It would be tedious to note the various views that have prevailed among theologians to the present day. Some hold that the offering was made to God to satisfy divine justice; others hold that it was a commercial transaction—so much blood for so many souls; and still others regard the whole as a governmental display to impress the world with a sense of the hatefulness of sin. Calvinists seem to think that the atonement was only made for the elect, but that the blood of Christ had sufficient merit to save the whole world. Roman Catholics hold that it is the literal, material blood of Christ that saves the sinner, and hence their extreme belief in the dogma of transubstantiation, the real body and blood of Jesus being offered in the sacrifice of the Mass, and taken by the penitent in the Holy Communion. Protestants generally hold to a sort of consubstantiation—a sort of real presence in the sacrament; while persons of intelligence profess to believe that this whole theory of blood-salvation is only to be accepted in a figurative sense. The fact is, that the whole scheme of vicarious atonement is an ancient superstition, though taught in the New Testament, and is absurd and unphilosophical, and false in principle and in practice, as we shall hereafter show.
We leave altogether out of view the logical conclusion that if the blood shed by Jesus was the blood of a man, it could have had no more efficacy than the blood of any other human being, and that if the blood shed was the blood of a God, the very mention of the thought is absurd and blasphemous in the extreme. It is nonsense to say that it was the union of the divine with the human nature that gave the blood of Christ its peculiar efficacy—that the altar sanctifies the gift for if the blood was changed by the man being united with the God, it was not human blood, but the blood of a divine man.
Now, there is no evidence that the blood of Jesus (supposing that he was crucified) differed in its essential qualities from other human blood. If analyzed by the chemist, it would have been found to contain only the constituent particles which belong to human blood. The white and red corpuscles and other chemical properties would have been found in it.
The dogma of blood-salvation as held by Romanists is cannibalism, pure and simple, and as held by Protestants it is sheer superstition, without one grain of reason to support it. It has no analogy in nature, nor in the philosophy of legal jurisprudence as held and practised by the most enlightened nations of the world.
It seems to us that the doctrine of vicarious atonement is not only immoral, but demoralizing. It represents God as punishing the innocent for the guilty to make it possible to forgive the guilty. This is inconsistent with the eternal principles of justice and rightfulness. It must have a demoralizing influence upon the mind and conscience of the sinner, to be told that his sins are already atoned for, and he only need to be cleansed by the blood of Christ; and this is to be obtained by simple faith and trust! Believe that Jesus shed his blood for you, and that he is waiting and anxious to apply it in washing away your guilt, and it is done! Then as often as you sin afterward you need only go through the same process to secure pardon! The easiness with which sins may be blotted out and washed away must have a demoralizing influence upon uneducated minds, though truly intelligent persons may not reason in this way. The low state of morals among those who really believe in this device for the forgiveness of sins may thus be accounted for. The numerous defalcations and downright thefts among the higher classes of Christians, and the petty lying and stealing among the great mass of Catholics and Protestants, are notorious, and can be traced, we think, to the easy methods of getting rid of the consequencees of wrong-doing. Our prison-statistics are truly suggestive, and should be carefully studied. Freethinkers are far in advance of Christians in the matter of practical morality. Many of those whom the courts exclude as witnesses, because they do not accept certain religious dogmas, are pre-eminently truthful, and would sooner die than tell a falsehood. They do not rely upon the blood of Jesus to wash away the vilest sins and make them white as snow.
Our statesmen are beginning to find out that our system of pardon is most pernicious. To relieve from the consequences of wrong-doing through a divine contrivance of the vicarious sufferings of an innocent person, and that human disobedience is made all right as to consequences by this obedience of a divine-human person, does not commend itself to the intelligence of this nineteenth century. The answer of theologians to this charge is familiar and specious enough, but it is not practically accepted by the common people. When a child enters the Sunday-school room, and his eyes rest upon the conspicuous placard, “Jesus Paid it All” the natural inference is there is nothing more to pay, nothing to do but to accept the free gift.
