"Force first made conquest, and that conquest, law;
Till Superstition taught the tyrant awe,
Then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid,
And gods of conquerors, slaves of subjects made.
She, from the rending earth and bursting skies,
Saw gods descend and fiends infernal rise;
Here fixed the dreadful, there the blest abodes;
Fear made her devils and weak hope her gods;
Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge and lust;
Such as the souls of cowards might conceive,
And, formed like tyrants, tyrants would believe.
Zeal then, not charity, became the guide;
And hell was built on spite, and heaven on pride."
--POPE.
Kind reader, have a care! For aught I know this article
may be the rankest blasphemy, and reading it may wreck
your immortal soul--granting of course, that you are in
possession of such perishable property. I submitted it to
several of my brother ministers and sought their opinion as
to the propriety of publishing it; but while some assured me
that it was calculated to purify the moral atmosphere
somewhat and foster respect for true religion, others were
equally certain that Satan had inspired it--that it was, in
fact, a choice bit of immigration literature for the lower
regions. Finding even the elders unable to decide what
should be done with Balaam's Ass--whether it should be
turned loose upon the land like another evangelist, or
consigned to the flames as a hopeless heretic--I determined
to give it the benefit of the doubt. The animal may
break into the preserves of some unctuous hypocrites and
trample a few choice flowers of sacerdotal folly; but I opine
that no honest man of average intellect will find herein
occasion for complaint. I would not wantonly wound the
sensibilities of those earnest but ignorant souls who believe
the very chapter headings of the Bible to have been
inspired; who interpret literally every foolish fable preserved
therein--"like flies in amber"; but the Car of Progress
cannot roll forward without crushing an occasional pismire.
We cannot bid it stand forever in the same old rut, like an
abandoned road-cart or "Jeffersonian Democrat," because
across its shining pathway lie the honest prejudices of
zealous stupidity.
The Bible is a great gold-mine, in which inexhaustible store
of yellow metal is mixed with much worthless rubbish that
must be purged away by honest criticism before the book
becomes really profitable even fit for general circulation. I
would rather place in the hands of an innocent girl a copy
of the Police Gazette or Sunday Sun than an
unexpurgated Bible. It is a book I value much, yet keep
under lock and key with "Don Juan" and the "Decameron."
It contains both the grandest morality and most degrading
obscenity ever conceived in the brain of mortal man. There
are passages whose beauty and power might cause the
heart of an angel to leap in ecstasy, others that would call a
blush of shame to the brassy front of the foulest fiend that
ever howled and shrieked through the sulphurous valleys of
Hell.
The man who rejects the Bible altogether because it is
honey-combed with barbarous traditions, rank with revolting
stories and darkened by the shadow of a savage
superstition, is cousin-german to him that casts aside a
priceless pearl because it is coated with ocean slime. He
that accepts it in its entirety--gulps it down like an
anaconda absorbing an unwashed goat; who makes no
attempt to separate the essential from the accidental--the
utterance of inspiration from the garrulity of hopeless
nescience; who forgets that it is half an epic poem filled
with the gorgeous imagery of the Orient, may, like the ass
which Balaam rode, open its mouth and speak; but he
never saw the Angel of the Lord; he utters the words of
emptiness and ignorance.
Had the Bible been taught intelligently and truthfully the
entire world would have accepted it centuries ago. Its very
worst enemies are those who insist upon its inerrancy--who
strive by some esoteric alchemy of logic to transmute its
every fragment of base metal into bars of yellow gold, the
folly of the creature into the wisdom of the Creator. During
the Dark Ages hide-bound orthodoxy prevailed and
practically every man was a church communicant; it is
paramount to-day only in those countries that have failed to
keep pace with the Car of Progress. It is a sad
commentary upon all religious faiths that they flourish best
where ignorance prevails--that Atheism is rapidly becoming
the recognized correlative of education. By presuming to
know too much of God's great plan; by decrying intelligent
criticism and attempting to seal the lips of living students
with the dicta of dead scholastics; by standing ever ready to
brand as blasphemers those who presume to question or
dare to differ, the dogmatists are driving millions of God-
fearing men into passive indifference or overt opposition.
Ignorance is not a crime per se; but it is the mother of
Superstition and Intolerance, those twin demons that have
time and again deluged the world with blood and tears; that
for forty centuries have stood like ravenous wolves in the
path of human progress; that with their empoisoned
fangs have torn a thousand times the snowy breast
of Liberty--that have done more to inspire Doubt and foster
Infidelity than all the French philosophes that ever
wielded pen. The logical, well-informed man who to-day
becomes a church communicant does not so because of
the doctrine promulgated by the average pulpiteer, but
despite of it.
