Setting aside all our hereditary beliefs, all our theological teachings
let us try to consider the true teachings of Jesus as differentiated
from the instructions given by Moses for the guidance of the Jews.
Moses never told his people to love and forgive their enemies. Jesus
made a strong point of this, even bidding his disciples to forgive
injuries to the seventieth time. Moses impressed upon his people the
excellence of revenge, always demanding "an eye for an eye," a life for
a life. Jesus said all that sort of compensation rested forever with
God, that He alone, who saw and knew the hearts of men, could deal
justly with them. The old Jewish law stoned to death the immoral
woman--not the man--O no! certainly not! Jesus said to a flagrant
woman brought before him by a rabble of men: "Let him that is without
sin cast the first stone." What divine sarcasm, and how they are said
to have slunk away under his perception of them!
How is it now with the Christian religion in the so-called Christian
nations? Where on the face of the earth is there a community or a
people that is governed and controlled by the real teachings of the
Christ?
All our jurisprudence is based upon the laws given to the Jews by their
leader and lawgiver. We take the lives of those people who are guilty
of breaking certain laws of ours based upon the laws of Moses, and
while we do not stone the life out of those women--not men--whom we
prove guilty of breaking the seventh commandment, we do build up
against them walls of conventionality, and of uncharity harder than the
rocks once used for the killing of their bodies.
Consider this beautiful law now in operation in the state of New York.
If a poor, starving, homeless, hopeless human being, maddened by the
bitter woes of life, seeks surcease of pain by throwing off his own
individual life, by committing suicide, the law insists that such a one
shall be not only forced back to a continuance of a horrible existence
here, but that each and every one of such sinners shall be punished by
imprisonment and fine. If that isn't serving the devil, what in the
name of common sense is it? Where are the good Samaritans among the
pretended followers of the loving Christ? What sort of a reckoning
will such lawmakers have to meet, and what penalties undergo under the
applied judgment of the Great Teacher and exemplars? "Woe to him
through whom offences come," he said, and again: "Because ye did not
give aid and comfort to the least of these, I will not call you of my
flock." Could anything be more brutally unmerciful than such a law as
this in its dealings with the most helpless, forlorn, and seemingly
Godforsaken of all earth's children--the voluntary suicide?
How the demons must gloat over the lost souls who formed and enforced
such a fiendish law! Why this everlasting "harking back" to Moses,
while posing as followers of teachings utterly at variance with his?
Let us admit that we are Jews and stop persecuting them because they
are not Christians, or let us try to know what Christ Jesus really
meant us to understand by his ethics of love and good will to men.
Many people have lost all their faith in the immortality of the soul,
because Moses did not preach it. It is quite possible that even the
worshipped Moses did not know everything that men may yet come to know
about this, and anent a world of other things. Neither did the
troglodytes, nor the cliff dwellers know of electricity or the X-ray!
But Jesus knew of the life--the eternal, unquenchable life--of the soul
beyond this mortal existence, and he knew and taught the way and the
life that leads to that higher life. All through his teachings run
this under-current of belief in the value of the individual soul, and
instructions as to the highest and best way to evolve it from its
lowest estate up to the Infinite.
Fancy what a revolution would come to the whole so-called Christian
world if the ethics of Jesus, so plainly set down in his legacy to the
children of men, were understood and lived! What wrong and injustice
would be done away with, what works of mercy would be wrought!