Thousands of ignorant persons, Catholics and Protestants, no doubt secretly accept and rely upon this easy device to cover up their numerous shortcomings and misdoings. This doctrine is a welcome one in the murderer’s cell and upon the platform of the gallows. In thousands of uncultivated minds the thought is no doubt deeply hidden that about the surest way to get to heaven is to commit a murder and have the “benefit of clergy,” and in due time to be “jerked to Jesus” (as described by a Western journal) by the hangman’s rope. Why should it not be so? The vicarious atonement has been made, and is being made in the Mass, and they have only to accept it. Two priests or ministers actually opposed the postponement of the execution of a certain murderer on the ground that he then believed in Jesus, but that if execution was postponed they did not know that he would continue to “believe,” and that his soul might thus be lost!
Suppose that our State authorities should proclaim in advance free pardon and a princely palace to all lawbreakers on the simple condition of trusting in the mediatorial interposition and substitution of another, already made and accepted; what would be the effect on public morals? The system of redemption and pardon set forth in the New Testament is infinitely more than this, and must be demoralizing. All public officers know the evil effects of the pardon system, and how even the faintest hope of pardon encourages crime, and how certainly a free pardon is almost sure to be followed by a life of increased criminality.
There should be no such thing as pardon in our State jurisprudence—no “board of pardons” and no “exercise of the executive clemency.” If a convict is believed to have been wrongly imprisoned, or by after-discovered evidence is found to be innocent, let no “pardon board” or “executive” interfere, but let the case go back to the court that convicted him or to one of like jurisdiction, and let the case be judicially reviewed in the light of evidence; and if the accused is found innocent, let him be honorably acquitted, or if guilty remanded to prison.
There is nothing in reason, philosophy, or science that approves the theologie method of dealing with offenders. It violates every principle of justice, and has not one single quality of rightfulness in it. It is a fiction pure and simple, in form and in fact. Macaulay well said of this redemptive scheme, “It resembles nothing so much as a forged bond, with a forged release endorsed upon its back.” Gregg pungently put it thus: “It looks very much like an impossible debt paid in inconceivable coin; or a legal fiction purely gratuitous got rid of by what looks like a legal chicanery purely fanciful. It gives unworthy conceptions of God as one delighting in the blood of human beings, and even suggests the disgusting practices of cannibalism. It is a relic of the ancient barbaric fetichism borrowed from savages by sacerdotalists for purposes of priestcraft, and should be scouted by all honest and intelligent men.”
The severely orthodox Rev. Professor Shedd, as well as Dr. Priestley, admits that there was no scientific construction of the doctrine of the atonement in the writings of the apostolic Fathers (Hist, of Doc., vol. ii., p. 208). The doctrine was evidently manufactured when the Romish Church was evolved out of the innumerable sects of early Christendom, and was enforced by wholesale excommunication of dissenters and the death penalty. Christianity was planted in Germany, Prussia, and Sweden by military power. The Saxons were “converted” by Charlemagne. All the secret religions have a god or demi-god put to death. Even the Freemasons have Hiram Abiff. The death of Osiris was the central point in the Egyptian system. He was killed by Seth or Typhon, and returned to life as Rat-Amenti, the judge. In Egypt, Christianity moulded its doctrines of the Trinity, atonement, and “mother of God.” The Osirian theology was grafted on the Christian stock, if indeed the Christian system was not an evolution of Osirianism; and of this the monstrous concoction known as vicarious atonement was made, and thrust down men’s throats by threats of hell and the visits of the executioner.
