LET us compare the gems of Jehovah with Pagan paste. It may be that
the best way to illustrate what I have said, is to compare the supposed
teachings of Jehovah with those of persons who never wrote an inspired
line. In all ages of which any record has been preserved, men have given
their ideas of justice, charity, liberty, love and law. If the Bible is
the work of God, it should contain the sublimest truths, it should excel
the works of man, it should contain the loftiest definitions of justice,
the best conceptions of human liberty, the clearest outlines of duty,
the tenderest and noblest thoughts. Upon every page should be found the
luminous evidence of its divine origin. It should contain grander and
more wonderful things than man has written.
It may be said that it is unfair to call attention to bad things in the
Bible. To this it may be replied that a divine being ought not to put
bad things in his book. If the Bible now upholds what we call crimes,
it will not do to say that it is not verbally inspired. If the words are
not inspired, what is? It may be said, that the thoughts are inspired.
This would include only thoughts expressed without words. If ideas are
inspired, they must be expressed by inspired words--that is to say, by
an inspired arrangement of words. If a sculptor were inspired of God to
make a statue, we would not say that the marble was inspired, but
the statue--that is to say, the relation of part to part, the married
harmony of form and function. The language, the words, take the place of
the marble, and it is the arrangement of the words that Christians claim
to be inspired. If there is an uninspired word, or a word in the wrong
place, until that word is known a doubt is cast on every word the book
contains.
If it was worth God's while to make a revelation at all, it was
certainly worth his while to see that it was correctly made--that it was
absolutely preserved.
Why should God allow an inspired book to be interpolated? If it was
worth while to inspire men to write it, it was worth while to
inspire men to preserve it; and why should he allow another person to
interpolate in it that which was not inspired? He certainly would not
have allowed the man he inspired to write contrary to the inspiration.
He should have preserved his revelation. Neither will it do to say that
God adapted his revelation to the prejudices of man. It was necessary
for him to adapt his revelation to the capacity of man, but certainly
God would not confirm a barbarian in his prejudices. He would not
fortify a heathen in his crimes....
If a revelation is of any importance, it is to eradicate prejudice.
They tell us now that the Jews were so ignorant, so bad, that God was
compelled to justify their crimes, in order to have any influence
with them. They say that if he had declared slavery and polygamy to be
crimes, the Jews would have refused to receive the Ten Commandments.
They tell us that God did the best he could; that his real intention was
to lead them along slowly, so that in a few hundred years they would be
induced to admit that larceny and murder and polygamy and slavery were
not virtues. I suppose if we now wished to break a cannibal of the bad
habit of devouring missionaries, we would first induce him to cook
them in a certain way, saying: "To eat cooked missionary is one step
in advance of eating your missionary raw. After a few years, a little
mutton could be cooked with missionary, and year after year the amount
of mutton could be increased and the amount of missionary decreased,
until in the fullness of time the dish could be entirely mutton, and
after that the missionaries would be absolutely safe."
If there is anything of value, it is liberty--liberty of body, liberty
of mind. The liberty of body is the reward of labor. Intellectual
liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without
it, the world is a prison, the universe a dungeon.
If the Bible is really inspired, Jehovah commanded the Jewish people to
buy the children of the strangers that sojourned among them, and ordered
that the children thus bought should be an inheritance for the children
of the Jews, and that they should be bondmen and bondwomen forever. Yet
Epictetus, a man to whom no revelation was ever made, a man whose soul
followed only the light of nature, and who had never heard of the Jewish
God, was great enough to say: "Will you not remember that your servants
are by nature your brothers, the children of God? In saying that you
have bought them, you look down on the earth, and into the pit, on the
wretched law of men long since dead, but you see not the laws of the
gods."
