The only good thing in all the worlds

Front matter

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TJNITKD STATES OP AMEKICA.

Dedication

To ALL THE VARIOUS PEOPLES OF AMERICA, OF WHATEVER PARTY, SECT, SCHOOL, RACE OR LANGUAGE.

We have in fact, if not in form, based all our civil government, public schools and institutions on the only authorized or extant proclamation of the law and gospel of the Kingdom of the Heavens over all worlds and beings. We are now, immeasurably, enjoying this freedom, co-operating for a World's Fair and universal peace on this new-born continent of ours, and over the whole world. Ought we not, '''• everyicliere and ahvays,^'' as individuals, to defend unitedly these liberties against all despots and dogmatists, all Jesuitical sophists and apostates, whether reputed saints or sinners, as Christ Himself, " everyichere and ahcays " did? Some reasons for this are given in this little book.

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE.

Contents

Dedication 3

Publishers' Preface .. 5

(1.) Personal Introduction 7

Preface

Said the old ''Iron Duke" to an officer who asked him what he should do, '-'■Read your inarching orders^ sir.'' So we would say to all professed and inquiring Christians, ' '-Read yoitr inarcTiing orders^ and read nothing else in the Bible or out of it, till you clearly understand them . ' '

Many good people are afraid that if our proclaimed Christ words should be exalted to their full supreme place and power over all other words, it would impair or destroy the force of many other great truths in the Bible. This is exactly parallel to the fear, that severely and sternly holding our proclaimed Constitutional law as the supreme authority over all else, would impair or destroy other great truths of American history and literature.

These papers were begun as extracts from my former private note books for the American Review, but, as that magazine was postponed for a time before the last of the papers were printed, it was thought best to re-print them all together in a little book by themselves. Here it is to speak for itself. As I am now in the sixteenth year of my second childhood, on the down hill road of my present earthly pilgrimage, with

II 12 Preface

sight SO impaired that I have not read or written a word with my own eyes and hands for the few past years, I cannot even hope that in perfection of style, method and proof, 1 have done any sort of justice to the great theme on hand. I have only tried to ''blaze the way" through this interminable forest of hypotheses and of doubts, hoping that abler hands and sharper eyes may soon follow in this line of thought, ''to prepare the way of the Lord, and make straight in the desert a highway for our God," and His only anointed teacher.

Chapter 1. General Principles

A voice said unto me, ''Write;" and I said ''what shall I write?"

Business is based on science; marriage on love; religion on both.

Apart from science, business is bankruptcy; apart from love, marriage is divorce; apart from science, religion is a fog; apart from love, it is nothing. Science is the absolute knowledge of facts. The Greek word agape^ the only word used in the New Testament for religious love, means pure goodness in intelligent activity; as agathos means goodness in repose. To love God and man in that pure sense is to be good and to do good toward both God and man, each one and all of us in our own proper spheres.

Our authorized Christ words, — as given us in Matthew and John, whojly sundered from all mere church or state words whether of Jews or of Gentiles — alone of all writings tell us truly how both to be and to do this. "My words they are spirit, they are life." Christ said to Pilate when standing face to face with the cross: "For this purpose was I born, and came into the world, that I might bear witness to the truth," or the eternal ever-present reality of things and beings. His last words to his disciples in Matthew were to teach the world to "observe (vigilantly watch, keep and guard) all things whatsoever I have commanded you," not what popes and priests and bibles and cliurches commanded in this age or any other.

By Christ words we therefore mean only those few words in our books and bibles which have at least some pretense of being authorizred, uttered and approved by Christ himself, according to the plainest reading of our records, given us for our salvation alone.

By Church words we mean that immense mass of books and words piled around and over these Christ words, or self-evidently interpolated into them, by the Papacy and so-called churches, for their own purposes of despotism and dogmatism.

FALLACIES OF SCIENCE AND FAITH.

1. The seeming and the real,

2. The visible and the invisible.

3. The transient and the eternal.

4. The local and the omnipresent.

5. The evil and the good.

Without the eternal interplay of each and all of these correlated antagonisms, beij^g, as we understand it, is neither possible nor thinkable. In its everlastingcircuits, without beginning and without end, all virtue, blessing, eternal good and well-being, in body and soul, are perpetually evolved by the triumph of the last factors over the first. Men and animals alike perceive the seeming and the transient through their animal eyes. The Spirit of God alone in the souls of all sane men enables them to correct the seeming and the transient by the real, the spiritual, and the eternal. Science has really demonstrated to us some things as reo-ards mere form and motion. The sun no lons^er seems to intelligent men as driven across the empyrean of the sky by invisible horses; the old seeming is thoroughly dispelled, and the eternal, everpresent REALITY is visible to the eye of the soul, though not to that of sense. But Science has as yet taught us nothino' new as resjards lifi^ht and life. The sun and all the vast hosts of the greater suns and planets still seem even to Professor Proctor nothino: but oreat coal- heaps of eternal lire. On this point the seeming still dominates the scientific mind almost as imperiously as it does the eye of the ox.

