"Yours in Christ, (Signed), John Joseph Lynch."
Since Ingersoll's visit to Canada, Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto,-has
also felt called upon to issue a bull against the Freethinkers; and, I
propose to take this "bull" by the horns and _lynch_ him (I may say _sub
rosa_ that the Bulls of Rome were long ago emasculated, yet, strangely
enough, they still keep _multiplying_!) Under the circumstances, I
think such a work (lynching the bull) will not be one wholly of
_supererogation_,--though it may be more than a _venial_ offence--indeed
possibly a _mortal_ sin for which I can get no _absolution_--to presume
to criticise an Archbishop, and break a lance with his holy bull! I
have, however, desperately resolved to take my chances of purgatory or
limbo and go in for the bull.
Some of the Archbishop's flock, it would seem, had ventured to exercise
the natural rights of man to the very modest extent of going to hear
Mr. Ingersoll lecture, and also attending some of the meetings of the
Toronto _Liberal Association_. Hence the fulmination of the aforesaid
"bull," wherein his Grace, with that meekness, charity and toleration
born of piety and infallibility, orders his people to "avoid all
contact with these Freethinkers, their lectures and their writings,"
and threatens all Catholics who "go to the meetings and lectures of the
Freethinkers or Atheists" with refusal of "absolution," which priestly
function, he patronizingly tells them, he "reserves" to himself.
Now, may we not indulge the hope, in this age of reason, and land of at
least professed liberty, and esoteric freedom of conscience, that
every man, be he Catholic or Protestant, will look upon this attempted
exercise of medieval bigotry and intolerance with practical disregard,
and deserved contempt. As for the Freethinkers, they can afford to smile
at the impotent Archbishop, who seems to imagine himself in the ninth
instead of the nineteenth century, and in Rome or Spain instead of the
Dominion of Canada. They can but look at him and his foolish "bull" as
most ridiculous anachronisms. On reading this precious document it is
plain that all this deputy "Vicegerent of God" requires to make him a
first-class modern Torquemada is the power--the outward authority to
carry out his subjective hatred of "brutalized" Freethinkers. But this,
thanks to science, and consequent civilization, he has not got.
The Rationalist can, therefore, at this day, afford to deride the
malevolent, though fortunately impotent, ravings of this zealous bishop
of an emasculated Church. He and his Church (the whole Christian Church)
are, fortunately for humanity, shorn of their wonted strength, which,
in the past, they have used with such fiendish ferocity and brutality
on human kind. The day has gone by when the Church may light an
_auto-da-fe_ around the body of a Bruno. The time has passed when she
may thrust a Galileo into prison and force him to recant the sublime
truths of Astronomy. She can no longer cast a Roger Bacon into a noisome
dungeon because of his scientific investigations. True, she can still,
if she choose, excommunicate a Copernicus for what she denounced as his
"false Pythagorean doctrine," but that is all. Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall,
Proctor and the rest are safe. This relentless enemy of Science and
liberty, and consequently of mankind, can no longer clutch every young
science by the throat and strangle struggling truth, which, crushed to
earth has risen again in its might; and history will scarcely repeat
itself in the case of Bruno the Atheist, or Galileo the Astronomer,
or Roger Bacon the Philosopher, or a thousand other victims of this
ruthless "Bourbon of the world of thought"--the Church. She may still
continue to fulminate her absurd and innocuous _anathemas_, but this is
about all. The Holy Inquisition, with its two hundred and fifty thousand
human victims; the Crusades with its five millions; the massacre of St.
Bartholomew with its fifty thousand; to say nothing of the religious
horrors of the Netherlands, of England, Scotland, and Ireland since the
reformation--all these holy horrors, let us hope, are "hideous blots on
the history of the past never to be repeated." Or will it be said of the
future history of Christianity, as has been frankly admitted of its past
by one of its ardent disciples, Baxter, that "Blood, blood, blood stains
every page?"