The long night of intellectual slavery has not altogether
passed, but on the higher hills already flame the harbingers
of Reason's glorious morn. Gone is the Inquisition with its
sacred infamies--the Christian rack is broken and the
thumb-screw rusted in twain. The persuasive wheel no
longer whisks the non-conformist into full communion, the
Iron Virgin has ceased to press the writhing heretic to her
orthodox heart. The faggot has fallen from the hand of the
saintly fanatic and the branding iron from the loving grasp
of the benevolent bigot, while Superstition, that once did
rule the world with autocratic sway, can only shriek her
impotent curses forth and flourish her foolish boycott at
Reason's growing flame.
If I can but enable sectarians to understand that all so-
called sacred books are essentially the same--that Brahma
and Baal, Jupiter and Jehovah are really identical; if I can
but make them cognizant of the crime they commit in
decrying honest criticism; if I can but convince them that
the man who is
"Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
But looks through nature up to nature's God,"
is not necessarily an active emissary of evil whom it is their
duty to denounce; if I can but create a suspicion in the
minds of the clergy that perhaps they know no more of the
Omnipotent than do other men--are possibly mistaking bile
for benevolence, gall for godliness and chronic laziness for
"a call to preach"--I will feel that these few hours
expended grooming Balaam's burro have not been cast
away.
. . .
Our information concerning the Rev. Mr. Balaam and his
burro is very limited. Although the latter was endowed with
the gift of gab it appears to have spoken but once and then
at the especial bidding of an angel, which fact leads us to
suspect that the voluble jackasses now extant have
deteriorated at both ends since the days of their
distinguished ancestor--have parted with all their brain as
well as with half their legs. Brother Balaam does not
appear to have "syndicated" his sermons or made any
special bid for notoriety. If he ever hired half-starved
courtesans a la Parkhurst--to dance the can-can, then
hastened into court to file complaint against the very bawds
he had filled with booze and dandled naked on his knee; if
he called the ladies of his congregation "old sows" after the
manner of Sam Jones; if he got himself tried on a charge of
heresy or became entangled with some half-wit sister
whose religious fervor led her to mistake Levite for the
Lord, no record of the shameful circumstance has been
preserved. He appears to have attended pretty strictly to
the prophet business, and we may presume, from such
stray bits of his biography as have come down to us, that
he prospered.
The Israelites, who had gotten out of Egypt between two
days with considerable of the portable property of other
people concealed about their persons, had gone into the
Bill Dalton business under the direct guidance--as they
claimed--of their Deity, and were for some time eminently
successful. Wholesale murder and robbery became their
only industry, arson and oppression their recognized
amusement. They had swiped up several cities--"leaving
not a soul alive"--and were now grinding the snickersnee for
Moab and Midian. The people of the petty nations of
Palestine--whom God's anointed received an
imperative command to "utterly destroy"--had builded them
happy homes and accumulated considerable property by
patient industry. They appear to have been peacefully
disposed and devout worshipers of those deities from
whom the better attributes of Jehovah were subsequently
borrowed. The Israelites had not struck a lick of honest
labor for forty years. They had drifted about like Cosey's
"Commonwealers" and developed into the most fiendish
mob of God-fearing guerrillas and marauding cut-throats of
which history makes mention. Compared with Joshua's
murderous Jews, the Huns who followed Attila were avatars
of mercy and the Sioux of Sitting Bull were Good
Samaritans. A careful comparison of the crimes committed
by the Kurds in Armenia with those perpetrated by "God's
chosen people" in Palestine will prove that the followers of
Allah are but amateurs in the art of outrage. Doubtless any
other people, brutalized by centuries of bondage, then
turned loose without king or country, with only ignorant
prophets for guides and avaricious priests for law-givers,
would have become equally cruel--would have adopted a
divinity devoid of mercy and a stranger to justice. The god
of a people is, and must of necessity ever be a reflection of
themselves, an idealization of their own virtues and vices--a
magic mirror in which, Narcissuslike, man worships his own
image.
