Ann I'm glad you enjoyed the article.
Here is one that really tells it like it is. It even tells what these people will respond.
The god-man of the Gnostics was not a man-god, but the god or divine nature in man, whichrepresented the spiritual image of the Invisible God, the formless in our human form; not in our human form of individual personality as an historical Christ, or Horus, or Buddha. That was but the symbolical presentment of the matter. The historical realisation was meant for all men and women, not for one man Jesus, or one female Sophia. We do not want to be beguiled, or to have
our children deceived any longer with the most beautiful biography of the man in the moon, who came down too soon, and whose second coming has been looked for so vainly during 1800 years. We are in search and in need of some truer illumination than moonshine. Having discovered
that these beautiful legends are mythical and non-human, we do not want the little ones to be misled for life by false teachings before ever they have learned to think. The illusion of false ideals
is the magical glamour with which Mephistopheles seduces the soul of Faust! A woman who sent to the lending library for a book that would make her cry, was in search of a false ideal in a world
brimming over with bitter reality. A minister of the gospel had been telling his little boy a tale that was full of human interest, and the child had been deeply affected by it, but looking up, with tears in his eyes, he asked,--"Is that true, papa, or is it only preaching?" Poor child! he had heard so much from the same source that he had looked upon it as being not necessarily true, but "only preaching!" That child's position is ours. By all we know, the story is untrue. And we have done for ever with the old wives' fables and romances of
mythology as a foundation for religion. We have done with a "Word of God" that is in fatal opposition to his Truth as manifested in Nature! We have done with the very God himself who, when traced to his origin, is found to be chief one of the seven devils or elementals of 0thology; and who is quite worthy of that origin in many aspects of his character. We have lost the power to make believe and deceive ourselves further in this matter! It cannot be too often repeated that the foundations of the Christian faith were laid in falsehood and ignorance. The Fall of man in the beginning was not a fact, and consequently there could be no curse. It is but a fable misinterpreted; and the redemption of the New Testament is based upon a fable in the Old. There is no virtue nor efficacy in a vicarious atonement, and no priesthood ever had or will have the power to forgive sin, to break the sequence between cause and effect, or to evade the Nemesis of Natural law. When the great delusion comes to an end its true epitaph would be,--"This was a fraud founded on a fable." Meanwhile, the Church that continues to put forth this scheme of
salvation and impose it on the public at the expense of the nation (some eight or ten millions annually!) ought not only to be disestablished and disendowed, it ought to be prosecuted for obtaining money on demonstrably false pretences!
We are often told that our civilisation is infinitely indebted to Christianity; but on the other hand it could be shown that Christianity has been infinitely indebted to civilisation, because it became the adopted religion, the official religion, of the races that happened to be in the swim and current of European progress. Indeed, our European progress has been in exact proportion as the civil law
and pre-extant common law have got the upper hand of the ecclesiastical usurpation. What did Christianity do for Italy, its birthplace? If it was such a renovator of the ancient worn-out world,
why did it not renew old Rome when its salvation had been adopted? What did it do for Greece? for Egypt? for the Mexicans? for any of the ancient races or civilisations? As Jerrold said truly, "We owe much to the Jews," but what do the Jews owe to Christianity? Its success has been as a parasite fed on the life of the recent races. The line of renewal was that of the races, whereas all the good results have been claimed for the Christian Creed. Thackeray was once attracted to an
elderly gentleman at table who was in the habit of maintaining that everything really good or great in modern literature came directly or indirectly from Pindar. "At all events," said one of the guests,
"Pindar did not write 'Vanity Fair'!" "Yes, sir," said the old gentleman with his customary assurance, "Yes, sir, he did; in the highest and noblest sense, Pindar did write 'Vanity Fair'!" In like manner it has been the custom to label every virtue as Christian that had been evolved as human, ages and ages before our own era, at which
time every good thing was re-dated, christened, and re-named, as if it were the result of an historical Christ! Indeed, one expects to hear of the elements of pure air, fresh water, and clear sunlight being christened under this name, in the same way that the well-known healing by means of Mental Medicine, which was practised by the pre-Christian races, has been designated "Christian Healing." We shall probably have Christian Lunacy or Christian Idiocy! Yet the fact
remains that the direst, bloodiest enemies of the human race in Europe have been the most besotted supporters of the doctrines called Christian. On the other hand if it were possible to eliminate from the factors in European civilisation the direct worth and hereditary influence of those free-thinkers who have not accepted the Historical Christian creed, what, think you, would remain of the progress that was made during many centuries? The only hold the system has ever
obtained on the most intellectual of men has been the hold of the rack! the death-grip of the stake! and the embracing fires of martyrdom! Has it ever struck you how little the great minds of the
past--the Shakspeares and Go‰thes, those "serene creators of immortal things"--troubled themselves about Christianity? How loftily they tower and overtook it. What preacher from the pulpit ever thinks of arraigning the present social conditions as based on the rights of the stronger and the wrongs of the weaker? On the contrary, it has been accepted as a divine arrangement that suffering humanity was the cheapest thing--with a never-ending supply--for manuring the soil, for
the greasing of wheels, for coining money out of. They never question whether this is the right basis of the national life. They rejoice in the scriptural assurance that the poor ye have always with
you, on purpose to keep down the price of labour; or, we may add, keep up the supply of children to the brothels of the rich, at the lowest possible figure! Christian civilisation to-day is
compatible with such a state of Society as was recently revealed by the Pall Mall Gazette. We have been assured that the one great sacrifice of the Son of God did put an end to individual
human sacrifice! But Christianity has been compatible with the masses of the people of Europe being offered up for ever in one great sacrifice. And what matters the mode, if you are sacrificed?