Science began by complaining of Theology, years ago, of its fanciful, cruel hell fires. Dogmatic science ends by demonstrating that God can make little or nothing else than a host of eternal hell fires, and must of course put us into these (if he puts us anywhere) after death.

We are now in science just beginning to crawl out from beneath this infinite absurdity of the seeming into the eternal s^ood of the real. For we ourselves can transform the cool and unknowable cause of gravity in our waterfalls into all the electricity, light and heat needed to warm and enlio^hten our o^reatest cities; and Mr. Miner and others have clearly demonstrated that we have really no single fact that tends to prove that the climate of the sun, or any of the stars, ever was, or can be, any more uucomfortable than our own; and that no single fact in science even tends to show the simultaneous beainnino^ of all thino^s; while each particular kind and class of things successively and eternally begin and end, in the unending flow and circuit of being, precisely in principle as they now do before our own eyes.

So much for the seeming, and the mere dogmatism of Science; all of which results from begging our WHOLE PREMISES, and assuming that the sun is what it seems to be, before we have scientifically demonstrated what it really is. Science has fairly unhitched the horses of the sun. True Science will soon put out forever its eternal fires; and the vision of our only true Philosopher of nearly two thousand years ago will become our fully demonstrated truth, that God, the father of all worlds, is the only light of the sun, and of all the stars and planets, and of all the life that can ever proceed from them, just as surely as he is the eternal force that forever moves them in their eternal circuit through the skies.

For ever and ever, in all the worlds alike, the seeming, the transient and the local alone is evil; the real, the eternal and the omnipresent, and the eternally triumphant over all things, creatures and worlds, alone is good; is God over all, in all and through all; Emmanuel, God with us, for us and in us; — as the first word of our only great Philosopher has taught us; — and no dogmatism of Science or Church, no mere philosophy of being or of God, can ever teach us the contrary. Hence, in the single elements of universal form and motions, our true Science and our true Christ word have already come into an eternal philosophic harmony, in everything except their bald names and symbolisms.

Science calls the moving and changing power of all forms and motions energy, or gives it some name iin-

IN ALL THE WORLDS. IT

plying blind force; while all generations of men, unsophisticated by Science, have spontaneously given it some name signifying God: while Christ defines all power, light and life as spirit, forever omnipresent in all that can exist, great or small, alive or dead, symbolized by eternal fatherhood; thus accounting for all life, thought, reason, form and motion that can ever exist by one and the same single, omnipresent, spiritual power: while Science really accounts for nothing but brute matter and brvite force. Which is Science ? Which is Philosophy ? Which teaches the omnipresent truth ? Which solves the eternal mystery of being, our ofl'-handed, bare-footed peasant boy of 1800 years ago, or the immense and hideous learning of our Scholastic schools and teachers and churches, that have done little else than whelm the world in darkness since his day ?

But the Church? Oh, yes, the Church! But which church and what church, among the hundreds and thousands of sects that are revising their creeds almost every day in the year? — as indeed they ought to do. And who authorized the church to tell us one single thing about either God or Nature that did not proceed out of the lips of this one and sole Philosopher and Teacher of us all? — this only voice of God indorsed to us from out the sky, and addressed to each one of us: this only "I say unto you," the hearer and reader of all lands, and not simply to old Jews and old churches, dead and buried, on the other side of the globe, thousands of years ago — the only being that ever spake on earth who was fit to be called both the son of man and the son of God.

Did he know anything about Science and Philosoyjhy ? Surely any being who undertakes to teach the whole world a universal religion which is not based on a Science and a Philosophy, given us in his own words, must come nearer to infinite idiocy than to infinite intelligence. And if he really fails here, at this most vital of all points, it is utterly in vain for popes and councils and synods and churches to attempt to patch up a philosophy for Him. They have been trying it now for 1500 years, with nothing but perpetual failure and disaster, through the same fatal error that has wrecked and annihilated so many of our Sciences and Philosophies and creeds; starting out on begged premises; putting guesses for knowledge and facts, careering endless imaginations as verified realities; building Utopian dreams instead of the eternal logoi, — reasons, rock-truths, omnipresent and ever-present and unchangeable axioms and eternal truths of the everbeing and everlasting and unending cosmos of God, founded only on the Christ words.