The Jews are one of the grandest people that ever dwelt
upon the earth. A more intellectual and progressive race is
unknown to human history; but, like all others, it had its age
of savagery and its epoch of barbarism before it reached
the golden era of civilization. I am not criticizing the Jews
for their treatment of the Canaanites during that century
when crass ignorance made them credulous and bondage
rendered them brutal; but to assume that the
excesses of semi-savages were Heaven-inspired
were a damning libel of the Deity. I rather enjoy being lied
about by malicious lollipops; but did I sit secure in some
celestial citadel, holding the thunderbolts of Heaven within
my hand, it were hardly safe to assert that I instigated such
unparalleled atrocities as were perpetrated by the
emancipated Israelites in Palestine. I would certainly be
tempted to take a potshot at an occasional preacher who
persisted in defaming me with his foolish dogmatism.
Balak, the king of Moab and Midian, saw that he was not
strong enough to withstand the sacred marauders, and well
knew that surrender meant a wholesale massacre--that
those who had dared to defend their homes would be
placed under harrows of iron--that the silvery head of the
aged grandsire would sink beneath a sword wielded in the
name of God; that unborn babes would be ripped from the
wombs of Moabite women and the maidens of Midian
coerced into concubinage by their heaven-led captors. In
this dire extremity Balak bethought him of Brother Balaam,
who was not "a prophet of God," as popularly supposed,
but a priest of Baal, the deity devoutly worshiped in Moab
and Midian. It were ridiculous to suppose that the king,
princes and elders of Moab and Midian would appeal for aid
to the God of their enemies instead of to their own divinity,
for in those days the principal business of a deity was to
wage war in behalf of his worshipers. Balaam was a
Midianite, and Balak sent messengers to him "with the
reward of divination in their hand," and begged that he
would kindly come over and knock the Israelites off the
Christmas tree with one of his smooth-bore, muzzle-loading
maledictions; "for," said he, with a pious fervor that proves
he was addressing a priest of his own faith, "I wot that he
whom thou blesseth is blessed, and whom thou curseth is
cursed." He evidently believed that Balaam carried
the celestial thunderbolts concealed about his person--that
when he turned them loose those on whom they alighted
frizzled up like a fat angleworm on a sea-coal fire. The
good man said he would see what could be done to help
Balak out of the hole.
"And God came unto Balaam and said,
'What men are these with thee?' "
As Balaam was evidently expecting the visit we may
conclude that the caller was Baal, as Jehovah was not at
that time on visiting terms with the Gentile priests--was
busily engaged pulling down their altars and putting them to
the sword. Balaam gratified the very natural curiosity of his
celestial visitor, and the latter, after learning all the
particulars, cautioned his diviner or priest not to make any
bad breaks. Balaam sent the ambassadors back with word
that Baal was a trifle shy of curses at that particular time.
Balak evidently understood the situation, for he sent other
agents with larger offerings. Balaam still insisted that he
had received no permission to wipe up the Plain of Moab
with the ex-brick builders, but saddled his ass and went
along, promising to do the best he could for his bleeding
country. He evidently desired to size up the situation and
be quite sure that none of his curses would come home to
roost. Doubtless he also desired to see if Balak was
bidding all he could afford for celestial aid, for we have no
reason to believe that Brother Balaam was in the prophet
business for his health or peddling curses for recreation.
While en route his companions probably informed him
that the Jews were as frequent as jugs in a Prohibition
precinct--that they had slaughtered the people of Ai, driven
Og into the earth, overcome Ammon and were making the
rest of the Canaanitish nations hard to catch, for the good
man was seized with a sudden desire to take the
back track. His burro balked and Balaam told his fellow
travelers that an angel was interfering with his
transportation facilities. Perhaps the princes of Moab made
ribald remarks anent the celestial obstruction--even hinted
that Balaam had best get a Maud S. move on him or he
might contract a vigorous case of unavailing regret. Then
the burro began to blab. Like many of the old pagan
priests, Balaam was doubtless an adept in the art of
ventriloquism. That may have convinced the ambassadors
and bulled the price of curses; for then, as now, it was no
uncommon thing for the utterance of an ass to be mistaken
for that of an oracle. Or some Doubting Thomas may have
twisted the burro's tail. For some reason not set forth by
the sacred chronicler, the angel withdrew his objections and
the prophet proceeded on his way, but still protesting that
no permit had been accorded him to put a kibosh on
Joshua's free-booters.
Balaam was entirely too smart to pray for rain when the
wind was in the wrong quarter--altogether too smooth to
launch his anathemas at an army he knew could take Moab
by the back-hair and rub her nose in the sawdust. He
counted the campfires of Israel and concluded that Balak's
promises of high honors were worth no more than a camp-
meeting certificate of conversion--that he would soon be
hoofing it over the hills with his coat-tails full of arrows; so,
after working his patrons for all the spare cash in sight, he
made a sneak, leaving his sovereign to wage war without
the aid of supernatural weapons. Like many of his
sacerdotal successors, Balaam took precious good care to
get on the winning side.
