“Do not disturb yourself,” he said, smiling; “I will sit here, if you
please;” and so speaking, he took the seat opposite me at the fire.
“Sit you,” he continued, “and I will endeavor to answer some of the
questions you were asking of yourself.”
“Had I known your presence I should hardly, perhaps, have dared to ask
such questions, or at least in such a form,” I said.
“Why not ask them of me if you ask them of yourself?” he responded.
“They were just and natural in themselves, and the forms of things are
of little use to one who cares for the essence—just as the forms of
the divinities I believed in are of no consequence compared to their
essences. What we call thoughts are but too often mere formulas, which
by dint of repetition we finally get to believe are in themselves
truths, while they are in fact mere dead husks, having no life in them,
and which by their very rigidity prevent life. No single statement,
however plausible, can contain truth, which is infinite in form and in
spirit. If we are to talk together, let us free ourselves, if we can,
from formulas, since they only check growth in the spirit, and, so to
speak, are mere inns at which we rest for a moment on account of our
weariness and weakness. If we stay permanently in them we narrow our
minds, dwarf our experience, and make no more progress. For what is
truth but a continual progression towards the divine?”
“Yet would you say that formulas are of no use? that we should not sum
up in them the best of our thought?”
“Undoubtedly they are useful. They are trunks in which we pack our
goods; but as we acquire more goods, we must have larger and ever
larger trunks. It is only dead formulas which kill, and the tendency of
formulas is to die and thus to repress thought. Look at the nutshell
that holds the precious germ of the future tree. It is a necessary
prison of a moment; but as that germ quickens and spreads, the shell
must give way, or death is the consequence. The infinite truth can be
comprehended in no formula and no system. All attempts to do this have
resulted in the same end—death. Every religious creed should be living,
but every Church formalizes it into barren words and shapes, and
erelong, Faith—that is, the living, aspiring principle—dies, wrapped
up in its formal observances or rigid statements, and becomes like the
dead mummies of the Egyptians—the form of life, not the reality.”
“Too true,” I answered, “all history proves it. Every real and thinking
man feels it. As habits get the better of our bodies, so conventions
and formulas get the better of our minds. But pray continue; I only
listen; and pardon me for interrupting you.”
“What I say has direct relation to the questions you were asking when
I entered. There is a grain, often many grains, of truth in every
system of religion, but complete Truth in none. If we wait until we
attain the perfect before adhering to one, we shall never arrive at
any. Each age has its religious ideas, which are the aggregate of its
moral perceptions influenced by its imaginative bias, and these are
shapen into formulas or systems, which serve as inns, or churches,
or temples of worship. These begin by representing the highest
reach of the best thought of the age, but they soon degenerate into
commonplaces, thought moving on beyond them, and of its very vitality
of nature seeking beyond them. At these inns the common mass put up,
and the host or priest controls them while they are there, and society
organizes them, and so a certain good is attained. In what you call the
ancient days, when I lived on the earth, I found a system already built
and surrounded by strong bulwarks of power. To strike at that was to
strike at the existence of society. A religious revolution is a social
revolution; one cannot alter a faith without altering everything out
of which it is moulded. To do that, more evil might result than good.
Man’s nature is such that if you throw down the temple of his worship
at once, assaulting its very foundations, you do not improve his faith;
you but too often annihilate it, so implanted is it in old prejudices,
in the forms stamped on the heart in youth, and in the habits of
thought. It is only by gradual changes that any real good can be
done—by enlarging and developing the principles of truth which already
exist, and not by overthrowing the whole system at once.”
“But in the religious system to which you gave your adherence,” I
exclaimed, “what was there grand and inspiring? What truth was there
out of which you could hope to develop a true system? for certainly you
could not believe in the divinities of your day.”
“Reverence to the gods that were,” he answered, “to a power above and
beyond us; recognition of divine powers and attributes. This lay as the
corner-stone of our worship, as it does of yours.”
“Almost,” I cried, “it seems to me worse to worship such gods as yours
than to worship none at all. Their attributes were at best only human,
their conduct was low and unworthy, their passions were sensual and
debased. Any good man would be ashamed to do the acts calmly attributed
to the divinities you worshiped. This, in itself, must have had a
degrading influence on the nation. How could man be ashamed of any act
allowed and attributed to the gods?”
“Your notions on this point are natural,” he calmly answered, “but they
are completely mistaken. There is no doubt that in every system of
religion the tendency is to humanize and, to a certain extent, degrade
God. To attribute to Him our own passions is universal, with the mass.
To deify man or to humanize God is the rule. You deify that beautiful
character named Christ, and you humanize God by representing Him as
inspired with anger and cruelty beyond anything in our system. You
attribute to Him a scheme of the universe which is to me abhorrent.
