Or perhaps this one Jane? These are all continued but I want to see if there is one to suit your fancy.
Our "friends the enemy" cheerily assure us that certain things are settled once for all in favour of
Historical Christianity, and any further kicking against the fact is all in vain. If you show them that the
Mosaic Writings do not contain an original revelation to mankind, but are a Mosaic of Persian and
Egyptian mythology, that the foundations of their creed are destroyed if the Fall of Man is a fable,
they will tell you that does not in the least invalidate the authority of the Bible, nor imperil the
Christian revelation. Oh, no! The Church has never committed itself to any particular interpretation.
Let us throw up the sponge and continue the battle. Some of the Apologists (as they call themselves,
without meaning it ironically) pretend to think they are so secure that they can denounce any
discussion of the Mosaic legends as intolerably tiresome. They affect to consider the matter past
discussion. But those same "certain things" were never more uncertain or unsettled than at the
present time; and when they do get settled the occupation of those who preach them as God's truth
to-day will be gone forever! If they have closed the controversy, we have just begun to open it! We
have not done with the note of interrogation yet. If they have made and tied up their little bundle of
old dried sticks, ours are beginning to grow, and put forth a new leaf; ours are yet green and lusty
with the sap of a new life.
These people have a vision of their own, and as it was bequeathed to them they will not part with it,
even though they have to close their eyes to see! They will die in the "good old faith." But that is
what others of us cannot do. We have but just begun to ascertain the meaning of the good old facts
that preceded the good old faith. We are finding out that names the most hallowed are spurious
counterfeits of the ancient gods. We are learning that the literary fortunes of the Bible were made by
Mythology, and filched from the peoples who have been spoiled as Pagans, and accursed as the
spawn of Satan. There is a spirit within us that wants to see, with our eyes wide open, and will see,
and must tear the bandages and blinkers off the eyes to see, each for himself,
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whether the traditional vision be false or true. Nature gave us eyes to see with; it was men who
added the blinkers. Nature intended us to be led by our own eyes; it was men who substituted the
system of leading by the nose the mass of dough-faced humanity which church and state have tried
so hard and so long to knuckle and mould for the purpose of leading it by the nose. We have found
out now-a-days that even the horses pull better without than with the use of blinkers. So
ignorant are many of these men of what is being thought outside their own little world, they do not
even know how the battle is going against them. They are in possession of a few crumbling
out-works, and do not appear to understand that the enemy is already in the heart of the citadel
itself, with the sappers and miners depositing their mental dynamite; nor care greatly, so long as the
commissariat remains intact, and they can draw the usual rations! for their attitude is, "deprive us of
what you please doctrinally, and resolve all our mysteries into myth, so long as you do not
disestablish and disendow the Church!" So long as the out-works are standing with them inside they
will not recognise defeat! And orthodox Christianity is mainly built up of out-works or scaffolding. It
is not the scaffolding, however, with which the institution was built, but one that conceals the true
nature of the real building inside. The ordinary worshipper stands outside and mistakes the
scaffolding for the real building, and looks upon it as it rises tier above tier like so many
landing-stages and resting-places on the upward way to heaven. It has been my aim to penetrate
beyond this scaffolding, discover the secrets of the hiding-place, and contradict the false report
concerning the builders. And what we do find is that the so-called "Revealed Religion" is simply
unrevealed mythology, and that a spurious system of salvation was proffered to those who would
accept the ancient mythology transmogrified into Historic Christianity, and be bribed into changing
their old lamps for new ones! Orthodox preachers will go on asserting Sunday after Sunday, in the
name of God, any number of things which their hearers do not believe, only they have heard them
repeated so often--past all power of impinging or impugning--until the sense is too out-wearied to
rebel; things which they themselves do not believe, if they could once afford to question their own
souls. The Pall Mall Gazette has lately asked the question, if you had œ100,000 to spare what do
you think would be the greatest charity to give it to? I should like to have replied, "Pension off a few
of those poor slaves of the pulpit, who are forced to earn their living by preaching what they no
longer believe." How little the orthodox world dreams of the new dawn that is rolling up the sky,
glorious with its promise of the brighter, better day! Nay, it is already flaming through the
cob-webbed windows, and trying to look in at the shut eyes of the sleepers, which are fast closed,
or blinking at the splendour shining on their faces! They are still dreaming how to roll the world back
the other way
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once more into the night of the past, even while they are passing, face upwards, beneath the radiant
arch over their heads, alight with the dawn of a day that is not theirs; blind to the glory of its coming,
deaf to the birds that soar and prophesy in song, senseless to an amazing apparition of the Eternal
growing visibly present in this our world of time! Now and again the sleepers start, and you hear a
troubled moan from those that dream, and know they dream, but are afraid to wake. And when they
do wake they will begin shouting for the fire-engines to come and put out the flame of dawn, now
reddening the sky as with a conflagration and the end of all things for them.
If these men had truly cared for religion instead of their Anthropomorphic theology, they would not
have gnashed their teeth and shaken the fist at the alleged phenomena of modern Spiritualism, as
they have done. They would have embraced Spiritualism as if it had held out to them the strong right
hand of salvation itself. For just when scientific research is undermining and exploding the ancient
beliefs that have been falsely founded on mythology--just when the Materialists think they have
discovered the great secret of life in protoplasm, and we are on the verge of finding the mechanical
equivalent for consciousness--just when some are assuming that force comes from the visible side of
phenomena, that mind is but a property of matter, an effect rather than a cause, and thought is
nothing more than a result of molecular motion--just when the scientific report is that the deeper we
dive physically, the farther off recedes the heart-beat of eternal life, in breaks this revelation from a
world unknown, and, as it was assumed, unknowable. And these alleged phenomena contain the
sole possible, palpable, natural evidence of a future life, that men have, or ever did have, or ever can
have, to go upon. But no! what they care for are the old wives' fables and the figments which have
become their hereditary stock in trade; the facts may go to the devil, to whom, indeed, they generally
consign them. For, if it be God himself who tries to speak with them in this way from behind the
mask of matter to prove the fact, they say it cannot be our God. He is dead, and buried in a book.
This must be the devil. It is the devil. They had succeeded in substituting the non-natural for the
natural, making men believe that this sham was the supernatural. They have taught us to look for
God in the wrong way. They have based religion on erroneous grounds. They have made us the
victims of false beliefs, and a false belief will make despicable cowards of men who would otherwise
have looked facts in the face, and been true to themselves and honest to others. They have evolved
our respect and reverence by means of the whip. And now when the stick and scourge, the knout
and whip, have lost their terrors, have done their worst, and had their day, it is found that religious
reverence has vanished also, and the young are becoming utterly sceptical in most things, before they
are old enough to be in
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earnest about anything; for which the false teaching is responsible. The young have been disgusted
with the ancient object of reverence, the grim and gory ghost of an anthropomorphic God.
We are constantly hearing complaints respecting the want of reverence on the part of the young for
the old. But if they are old fools, and "old women" of the wrong sex, why should they be
reverenced? It is said the children of this generation have no reverence for God or man. But if the
reverence was evoked by the stick, and the reign of the stick is over, what are you going to do? It is
of no use complaining, and probably it is too late to think of getting a new stick. |