Honey and milk are sacrifice to thee,
Kind Hermes, inexpensive Deity!
But Heracles demands a lamb each day,
For keeping, as he says, the wolves away.
What matters it, meek browsers of the sod,
Whether a wolf devour you or a God?
The pretended stewards of the mysteries of God have left it for the future to create the very consciousness of wrong in a myriad ways, that their religion has never yet taken into account. As the dogs of Dives, they have now and again given a lick to the sores of
Lazarus, and promised him the healing hereafter. But when have they banded together and fought against the social system that dooms the many to poverty--that creates Lazarus as well as his sores?
When they have made large fortunes, and grown very rich, and death is drawing near, some Christians do wax charitable and grow liberal of alms. They do build large and comfortable houses for broken-down paupers to die in; they do supply hospitals for the refuge of those who are ailing and afflicted. But a good deal of the money has been donated for hell-fire insurance, and perhaps these paupers were left all through their working-life to pig together in hovels and slums,
the breeding-places of pestilence, which were sure to create the diseases you treat so generously when too late. They starved, and suffered, and sickened, that wealth might accumulate for others!
Peabody bequests are all very well in their way; but if the Peabody wealth had been spread in preventing the poverty and crime of the nation, instead of being wrung out of labour, and accumulating to cause these evils, how much better and more blessed would have been the prevention than the late attempt to cure, or rather to help bolster up a state of things which is relief of its running sores! We do not want to become paupers, as we must ever be if we are to be
forever pauperised. On reading lately that Belgravia had turned out to carry its broken victuals round in scrap-carts to the starving poor, I declare it struck a glow of shame into my face as if I
had received the insult of a blow, to think of the unnecessary necessity! You need not wonder if the poor should damn the charity that is offered to them in the name of religion, as a bribe for
them not to ask for justice; or that they should turn a deaf ear to all talk about the bread of heaven when they lack the bread of earth; or the milk of human kindness when their babes are perishing for lack of a little morning-milk from the cow! It is here that Christianity, after 1800 years, is an utter failure, and these are some of the things the Coming religion must go to the root of to be of any use for this world or any other. I know a poor old man in England who, for 40 years, worked for one firm and its three generations of proprietors. He began at a wage of 16s. per week, and worked his way, as he grew older and older, and many necessaries of life grew dearer and
dearer, down to six shillings a week, and still he kept on working, and would not give up. At six shillings a week he broke a limb, and left work at last, being pensioned off by the firm with a
four-penny piece! I know whereof I speak, for that man was my father. At the same time, as you are well aware, during those 40 years any possessor of capital might have put it out to usury, and
without lifting a finger himself it would have been quadrupled. Such are two of our naturalised laws of capital and labour. The one is the complement of the other; you cannot have the one without the other, and any religion that is not directed to help revolutionise this state of society is damned already, under whatsoever name!
