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 £100,000
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 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 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. |