Till some of these hideous fallacies are corrected, we can never have a science, a philosophy, a law, a gospel, a religion or a salvation, that is worth keeping over night; for no one was ever worth it that did not proceed directly from this one voice of the son of man and son of God, before whose eternal tribunal alone all truth and reason, all law and order, are forever to be tested and tried, in this world and all other worlds.

Neither Plato nor the Greeks, neither Moses nor the Jews, neither Paul nor the Apostles, nor the Romans, nor our Tolstoi Quakers, nor our John Calvins,

IN ALL THE WOELDS. 19

neither onr American Mormons, Sects, nor Agnostics; not all the Schools and Churches of the whole wide world, have given us a scrap of true Philosophy on which this great Republic of ours can safely stand for an hour, except that which has proceeded from this lone voice of the sky.

Neither our Thomas Paine nor our Colonel Ingersoll, nor Voltaire nor Bradlaugh of Europe, nor any other living man, in the eighteen centuries of the past, has ever been able to turn td the right or the left of a single proposition laid down for us in our authorized and verifiable Christ words, as we read them in the Greek of to-day. What havoc they, each and all of them, have made with all our so-called Christianities, all our chaotic, tumultuous Church words — used mainly to hide the Christ words from our sight, — the world knows by heart. It can no longer be concealed,

Mr. Bradlaugh' s recent arraignment of Christianity, for its cruel and infamous assaults upon Science, neither Mr. Gladstone nor all Europe can answer. But not even Mr. Bradlauorh alleo-es, or dares to alleo^e, that one single verifiable Christ word is responsible for any one of all these infinite infamies. On the contrary, there is no Science abroad under heaven to-day, there never was any on the face of the earth, worth sheltering and protecting, that was not inspired, sheltered, protected, nurtured and cared for, by these same imperishable Christ truths: whether in so-called Pagan, Hebrew, Mahometan or Christian lands. We have, therefore, at least one teacher who never begged his premises, nor dealt in fallacies, which any or all of the ages have been able to overthrow. Has the world ever had aii}^ other? If so, please tell us who, where and what he was !

He spoke of Faith, of Reason, and of Truth. He defined faith as "fidelity to God, in the little we do know, and implicit trust in him for the infinite we do not know." He spoke of truth as ''the eternal and everpresent reality of things, manifested in all that can ever exist:" of reason, as ''the eternal relation of each to each, of all to the whole, impressed by the hand of God on everything that exists." No mere human words and symbols, nor human power, can make either a reason or a truth, any more than they can create a cosmos. They are but the mere fingerboards, that point the w^ay toward them, inspired or uninspired. Till we get at the substance, we grasp nothing but the shadow; and verbiage alone cannot make even the shadow.

A forcible writer has said, ' 'Man is a compound of dust and deity; the dust is forever escaping, but the divine eternally abides." An old Philosopher said, "God is my father, and Nature is my mother; I look to my Father for all truth, duty and reason, while I yield to my Mother in all mere feeling and tastes."

God is the invisible, ever-present essential of all reason and truth, all force, life and spirit. Nature is the SUBSTANTIAL MANIFESTATION of all visiblc gracc and beauty, form, order and color; each alike without beginning and without end.

Paul uttered a great truth when he said, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." But Christ uttered a far greater truth, when he demonstrated to us that God is forever in all things that can exist, small and great, alive and dead; and in Christ himself, more than in all else, reconciling all worlds unto himself, by eternally creating and re-creating, ffeneratino^ and reoeneratino- and resurrectino:, in eternal succession, all thins^s and beinofs that exist rio'ht before our eves, out of nothing: visible to mortal eyes.

A Science, a Philosophy, and a Faith that does not recognize these great, eternal, omnipresent truths, in all that is within us and in all that is round about us.

is neither worth reading nor believing; and our Christ words everywhere teach us that any man who will believe anything without a good and satisfactory reason deserves spanking rather than saving.

God's will (houleema) is as eternally done in the moral and spiritual world as it is in the physical, but, like all other good fathers. His most benevolent wishes and desires {theleemci) are perhaps never fully realized. His eternal avill is that every moral being, in all worlds, should be wholly free to choose good and evil for himself, and perpetually reap the fruits of his own doing, and thus forever serve God, as an inspiration to all that is good, or as a continued warning against all that is evil. In one way or the other, serve God he musj, so long as he exists, and in all worlds alike, as necessarily as a stone drops to the earth, or a balloon rises toward the sky; he only chooses his own way and method of doing it, as the stone and balloon do not.