Will you excuse me if I state thus plainly how it strikes one who
belonged to a different age and creed, and who therefore cannot enter
into the deep-grained prejudices and ideas of your century and faith?”
“Speak boldly,” I said. “Do not fear to shock me. I am so deeply
planted that I do not fear to be uprooted in my faith. And, besides,
that is not truth which does not court assault, sure to be strengthened
by it. If you can overthrow my faith, overthrow it.”
“_That_ I should be most unwilling to do,” he answered. “No word would
I say to produce such a result. In your faith there is a noble and
beautiful truth, which sheds a soft lustre over life; and in my own day
the pure and philosophic spirit of Jesus of Nazareth was recognized by
me and reverenced. ’T is not of Him I would speak, but rather of the
general scheme of the regulation of this world by God that I alluded
to; and I yet pause, fearing to shock you by a simple statement of this
creed.”
“I pray you do not hesitate; speak! I am ready and anxious to hear you.”
“It is only in answer to what you say of the acts and passions
attributed by us to our divinities, as constituting a clear reason why
we should not reverence them, that I speak. You attribute to your God
omnipotence, omniscience, and infinite love. Yet in his omnipotence
He made first a world, and then placed in it man and woman, whom He
also made and pronounced good. In this, according to your belief, He
was mistaken. The man and woman proved immediately not to be good; and
He, omnipotent as He was, was foiled by another power named Satan,
who upset at once his whole scheme. After infinite consideration and
in pity for man, He could or did invent no better scheme of redeeming
him than for Himself, or an emanation from Himself, to take the form
of man, and to suffer death through his wickedness and at his hands.
Thus man, by adding to the previous fault the crime of killing God
on the earth, acquired a claim to be saved from the consequences of
his first fault. A new crime affords a cause of pardon for a previous
fault of disobedience. What was this first fault, which induced God
to drive the first man and woman out of the Paradise He had made for
them? Simply that they ate an apple when they were prohibited. Is any
pagan legend more absurd than this? Then for the justice of God, on
what principle of right can the subsequent crime and horror—without
example—of killing God, or a person, as you say, of the Trinity, afford
a reason for removing from man a penalty previously incurred? When one
remembers that you assume God to be omniscient as well as omnipotent,
and that He might have made any other scheme, by simply forgiving man,
or obliging him to redeem himself by doing good and acting virtuously,
instead of committing a crime and a horror, this belief becomes still
more strange. Nor can you explain it yourself; you only say it is a
mystery which is beyond your reason, but none the less true. Yet though
it offends all sense of justice and right in my mind, you believe it
and adhere to it as a corner-stone of your faith. Are you sure I do not
offend you?”
“Pray go on,” I said. “When you have said it is a mystery, you have
said all. Shall man, with his deficient reason, pretend to understand
God? This is a truth revealed to us by his only begotten Son, Jesus
Christ, who was himself in a human form; and when God reveals to us a
mystery, shall we not believe it? Shall we measure Him by our feeble
wits?”
“I do not mean to argue with you. This is furthest from my intention;
though I might say this holds good of us in the ancient days, as well
as with you now. I only wish, however, to show you that you believe
what you acknowledge to be beyond reason—a mystery, as you call it. You
believe this, and yet you despise the pagan for believing what his gods
told him, simply because it was unreasonable or ridiculous.”
“The question,” I said, “is very different; but let it pass. Pray go
on.”
“Your God is a God of infinite love, you say. Yet in the opinion of
many of you, at least, this infinitely loving God, omnipotent, and
having the power to make man as He chose,—omniscient, and knowing how
to make him good and happy if He wished to,—has chosen in his love
to make him weak and impotent, to endow him with passions which are
temptations to evil, to afflict him with disease and pain, to render
him susceptible to torments of every kind and sufferings beyond his
power to avoid, however he strive to be good and virtuous and obedient;
and then at the last, after a life of suffering and struggle here,
either to save him and make him eternally happy, or, if He so elect,
without any reason intelligible to you or any one, to plunge him into
everlasting torment, from which he can never free himself. Now, I
ask you in what respect is such a God better than Jupiter, who, even
according to the lowest popular notions, whatever were his passions,
was at least placable; who, whatever were his follies, was not a demon
like this? And when one takes into consideration the fact that there
is not a humane man living who would not be ashamed to do to his own
child, however vicious, what he calmly attributes to this all-loving
God, the belief in such a God seems all the more extraordinary.”
“It is a mystery,” I said, “that one like you, born in another age and
tinctured with another creed, could not be expected to understand. It
would be useless for me to attempt it, and certainly not now, when I so
greatly prefer hearing you to speaking myself. My purpose is not now to
defend my religion, but to listen to your defense of yours.”
