We learn as we come to a knowledge of joy, that all sorrow and suffering are but the passing shadows of things mortal, and not the enduring or eternal reality. When no longer darkened or eclipsed by the false creed which has benighted our minds and totally obscured so many natural truths, we can see to the end of these shadows--we can overlook them--in the larger intellectual light of a truer interpretation of the necessities of evolution and of the human environment. If nature has one revelation of truth to make more plainly apparent than another, it is that her creature, man, is
intended for health and happiness here, in this life, and not merely hereafter--on condition of suffering here! Pleasure is the natural accompaniment of our creative and productive activities, and the
human likeness of life itself is conceived and imaged in delight. Health, physical or mental, means happiness.
And everywhere the pull of the natural forces and elements are on
the side of health, and, therefore, of consequent or premeditated happiness; children of the blind who never saw, being born to see,
and the children of the deaf mutes being born to talk. That delight
in life was intended by means of health and happiness may likewise be read in the stern punishment administered by nature for every breach of natural law by which we injure our health and destroy our happiness; and, lest the personal memory of the fact for one generation should be too short-lived, the results and effects of the
violated law are kept before us, in some cases from generation to generation, not as gibbets for mere vengeance, but as sign-posts pointing to the way of reformation. Health is intended, and
happiness is the result. It is the happy who will be moral; not the miserable. Now, the Christian scheme would make us miserable, in
order that we may be moral here and happy hereafter!
Whereas Nature says, be happy here and now, by learning the laws of health--individual, social, political, universal; by getting rid of all opposing falsehood, and establishing the true conditions for evolving health and happiness everywhere for all.
"But," it has actually been urged in reply to me, and in arrest of judgment, "supposing the Christian Narrative to be entirely mythical, is not this supreme legend of divinest pity a beautiful and touching
story?" Yes, and the more beautiful the deceit, the deeper the delusion. If it were only a dramatic representation, the plea would apply. But this thing has no meaning if it is not humanly true. The
supreme legend of divine pity! That is pity for a fallen race on the part of a supposed deity who damned mankind for ever for the stealing of an apple! Why, our own unpaid magistracy--who are not over-lenient--would not have made more of it than a matter of
fourteen days, or a month at most. Suppose you do touch the heart of the world upon false pretences, even to the extent of drawing a tear from John Morley, or getting a perfumed pastille offered up as a
sweet savour in sacrificial smoke by Renan, where is the gain when once the falsehood is found out? As soon as the theological Scotsman discovers that his foundations of belief in the fall of man, in predestination, hell-fire, and eternal damnation are false, he naturally takes to whisky, and maybe for the rest of his life cannot find a brand that is quite fiery enough! The illusion of false ideals is always at war with reality. The Christ of the Gnostics was a true ideal, possible to all men. But an Historic Christ is a false ideal! Where is the sense of supposing a God sliding down to earth on a ladder with no steps to it, and then asking us to walk up minus the foothold? Also, it is in vain we set up an objective ideal for outer worship of that which can only be a reality within the soul.
The god-man of the Gnostics was not a man-god, but the god or divine nature in man, which represented 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 mythology; 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! |
