I.

I want to do what little I can to make my country truly free, to broaden

the intellectual horizon of our people, to destroy the prejudices born

of ignorance and fear, to do away with the blind worship of the ignoble

past, with the idea that all the great and good are dead, that the

living are totally depraved, that all pleasures are sins, that sighs

and groans are alone pleasing to God, that thought is dangerous, that

intellectual courage is a crime, that cowardice is a virtue, that a

certain belief is necessary to secure salvation, that to carry a cross

in this world will give us a palm in the next, and that we must allow

some priest to be the pilot of our souls.

Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and

creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be

enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have

his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon

all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends.

It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we

know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and

despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination,

or the Trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other

seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where

Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact

extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist?

Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable

of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be

far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?

Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask

is--not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends

even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple

fairness.

We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we

will not have to forgive them.

If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the

question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful

churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every

person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies

their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To

hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.

That which has happened in most countries has happened in ours. When

a religion is founded, the educated, the powerful--that is to say, the

priests and nobles, tell the ignorant and superstitious--that is to

say, the people, that the religion of their country was given to their

fathers by God himself; that it is the only true religion; that all

others were conceived in falsehood and brought forth in fraud, and that

all who believe in the true religion will be happy forever, while all

others will burn in hell. For the purpose of governing the people, that

is to say, for the purpose of being supported by the people, the priests

and nobles declare this religion to be sacred, and that whoever adds to,

or takes from it, will be burned here by man, and hereafter by God. The

result of this is, that the priests and nobles will not allow the people

to change; and when, after a time, the priests, having intellectually

advanced, wish to take a step in the direction of progress, the people

will not allow them to change. At first, the rabble are enslaved by the

priests, and afterwards the rabble become the masters.

One of the first things I wish to do, is to free the orthodox clergy.

I am a great friend of theirs, and in spite of all they may say against

me, I am going to do them a great and lasting service. Upon their necks

are visible the marks of the collar, and upon their backs those of the

lash. They are not allowed to read and think for themselves. They are

taught like parrots, and the best are those who repeat, with the fewest

mistakes, the sentences they have been taught. They sit like owls upon

some dead limb of the tree of knowledge, and hoot the same old hoots

that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. Their congregations

are not grand enough, nor sufficiently civilized, to be willing that

the poor preachers shall think for themselves. They are not employed for

that purpose. Investigation regarded as a dangerous experiment, and the

ministers are warned that none of that kind of work will be tolerated.

They are notified to stand by the old creed, and to avoid all original

thought, as a mortal pestilence. Every minister is employed like an

attorney--either for plaintiff or defendant,--and he is expected to

be true to his client. If he changes his mind, he is regarded as

a deserter, and denounced, hated, and slandered accordingly. Every

orthodox clergyman agrees not to change. He contracts not to find new

facts, and makes a bargain that he will deny them if he does. Such is

the position of a Protestant minister in this nineteenth century. His

condition excites my pity; and to better it, I am going to do what

little I can.

Some of the clergy have the independence to break away, and the

intellect to maintain themselves as free men, but the most are compelled

to submit to the dictation of the orthodox, and the dead. They are

not employed to give their thoughts, but simply to repeat the ideas of

others. They are not expected to give even the doubts that may suggest

themselves, but are required to walk in the narrow, verdureless path

trodden by the ignorance of the past. The forests and fields on either

side are nothing to them. They must not even look at the purple hills,

nor pause to hear the babble of the brooks. They must remain in the

dusty road where the guide-boards are. They must confine themselves

to the "fall of man," the expulsion from the garden, the "scheme of

salvation," the "second birth," the atonement, the happiness of the

redeemed, and the misery of the lost. They must be careful not to

express any new ideas upon these great questions. It is much safer for

them to quote from the works of the dead. The more vividly they describe

the sufferings of the unregenerate, of those who attended theatres and

balls, and drank wine in summer gardens on the Sabbath-day, and laughed

at priests, the better ministers they are supposed to be. They must show

that misery fits the good for heaven, while happiness prepares the bad

for hell; that the wicked get all their good things in this life, and

the good all their evil; that in this world God punishes the people he

loves, and in the next, the ones he hates; that happiness makes us bad

here, but not in heaven; that pain makes us good here, but not in hell.

No matter how absurd these things may appear to the carnal mind, they

must be preached and they must be believed. If they were reasonable,

there would be no virtue in believing. Even the publicans and sinners

believe reasonable things. To believe without evidence, or in spite of

it, is accounted as righteousness to the sincere and humble Christian.

The ministers are in duty bound to denounce all intellectual pride, and

show that we are never quite so dear to God as when we admit that we are

poor, corrupt and idiotic worms; that we never should have been born;

that we ought to be damned without the least delay; that we are so

infamous that we like to enjoy ourselves; that we love our wives and

children better than our God; that we are generous only because we are

vile; that we are honest from the meanest motives, and that sometimes we

have fallen so low that we have had doubts about the inspiration of the

Jewish Scriptures. In short, they are expected to denounce all pleasant

paths and rustling trees, to curse the grass and flowers, and glorify

the dust and weeds. They are expected to malign the wicked people in the

green and happy fields, who sit and laugh beside the gurgling springs or

climb the hills and wander as they will. They are expected to point out

the dangers of freedom, the safety of implicit obedience, and to show

the wickedness of philosophy, the goodness of faith, the immorality of

science and the purity of ignorance.

