While the state of our race is such as to need all our mutual
devotedness, all our aspiration, all our resources of courage, hope,
faith, and good cheer, the disciples of the Christian Creed and
Morality are called upon, day by day, to work out their own salvation
with fear and trembling and so forth. Such exhortations are too low
for even the wavering mood and quacked morality of a time of
theological suspense and uncertainty. In the extinction of that
suspense and the discrediting of that selfish quacking I see the
prospect for future generations of a purer and loftier virtue, and a
truer and sweeter heroism than divines who preach such self-seeking can
conceive of.'--HARRIET MARTINEAU, _Autobiography_, vol. ii. p. 461.
'Noble morality is classic morality, the morality of Greece, of Rome,
of Renaissance Italy, of ancient India. But Christian morality is
slave morality _in excelsis_. For the essence of Christian morality is
the desire of the individual to be saved: his consciousness of power is
so small that he lives in hourly peril of damnation and death and
yearns thus for the arms of some saving grace.'--_F. Nietzsche_, by A.
R. Orage, p. 53.
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'They [Christians] have never learnt to love, to think, to trust. They
have been nursed and bred and swaddled and fed on fear. They are
afraid of death: they are afraid of truth: they are afraid of human
nature: they are afraid of God.... They deal in a poor kind of old
wives' fables, of lackadaisical dreams, of discredited sorcery, and
white magic, and call it religion and the holy of holies. They wander
about in a sickly soil of intellectual moonshine, where they mistake
the dense and sombre shadows for substances. They want to stop the
clocks of time that it may never be day, and to hoodwink the eyes of
the nations that they may lead the people as so many blind.'--ROBERT
BLATCHFORD, _Clarion_, March 3, 1905.
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