The tables are now turning. The Church, to-day, instead of burning
unbelievers, and strangling science by immuring in dungeons its
votaries, is herself being strangled by science (with no loss of human
blood, however). Her cruel theology and irrational dogmas are prostrate,
writhing in their death throes, at the feet of the Hercules of modern
science and criticism.
A little digression will not be out of order here. Our comic
caricaturist at Toronto (of which, on the whole, Canada may feel proud),
recently had a cartoon representing the theological Gamaliel of St.
Michael's Palace, Toronto, strangling the _serpent_ "Freethought."
Now, though usually on the side of truth and impartiality, _Grip_ has
undoubtedly, in this case, taken an oblique squint at truth and justice,
and has for once, at least, got the cart before the horse. Facts and
truth demand that the positions of the gladiators in his cartoon must be
reversed, and the zoological nomenclature corrected. And if _Grip_ had
read Huxley and Tyndall, and correctly observed the signs of the times,
he would scarcely have fallen into this unpardonable error. Let us quote
Prof. Huxley on this subject of strangling serpents:--
"It is true that, if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been
amply revenged. _Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every
science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules_; and history
records that, whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed,
the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and
crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy
is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it
forget; and, though at present bewildered and afraid to move, it is as
willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the
beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty
thunderbolts as its half-paralyzed hands can hurl those who refuse to
degrade Nature to the level of primitive Judaism."--_Lay Sermons_, p.
277-8.
From this, _Grip_ will see that instead of the fair form of reason
and Freethought (which he represents as a snake) being strangled by
a prelate of the church, it is the serpent, orthodoxy, which is being
strangled by the Hercules of science. It is to be regretted that _Grip_,
notwithstanding his professions of independence and impartiality, is
himself obnoxious to the very moral cowardice he has so often fearlessly
and justly exposed in others. Else why does he represent Freethought as
a snake? Is it because Freethought is yet comparatively weak in numbers,
and unpopular, and because this sort of thing will please the Church,
which _is_ popular and powerful? What characteristic of the snake
attaches to Freethought or Freethinkers? None; and we fearlessly
challenge _Grip_ and the Church on this point. Freethought has none of
the reptilian qualities of hypocrisy, cunning or deceit, but is frank
and fearless. Amid all the obloquy, denunciation, persecution, social
ostracism, calumny, and "holy bulls" hurled at them, Freethinkers have
the courage of their opinions; and bear all these, as well as business
detriment, for the sake of what they sacredly regard as _truth_.
What does Prof. Tyndall say of Freethinkers and Atheists? To Archbishop
Lynch, who, in his pronunciamiento, says, "A person who, disbelieves in
the Ten Commandments, in hell or in Heaven, can hardly be trusted in
the concerns of life;" and to _Grip_ who cowardly crystalizes this base
assertion into a baser cartoon, I quote with pride the language of
this noble man, and eminent scholar and scientist. In the _Fortnightly
Review_ for November, 1877, Prof. Tyndall says:
"It may comfort some to know that there are amongst us many whom the
gladiators of the pulpit would call Atheists and Materialists, whose
lives, nevertheless, as tested by any accessible standard of morality,
would contrast more than favorably with the lives of those who seek to
stamp them with this offensive brand. When I say 'offensive' I refer
simply to the intention of those who use such terms, and not because
Atheism or Materialism, when compared with many of the notions
ventilated in the columns of religious newspapers, has any particular
offensiveness to me. If I wished to find men who are scrupulous in their
adherence to engagements, whose words are their bond, and to whom moral
shiftiness of any kind is subjectively unknown; if I wanted a loving
father, a faithful husband, an honorable neighbor, and a just citizen, I
would seek him among the band of Atheists to which I refer. I have
known some of the most pronounced amongst them, not only in life, but in
death--seen them approaching with open eyes the inexorable goal, with no
dread of a 'hangman's whip,' with no hope of a heavenly crown, and still
as mindful of their duties, and as faithful in the discharge of them, as
if their eternal future depended on their latest deeds."