In morals, as well as physics, God is forever with the majority, and on the side of the strongest battalions. In physical warfare the rich and the powerful, who can marshal the greatest array of numbers, cannon and lire-arms, are the majority, and present the strongest battalions, that will surely win the day. In morals, God and one single pure soul forever make both the majority and the strongest battalion, that will forever ride forth, conquering and to conquer, despite all armies and navies, all schools, churches and empires, through all time and through all eternity. Who that one pure soul on earth is and was, no I a child in Christendom ten years old but well knows. What armed battalions, what external forces, sophistries, dress-parades, have we at hand, that w^e can marshal against a force like this! Like the invisible light and air, it creeps in everywhere, and undermines and overthrows the loftiest and strongest structures of man. Who are we that we can fight against God ?

And why are we frightened at miracles ? We are ourselves but so many bundles of miracles, wholly inexplicable to ourselves. All law is but the mere visible order of the miracle; it forever starts out from, and at every step of its movement treads upon, and at last sinks out of sight into utter, unfathomable mystery and miracle.

No man ever lived who can explain to the bottom how a candle burns, or how a bl^de of grass grows, otherwise than by saying, ' 'that is the will of God. ' ' A pig might think that the visible order of an army's march was the cause of its march, or that the order in which the hands of a watch move, or a wheel turns, was the cause of the movino^ and turnino^. But a rational man cannot think so, for there is a spirit in man as a man, and ''the inspiration of the Almighty giveth to

THEM understanding," in all things alike. To the pig no such spirit is given. This utterance in Job, given to the world perhaps before any Jew was born, certainly before Christ was, is the only definition of inspiration given in the whole Bible, and the only true one known in extant literature, the only one the Jews ever acknowledged; but still it is the last one either the Papal or Sectarian Church will ever accept. All their air-castles are built on wholly other foundations: Christ alone of all our teachers seems to have fully recoo^nized and believed in it.

In his first speech to his disciples and to the multitude, in that miraculously woven web of axioms and eternal truths which he laid at the bottom of his then and there declared, defined and instituted "Kinoxlom of the Heavens," over all worlds and beings, all times and eternities, he quoted no word or scrap from the Jews of olden times, except to correct, reject or amend it. Yet his utterance, as he himself declares, covers all law and prophecy, all of eternal duty and destiny essential to that kingdom, and needful to men now on earth, or in the heavens. ' In all his instructions to the twelve and to the seventy, and in his prolonged final discourse to his disciples in John, not a single scripture text is anywhere quoted or alluded to, as either basis or sanction of anything he taught or said. So utterly — in fact in all his utterances — does he make his own personal words the way, the truth, the life and the light of men.

To the Devil and the old Jews, who were perpetually quoting scripture to him, he quoted scripture back again; and he served them right, too. But even with them, he everywhere insisted, "I give you the bread of heaven ; Moses gave you not that bread." This was not only true and right, but absolutely indispensable; for the old kingdom of the Jews, even in its best days, was scarcely more like his kingdom of the heavens than was that of the Romans under Nero ; while the old Javeh of the Jews was no more like Christ's Father in the heavens, than was the Jupiter of the Greeks, as each is presented to us in the facts of history. Wholly apart from the panegyrics and campaign speeches of their admirers, there was really nothinoj in them fit for the eternal kino^dom of the heavens, and the real Christ of God to sanction or to sanctify. Though all nations and all peoples on earth instinctively know that G.od is good, and as instinctively attribute goodness to him, in all their spontaneous songs and worships, whatever their records of facts may have been.

If the Jews had never existed, if no miracle had ever been recorded, if there were no scrap of human literature on the face of the earth but only our authorized, verifiable Christ words, they would to-day be just as unquestionably true and thoroughly verifiable as they are now, as they were when they first fell from his lips. It is not true, and never was true, that our Christ words either stood or fell on miracles or mysteries or on the endorsement of schools, churches, popes or priests. They stand to-day where they always have stood, and where he himself stood, alone and single-handed against an embattled world. If any other human utterance makes them more truthful or more clear, it is only as a smoked glass helps weakened eyes to see the sun.