. . .
Ever since the days of Brother Balaam there has been
considerable trading of curses for cold cash. The industry
has been patiently built up from humble beginnings to a
magnificent business. From an itinerant curse
peddler, trotting about on a spavined burro and resorting to
the methods of the mountebank to create a market for his
merchandise, it has become a vast commercial concern
with costly establishments in every country. The first
curses, as might have been expected, were very crude
affairs--little more than hoodoos, intended to promote the
material welfare of the purchaser at the expense of other
people. A king of ye olden times bought a curse and
turned it loose upon his enemies--"played the god an
engine on his foe"--much as a modern prince might a
gatling-gun; but it seems to have slowly dawned upon the
royal ignorami that the Lord is usually on the side of the
heaviest battalions--a fact which Napoleon emphasized.
The practice of fencing in a nation with a few wild-eyed
prophets, or sending a single soldier forth with a hair-trigger
hoodoo and the jawbone of a defunct jackass to drive great
armies into the earth, gradually fell into disuse--curses and
blessings became a drug in the market.
About this time the Jewish priesthood began to take kindly
to the doctrine of future rewards and punishments. This
theological thesis--promulgated before the age of
Abraham--had influenced to some extent the religious
thought of the entire eastern hemisphere. That the Jews
were among the last to admit the immortality of the soul
was doubtless due to the fact that, because of their long
enslavement, they did not emerge from semi-savagery so
soon as did the other divisions of the great semitic family.
Furthermore, for a long period after their emancipation the
Jews seem to have received the rewards of their peculiar
virtues here on earth and were little inclined to defer their
happiness to the hereafter--were amply able to punish their
enemies and had no occasion to delegate that pleasant
duty to a Superior Power. Finally, however, the
fortunes of war began to go against them. They
were no longer able to make on earth a heaven for
themselves and a hell for other people. Instead of
despoiling others they discovered an occasional hiatus in
their own smoke-house. Instead of burning the cities of
their inoffensive neighbors their own began to blaze. The
priests and prophets insisted that these evils befell them
because they had neglected their Deity; but the more
devout they became--the more fat kids, fine meal and first
fruits they referred to the Levite larder as "offerings to the
Lord"--the more deplorable became their condition. The
people began to drift to the more reasonable religion of
their neighbors and even the wisest of their kings could not
be held to the faith of their fathers. The Jewish priesthood
gradually adopted the old Parsi doctrine of Heaven and
Hell--a doctrine unrecognized by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
and having no place in the theology of Moses.
The Jews eventually discovered that robbery was wrong
and assassination a crime--that the practice of ripping open
pregnant women and putting prisoners of war under
harrows of iron was displeasing to the Lord. It was a
forcible illustration of the ancient axiom that it makes a
great difference whose ox is gored. Instead of founding a
mighty nation as predicted by their prophets, the Jews were
conquered, scattered, enslaved.
Palestine was filled with foreigners; had become a religious
Babel, a theological chaos. The time was ripe for a
religious revolution such as had been inaugurated in India
six centuries before. It was accomplished and, as might
have been expected, the result was a curious composition;
a religious olla-podrida in which the profound wisdom of
Zoroaster and the childish superstition of western
barbarians, grand morality and monumental absurdity elbow
each other like specters in a delirium--in which is heard
both "the still small voice" of Omnipotent God and
the megalophanous bray of Balaam's Ass.
Jehovah, the national God of the Jews, supplanted Jove
and Baal, Ashtaroth and Oromasdes, and with their thrones
took many of their attributes. The doctrine of future
rewards and punishments became the cornerstone of the
new theology, while further concessions were made to
ethnic creeds in various stages of decay by the adoption of
the Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. The Jewish
prophets were accepted by the composite cult--which Christ
may have originated, but certainly did not develop--but their
every utterance was given a new interpretation of which the
Hebrew hierarchy had never dreamed. The great kingdom
which they had predicted was to be spiritual instead of
temporal; the Jerusalem predestined to become the capitol
of a powerful prince, to whom all nations should
acknowledge allegiance--and pay tribute--was not the
leprosy-eaten old town among the Judean hills, but a city
not made with hands, existing eternal in the heavens.
