Christianity and all such teaching is entirely false. An old Scotsman, known to me, used to say, "I like Paul! puir soul, I do like Paul. But I dinna like Jesus Christ; I canna like Jesus Christ; they are aye casting it in your teeth that he dee'd for ye; and I dinna want to be dee'd for!" The old fellow's manhood rose in revolt against this salvation of the savage mind by means of blood shed in a vicarious atonement. And he was in the right. We do not want to be died for, and if we did, it would be unavailing. We can no more be died for for another life than the law will allow us to be died for in this.
Men like Jesus, or Jehoshua ben Pandira, the Jewish political and social reformer, or Bruno, or Garibaldi, or Gordon, or Garfield, are in a sense Saviours of the world. They set before us an illuminated image of immortal love. They pull down on themselves, and bear for us, the heavy burden of martyrdom, because of the wolfish selfishness of the world! But there is no salvation possible for us out of the mere act of their suffering. The only salvation is for those who range themselves on the side of these martyrs, and reformers, and forerunners, against the selfishness of the world, to work and change the crude conditions of things, which forever demand the sacrifice of the best and dearest of women and men. When Arnold von Winklereid took the double armful of the enemies' spears into his own breast, it was to make a way for his fellow-countrymen to pass on and widen the gap he had made--not for them to stay behind and pat him on the back, or merely subscribe to erect a statue to his memory. That the innocent are continually offered up on account of the besotted selfishness of the many is a fact. That they must continue to be thus offered up, until the world awakes to see this shameful sacrifice of others to save its own selfishness, is likewise a fact. But to erect this into a religious dogma, and call it the divine means of saving men, who wilfully continue and necessitate the conditions of society which cause and demand the martyrdom, is about the most immoral and damnable doctrine ever offered to humanity. Why, this doctrine of atonement is so unmanly, so cowardly, and currish, that, if put in its naked truth, the lowest rough in Whitechapel, if unperverted by orthodoxy, would be too manly to accept such an immoral mode of salvation. Any one who would consent to be saved at the expense of another, and an innocent person, ought only to escape, if at all, because he would not be worth the damning. Far nobler was the teaching of Captain George W. Pendleton of the Cleopatra, of Gloucester, Mass. His vessel was doomed and sinking fast, when the boat put off from the "Lord Gough" with a crew that volunteered to try and rescue the shipwrecked man. But with salvation in sight the American captain, by agreement with his men, hauled down his own flag of distress. He thought the boat could live in such a sea. "I said to my men, shall we let those brave fellows risk their lives to save ours? and they said 'No.' Then I hauled down the flag." And so they deliberately elected to die first. That was the gospel according to George Pendleton! But this sacrifice of the innocent to save the guilty--of others instead of self--is the religion of savages; it belongs to the most benighted conditions of the human race, and as such is doomed to die out of any state of true civilisation. The doom of Historic Christianity is sealed, because it was based upon Dogmas against which the highest instincts of the race will forever rise in insurrection, and Doctrines that are certain to be rejected by the growing moral sense of enfranchised humanity.
From what I have learned of the interior operations of natural law, such selfishness defeats its own end and aim. The only way of helping oneself is by helping others. The only true way of receiving is by giving. The fear of being lost never yet saved the soul of any man. Put aside the fable, and the foolish fraud that has been founded on it, and we are face to face with the fact that man has no power to lose his own soul or damn himself for all eternity. If man be immortal by nature, continuity is not based on morality--however much he may retard development by limiting his life to the lower self, which may be a hell to think of and struggle out of hereafter. Nor is the hereafter a heaven provided on purpose to make up for the man-made sufferings to those who have been deluded and cheated and starved out of their life in this world. If it were so, then Providence would not only be responsible for all the mal-arrangement and the misery, through not simply allowing it, but for permitting it, and providing for it! Whereas we see the wrong is remediable, the sufferings are unnecessary, and the Christian way out of it is a misleading cul de sac. It is like some of the squirrel tracks in the forest with the trail ending up a tree.
The orthodox teachings are so false that they have made the utterance of truth a blasphemy, and all the proclaimers of truth blasphemers! Oppose their savage theology, and you are denounced as an Atheist. Expose the folly of their faith, and you are an Infidel all round. Deny their miracles, and they damn your morals.
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