We might extend our remarks upon this subject indefinitely, but we have not space. We have seen that blood-salvation did not originate with either Jews or Christians. Dr. Trumbull has proved this over and over again, and Kurtz, an orthodox writer, has admitted this fact. He says: “A comparison of the religious symbols of the Old Testament with those of ancient heathendom shows that the ground and the starting-point of those forms of religion which found their appropriate expressions in symbols was the same in all cases; while the history of civilization proves that on this point priority cannot be claimed by the Israelites. But when instituting such an inquiry we shall also find that the symbols which were transferred from the religions of nature to that of the spirit first passed through the fire of divine purification, from which they issued as the distinctive theology of the Jews, the dross of a pantheistic deification of nature having been consumed.” All this is very frank, but we should not overlook the fact, so clearly established, that this doctrine of cleansing blood, so constantly taught in the New Testament and proclaimed from every orthodox pulpit in the land, was not a divine revelation specially made to Jews or Christians, but has been adopted and modified from the religions of nature, celebrated in all parts of the world by the most barbarous peoples in the remotest periods of time. Indeed, the more gross and savage the people, the more disgusting has been this doctrine of blood-salvation.
Dr. Trumbull could only think of two possible ways of explaining these marvellous things: “How it came to pass that men everywhere were so generally agreed on the main symbols of their religious yearnings, and their religious hopes in this realm of their aspirations, is a question which obviously admits of two possible answers. A common revelation from God may have been given to primitive man, and all these varying yet related indications of religious strivings and aim may be but the perverted remains of the lessons of that misused or slighted revelation. On the other hand, God may originally have implanted the germs of a common religious thought in the mind of man, and then have adapted his successive revelations to the outworking of those germs. Whichever view of the probable origin of these common symbolisms, all the world over, be adopted by any Christian student, the importance of the symbolisms themselves, in their relation to the truths of revelation, is manifestly the same."… “Because the primitive rite of blood-covenanting was well known in the lands of the Bible at the time of the writing of the Bible, for that very reason we are not to look to the Bible for a specific explanation of the rite itself, even where there are incidental references in the Bible to the rite and its observances; but, on the other hand, we are to find an explanation of the biblical illustrations of the primitive rite in the understanding of that rite which we gain from outside sources."
These assumptions are very flimsy stuff upon which to found the most prominent and mysterious doctrine of the orthodox Christian religion, making it the Alpha and Omega of the whole “scheme of redemption” To witness the mummeries of Roman Catholic priests and the manipulations of Protestant ministers in the celebration of the “Eucharistic Feast” or “Holy Communion” is enough to lead a truly intelligent man to wonder why these celebrants do not laugh each other in the face. Even our Universalist and Unitarian ministers sometimes indulge in this heathen diversion, though some of them deeply feel the absurdity of the rite, and the consequent humiliation to which they are subjected. Nevertheless, some of our most profound statesmen, when about to die, call in a priest, Catholic or Protestant, to administer the heathen ordinance. When will the world open its blind eyes, and learn that all that God requires of men is to “walk humbly, love mercy, and deal justly”?
There is no difficulty in accepting the words of a God who is said to have uttered the burning reproof to ritualists and hypocrites as follows: “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices? I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. And when you spread your hands I will hide mine eyes from you, yea, you make many prayers I will not hear, your hands are full of blood. Wash ye, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widows.”
This doctrine of bloodsalvation is, in our judgment, most unphilosophical and even absurd. It originated, as we have shown, in the most gross and anthropomorphic conceptions of God, and its solemn celebration in orthodox churches is inseparable from the most ignorant and superstitious rites of the most savage peoples. Its tendency must be demoralizing.
CHAPTER XVI. THINGS THAT REMAIN
“That those things which cannot be shaken may remain.”—Heb. 12: 27.
IN the preceding chapters we have shown that in our judgment the time has fully come for the fearless proclamation of the whole truth, regardless of temporary consequences.
We think that we have also shown that for many important reasons we cannot expect the whole truth from the professional clergy.
We have shown that the Jews are not the very ancient and numerous people that they have been supposed to have been, and that many of their claims are purely fabulous; and that this is specially true of their Pentateuch, which Moses, supposing such a man to have lived, could not have written.