Christianity does not contain a single original idea. It
borrowed liberally on every hand, but chiefly of Parseeism
in which faith, as taught by Zoroaster--Aristotle says six
thousand years before Plato--may be found its most
important features. It owes absolutely nothing to Judaism
but the name of its God and an idle string of misinterpreted
prophecies--is, from first to last, essentially a "Gentile"
faith. There never was a religion instituted upon the earth
that the priesthood failed to transform into arrant folly, to
debase until it finally fell into disrepute. Such was the fate
of that established by Zoroaster, and upon the ruins of the
grandest theology this world has known, Siddartha
Gautama erected the Buddhist credo, which is really a
revolt to first principles--a search for happiness here on
earth, the attainment of Nirvana. So, too, the
priesthood has corrupted the teachings of Christ until the
logical mind revolts from the jumble of self-evident
absurdities, rejects Revelations as a nursery tale and seeks
by the dim light of science to find the cause of all
Existence.
The new cult was not regarded kindly by the old
priesthoods, and the methods adopted for its suppression
were almost as rigorous as those it in turn employed some
centuries later for the discouragement of other
"blasphemers" and "heretics"; hence it is not surprising
that the old Hebrew doctrine that whom the Lord loves he
makes mighty, gives wealth in plenty and concubines
galore, power over his enemies and privilege to despoil his
neighbors, should have been early transformed into
"Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth." The doctrine of
temporal rewards and punishments revived somewhat as
Christianity became powerful, but has remained a
subordinate feature. As not a sparrow falls to the earth
without a special permit from the Almighty, it follows, as a
natural sequence, that every brutal crime is gracefully
permitted--if not ordained--by that dear Lord whose
protection we daily pray, and whose apostles we support.
If we inquire why this is so we are cautioned not to commit
blasphemy--some worthy brother of Balaam's Ass bids us
beware the Angel of the Lord.
. . .
The claim of the ancient priesthoods to support was based
on the presumption that they promoted the national welfare
of the people by keeping the national deity in good humor.
Whenever he contracted a case of the sulks the smell of
fresh blood would usually bring him around all right.
Sometimes the butchery of a few innocent birds and beasts
would do the business; but it not infrequently became
necessary to commit a number of homicides to get
him actually gay. When even the sweet incense of
blazing cities and roasting babes failed to restore his hilarity
the prophets sounded the alarm much as the weather
bureau gives warning of approaching cyclones and other
atmospheric disturbances. In case the dire predictions
failed to materialize the Lord had listened to their
protestations that he was not doing the proper thing and
"repented him"--the Immutable had changed his mind! The
prophets were supposed to make a man prosperous as a
Tammany politician by blessing, or poor as a Houston
Post editorial by laying a curse upon him. As civilization
advanced the people able to pay "the rewards of
divination" became too intelligent to be taken in by the
transparent tricks of Brother Balaam, hence the new
priesthood devoted itself chiefly to the spiritual welfare of
the people--made a specialty of the hereafter business. For
obvious reasons, it is the safer enterprise.
Man was now told to believe thus-and-so and he would be
blessed eternally, but if he believed not he would be cursed
everlastingly. The rewards promised by the early
priesthoods had, by centuries of evolution, developed from
good crops and fat cattle, fruitful vines and successful
villainy, into mansions in Heaven; the punishments from a
protracted drought or descent of the Assyrians, a bad case
of buck ague or boils into a Hell of fire where the souls of
aged unbelievers and unbaptized babes forever burn. This
was the old argumentum ad hominem in a new Mother
Hubbard; but the masses were still ignorant, and those who
could not be bribed with the fruits of Heaven were bluffed
with the fires of Hell. The old priesthoods were crushed
and kings became the sworn defenders of the new faith,
even propagated it with the sword--dispensed saving grace
with gallows' ropes and with the bludgeon drove heaven-
inspired precepts into the heads of unbelievers.
Wisdom could not withstand such logic--the
philosopher yielded to the unanswerable argument of the
Inquisition. As no one could disprove the comforting
doctrine of eternal damnation, and there is a strong vein of
superstition in even the best of men, the ignorant populace
cowered in terror most pitiful at the feet of a presumptuous
priesthood. And to this good day men who have managed
in some mysterious manner to dodge the madhouse,
believe that priests or preachers are the special deputies of
the Deity, that a criticism of the clergy is an insult to the
Almighty--that if you dare dissent from the foolish opinions
of some wooden-headed dominus anent the Divine Plan
you might as well "curse God and die."