“Well, then, allow us to have our mystery too. If you cannot explain
all, neither could we; but neither with us nor with you was that a
reason for not believing at all. It was the mystery itself, perhaps,
that attracted us and attracts you. The love of the unintelligible is
at the root of all systems of religion. If man is unintelligible to
us, shall not God be? Man has always invested his gods with his own
passions, and his gods are for the most part his own shadows cast out
into infinite space, enlarged, gigantic, and mysterious. Man cannot,
with the utmost exercise of his faculties, get out of himself any more
than he can leap over his own shadow. He cannot comprehend (or inclose
within himself) God, who comprehends and incloses him; and therefore
he vaguely magnifies his own powers, and calls the result God. God the
infinite Spirit made man; but man in every system of religion makes
God. In our own reason He is the best that we can imagine—that is,
our own selves purged of evil and extended. We cannot stretch beyond
ourselves.”
“Ay, but your gods were not the best you could conceive. They were
lower of nature than man himself in some particulars, and were guilty
of acts that you yourself would reprove.”
“This is because you consider them purely in their mythical
history, according to the notions of the common ignorant mass; not
looking behind those acts which were purely typical, often simply
allegorical, to the ideas which they represented and of which they
were incarnations. You cannot believe that so low a system as this
satisfied the spiritual needs of those august and refined souls who
still shine like planets in the sky of thought. Do you suppose that
Plato and Epictetus, that Zeno and Socrates, that Seneca and Cicero,
with their expanded minds, accepted these low formulas of Divinity?
As well might I suppose that the low superstitions of the Christian
Church, in which the vulgar believe, represent the highest philosophy
of the best thinkers. Yet for long centuries of superstition the Church
has been accepted by you just as it stands, with its saints and their
miracles, and its singular rites and ceremonies. Nor has any effort
been made to cleanse the bark of St. Peter of the barnacles and rubbish
which encumber and defile it. Religious faith easily degenerates into
superstition in the common mind. And why has the superstition been
accepted? Simply because it is so deeply ingrained into the belief of
the unthinking mass, that there might be danger of destroying all faith
by destroying the follies and accidents which had become imbedded in
it. Not only for this; by means of these very superstitions men may be
led and governed, and leaders will not surrender or overthrow means
of power. Yet the best minds,” he continued, “did what they could in
ancient days to purify and refine the popular faith, and sought even
to elevate men’s notions of the gods by educating their sense of the
beautiful, and by presenting to them images of the gods unstained by
low passions and glorious in their forms.”
“But surely your idea of Jupiter or Zeus,” I answered, “was most
unworthy when compared with that which we entertain of the infinite
God, the source of all created things, the sole and supreme Creator.
The Hebrews certainly attained a far loftier conception in their
Jehovah than you in your Jupiter.”
“What matter names?” he replied; “Zeus, Jehovah, God, are all mere
names, and the ideas they represented were only differenced by the
temperaments and character of the various peoples who worshiped them.”
“But the Jehovah of the Jews was not merely the head ruler of many
gods, but a single universal God, one and infinite!”
“No! I think not. The Jehovah of the Jews underwent many changes and
developments with the growth of the Hebrew people; and in many of
their writings He is represented as a passionate, vindictive, and
even unreasonable and unjust God, whose passions were modified by
human arguments. And, so far from being a universal God of all, He was
specially the God of the Hebrews, and is so constantly represented in
their Scriptures. He comes down upon earth and interferes personally
in the doings of men, and talks with them, and discusses questions
with them, and sometimes even takes their advice. In process of time
this notion is modified, and assumes a nobler type; but He is never
the Universal Father, nor the God whose essence is Love,—never, that
is, until the coming of Christ, who first enunciated the idea that
God is love,—rejoicing over the saving of man, far and above all
human passions. ‘Vengeance is mine’ was the original idea of Jehovah;
and He was feared and worshiped by the Jews as their peculiar God,
whose chosen people they were. As for his unity, whatever may have
been the popular superstitions of the Greeks and Romans, God is
recognized by the greatest and purest minds as one and indivisible,
the Father of all, who commands all, who creates all, who is invisible
and omnipotent. Do you not remember the fragment of the Sibylline
verses preserved by Lactantius,[25] S. Theophilus Antiochenus,
and S. Justinus, where it is said that Zeus was one being alone,
self-creating, from whom all things are made, who beholds all mortals,
but whom no mortal can behold?—
Εἷς δ’ ἔστ’ αὐτογενής· ἑνὸς ἔκγονα πάντα τέτυκται,
Ἐν δ’ αὐτοῖς αὐτὸς περιγίγνεται· οὐδέ τις αὐτὸν
Εἰσοράᾳ θνητῶν, αὐτὸς δέ γε πάντας ὁρᾶται.