Chapter I. Introductory

Chapter II. The Sixteenth Century

Chapter III. The Seventeenth Century

Chapter IV. The Eighteenth Century

HUMANITY'S GAIN FROM UNBELIEF

SUPERNATURAL AND RATIONAL MORALITY

HAS MAN A SOUL?

IS THERE A GOD

A PLEA FOR ATHEISM

A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE DEVIL

WERE ADAM AND EVE OUR FIRST PARENTS?

NEW LIFE OF ABRAHAM

NEW LIFE OF JACOB

NEW LIFE OF MOSES

NEW LIFE OF DAVID

A NEW LIFE OF JONAH

WHO WAS JESUS CHRIST?

WHAT DID JESUS TEACH?

THE TWELVE APOSTLES

THE ATONEMENT

WHEN WERE OUR GOSPELS WRITTEN?

MR. GLADSTONE IN REPLY TO COLONEL INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY

A FEW WORDS ON THE CHRISTIANS' CREED

HERESY: ITS UTILITY AND MORALITY

Chapter I. Introductory

WHAT is heresy that it should be so heavily punished? Why is it that

society will condone many offences, pardon many vicious practices, and

yet have such scant mercy for the open heretic, who is treated as though

he were some horrid monster to be feared, hated, and, if possible,

exterminated? Most religionists, instead of endeavoring with kindly

thought to provide some solution for the difficulties propounded by

their heretical brethren, indiscriminately confound all inquirers in one

common category of censure; their views are dismissed with ridicule as

sophistical and fallacious, abused as infinitely dangerous, themselves

denounced as heretics and infidels, and libelled as scoffers and

Atheists. With some religionists all heretics are Atheists. With the

Pope of Rome, Garibaldi and Mazzini were Atheists. With the Religious

Tract Society, Voltaire and Paine were Atheists. Yet in none of the

above-named cases is the allegation true. Voltaire and Paine were

heretics, but both were Theists. Garibaldi and Mazzini were heretics,

but neither of them was an Atheist, though the latter had given color to

the description by accepting the presidency of an Atheistical society.

With few exceptions, the heretics of one generation become the revered

saints of a period less than twenty generations later. Lord Bacon, in

his own age, was charged with Atheism, Sir Isaac Newton with

Socinianism, the famous Tillotson was actually charged with Atheism, and

Dr. Burnet wrote vigorously against the commonly received traditions of

the fall and deluge. There are but few men of the past of whom the

church boasts to-day, who have not at some time been pointed at as

heretics by orthodox antagonists excited by party rancor. Heresy is in

itself neither Atheism nor Theism, neither the rejection of the Church

of Rome, nor of Canterbury, nor of Constantinople; heresy is not

necessarily of any-ist or-ism. The heretic is one who has selected his

own opinions, or whose opinions are the result of some mental effort;

and he differs from others who are orthodox in this:--they hold opinions

which are often only the bequest of an earlier generation

unquestioningly accepted; he has escaped from the customary grooves of

conventional acquiescence, and sought truth outside the channels

sanctified by habit.

Men and women who are orthodox are generally so for the same reason that

they are English or French--they were born in England or France, and

cannot help the good or ill fortune of their birthplace. Their orthodoxy

is no higher virtue than their nationality. Men are good and true of

every nation and of every faith; but there are more good and true men in

nations where civilisation has made progress, and amongst faiths which

have been modified by high humanising influences. Men are good not

because of their orthodoxy, but in spite of it; their goodness is the

outgrowth of their humanity, not of their orthodoxy. Heresy is necessary

to progress; heresy in religion always precedes endeavor for political

freedom. You cannot have effectual political progress without

wide-spread heretical thought. Every grand political change in which the

people have played an important part has been preceded by the

popularisation of heresy in the immediately earlier generations.

Fortunately, ignorant men cannot be real heretics, so that education

must be hand-maiden to heresy. Ignorance and superstition are twin

sisters. Belief too often means nothing more than prostration of the

intellect on the threshold of the unknown. Heresy is the pioneer, erect

and manly, striding over the forbidden line in his search for truth.