Let the Archbishop, and _Grip_, and every reader ponder these
brave words of so high an authority in defence of the reprobated
class-stigmatised as "infidels," to which they refer; and then, for
corroboration, compare the testimony given with the living facts around
them..
The Archbishop says, these "foolish men" (the Freethinkers) are
"striving to replunge the world into the depths of Barbarism and
Paganism," etc., etc. To those who know that the present attitude of
all the great scientists and eminent _savans_ towards the dogmas of the
Christian Church, is one of undoubted unbelief and hostility; and
who are conversant with the history of the Archbishop's own church in
particular, during the past fifteen centuries,--to them the Archbishop's
vituperation is as foolish as it is ridiculous. From the days of
Constantine to this year, 1880, the Church, of which this learned (?)
prelate is a representative, has strenuously opposed learning, and
retarded civilization; has tolerated no freedom of conscience or liberty
of thought, thus narrowing instead of extending the liberty enjoyed
in Pagan and Imperial Rome, over whose ruins she reared her tyrannical
head. Talk of "Paganism!" His Church needs, as Emerson puts it, "some
good Paganism." She left behind her the liberty even of Pagan Rome, her
maligned precursor. Renan tells us, "We may search in vain, the Roman
law before Constantine, for a single passage against freedom of thought,
and the history of the imperial government furnishes no instance of a
prosecution for entertaining an abstract doctrine." And, Mosheim,
the ecclesiastical historian, tells us that the Romans exercised this
toleration in the amplest manner.
"The prosecutions of the Christians by the Pagans, it is now universally
conceded by Christian historians, have been greatly exaggerated;
Christians have killed, in one day, for their faith nearly half as many
heretics as all the Christians put to death by the Pagans during the
whole period of the Pagan Empire." (The Influence of Christianity on
Civilization, pp. 24-5, Underwood.)
The Archbishop's Church is, therefore, no improvement in respect of
liberty or toleration, on the Paganism he reviles.
What progress the world has made in liberty and civilization, has been
made, not with the assistance of the Christian Church, but in spite of
its determined opposition and deadly hostility. Dr. Draper, author of
the "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science," and other
works, tells us that:
"Latin Christianity is responsible for the condition and progress of
Europe from the fourth to the sixteenth century," and subsequently
avers, "Whoever will, in in a spirit of impartiality, examine what had
been done by Catholicism for the intellectual and material advancement
of Europe, during her long reign, and what has been done by science
in its brief period of action, can, I am persuaded, come to no other
conclusion than this, that, in instituting a comparison, he has
established a contrast." ("Conflict," p. 321.) Lecky, in his "History
of Morals," vol. 2, p. 18, tells us:--"For more than three centuries the
decadence of theological influence has been one of the most invariable
signs and measures of our progress. In medicine, physical science,
commercial interests, politics, and even ethics, the reformer has been
confronted with theological affirmations that have barred his way, which
were all defended as of vital importance, and were all compelled to
yield before the secularizing influence of civilization." (Protestant as
well as Catholic Christianity is, however, obnoxious to this stricture
of Lecky.)
The Freethinkers "striving to replunge the world into the depths of
barbarism!" What can the Archbishop's idea of barbarism be? Doubtless in
his priestly mind everything is "barbarism" which does not square
with the Encyclical, or with the dogmas of his infallible Church.
