this absolute statement of Christ, that no sign should be given to that generation, He raised no dead to life, turned no water into wine, multiplied no bread or fish by miraculous power, or did any other supernatural thing that could be construed into signs, any of which would have constituted all the sign any reasonable being could ask for ; and we do not believe the person ever lived that could or would ask a greater sign than the raising of a man after having been dead and buried four days.

Opposed to this positive assertion of Christ's, that no sign should be given, stands this pagan assertion in John ii. 11, new version, which reads : '' This beginning of His signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee." This is the Antichrist that John speaks of, that denies the Christ, denies His statements, opposes Him throughout.

This fable of the wine miracle presents Christ in a position censurable to all creation, as fostering and giving divine sanction to a practice more damaging in its results than that of any other in the world's history, a practice that has proved the greatest moral curse ever known to the race of man ; a practice that, according to orthodoxy, has sent more men to hell in the last eighteen centuries than the blood of Christ has redeemed. Here again, in this fable, we would call attention to the distinctive feature between Christ and Paganism ; Christ in the natural, and Paganism in the fabulous or supernatural.

Christ, in describing the manner of His coming (presence) at the end of the dispensation, declares emphatically that it will not be by observation ; ^.e. He will not be visible to mortal sight or touch, but will be represented by the breaking light of a new day ; i.e, by the entering in of the truth to take the place of error (Matt. xxiv. 27 ; Luke xvii. 22, 23, 24). He used the plainest terms and figures to make it sufficiently clear for every one to understand, that it would not occur through any shock to nature's laws of inordinate action, but in the regular established order of Divine Providence, under the ordinary, universal, working principle of intelligent action, freed from the limitations of a tangible personality, all coming about by the operation of natural law and order.