Heterodoxy develops the intellect, orthodoxy smothers it. Heresy is the

star twinkle in the night, orthodoxy the cloud which hides this faint

gleam of light from the weary travellers on life's encumbered pathway.

Orthodoxy was well exemplified in the dark middle ages, when the mass of

men and women believed much and knew little, when miracles were common

and schools were rare, and when the monasteries on the hill tops held

the literature of Europe. Heresy speaks for itself in this nineteenth

century, with the gas and electric light, with cheap newspapers, with a

thousand lecture rooms, with innumerable libraries, and at least a

majority of the people able to read the thoughts the dead have left, as

well as to listen to the words the living utter.

The word heretic ought to be a term of honor; for honest, clearly

uttered heresy is always virtuous, and this whether truth or error; yet

it is not difficult to understand how the charge of heresy has been

generally used as a means of exciting bad feeling. The Greek word

[--Greek--] which is in fact our word heresy, signifies simply selection

or choice. The heretic philosopher was the one who had searched and

found, who, not content with the beaten paths, had selected a new road,

chosen a new fashion of travelling in the march for that happiness all

human-kind are seeking.

Heretics are usually called "infidels," but no word could be more

unfairly applied, if by it is meant anything more than that the heretic

does not conform to the State faith. If it meant those who do not

profess the faith, then there would be no objection, but it is more

often used of those who are unfaithful, and then it is generally a

libel. Mahomedans and Christians both call Jews infidels, and Mahomedans

and Christians call each other infidels. Each religionist is thus an

infidel to all sects but his own; there is but one degree of heresy

between him and the heretic who rejects all churches. Each ordinary

orthodox man is a heretic to every religion in the world except one, but

he is heretic from the accident of birth without the virtue of true

heresy.

In our own country heresy is not confined to the extreme platform

adopted as a standing-point by such a man as myself. It is rife even in

the state-sustained Church of England, and to show this one does not

need to be content with such illustrations as are afforded by the

Essayists and Reviewers, who discover the sources of the world's

education rather in Greece and Italy than in Judea; who reject the

alleged prophecies as evidence of the Messianic character of Jesus; who

admit that in nature and from nature, by science and by reason, we

neither have, nor can possibly have, any evidence of a deity working

miracles; but declare that for that we must go out of nature and beyond

science, and in effect avow that Gospel miracles are always _objects,_

not _evidences_, of faith; who deny the necessity of faith in Jesus as

savior to peoples who could never have such faith; and who reject the

notion that all mankind are individually involved in the curse and

perdition of Adam's sin; or even by the Rev. Charles Voysey, who

declines to preach "the God of the Bible," and who will not teach that

every word of the Old and New Testament is the word of God; or by the

Rev, Dunbar Heath, who in defiance of the Bible doctrine, that man has

only existed on the earth about 6,000 years, teaches that unnumbered

chiliads have passed away since the human family can be traced as

nations on our earth; or by Bishop Colenso, who in his impeachment of

the Pentateuch, his denial of the literal truth of the narratives of the

creation, fall, and deluge, actually impugns the whole scheme of

Christianity (if the foundation be false, the superstructure cannot be

true); or by the Rev. Baden Powell, who declared "that the whole tenor

of geology is in entire contradiction to the cosmogony delivered from

Mount Sinai," and who denied a "local heaven above and a local hell

beneath the earth;" or by the Rev. Dr. Giles, who, not content with

preceding Dr. Colenso in his assaults on the text of the Pentateuch,

also wrote as vigorously against the text of the New Testament; or by

the Rev. Dr. Wall, who, unsatisfied with arguments against the

admittedly incorrect authorised translation of the Bible, actually wrote

to prove that a new and corrected Hebrew text was necessary, the Hebrew

itself being corrupt; or by the Rev. Dr. Irons, who teaches that not

only are the Gospel writers unknown, but that the very language in which

Jesus taught is yet to be discovered, who declares that prior to the

Ezraic period the literal history of the Old Testament is lost, who does

not find the Trinity taught in Scripture, and who declares that the

Gospel does not teach the doctrine of the Atonement; or by the late

Archbishop Whately, to whom is attributed a Latin pamphlet raising

strong objections against the truth of the alleged confusion of tongues

at Babel.