We have shown how extensively symbolism anciently prevailed in sacred writings, how modern sacerdotalists have accepted as literal history and matters of fact what was at first a romance or an allegory intended to illustrate certain principles, and how the introduction of astral keys can only explain many of the Old-Testament stories, which, taken literally, are extremely absurd and foolish.
We think we have shown that the “fall” of the mythical Adam and Eve is an allegory, and not an historical fact, and that it is extremely unfortunate that the whole system of dogmatic theology is made to depend upon a mythus.
We have gone in search of the “second Adam,” and have not found him, except in the New Testament, and we have shown how utterly incomplete and unsatisfactory that account is, not rising in any degree to the character of evidence.
We have shown that the Gospels are highly dramatic; that the Christ is largely ideal; that many other persons before the Christian era claimed all that was claimed for Jesus; and that he, his conduct, and alleged sayings (he wrote nothing) are widely open to criticism.
We have shown that the distinguishing feature of the New Testament—blood-salvation—is not a special revelation, but that it has been borrowed and modified and adapted from savages and from the most ignorant and superstitious tribes; and that what is called the “redemptive scheme” is full of absurdities and contradictions, and that it is philosophically and naturally demoralizing in its tendency and influence if its logical consequences are accepted.
We now come to the practical question, What have we left? Is there anything in religion worth preserving? Indeed, is there anything condemned in this book that is essential to the purest religion and the highest morality? After doubting and throwing discredit on so much, have we anything left worth preserving? Having cast so much of the cargo overboard to lighten the ship, is the vessel worth saving? Having cast away the accretions and superstitions of religion, we are only now just prepared to defend its essential and sublime principles. Let us see what remains.
Our Faith in God remains.—Not a God. The passage in the New Testament (John 4: 24) admits that “a” is an interpolation. There is no personality in God in a sense which implies limitation. God is spirit, and so spirit is God. Even Professor Hæckel, the German materialist, says: “This monistic idea of God, which belongs to the future, has already been expressed by Bruno in the following words: A spirit exists in all things, and no body is so small but contains a part of the divine substance within itself by which it is animated.” The words God and religion have been so long associated with superstition and priestcraft that many liberal thinkers have a repugnance to both. But we must not let these perversions of sacerdotalism rob us of good words. We can conceive of God as the Over-all and In-all Spirit of the Universe. That spirit is causation, and matter, its palpable form, is one of its manifestations. We know that Nature’s method of making worlds and brutes and men is by a uniform system of evolution, taking millions and billions of years to carry on the work to the present time, and that it is likely that it will take millions more to perfect it. When asked what spirit is, we answer, We do not know; neither do we know what electricity is, nor can we answer one of a thousand questions that come up regarding the subtle and occult qualities of matter. We see no difference between the Unknowable of Herbert Spencer and the Unsearchable of Zophar in the book of Job. The Unknown Power is the Noumenon, the absolute Being in itself, the inner nature of force, motion, and even of conscience.
We have said, in substance, elsewhere: It is a great mistake to think of God as outside of and distinct from the universe. If there be a God at all, he is in the universe and in every part of it. We cannot properly localize him, and say that he is present in one place and not in another, or that he is in one place more than another. He must be everywhere and in everything. Anthropomorphic (man-like) views of God are what make atheists and agnostics.
Men constantly talk of the laws of Nature, forgetting that law itself is a product and cannot be a cause. The law of gravitation is not the cause of gravitation. A self-originating and self-executing law is unthinkable. The prevalence of law supposes the existence of a lawmaker and a law-executor. We accept the law of evolution, but cannot conceive of evolution independent of involution and an Evolver.
It may be said that this is “begging the question” by assuming the existence of an infinite God. But we deny that it is an assumption in its last analysis. What is known as the scientific method leads logically to the conclusion that there must be something that theists generally name God. You may call it “protoplasm,” “molecular force,” the “potentiality of matter,” or even matter itself; and when you tell us what these words mean we will tell you what we mean by “God.” Possibly we all mean the same thing. We know of the existence of God, as we know other things, by palpable manifestations.