Once this old ethnic cult in a new dress became well
established--and the source of considerable revenue to the
latter day Levites--its most glaring absurdities were able to
withstand for a time even the invention of the printing press
and the general dissemination of knowledge; for "that
monster custom, of habits devil," is very potent in shaping
the minds of men and retarding human progress. Thus we
find, in this so-called enlightened age, millions of men
defending the rights of certain scorbutic families of
indifferent minds and muddy morals, to sway the
sovereign's scepter. Mental colossi--men who tower up like
Titans in the world of intellect--are proud to acknowledge
themselves the "dutiful subjects" of some brainless fop or
beery old female who chanced to be born in a royal bed
while their betters were ushered in as the brats of beggars.
So, too, we find men possessing clear judicial minds
defending with all the fervor of fifteenth century fanatics, not
the Christian faith per se, but some special interpretation
thereof; not the philosophy of religion, but the
inconsequential theorems of some sacerdotal "reformer"
who has added to the world's discord by founding a
new "faith." These various religious divisions have become
little more than rival commercial establishments, each
peddling its own peculiar brand of saving grace--warranted
the only genuine--and dealing damnation round on all
dissenters.
Dogmatism begat Doubt, and men began to study the
Bible, not to search out its wisdom and its truth, but its folly
and its falsehood. They represent the recoil from one
extreme to the other--from blind belief to unreasoning
skepticism, from intellectual slavery to liberty degenerated
into license. Instead of judging the Bible by God they judge
God by the Bible, and finding by this ridiculous formula that
he is little better than a brutal maniac, they reject him
altogether and try to account for the creature without the
Creator, to explain an effect without an efficient cause. If
we could but muzzle the dogmatists Infidelity would quickly
die.
. . .
The essentials of the Christian religion do not depend upon
the inerrancy of the Scriptures. They do not depend upon
direct Revelation or the Miracle, the Incarnation or the
Resurrection of Jesus from the tomb of Joseph of
Arimathea. In fact, these very "Evidences" adduced in
behalf of the "True Faith," produce all the Doubt with which
it is called to contend. Let us grant that Moses was not
called to Sinai's flaming crest to receive laws promulgated
centuries before Joseph was carried a captive into Egypt;
that the Bible is but the history of a barbarous people--a
compendium of their poetry, religion and philosophy; that
the Incarnation and Resurrection are but myths borrowed
from decaying ethnic cults, and what have we lost? Simply
indefensible non-essentials--the tawdry garment with which
Ignorance has bedecked her poor idea of the Infinite. What
matters it whether we call our Creator Jehovah or
Jupiter, Brahma or Buddha? Who knoweth the name by
which the Seraphim address him? Why should we care
whether Christ came into the world with or without the
intervention of an earthly father? Are we not all sons of the
Most High God--"bright sparkles of the Infinite?" Suppose
that the story of the Incarnation (older than Jerusalem itself)
be literally true--that the Almighty was the immediate father
of Mary's child: Is not the birth of each and all of us as
much a mystery, as great a "miracle," as though we
sprang full-grown from the brow of Olympian Jove? Is it
necessary that the Creator should violate his own laws to
convince us that he does exist? Is it more wonderful that
the sun should stand still upon Gibeon and the moon in the
Valley of Ajalon than that the great world should spin
forever, bringing the night and the morning, the seed-time
and the harvest? Is not a "miracle"--an interruption of
nature's harmony--rather calculated to make a man of
logical mind suspect that he is the sport of chance than
believe himself the especial care of an Omniscient Power
that "Ordereth all things well?" When this great globe
hangs motionless in space and the rotting dead arise in
their cerements; when great multitudes are fed with a few
small fishes and virgins are found with child, then, and not
till then, will I relinquish faith in an intelligent Architect
and acknowledge lawless Force the only Deity.
Man is but a microbe lost in immensity. He peers about
him and, by the uncertain light of his small intelligence,
reads here a word, there a line in the great Book of Nature,
and putting together these scattered fragments, makes a
"Faith" which he defends with fanatical fervor. Dare to call
in question its most inconsequential thesis and you are
branded as an heretic; deny it in toto and you are
denounced as an enemy of the Almighty! The curses
of Brother Balaam no longer kill the body, but they are
expected to play sad havoc with the soul! When the priest
of Baal was en route to Moab's capital for cursing
purposes an angel tried to withhold him, and even his burro
rebuked him, but neither angels nor asses are exempt from
the law of evolution. Now when a priest or preacher lets
slip a curse at those who presume to question the supernal
wisdom of his creed, the angels are supposed to flap their
wings until Heaven is filled with flying feathers, while every
blatant jackass who takes his spiritual fodder at that
particular rick unbraids his ears and brays approvingly.