We may fairly allege, that amongst thinking clergymen of the Church of

England, heresy is the rule and not the exception. So soon as a minister

begins to preach sermons which he does not buy ready

lithographed-sermons which are the work of his brain--so soon heresy

more or less buds out, now in the rejection of some church doctrine or

article of minor importance, now in some bold declaration at variance

with major and more essential tenets. Even Bishop Watson, so famous for

his Bible Apology, declared that the church articles and creeds were not

binding on any man. "They may be true, they may be false," he wrote.

To-day scores of Church of England clergymen openly protest against, or

groan in silence under the enforced subscription of Thirty-nine

unbelievable Articles. Sir William Hamilton declares that the heads of

Colleges at Oxford well knew that the man preparing for the Church "will

subscribe Thirty-nine Articles which he cannot believe, and swears to do

and to have done a hundred articles which he cannot or does not

perform."

In scientific circles the heresy of the most efficient members is

startlingly apparent. Against the late Anthropological Society charges

of Atheism were freely levelled; and although such a charge does not

seem to be justified by any reports of their meetings, or by their

printed publications, it is clear that not only out of doors, but even

amongst their own circle, it was felt that their researches conflicted

seriously with the Hebrew writ. The Society was preached against and

prayed against until it collapsed; and yet it was simply a society for

discovering everything possible about man, prehistoric as well as

modern. It had, however, an unpardonable vice in the eyes of the

orthodox--it encouraged the utterance of facts without regard to their

effect on faiths.

The Ethnological Society is kindred to the last-named in many of its

objects, and hence some of its most active members have been direct

assailants of the Hebrew Chronology, which limits man's existence to the

short space of 6,000 years; they have been deniers of the origin of the

human race from one pair, of the confusion of tongues at Babel, and of

the reduction of the human race to one family by the Noachian deluge.

Geological science has a crowd of heretics amongst its professors, men

who deny the sudden origin of fauna and flora; who trace the gradual

development of the vegetable and animal kingdoms through vast periods of

time; and who find no resting place in a beginning of existence, but are

obliged to halt in face of a measureless past, inconceivable in its

grandeur. Geology, to quote the words of Dr. Kalisch, declares "the

utter impossibility of a creation of even the earth alone in six days."

Mr. Goodwin says in the "Essays and Reviews:" "The school-books of the

present day, while they teach the child that the earth moves, yet assure

him that it is a little less than six thousand years old, and that it

was made in six days. On the other hand, geologists of all religious

creeds are agreed that the earth has existed for an immense series of

years--to be counted by millions rather than by thousands; and that

indubitably more than six days elapsed from its first creation to the

appearance of man upon its surface."

Mr. Richard Proctor says: "It has been shown that had past geological

changes in the earth taken place at the same rate as those which are now

in progress, one hundred millions of years at the very least would have

been required to produce those effects which have actually been

produced, we find, since the earth's surface was fit to be the abode of

life. But recently it has been pointed out, correctly in all

probability, that under the greater tide-raising power of the moon in

past ages, these changes would have taken place more rapidly. As,

however, certainly ten millions of years, and probably a much longer

time, must have elapsed since the moon was at that favorable distance

for raising tides, we are by no means enabled, as some well-meaning but

mistaken persons have imagined, to reduce the life-bearing stage of the

earth from a duration of a hundred millions of years to a minute

fraction of such a period. The short life, but exceedingly lively one,

which they desire to see established by geological or astronomical

reasoning, never can be demonstrated. At the very least we must assign

ten millions of years to the life-bearing stage of the earth's

existence."

Astronomy has in the ranks of its professors many of its most able minds

who do not believe in the sun and moon as two great lights, who cannot

accept the myriad stars as fixed in the firmament solely to give light

upon the earth, who refuse to believe in the heaven as a fixed firmament

to divide the waters above from the waters beneath, who cannot by their

telescopes discover the local heaven above or the local hell beneath,

although their science marks each faint nebulosity crossing, or crossed,

by the range of the watcher's vision. To quote again from Mr.