If, however, barbarism is in reality just the opposite of our most
enlightened and highest civilization in Art, Science, Literature and
Ethics, it will, I have the presumption to think, be found that those
"foolish men"--those "brutalized" Freethinkers--are leading the van
of progress forward to a higher civilization, instead of dragging it
backward to barbarism. The truth of this is patent everywhere, in every
civilized country, and many of our Christian opponents admit it, though
Archbishop Lynch may not. A clergyman of Toronto--Rev. W. S. Rainsford,
of St. James' Cathedral--(from whom the Archbishop of St. Mary's
Cathedral might probably, to his advantage, take a lesson in
toleration), in a sermon preached in that city, Nov. 17th, 1878,
in speaking of Freethinkers, made use of the following language, as
reported in the _Globe_ of the 18th:
"This sort of infidelity, that of Materialism, has its students in
the laboratory and in the library. It includes men of moral lives, of
earnest purposes, * * * men who uphold morality, chastity, self-denial,
perseverance with as clear a voice as Christians do, but on different
grounds."
Years ago the N. Y. _Independent_, a religious paper, made the following
ingenuous admission:
"To the shame of the Church it must be confessed that the foremost in
all our philanthropic movements, in the interpretation of the spirit of
the age, in the practical application of genuine Christianity, in the
reformation of abuses in high and low places, in the vindication of
the rights of man, and in practically redressing his wrongs, in the
intellectual and moral regeneration of the race, are the so-called
infidels in our land. The Church has pusillanimously left, not only the
working oar, but the very reins of salutary reform in the hands of
men she denounces as inimical to Christianity, and who are practically
doing, with all their might, for humanity's sake, what the Church ought
to be doing for Christ's sake; and if they succeed, as succeed they
will, in abolishing slavery, banishing rum, restraining licentiousness,
reforming abuses and elevating the masses, then must the recoil on
Christianity be disastrous. Woe, woe, woe, to Christianity when Infidels
by the force of nature, or the tendency of the age, get ahead of the
Church in morals, and in the practical work of Christianity. In some
instances they are already far in advance. In the vindication of Truth,
Righteousness, and Liberty, _they are the pioneers_, beckoning to a
sluggish Church to follow in the rear."
The _Evangelist_ also, made the following admission of the same facts:
"Among all the earnest minded young men, who are at this moment leading
in thought and action in America, we venture to say that four-fifths are
skeptical of the great historical facts of Christianity. What is held as
Christian doctrine by the churches claims none of their consideration,
and there is among them a general distrust of the clergy, as a class,
and an utter disgust with the very aspect of modern Christianity and of
church worship. This scepticism is not flippant; little is said about
it. It is not a peculiarity alone of radicals and fanatics; most of
them are men of calm and even balance of mind, and belong to no class of
ultraists. It is not worldly and selfish. Nay, the doubters lead in the
bravest and most self-denying enterprises of the day."
From a Church which has always opposed the education of the people, when
she had the power, and exterminated or expatriated the best intellects
under her jurisdiction, this talk of Freethinkers "re-plunging the world
into the depths of barbarism" comes with a very bad grace from his
Grace of Toronto. By this Church the Moriscoes were driven out of
Spain--100,000 of them--and this because they were the friends of
progress, of art and science. Buckle, the historian, tells us:--"When
they were thrust out of Spain there was no one to fill their places;
arts and manufactures either degenerated or were entirely lost, ard
immense regions of arable land were left uncultivated; whole districts
were suddenly deserted, and down to the present day have never been
repeopled." The Jews also were expelled, as they, too, were in favor
of knowledge and improvement, and this was sufficient cause for their
expatriation.
This relentless enemy--the Church--of all science, all progress in
knowledge among the people, ruthlessly exterminated the best minds
within its grasp for centuries. Darwin, in his "Descent of Man," vol. 1,
p. 171-2, says:--
"During the same period the Holy Inquisition selected with extreme care
the freest and boldest men in order to burn and imprison them. In
Spain alone some of the best men, those who doubted and questioned--and
without doubting and questioning there can be no progress--were
eliminated during three centuries at the rate of a thousand a year."