We never can attain the stature of true manhood, or be man, so long as we will un-man ourselves by taking so unmanly an advantage as we do of our more ignorant and hitherto helpless fellow-men. No one class of men can hold another with their faces to the ground, or noses to the
grindstone, without also stooping over them in a manner that for ever hinders from attaining the perfect stature of genuine manhood. The degradation, though different, is shared in common! And, mark you, these things are done as effectually by aid of our social system, and laws of supply and demand, as if one man stood over another with the whip of the slave-driver, or sword of the executioner, in his hand. The wrong and the responsibility, the cruelty and the cowardliness
are none the less because they are warranted by custom, sustained by legal enactments, and defended by the press. After the recent utterances of the Archbishop of York, who spoke of our continual doubling of the pile of the rich by halving the wages of the poor, we shall doubtless hear more from the echoists. But the redemption preached for 1800 years has failed to save the world, and it must now give way for other workers with other methods, applied to such matters as the problems of poverty, the distribution of wealth, and the ownership of land. In vain will they claim and Christen every good work of Co-operation, Communism, or Socialism, as Christian by
name. The "good Lord Jesus" as an objective saviour and historical Christ has "had his day." Our science, applied to civilisation, will part company more and more with the found-out fraud, and
will help to carry it no further! Its triumphs will not be made or allowed to support the Christian delusion in the future any more than in the past. And what is the chief cause of this novel interest in
the churches on behalf of the poor to-day? Is it not fear that the new electorate will reject the orthodox system, and that their political influence will prove fatal to the Church?
And now the question is being asked,--What is going to take the place of the cast-out faith? for it is already cast out from the minds of the men who will assuredly mould the freer thought of the future. It is not going to be re-established by law; nor by the blood and fire of the salvation army--nor by presenting our cast-off clothes to the aborigines! Nor by teaching blind Chinamen to read the Bible. Not going to be re-established even though more Bibles have been printed
during the last ten years than in all the preceding centuries. It is being rejected at home faster than you can give it away abroad! We have had our religion based on belief--on belief in a God who cared an infinite deal more for a few pleasures than for the eternal damnation of myriads of immortal souls--a God who played fast and loose with the laws of his own nature and creation! A creed based on the divine truth of every lie that science has exploded--a belief that was in deadly opposition to all and every truth that has been established. A "good old faith" which is a fraud--so far as being saved by it goes--founded
upon a legend misinterpreted. And at last the old grounds of belief are breaking up rapidly; no matter what fresh efforts may be made to deceive, delude, and secure the ignorant, the infants or the aborigines. The orthodox creed is doomed to reversal, even as a dish is wiped clean, and turned upside down. The foundations of the false, cruel, and gory faith are all afloat. It was built as the Russians reared their palace on the frozen river Neva, and the great thaw has come suddenly upon them; the ominous sounds of the final break-up are in their ears; their anchorage and place of trust is crumbling before their eyes. For they had built on the very things (or condition of things) which had sealed up the running springs, and stayed the stream of progress in its course. They have arrested for the purpose of resting. And here is the hint of Science, of Nature, of Spiritualism, of Theosophy, of Freethought, in every form--that they must move on, and get out of the way, or be moved off for ever. The orthodox religion has been dying in proportion as it lost the power to persecute! People now inquire, "what next?" As did the tad-pole when his tail dropped off. What next? as if we were going to straightway put forth a new tail! But that is not the way of Nature. She works by transformation, not by repetition; and her changes imply growth, as
the out-come of a new life. It is not possible for us to swap creeds or formulate a new religion. Religion is not a set of precepts, or a mode of worship. It is not a creed that counts in the eternal
court. It is not what we believe or profess, but what we are when stripped bare in the balance. Nothing avails but the life lived. Our past deeds must and will make our future state! Some people
seem to think that Spiritualism is about to give us a new tail, or at least to put a firmer tag on the old limp stay-lace of Christianity, to bind us up anew with a fresh support! They are wondering
when the Spiritualists are going to open their Sunday shop for the purposes of prayer and praise. But I doubt whether that mode of procedure will ever be repeated in this world. When Sydney Smith saw his child tenderly stroking the hard shell of a tortoise to please the tortoise, he said, "you might just as well stroke the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral with the idea of pleasing the Dean and Chapter." So when we see people crowding together to worship and praise and flatter the Lord, as if they fancied they could gratify his self-esteem, or excite his benevolence, or keep his destructiveness quiet, it reminds me irresistibly of the child's stroking the tortoise to please it. The
offering of words of praise which people make to show their love of God is of no more value than the cheap oblations of sham bank
notes which the Chinese burn to any amount as a sacrifice to their deities! They offer money by millions in that way. The only worthy way of showing love to God is in working for humanity. That is the practical test. The Lord does not want your long and loud laudations or offerings of false money!
Hermes says "there can be no religion more true or just than to know the things that are." We have had a religion without knowledge, and the Coming religion must be founded on knowledge.