We find that Jehovah, speaking to his chosen people, assured them that
their bondmen and their bondmaids must be "of the heathen that were
round about them." "Of them," said Jehovah, "shall ye buy bondmen
and bondmaids." And yet Cicero, a pagan, Cicero, who had never been
enlightened by reading the Old Testament, had the moral grandeur to
declare: "They who say that we should love our fellow-citizens but not
foreigners, destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, with which
benevolence and justice would perish forever."
If the Bible is inspired, Jehovah, God of all worlds, actually said:
"And if a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die under
his hand, he shall be sorely punished; notwithstanding, if he continue
a day or two, he shall not be punished, for he is his money." And yet
Zeno, founder of the Stoics, centuries before Christ was born, insisted
that no man could be the owner of another, and that the title was bad,
whether the slave had become so by conquest or by purchase.
Jehovah ordered a Jewish general to make war, and gave, among others,
this command: "When the Lord thy God shall drive them before thee, thou
shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant
with them, nor show mercy unto them." And yet Epictetus, whom we have
already quoted, gave this marvelous rule for the guidance of human
conduct: "Live with thy inferiors as thou wouldst have thy superiors
live with thee."
Is it possible, after all, that a being of infinite goodness and wisdom
said: "I will heap mischief upon them; I will send mine arrows upon
them; they shall be burned with hunger, and devoured with burning heat,
and with bitter destruction. I will send the tooth of beasts upon them,
with the poison of serpents of the dust. The sword without, and terror
within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling
also, with the man of gray hairs" while Seneca, an uninspired Roman,
said: "The wise man will not pardon any crime that ought to be
punished, but he will accomplish, in a nobler way, all that is sought
in pardoning. He will spare some and watch over some, because of their
youth, and others on account of their ignorance. His clemency will not
fall short of justice, but will fulfill it perfectly."
Can we believe that God ever said to any one: "Let his children be
fatherless and his wife a widow; let his children be continually
vagabonds, and beg; let them seek their bread also out of their desolate
places; let the extortioner catch all that he hath, and let the stranger
spoil his labor; let there be none to extend mercy unto him, neither let
there be any to favor his fatherless children." If he ever said these
words, surely he had never heard this line, this strain of music from
the Hindu: "Sweet is the lute to those who have not heard the prattle of
their own children."
Jehovah, "from the clouds and darkness of Sinai," said to the Jews:
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me.... Though shalt not bow down
thyself to them nor serve them; for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous
God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the
third and fourth generation of them that hate me." Contrast this with
the words put by the Hindu in the mouth of Brahma: "I am the same to all
mankind. They who honestly serve other gods involuntarily worship me.
I am he who partakest of all worship, and I am the reward of all
worshipers."
Compare these passages; the first a dungeon where crawl the things begot
of jealous slime; the other, great as the domed firmament inlaid with
suns. Is it possible that the real God ever said:
"And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I, the
Lord, have deceived that prophet; and I will stretch out my hand upon
him and will destroy him from the midst of my people." Compare that
passage with one from a Pagan.
"It is better to keep silence for the remainder of your life than to
speak falsely."
Can we believe that a being of infinite mercy gave this command:
"Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to
gate, throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man
his companion, and every man his neighbor; consecrate yourselves to-day
to the Lord, even every man upon his son and upon his brother, that he
may bestow a blessing upon you this day."
Surely, that God was not animated by so great and magnanimous a spirit
as was Antoninus, a Roman emperor, who declared that, "he had rather
keep a single Roman citizen alive than slay a thousand enemies."
Compare the laws given to the children of Israel, as it is claimed by
the Creator of us all, with the following from Marcus Aurelius:
"I have formed the ideal of a state, in which there is the same law
for all, and equal rights, and equal liberty of speech established; an
empire where nothing is honored so much as the freedom of the citizen."
In the Avesta I find this: "I belong to five: to those who think good,
to those who speak good, to those who do good, to those who hear, and to
those who are pure."
"Which is the one prayer which in greatness, goodness, and beauty is
worth all that is between heaven and earth and between this earth and
the stars? And he replied: To renounce all evil thoughts and words and
works."