Talk to us of barbarism and paganism! A church which, from the time,
nearly fifteen centuries ago, when she burnt the Alexandrian
Libraries and Museum--the intellectual legacies of centuries--to the
present time, has never yet called off her sleuth-hounds with which she
has always hunted down the sacred principles of liberty of thought
and freedom of conscience! A Church which from "the beginning of that
unhappy contest," as Mosheim tells us, "between faith and reason,
religion and philosophy, piety and genius, which increased in succeeding
ages, and is prolonged even to our times with a violence which renders
it extremely difficult to be brought to a conclusion," to this day,
would hold the world in barbarous ignorance if its paralyzed hand could
but avail against the resistless march of knowledge and truth! Draper,
in speaking of the condition of the people under Catholicity in the 14th
century, thus pictures the civilizing (?) and elevating influences of
that Holy Religion:--
"There was no far reaching, no persistent plan to ameliorate the
physical condition of the nations. Nothing was done to favor their
intellectual development, indeed, on the contrary, it was the settled
policy to keep them not merely illiterate, but ignorant. Century after
century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the
cattle in the fields. * * * Pestilences were permitted to stalk forth
unchecked, or at best opposed only by mummeries. Bad food, wretched
clothing, inadequate shelter, were suffered to produce their result,
and at the end of a thousand years the population of Europe had not
doubled."
For centuries, and centuries, in the Western Empire, subsequent to the
invasion of the barbarians, when the Church this Toronto prelate owes
allegiance to, had absolute control, such was the dense ignorance that
scarcely a layman could be found who could sign his own name. There was
very little learning, and what little there was the clergy carefully and
jealously confined to themselves; and as Hallam, the historian, tells
us:--
"A cloud of ignorance overspread the whole face of the church, hardly
broken by a few glimmering lights, who owe almost the whole of their
distinction to the surrounding darkness." The same historian (Middle
Ages, p. 460,) tells us:--"France reached her lowest point at the
beginning of the eighth century, but England was, at that time, more
respectable, and did not fall into complete degradation until the middle
of the ninth. There could be nothing more deplorable than the state
of Italy during the succeeding century. In almost every council the
ignorance of the clergy forms a subject for reproach. It is asserted by
one held in 992 that scarcely a single person was to be found in Rome
itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a
thousand in Spain, about the age of Charlemagne, could address a common
letter of salutation to one another."
Lecky, in his "History of Morals," vol. 2, p. 222, tells us that:
"Mediaeval Catholicity discouraged and suppressed, in every way, secular
studies," and further, that, "Not till the education of Europe passed
from the monasteries to the universities; not until Mahomedan science
and classical freethought and industrial independence broke the sceptre
of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe commence."
And, I would ask Archbishop Lynch, what was the condition of
the Byzantine Empire during the thousand years or upwards of its
existence?--An empire under the sway of his Church, from its foundation
by the first Christian emperor, Constantine--that exemplary Christian
murderer who, because the Pagan priests refused him absolution for his
enormities, hastened to the bosom of the Christian Church, whose priests
he found more pliable, having little compunction or hesitancy about
granting absolution to the new proselyte. What is the record of history
touching this Empire under the aegis of Catholic Christianity? The
historian Lecky thus graphically sets forth its condition:--
"The universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a
single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that
civilization has yet assumed. Though very cruel and very sensual, there
have been times when cruelty assumed more ruthless, and sensuality more
extravagant aspects, but there has been no other enduring civilization
so absolutely destitute of all the forms, the elements, of greatness,
and none to which the epithet _mean_ may be so emphatically applied. The
Byzantine Empire was pre-eminently the age of treachery. Its vices were
the vices of men who ceased to be brave without learning to be virtuous.
* * * The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues
of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of
uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides." In speaking of the
condition of the Western Empire the same author proceeds:--"A boundless
intolerance of all divergence of opinion was united with an equally
boundless toleration of all falsehood and deliberate fraud, that could
favor received opinions. Credulity being taught as a virtue, and all
conclusions dictated by authority, a deadly torpor sank upon the human
mind, which for many centuries almost suspended its action, and was only
broken by the scrutinizing, innovating and free-thinking habits that
accompanied the rise of the industrial republics in Italy. Few men who
are not either priests or monks would not have preferred to live in
the best days of the Athenian or of the Roman republics, in the age of
Augustus, or in the age of the Antonines rather than in any period
that elapsed between the _triumph of Christianity and the fourteenth
century_."