Now and then a few pious people discover some young man of a religious

turn of mind and a consumptive habit of body, not quite sickly enough

to die, nor healthy enough to be wicked. The idea occurs to them that

he would make a good orthodox minister. They take up a contribution, and

send the young man to some theological school where he can be taught to

repeat a creed and despise reason. Should it turn out that the young

man had some mind of his own, and, after graduating, should change his

opinions and preach a different doctrine from that taught in the school,

every man who contributed a dollar towards his education would feel that

he had been robbed, and would denounce him as a dishonest and ungrateful

wretch.

The pulpit should not be a pillory. Congregations should allow the

minister a little liberty. They should, at least, permit him to tell the

truth.

They have, in Massachusetts, at a place called Andover, a kind of

minister factory, where each professor takes an oath once in five

years--that time being considered the life of an oath--that he has not,

during the last five years, and will not, during the next five years,

intellectually advance. There is probably no oath that they could easier

keep. Probably, since the foundation stone of that institution was laid

there has not been a single case of perjury. The old creed is still

taught. They still insist that God is infinitely wise, powerful and

good, and that all men are totally depraved. They insist that the best

man God ever made, deserved to be damned the moment he was finished.

Andover puts its brand upon every minister it turns out, the same as

Sheffield and Birmingham brand their wares, and all who see the brand

know exactly what the minister believes, the books he has read, the

arguments he relies on, and just what he intellectually is. They know

just what he can be depended on to preach, and that he will continue to

shrink and shrivel, and grow solemnly stupid day by day until he reaches

the Andover of the grave and becomes truly orthodox forever.

I have not singled out the Andover factory because it is worse than the

others. They are all about the same. The professors, for the most part,

are ministers who failed in the pulpit and were retired to the seminary

on account of their deficiency in reason and their excess of faith. As

a rule, they know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but

they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces

solemn as stupidity touched by fear.

Something should be done for the liberation of these men. They should

be allowed to grow--to have sunlight and air. They should no longer

be chained and tied to confessions of faith, to mouldy books and

musty creeds. Thousands of ministers are anxious to give their honest

thoughts. The hands of wives and babes now stop their mouths. They

must have bread, and so the husbands and fathers are forced to preach

a doctrine that they hold in scorn. For the sake of shelter, food and

clothes, they are obliged to defend the childish miracles of the past,

and denounce the sublime discoveries of to-day. They are compelled to

attack all modern thought, to point out the dangers of science, the

wickedness of investigation and the corrupting influence of logic. It is

for them to show that virtue rests upon ignorance and faith, while vice

impudently feeds and fattens upon fact and demonstration. It is a part

of their business to malign and vilify the Voltaires, Humes, Paines,

Humboldts, Tyndalls, Haeckels, Darwins, Spencers, and Drapers, and

to bow with uncovered heads before the murderers, adulterers, and

persecutors of the world. They are, for the most part, engaged in

poisoning the minds of the young, prejudicing children against science,

teaching the astronomy and geology of the Bible, and inducing all to

desert the sublime standard of reason.

These orthodox ministers do not add to the sum of knowledge. They

produce nothing. They live upon alms. They hate laughter and joy. They

officiate at weddings, sprinkle water upon babes, and utter meaningless

words and barren promises above the dead. They laugh at the agony of

unbelievers, mock at their tears, and of their sorrows make a jest.

There are some noble exceptions. Now and then a pulpit holds a brave

and honest man. Their congregations are willing that they should

think--willing that their ministers should have a little freedom.

As we become civilized, more and more liberty will be accorded to these

men, until finally ministers will give their best and highest thoughts.

The congregations will finally get tired of hearing about the patriarchs

and saints, the miracles and wonders, and will insist upon knowing

something about the men and women of our day, and the accomplishments

and discoveries of our time. They will finally insist upon knowing how

to escape the evils of this world instead of the next. They will ask

light upon the enigmas of this life. They will wish to know what we

shall do with our criminals instead of what God will do with his--how

we shall do away with beggary and want--with crime and misery--with

prostitution, disease and famine,--with tyranny in all its cruel

forms--with prisons and scaffolds, and how we shall reward the honest

workers, and fill the world with happy homes! These are the problems

for the pulpits and congregations of an enlightened future. If Science

cannot finally answer these questions, it is a vain and worthless thing.

The clergy, however, will continue to answer them in the old way, until

their congregations are good enough to set them free. They will still

talk about believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, as though that were the

only remedy for all human ills. They will still teach that retrogression

is the only path that leads to light; that we must go back, that faith

is the only sure guide, and that reason is a delusive glare, lighting

only the road to eternal pain.

Until the clergy are free they cannot be intellectually honest. We can

never tell what they really believe until they know that they can safely

speak. They console themselves now by a secret resolution to be as

liberal as they dare, with the hope that they can finally educate

their congregations to the point of allowing them to think a little for

themselves. They hardly know what they ought to do. The best part of

their lives has been wasted in studying subjects of no possible value.

Most of them are married, have families, and know but one way of making

their living. Some of them say that if they do not preach these foolish

dogmas, others will, and that they may through fear, after all, restrain

mankind. Besides, they hate publicly to admit that they are mistaken,

that the whole thing is a delusion, that the "scheme of salvation" is

absurd, and that the Bible is no better than some other books, and worse

than most.

You can hardly expect a bishop to leave his palace, or the pope to

vacate the Vatican. As long as people want popes, plenty of hypocrites

will be found to take the place. And as long as labor fatigues, there

will be found a good many men willing to preach once a week, if other

folks will work and give them bread. In other words, while the demand

lasts, the supply will never fail.

If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish--if

a little more enlightened, religion would perish!