And it must be good for this world as its warrant for being good for any other. In knowledge only can we find a common ground of agreement. That which is based upon knowledge, need not be the subject of everlasting diversity and contention amongst innumerable sects. We need a first-hand acquaintanceship with the facts of Nature--not limiting Nature, however, to the little we may know of it at present. Of course, mere facts are not everything. No number of separate
vertebral joints will supply a man with a backbone. We have to collect the various joints in our scattered facts derived from a closer acquaintanceship with, and truer interpretation of Nature,
but life alone can produce the unity and cohesion that will constitute a back-bone. Amongst these facts we naturally assign a foremost place to those of Spiritualistic phenomena, which the orthodox as good as prohibit to their followers in favour of theoretical teachings. Whereas we need a first-hand acquaintanceship here, if anywhere. Present facts are worth all the teachings of the past: by means of these we can test them. The facts in nature are the sole ground to go upon for another life, just as they are for this; facts that are scientific because they are verifiable to-day as in the past. We claim that the inner vision or second sight is a fact in nature. Pre-vision is a fact in nature. The spiritual apparition is, and always has been, a fact in nature. But a physical resurrection from the dead is not a fact in nature, and here the Aborigines are far ahead of the
orthodox Christian world in a practical knowledge of these phenomena on which the demonstration of our continuity is based. The naturalist Kircher estimated the number of intellectual proofs of the existence of God at 6561. A Spiritualist considers one actual proof of
objective spiritual manifestation as worth them all. Better is one real spirit communication than a divinity put together in 6561 pieces; it is a fact that for the first time makes those figures live!--or
gives a foothold for taking the first step in the unknown. As evidence of a future life, one single proof in spiritual manifestation is worth the hear-say revelation of the world. The time has not yet come for any thinker to set forth the reign of law and order in this obscure domain of Nature which, for lack of another name, we call "Spiritual," or neo-natural; but Spiritualism is none the less real because orthodox physical science has not yet established it as one of its truths. A sufficient number of competent observers and credible witnesses testify to the occurrence and recurrence of certain phenomenal manifestations, which go to prove that we have found the sole bridge in nature that crosses the unfathomable gulf between the dead and the not-dead; the organic and the inorganic--between mind and
matter--which Science has strenuously sought elsewhere, but never yet found. A million of us know that the cable is laid between the two worlds, and the messages prove that there are intelligent operators at the other end of it, who can send us messages in human language. We
know that the so-called dead are living still, however difficult it may be, and is, though not impossible, to establish their personal identity! We know they can communicate with us and we with them, objectively as well as subjectively, and that the objective phenomena enable us to comprehend the true nature of the subjective--to accept and to found upon it inferentially. We know they can establish a rapport with us more rare and potent than we can with each other in
the body. Some of us have felt and handled and heard that which was invisible to our sight, in the presence of those who could see and describe the forms and motions of that (or of those) which
we only felt and heard. And so we can put our evidence together, and draw the necessary inference. Buckle has said: "The doctrine of immortality is the doctrine of doctrines. A truth compared with which it is indifferent whether anything else be true!" Anyway, Spiritualism alone offers the means of establishing it as a fact. Spiritualism alone offers a scientific basis for a doctrine of immortality! The Phenomenal Spiritualist stands level-footed on the only ground of fact
that is, or ever has been, offered by Nature for human foothold in the Unseen. Spiritualism alone reveals a bridge on which we can get any bit of actual foothold for crossing the gulf of death. The
Spiritualist makes connection between the two worlds, and runs his trains of thought right through! Indeed, the two worlds are but one for him--they are not two, any more than the railway runs
through another world by night. It is but one world after all, with two aspects. The daylight part of it is but half-revealed by day, and the dark side is but half-concealed by night. The phenomena
called Spiritualistic furnish us with a means of interrogating Nature in such a way that it is sure to revolutionise all our mental science--psychology, philosophy, metaphysic, and theosophy. These
phenomena show us that we have other and profounder facts to go upon than those hitherto included in our data. Realistic phenomena, not merely idealistic--facts in place of faith. Spiritualism opens up to our vision a Power that operates upon us, and through us, and makes use of us whether we will or no,--whether we are conscious of its presence or not--our recognition being
unnecessary to its existence or operations. Spiritualism shows us how the soul of man may be fed with a sustenance drawn from the well of life within us, that is penetrated and replenished from eternal springs. And we maintain that these phenomena, called Spiritualistic (which have no relationship to the miracles of misinterpreted mythology), and these alone, do actually demonstrate the natural nexus for the continuity of life, and the next step upward in human evolution.