The same historian, whose accuracy Archbishop Lynch will scarcely
attempt to impeach, thus judicially and impartially sums up the
influences of Catholic Christianity both in the Eastern and Western
Empires during many centuries when it had the fullest sway:--
"When we remember that in the Byzantine Empire the renovating power of
theology was tried in a new capital, free from Pagan traditions, and for
more than one thousand years unsubdued by barbarians, and that in the
west, the Church, for at least seven hundred years after the shocks of
the invasion had subsided, exercised a control more absolute than any
other moral or intellectual agency has ever attained, it will appear,
I think, that the experiment was very sufficiently tried. It is easy to
make a catalogue of the glaring vices of antiquity, and to contrast them
with the pure morality of Christian writings; but, if we desire to
form a just estimate of the realized improvement, we must compare the
classical and ecclesiastical civilizations as wholes, and must observe
in each case not only the vices that were repressed but also the degree
and variety of positive excellence attained."
Before the art of printing was discovered, the Church had less
difficulty in keeping the people in ignorance, but after the invention
of that boon to mankind she found herself ominously confronted with the
tree of life from which the people would soon learn to pluck the fruit
of knowledge. Hence the establishment, by Pope Paul IV., about the
middle of the sixteenth century, of the _Index Expurgatorius_, whose
functions, we are told, was "to examine books and manuscripts intended
for publication, and to decide whether the people may be permitted to
read them." This is what his Grace of St. Michael's Palace, in Toronto,
proposes to do for the good Catholics of that city--decide what they
shall read and what they shall not read, as though they were ninnies
and not able to decide that matter for themselves! The fact is, however,
that, in this priestly arrogance and assumption, the Archbishop is
consistent enough; for, although such mediaeval tyranny is altogether
inconsistent with the spirit of this age, and ludicrously out of place
in 1880, in the City of Toronto, it, nevertheless, perfectly accords
with the tenets and spirit as well as the antecedents of his Church;
which, while it accuses Freethinkers of "barbarism," allows not an inch
of latitude of private judgment in matters of religion, and tolerates
no freedom of conscience: And what is this but barbarism? All freedom of
conscience was fiercely denounced by Gregory XVI. as insane folly,
and the Archbishop of Toronto reiterates this unsavory stigma on
civilization. And why shouldn't he? Theology never learns. The Church
changes not. How can she when she is infallible? Yet an infallible
Pope of an infallible Church, not long since, found himself, while
encompassed with many difficulties, spiritual and temporal, to be about
like other weak mortals in flesh and blood; and, though infallible,
remember, and with the power of miracles and all that, he succumbs and
whiningly complains to a vulgar world that he is "a prisoner in his own
palace in Rome!" And the heretical and sceptical world--the "outside
barbarians"--with a contemptuous leer, gape at the queer spectacle of
the "Vicegerent on Earth" of an all-powerful God being obliged so easily
to succumb to heresy--to a little temporal power. Such, however, is
life--or rather the "mysterious ways of providence," which "ways" always
seem though, as Cromwell observed, to be on the side of the heaviest
artillery,--not the artillery of heaven, but the base artillery of
earth. Indeed, this worldly artillery--the artillery of science and
civilization--has, in this nineteenth century, been making such havoc
with creeds, confessions, and dogmas, that the crowning dogma
of all--this fundamental pillar of the Vatican, the dogma of
infallibility--was, it would seem, fast becoming a _dead dog_; when the
Holy Catholic Church finds it imperatively incumbent upon her to attempt
a resuscitation. This happened in Rome in "_anno domini_" 1870, at that
great Ecumenical Council--that unique anachronism of the nineteenth
century. I know not whether that mediaeval assembly of Holy "Fathers in
God" was honored by the presence of his Grace of St. Michael's Palace,
in Toronto, or not; but, be that as it may, his reverence's entire
loyalty to the notorious Encyclical and Syllabus of that Council is not
to be questioned or doubted. The miniature Toronto _bull_ of May 9th,
1880, has the true Vatican ring of the big _bull_ of the Council in
Rome in 1870. It, too, denounced, with its usual, though harmless,
_anathema_, Atheism, Pantheism, Naturalism, Rationalism and every other
ism that failed to square with Papal dogma. By the fulmination of that
Syllabus the world learned among many other things, that "No one may
interpret the Sacred Scriptures contrary to the sense in which they are
interpreted by Holy Mother Church, to whom such interpretation belongs."