Histories, myths, miracles and parables, whether facts or fictions, can do nothing at best and at most but illustrate such ever-present, eternal principles. Our scholastic and irrational habit of ransacking the grave-yards and catacombs of the past to find the everlivino: God has not the slioiitest sanction of the Christ words. Yet for fifteen hundred years past the so-called Church has done little else with these Christ words than to crucify them between the two thieves of papal scriptural analogy and church orthodoxy. Wholly based on the begged premise and false assumption that the Church words and the Christ words are identically the same. AVhen we have reduced the Christ words to the level of our superimposed and interpolated Church words by bald scriptural analogies, and whittled them all down into mere tags to attach to our huge bundles of ready-made orthodoxy to give to our work credence and power over the minds of the compelled or volunteer slaves of the Church, creed, and the sect, we have totally extinguished that one voice from the sky amid the babel of our orthodoxies and the eternal freedom of his kingdom of the heavens over all worlds and beings, and given the world of men either the most direful despotism or a clamorous anarchy of sects in place of it. Is this God the father of all that exists ? Is this Christ the saviour of all men ? No I it is sheer cant and dogmatism ; nothing but wind and gas. What is such wooden-legged reason, based upon begged premises, worth either in faith or science ?

On similar begged premises, based only on the seemino^ with not a frao^ment of the demonstrated real, our wooden scientists and theologians tell us how God himself began business in the world and how he will close it out. How he builds worlds out of fogs and star dust; all living things out of one unknowable cell; men out of monkeys and monkeys out of men, — which last, by the way, is no great trick. But where is the truth ? Only an eternal and blundering guess to begin with, and not even a guess to end with. When that most wonderful and eloquent of all orators. Professor Proctor, discoursed to us with surprising brilliancy and power that the whole hemisphere of suns and worlds thrown upon the canvas before us were nothing but vast globes of fires, with an argument based wholly upon ''it seems so and so," at the close each blazinghell of a world seemed to cry out in my ears : "It seems ! it seems ! it seems ! it is not real and never can be."

All things must be stripped of their seeming before we get at their reality: which lies wholly in that voice of eternal silence never heard by mortal ear, and that light of eternal glory never seen on sea or land. The reason of God and the truth of God that fell first to us from the Christ lips alone.

And when soon after that most eloquent lecturer Professor Wendling told us of Saul, exalting him as the great philosophic source and spring and power of our Christian truths, with so exaggerated a view that if Paul was about our world we had little need of Christ or of God himself, I could almost feel the old apostle shrugging his shoulders from beneath his eighteen centuries of dirt, and saying: "Apart from Christ I am nothing, and never was and never can be anything."

Stranger still, that most learned Rabbi, Solomon

Scliindler, of Boston, in his twenty-four lectures to his Hebrew synagogue arrays before us twenty-four of the most learned Jews from Moses' day to our own time, to demonstrate that these heroes of Judaism have annihilated the Old Testament and monopolized to themselves the substantial Christ words of the New. But he seems never to have heard that the Christ of God was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and in three short years after his endorsement out of the sky, his divine thought practically revolutionized all the religions and empires of the globe — that of the Jews included — and gave to the children of men the only philosophy now extant upon the earth, on the basis of which it is possible to bring peace on earth, and create here and now a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

Paul called Felix "his most noble Felix," and interwove into his letters an ingenious patchwork of analogies with their old literature, only to render the Christ words more acceptable to men of that age.

But we cannot make a gospel out of Paul's terms of courtesy nor out of his patchwork of analogies, neither could he ; indeed, he never tried. But we have tried it and we have utterly failed.

Our Christ words give us no after death or other world theories except that the eternal kingdom of the Father and of the heavens is to go with us, be with us, in us, and over us and all about us wherever we may go or be, whether before death or after it ; forever unchangeably the same.

But the old papal church theories were unutterably stupid and diabolical ; they repelled, burnt up and exterminated all reason and wisdom but their own, and substituted their own for the reason and wisdom of Christ ; a very considerable mistake, both in its beginning and its outcome.

All the doubts and distrusts, all the fears and antagonisms of the world, all the sects and schisms, all the errors, blunders, crimes and infamies of the so-called church have grown out of the superimposed, interpolated church words, or out of translations and interpretations constrained and distorted by attempts to subject and subjugate real Christ words to these antagonistic church words, by a hocus pocus of scripture analogy. Amid these endless sophistries and the confusions of all reason and all truth, one might as well attempt to find the sunlight amid the lumber of some dark cellar with a tallow candle in his hand as to try to find the real Christ words under any such conditions. The first step out of the difficulty is to blow out the candle and to come up out of the cellar into the daylight, where alone the daylight can be found. God's eternal providences in his recreations are, like his mercies, new every morning, fresh every evening, repeated every moment of our lives ; and science finds that nothing else ever perishes, even if human souls do.

All forces, powers, and spirits as well as all visible things and beings revolve in everlasting circuits without beginning or end ; at every moment parts somewhere sinking into the invisible chaos and debris of the past for respite and repairs, while other parts eternally and momentarily are rising refreshed, repaired, regenerated and resurrected, into the renewed activities and service of the forever returning life and light of day.