Some of our Free-thought Secularist friends seem to suffer from rabies on the subject of a future existence. The very idea of it drives them frantic; and that which is as the water of life to others
only serves to aggravate their symptoms, and make them rage more furiously. The editor of the Melbourne Liberator says it is a swindle of the worst description to keep up the farce of a future life. Now, I think we know that there are facts in Nature which warrant the inference of another life; and simply as facts I would have them made known. Without the facts we cannot know the truth! Anyway, there is no warrant for those who do not know that man has a soul to dogmatise
and teach that men have no souls, or that there is no future life. Those who do not know can have no right to pretend to know, and such pretensions of the negational dogmatists constitute a positive imposture. Whosoever owns the head, you cannot quite bring a knowledge of all things pertaining to the ultimate reality under one hat. The Agnostics show more modesty. Professor Huxley says: "Agnosticism means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has
no scientific grounds for professing to know and believe!" So say we. Only we claim to have scientific grounds for knowing. A crude materialistic interpretation of the Universe bottoms nothing. There is eternal motion; there is eternal life. There is a being beyond appearance. There is a Consciousness that co-ordinates the means to attain the ends, with power to turn to account all that occurs in the sphere of so-called human Free-Will. There is Intelligence involved in all that is intelligible. All who break the laws of nature do so under penalty of punishment. They learn sooner or later that there is a law-maker, whose ministers and agencies will dog the law-breaker;
however we may deny the law-maker, we cannot evade the law! False Spiritualism merely begets a craze after another life. But a true Spiritualism will turn our attention to this life, and help on the
work of this world. Spiritualism enables us to call in the new world in our rectification and adjustment of the wrong done in the old--somewhat like calling in troops from the new world of
the Colonies to fight the battle of England in the old. It has come to quicken a keener conscience in the human race; set up a loftier ideal of life and a nobler standard of appeal than fear of punishment and hope of reward. For me, Spiritualism means an aid in the certain overthrow of all false dogmas and lying legends, which have been imposed upon men, and are still imposed upon the children, in the name of God. Science has been driving in its splitting wedge with a mighty
ripping and rending of the ancient beliefs. But with Spiritualism the wedge is alive, and takes root just as the seed of the Indian Bo-tree is so vital that when it is sown singly in the cleft of some lofty tower or fortress, and a drop of moisture and a smile of
sunshine have caused it to quicken, it will shoot out and lay hold of the stone with its feelers and strike root to make its way down the walls to the earth outside, and laying hold of this it gathers
strength and grows mightily, and sends back such force to its birth-place that the walls are rent, and the temporary resting-place betwixt earth and heaven is shattered in favour of the newer
rootage and firmer foothold upon this more nutritious and life-giving ground. So will Spiritualism lay hold of the larger substance of reality, and inevitably rend the barren stone walls of the
Establishments into fragments, minute enough to be ground down into the new fresh soil in which it is destined to flourish and bear fruit in the freer, larger, loftier life of a nobler human race!
Spiritualism will help to break up the sacerdotal ring of priestcraft that has hemmed the people round with terrors and strangled souls with fear. It is rapidly abolishing the tyranny of death, and restoring freedom for life to those whose whole living had been turned into one long dread of death. Spiritualism will have done a great work, if only by destroying that craven dread of dying which has been instilled into us from before birth; the child in embryo having been made to feel
and embody the mother's shudderings at the frightful language used by the torturers of souls, who fulminate their cruel formulas from the pulpit. If it sets us free to do our own thinking as rational
men and women, who have so long and so profoundly suffered from the pretensions of the sacerdotalists, who continue to peddle, in the name of God, a system of delusion, the foundations of which are to be discovered at last in misinterpreted mythology; against which system of false teaching I, for one, am at war to the death, with any and every weapon I can lay hands on, including this most potent weapon--the sword of Spiritualism. Spiritualism is sure to be terribly
iconoclastic! It means a new light of revelation in the world from the old eternal source. And you cannot have new light let in without seeing many old acquaintances with a new face. Many aspects
of things will change; and some things that we mistook for live faces will turn into the sheerest masks of mockery, and whiten with the sweat of dissolution running down them. Spiritualism, as I
interpret it, means a new life in the world, and new life is not brought forth without pain and parting, and the sheddings of old decay. New ideas are not born in the mind without the pangs of
parturition; and to get rid of our old ingrained errors of false teaching is like having to tear up by the root the snags of one's own teeth with our own hand. But, by our own hand and will, this has
to be done, for nothing else can do it. New light and new life, however, do not come to impoverish, they come to enrich, and no harm can befall the nature of that which is eternally true.
It is only falsehood that fears or needs to fear the transfiguring touch of light; that must needs shrink and shrink until it shrivels away. |