It was further decreed that "All the Christian faithful are not only
forbidden to defend, as legitimate conclusions of science, those
opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith,
especially when condemned by the Church, but are rather absolutely bound
to hold them for errors wearing the deceitful appearance of truth."
As examples of the holy canons which were actually fulminated and
promulgated by that Ecumenical Council in the latter part of this 19th
century, here are a few:--
"Who shall refuse to receive, for sacred and canonical, the books of
Holy Scripture in their integrity, with all their parts, according as
they were enumerated by the Holy Council of Trent, or shall deny that
they are inspired by God, _Let him be anathema_."
"Who shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit
of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions,
even when opposed to revealed doctrine, _Let him be anathema_."
"Who shall say that it may at any time come to pass, in the progress
of science, that the doctrines set forth by the Church must be taken in
another sense than that in which the Church has ever received and yet
receives them, _Let him be anathema_."
These are the modest assumptions of the Church of Rome in this age; and
a prelate of that Church breathes the same noxious vapors forth into the
intellectual atmosphere of the City of Toronto! It remains to be seen
whether in Toronto there are such slaves or fools as will submit to this
worse than Egyptian bondage. Will intelligent Catholics put their necks
in a yoke so galling? None but slaves or barbarians would do it. The
Archbishop would thus fain make barbarians of his own people, and then
he would have the pagans at home without hunting among Freethinkers for
them. In his lecture in Napanee, in April last, Col. Ingersoll gave it
as his opinion that any man--no matter what Church he belonged to, or
what country he lived in--who claimed rights for himself which he denied
to others, is a barbarian! Now, according to this definition, who are
the barbarians? The Freethinkers, or the Archbishop himself and those he
ignominiously holds in mental bondage?
In conclusion, we thank Archbishop Lynch for his timely "bull." As a
propagandist document for the spread of Freethought, and really in the
interests of those "foolish" and "brutalized" Freethinkers against
whom it was directed, it must prove a great success. It is another
illustration of the essentially bigoted and intolerant spirit of
Christianity in general.*
* I am well aware that the Protestant sects of Christianity
repudiate this charge of the intolerant and persecuting
spirit of Christianity in general, and vainly attempt to
shift the whole onus and odium upon the Church of Rome. They
tell us that Christianity itself is not persecuting--that it
is not responsible for having reddened the earth with blood
--but that this was all done contrary to the spirit and
teachings of Christianity by men who were not really
Christians. We deny it. We take the position that
Christianity itself is essentially intolerant and
persecuting in spirit; and, we take the New Testament itself
to prove it. We take Christ's alleged words as reported
there, and Paul's alleged words as reported there, and can
thereby abundantly sustain our charge. "He that believeth
not shall be damned." "A man that is a heretic after the
first and second admonition, reject." What is that but the
quintessence of bigotry and intolerance? "I would they were
even cut off which trouble you." How kind! "Think not that I
come to send peace on earth, etc., etc" Scores of passages
could be quoted from the New Testament of similar import,
and the Old Testament is worse yet, for it recommends
putting even your wives or brothers to death should they try
to persuade you to worship their God.--See Deut. 13, 6, 7
and 8.