My Dear Colonel:--I have not picked up my pen for the
express purpose of annihilating you at one fell swoop.
Even were such the case, I do not flatter myself that your
impending doom would cause you to miss meals or lose
sleep, for you have become somewhat used to being
knocked off the Christmas tree by theological disputants
from the back districts. At least once each lunar month for
long years past your quivering diaphragm has been
slammed up against the shrinking face of nature by mental
microbes, or walked on by ambitious doodle-bugs, who
wondered next day to learn that you were absorbing your
rations with clock-work regularity and doing business at the
same old stand. I once saw an egotistical brindle-pup
joyfully bestride the collar of an adult wild-cat, and the
woeful result convinced me that Ambition and Judgment
should blithely foot it hand in hand. That is why, my dear
Colonel, I approach you by siege and parallel, instead
of capering gayly down your right-o'-way like a youthful
William goat seeking a head-end collision with a runaway
freight train.
Without any view of paving the way for a future loan, I tell
you frankly that I admire you very much. Your public
record and private life prove you to be one of God's
noblest--and rarest--works, an honest man. That you are
the equal morally and the superior mentally of any man
who has presumed to criticize you must be conceded. The
prejudices of honesty are entitled to consideration and the
judgment of genius to respect bordering on reverence; but
in this age of almost universal inquiry we cannot accept any
man, however wise, as infallible pope in the realm of
intellect and declare that from his ipse dixit there shall be
no appeal. That were intellectual slavery, the most
degrading species of bondage, and it is your greatest glory
that you have ever been the apostle of liberty--liberty of the
hand and liberty of the brain. More than all other men of
your generation you have fostered independence of thought
and the search for new truth; hence you cannot complain if
the fierce light which you have taught the world to turn full
and fair upon cults and creeds, should be employed to
discern the false logic of the great critic himself.
In your warfare upon hypocrisy and humbuggery I am with
you heart and soul. I will set my foot as far as who goes
farthest in the exposure of frauds and fakes of every class
and kind, though hedged about with the superstitions of a
thousand centuries and licensed by prescriptive right to
perpetrate a brutal wrong; but it does not follow because
some church communicants are hypocrites that all religion
is a humbug; that because the Bible winks at incest and
robbery , murder and slavery, the book is but a tissue of
foolish falsehoods; that because Almighty God has not
seen proper to reveal Himself in all His supernal splendor to
Messrs. Hume and Voltaire, Paine and Ingersoll the world
has no good reason for belief in His existence--that
because the dead do not come back to us with a diagram
of the New Jerusalem it were folly to believe the soul of
man immortal.
My dear Colonel, your mighty intellect has not yet
comprehended the philosophy of religion. Oratorically you
soar like the condor when its shadow falls upon the highest
peaks of the Andes, but logically you grope among the
pestilential shadows of an intellectual Dismal Swamp, ever
mistaking shadow for substance. You are frittering away
your mighty intellectual strength with the idiosyncrasies of
creeds and the clumsy detail of cults, instead of considering
the psychological phenomena of religion in its entirety. You
descend from the realm of philosophy to assume the role of
scholastic--to dispute with little men anent points of
doctrine, to wrangle with dogmatists regarding their
conception of the Deity.
An ignoramus believes the Bible because of the miracles,
and because of the miracles an Ingersoll disbelieves it--and
both are equally blind . A cult is simply an expression,
more or less crude, of the religious sentiment of a people,
the poor garment with which finite man clothes Infinity.
Would you quarrel with Science because it is not yet made
perfect? Would you condemn music because of an
occasional discord? Would you reject history altogether
because amid a world of truth there are preserved some
fables such as tempted the satire of Cervantes? Would
you banish the sun from Heaven because of its spots or
declare Love a monster because born of Passion?
The real question at issue is not whether the miracles
be fact or fable; Mahomet, the duly ordained prophet
of Allah, or an ignorant adventurer; Jonah, a delegate of the
Deity or the father of Populism--whether Christ was born of
an earthly father or drew his vigor direct from the loins of
omnipotent God. Let us leave these details to the
dogmatists, these non-essentials to the sectarians. Let us
consider the religion of the world in its entirety, with the full
understanding that all sects are essentially the same.