Goodwin:--"On the revival of science in the sixteenth century, some of

the earliest conclusions at which philosophers arrived, were found to be

at variance with popular and long established belief. The Ptolemaic

system of astronomy, which had then full possession of the minds of men,

contemplated the whole visible universe from the earth as the immovable

centre of things. Copernicus changed the point of view, and placing the

beholder in the sun, at once reduced the earth to an inconspicuous

globule, a merely subordinate member of a family of planets, which the

terrestrials had, until then, fondly imagined to be but pendants and

ornaments of their own habitation. The Church, naturally, took a lively

interest in the disputes which arose between the philosophers of the new

school, and those who adhered to the old doctrines, inasmuch as the

Hebrew records, the basis of religious faith, manifestly countenanced

the opinion of the earth's immobility, and certain other views of the

universe, very incompatible with those propounded by Copernicus. Hence

arose the official proceedings against Galileo, in consequence of which

he submitted to sign his celebrated recantation, acknowledging that 'the

proposition that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable from

its place, is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical,

because it is expressly contrary to the Scripture;' and that 'the

proposition that the earth is not the centre of the world, nor

immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is absurd,

philosophically false, and at least erroneous in faith.'"

Why is it that society is so severe on heresy? Three hundred years ago

it burned heretics, till thirty years ago it sent them to jail; even in

England and America to-day it is content to harass, annoy, and slander

them. In the United States a candidate for the Governorship of a State,

although otherwise admittedly eligible, was assailed bitterly for his

suspected Socinianism. Sir Sidney Waterlow, standing for a Scotch seat,

was sharply catechised as to when he had last been inside a Unitarian

Chapel, and only saved his seat by not too boldly avowing his opinions.

Lord Amberley, who was "unwise" enough to be honest in some of his

answers, did not obtain his seat for South Devon in consequence of the

suspicion of heresy excited against him. It was chiefly to the _odium

theologicum_ that John Stuart Mill attributed his rejection at

Westminster.

During the past few years we have had an attempt to revive the old

persecuting spirit. Atheism has been held sufficient ground for

depriving Mrs. Besant of the custody of her infant daughter. Heretical

views were enough to cancel the appointment made by Lord Amberley for

the guardianship of his children. The Blasphemy Laws have been once more

put in force in different parts of England, and the Conservative party

boast that they have been united in their effort to prevent an Atheist

from exercising his political rights.

Sir William Drummond says: "Early associations are generally the

strongest in the human mind, and what we have been taught to credit as

children we are seldom disposed to question as men. Called away from

speculative inquiries by the common business of life, men in general

possess neither the inclination, nor the leisure to examine _what_ they

believe or _why_ they believe. A powerful prejudice remains in the mind;

insures conviction without the trouble of thinking; and repels doubt

without the aid or authority of reason. The multitude then is not very

likely to applaud an author, who calls upon it to consider what it had

hitherto neglected, and to stop where it had been accustomed to pass on.

It may also happen that there is a learned and formidable body, which,

having given its general sanction to the literal interpretation of the

Holy Scriptures, may be offended at the presumption of an unhallowed

layman, who ventures to hold that the language of those Scriptures is

often symbolical and allegorical, even in passages which both the Church

and the Synagogue consider as nothing else than a plain statement of

fact. A writer who had sufficient boldness to encounter such obstacles,

and to make an appeal to the public, would only expose himself to the

invectives of offended bigotry, and to the misrepresentations of

interested malice. The press would be made to ring with declamations

against him, and neither learning, nor argument, nor reason, nor

moderation on his side, would protect him from the literary

assassination which awaited him. In vain would he put on the

heaven-tempered panoply of truth. The weapons which could neither pierce

his buckler nor break his casque, might be made to pass with envenomed

points through the joints of his armor. Every trivial error which he

might commit would be magnified into a flagrant fault; and every

insignificant mistake into which he might fall would be represented by

the bigoted, or by the hireling critics of the day as an ignorant, or as

a perverse deviation from the truth."

Both by the Statute Law and Common Law, heresy is punishable, and many

are punished for it even in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Besides open persecution, there is the constant, unceasing, paltry,

petty persecuting spirit which refuses to trade with the heretic; which

declines to eat with him; which will not employ him; which feels

justified in slandering him; which seeks to set his wife's mind against

him, and to take away the affection of his children from him.