Astronomers assumed the existence of Neptune from certain phenomena long before its existence could be demonstrated; and if the discovery had never been made the phenomena so long observed would have nevertheless justified the conclusion that there must be some stupendous cause for such unmistakable and marvellous perturbations.
When men talk of the eternity of matter we do not even profess to understand them. The most advanced scientists do not attempt to explain one of a thousand mysteries in which the phenomena of the material world is enshrouded. Why, then, should we be expected to explain where and how and when God came into existence, or how he could have had an eternal existence or be self-existent? We affirm no more of God than materialists imply of matter, and we endow him with no attributes that they do not virtually ascribe to matter. So far as assumption is concerned, both stand on the same ground. They, indeed, call things by different names, but mean about the same thing. What theists prefer to call “the works of God” materialists call “Nature,” “cosmic laws,” “spontaneous generation,” “the potency of matter,” “conservation of energy," “correlation of force," and “natural selection."
The fundamental error of modern scientists is that they limit their investigations to the physical and palpable, while we have demonstrable evidence of the existence of the spiritual and invisible. We know nothing of matter but from its properties and manifestations, and we have the same kind of evidence in regard to spirit, and know that it is superior to gross matter, and therefore cannot be tested by the same crucibles. In the very nature of things a great cause must ever be imponderable and invisible. It cannot be weighed and measured, but must ever remain intangible and incomprehensible. The spirit in physical man in its relation to the Supreme Spirit is as the drop of water to the ocean or the single glimmering ray to the full-orbed, refulgent sun. Men may talk of “force correlation," and trace its progress and products, but they must remain dumb as to the beginning or origin of force unless they accept the doctrine of an intelligent First Force. There is no way of accounting for the existence of spirit, of life, of intelligence, but by premising the prior existence of spirit, life, and intelligence. Like only causes like. An egg does not come from a stone, and the ascidian did not come from a lifeless rock.
The logical conclusion from the facts and principles herein suggested is that there must be an intelligent First Cause of all things—an all-pervading, fecundating, animating Spirit of the universe; and we prefer to call this God. Science has taught us the processes of his work, and denominates them the “laws of Nature.” In point of fact, as little is known of the origin and essence of matter as of spirit, and there is as good ground for agnosticism in the former as in the latter. There is therefore no necessary conflict between true science and a rational theism or monism.
It is a rational proposition that something must have been before what is called creation. There must have been an intelligent potency, and that power theists call God. Materialism in its last analysis ascribes to matter all that theists ascribe to God. It gives matter an eternal self-existence—endows it with an inherent infinite intelligence and an omnipotent potency. It spells “God” with six letters instead of three. It makes a God of matter, and then denies his existence!
We now submit that it is more rational to postulate the existence of an eternal Supreme Intelligence and Power, the Creator and Ruler of all things visible and invisible, who is the Author and Executor of the laws by which both mind and matter are governed. This Supreme Being is alone the Self-existent One, and what are called the properties and modes of inert matter are but the proofs and manifestations of his eternal power and Godhead. There cannot be a poem without a poet, nor a picture without an artist. There cannot be a watch or other complex machine without an inventor and artisan. The universe is the sublimest of all poems, and Cicero well said that it would be easier to conceive that Homer’s Iliad came from the chance shaking together of the letters of the alphabet than that the atoms should have produced the cosmos without a marshalling agency. The visible and palpable compel us to acknowledge their counterpart in the invisible and intangible, and we cannot rationally account for the origin of man without postulating the existence of an Intelligence and Power greater than humanity.
We are reproached for the inconsistency of believing in a Power we cannot comprehend, and endowing him with attributes of which we can form no just conceptions. Atheists do not seem to realize that they are guilty of a greater inconsistency. They tell us that we believe in a Being of whom we can form no conception, but they themselves must form some conception of such a Being, else how could they deny his existence?