The core of all religion is the worship of a Supreme Power,
and the belief in man's immortality. That is the central idea,
around which the imagination of man has woven many a
complicated web, some beautiful as Arachne's robe, some
barbaric and repulsive, but all of little worth. The wise man,
the true philosopher, will not mistake the machinery of a
religion for the religious idea, the garment which ignorance
weaves for Omniscience, for God himself.
Even if we grant that the Creator never yet communicated
directly with the creature; that man has not seen with mortal
eyes beyond the veil that shrouds the two eternities, it does
not follow that religious faith is but arrant folly, that God is
non-extant and man but the pitiful creature of blind force.
The dumb brute knows many things it was never taught,
and might not man, the greatest of the animal creation, be
gifted with a knowledge not based upon experience? So
far as observation goes, there is provision for the
satisfaction of every passion, and the most powerful of all
passions is the dread of annihilation--the longing for
continual life. If death ends all then here is a violation of
"natural law"--a miracle! And you, my dear Colonel, do not
believe in miracles. If we discard Revelation and take
Reason for our supreme guide, we must infallibly conclude
that the devotional instinct implanted in the heart of
the entire human race has its correlative that the longing for
immortal life which burns in the breast of man was not a
brutal mistake, else concede Nature a poor blunderer and
all this prattle anent her "immutable laws" mere nonsense.
Before ridiculing Revelation and mocking at Inspiration were
it not well to determine their true definition? What is genius
but inspiration? and a new truth bodied forth to the world
but a revelation? Were it not possible for a genius--an
inspired man--to trace the finger of God in the sunset's
splendor as easily as upon tables of stone? to hear the
voice of Omnipotence in the murmur of the majestic sea as
well as in the thunders of Sinai? to read a divine message
of undying love in a mother's lullaby as readily as in the
death and resurrection of a Deity? If God can teach the
very insects wisdom and gift even the oyster with instinct,
can He communicate with man only by word of mouth or
the engraver's burin? Examine the most beautiful woman
imaginable with a powerful microscope and you will turn
from her with a disgust similar to that of Gulliver when the
Brobdingnagian maid placed him astride the nipple of her
bosom. Her skin, so fair to the natural eye and velvety to
the touch, becomes beneath the microscope suggestive of
the hide of a hairless Mexican dog. Religion is a beautiful,
an enchanting thing if you do but look at it with the natural
eye; but when you employ the adventitious aid of the skeptic's
microscope you find flaws enough. It were doubtful if even our
boasted American Government, of which you are so proud, could
stand such an examination and retain your confidence.
No, my dear Colonel; you will never banish worship from
the world by warring upon non-essentials. You may
demonstrate that every recorded miracle is a myth--
that the founders of the various cults were but mortal men
and the writers of every sacred book but scheming priests.
You may make it gross to sense that the Creator has never
held direct communication with the creature, and you have
but stripped religion of its tattered vestments--have not laid
the weight of your hand upon the impregnable citadel, the
universal Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man. You
have never yet talked to the real question. You reject
religion because Moses and Mahomet, Luther and Calvin
entertained crude ideas of the plans and attributes of the
Creator. You pose as an agnostic--a religious Know-
nothing--because the Almighty has not taken you
completely into his confidence. Because the blind have
sometimes led the blind and both have fallen into the foul
ditch of fanaticism and cruelty, you infer that not one gleam
of supernal glory has pierced the dark vale of human life.
While posing as the apostle of light, you will obscure the
scintillations of the stars because the sun is hid; while
apotheosizing Happiness you would banish Hope, that
mother of which it is born.
But your labors have borne good as well as evil fruit. While
your siren eloquence has led some doubting Thomases into
the barren desert of Atheism, you have driven others to
seek a better reason for their religious faith than barbarous
tradition and the vote of ecumenical councils. Bigotry has
quailed beneath the ringing blows of your iconoclastic
hammer, dogmatism become more humble and the
priesthood well-nigh forgotten to prate of a hell of fire in
which the souls of unbaptized babes forever burn. Without
intending it, perhaps, you have done more to promote the
cause of true religion, more to intellectualize and humanize
man's conception of Almighty God, than any other reformer
since the days of Christ.