There is no difficulty in admitting the existence of a Supreme Power if we do not attempt to comprehend and describe it. Matthew Arnold says: “We too would say 'God' if the moment we said 'God, you would not pretend that you know all about him.” His definition of God is indeed vague, but vastly suggestive: “An enduring Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” This suggests the moral element in the unknown Power. There is not only a spiritual sense in man which recognizes the supersensuous, but there is an indwelling witness to the eternal principle of rightfulness. The sentiment of oughtness is inherent and ineradicable. Every man who is not a moral idiot has a feeling that certain things ought and ought not to be—that there is an essential right and wrong. Human intuition sees and feels this mysterious Power that answers to our Ego, and from which it proceeds; and this inward conviction cannot be eradicated from the average mind by the pretensions of science. The patient watcher in the dark room at the terminus of the ocean cable sees in his suspended mirror the reflection of an electric spark, and he at once recognizes it as a message from the operator three thousand miles away. So God is seen by the aspiring and contemplative in the concave mirror of man’s own spirit, and, though it is a mere reflection, a spark, a flash, it clearly proves the existence of the Central Magnet. It is this recognition of the moral element that forms the basis of moral government and of that worshipfulness which has manifested itself among all nations, barbarian and civilized.
It is safe to assume that the average Atheism is disbelief in the God of the dominant theology, and not in the Ultimate Power that makes for righteousness. Vulgar, anthropomorphic conceptions of God, which endow him with certain speculative attributes, are condemned by reason and science; but nevertheless phenomena have something behind them, and energy has something beneath it, and all things have something in them which is the source of all phenomena and energy; and this enduring, all-pervading Power is our sure guarantee of the order of the universe. And this Power theists persist in calling God. Theologians may call this Pantheism, but it is only seemingly so. There is a vast difference between saying that everything is God, and that God is in everything. The old watchmaker-mechanician idea, a God separate and outside of the universe, has become obsolete, and science and reason and the law of progressive development now compel men to reshape their conceptions of God as identical with the Cosmos, plus the Eternal Power.
Herbert Spencer has beautifully said: “But amid the mysteries, which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that man is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.” The felt and the seen have their fulness in the unseen and intangible, and the visible impels us to seek its counterpart and complement in the invisible.
Our Faith in Religion remains.—And here the question comes up, What is religion? The commonly-accepted meaning of the word is as derived from the Latin religare, which means “to bind back or to bind fast.” We do not accept the definition, because it is suggestive of bondage. It implies a previous harmonious relation with God which had been lost. It favors the dogmas of the fall of Adam and man’s alleged reinstatement and “binding back” to the divine allegiance, through what is called, in theological parlance, a “redemptive scheme.” It is a significant fact that Lactantius, a theologian of the early part of the fourth century, was the first to apply the word religion to “the bond of piety by which we are bound to God.” Augustine of the fifth century followed his example, and so did Servius about the same time; and their example has been followed by theologians ever since, presumably because it favors the dogmas of the fall of Adam and the redemption by Christ. But the highest classical authorities derive the word religion from relegere or religere, signifying “to go through or over and over again in reading, speech, or thought—to review carefully and faithfully to ponder and reflect with conscientious fidelity.”
Cicero must have understood the original meaning and origin of the Latin word, and he took this view of the subject. He lived more than three hundred years before Lactantius, and he said: “But they who carefully meditated, and as it were considered and reconsidered all those things which pertained to the worship of the gods, were called religious, from religere.” The word religio was in common use in ancient Rome in the sense of scruple, implying the consciousness of a natural obligation wholly irrespective of the gods. The oldest popular meanings of the word religion were faithfulness, sincerity, veracity, honor, punctiliousness, and conscientiousness.*(1) Religion, then, in its true meaning, is the great fact of *duty, of oughtness or right-fulness, of conscience and moral sense. Its great business is to seek conformity to one’s highest ideal. It consists in an honest and persistent effort by all appropriate means to realize ideal excellence and to transform into actual character and practical life.