'T'HERE is a view quite prevalent, that in some way you can prove
whether the theories defended or advanced by a man are right or not, by
showing what kind of man he was, what kind of life he lived, and what
manner of death he died.
A man entertains certain opinions; he is persecuted. He refuses to
change his mind; he is burned, and in the midst of flames cries out
that he dies without change. Hundreds then say that he has sealed his
testimony with his blood, and his doctrines must be true.
All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient
to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule,
establishes the sincerity of the martyr,--never the correctness of
his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be
affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected
by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a
truth.
No Christian will admit that any amount of heroism displayed by a Mormon
is sufficient to prove that Joseph Smith was divinely inspired. All the
courage and culture, all the poetry and art of ancient Greece, do not
even tend to establish the truth of any myth.
The testimony of the dying concerning some other world, or in regard to
the supernatural, cannot be any better, to say the least, than that
of the living. In the early days of Christianity a serene and intrepid
death was regarded as a testimony in favor of the church. At that time
Pagans were being converted to Christianity--were throwing Jupiter away
and taking the Hebrew God instead. In the moment of death many of these
converts, without doubt, retraced their steps and died in the faith of
their ancestors. But whenever one died clinging to the cross of the
new religion, this was seized upon as an evidence of the truth of the
gospel. After a time the Christians taught that an unbeliever, one
who spoke or wrote against their doctrines, could not meet death with
composure--that the infidel in his last moments would necessarily be a
prey to the serpent of remorse. For more than a thousand years they
have made the "facts" to fit this theory. Crimes against men have been
considered as nothing when compared with a denial of the truth of the
Bible, the divinity of Christ, or the existence of God.
According to the theologians, God has always acted in this way. As long
as men did nothing except to render their fellows wretched; as long as
they only butchered and burnt the innocent and helpless, God maintained
the strictest and most heartless neutrality; but when some honest man,
some great and tender soul expressed a doubt as to the truth of the
Scriptures, or prayed to the wrong God, or to the right one by the wrong
name, then the real God leaped like a wounded tiger upon his victim, and
from his quivering flesh tore his wretched soul.
There is no recorded instance where the uplifted hand of murder has been
paralyzed--no truthful account in all the literature of the world of the
innocent being shielded by God. Thousands of crimes are committed every
day--men are this moment lying in wait for their human prey--wives
are whipped and crushed, driven to insanity and death--little children
begging for mercy, lifting imploring, tear-filled eyes to the brutal
faces of fathers and mothers--sweet girls are deceived, lured, and
outraged, but God has no time to prevent these things--no time to defend
the good and to protect the pure. He is too busy numbering hairs and
watching sparrows.
He listens for blasphemy; looks for persons who laugh at priests;
examines baptismal registers; watches professors in colleges who begin
to doubt the geology of Moses and the astronomy of Joshua. He does not
particularly object to stealing if you won't swear. A great many persons
have fallen dead in the act of taking God's name in vain, but millions
of men, women, and children have been stolen from their homes and used
as beasts of burden, but no one engaged in this infamy has ever been
touched by the wrathful hand of God.
All kinds of criminals, except infidels, meet death with reasonable
serenity. As a rule, there is nothing in the death of a pirate to cast
any discredit on his profession. The murderer upon the scaffold, with
a priest on either side, smilingly exhorts the multitude to meet him in
heaven. The man who has succeeded in making his home a hell, meets death
without a quiver, provided he has never expressed any doubt as to the
divinity of Christ, or the eternal "procession" of the Holy Ghost. The
king who has waged cruel and useless war, who has filled countries with
widows and fatherless children, with the maimed and diseased, and who
has succeeded in offering to the Moloch of ambition the best and bravest
of his subjects, dies like a saint.
The Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered
his wife Fausta, and his eldest son Crispus, the same year that he
convened the Council of Nice to decide whether Jesus Christ was a man or
the Son of God. The council decided that Christ was consubstantial
with the Father. This was in the year 325. We are thus indebted to a
wife-murderer for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the
Savior. Theodosius called a council at Constantinople in 381, and
this council decided that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father.
Theodosius, the younger, assembled another council at Ephesus to
ascertain who the Virgin Mary really was, and it was solemnly decided in
the year 431 that she was the Mother of God. In 451 it was decided by a
council held at Chalcedon, called together by the Emperor Marcian, that
Christ had two natures--the human and divine. In 680, in another general
council, held at Constantinople, convened by order of Pognatius, it
was also decided that Christ had two wills, and in the year 1274 it was
decided at the Council of Lyons, that the Holy Ghost proceeded not only
from the Father, but from the Son as well. Had it not been for these
councils, we might have been without a Trinity even unto this day. When
we take into consideration the fact that a belief in the Trinity is
absolutely essential to salvation, how unfortunate it was for the world
that this doctrine was not established until the year 1274. Think of
the millions that dropped into hell while these questions were being
discussed.
This, however, is a digression. Let us go back to Constantine. This
Emperor, stained with every crime, is supposed to have died like a
Christian. We hear nothing of fiends leering at him in the shadows of
death. He does not see the forms of his murdered wife and son covered
with the blood he shed. From his white and shrivelled lips issued no
shrieks of terror. He does not cover his glazed eyes with thin and
trembling hands to shut out the visions of hell. His chamber is filled
with the rustle of wings--of wings waiting to bear his soul to the
thrilling realms of joy.
Against the Emperor Constantine the church has hurled no anathema. She
has accepted the story of his vision in the clouds, and his holy memory
has been guarded by priest and pope. All the persecutors sleep in peace,
and the ashes of those who burned their brothers in the name of Christ
rest in consecrated ground. Whole libraries could not contain even the
names of the wretches who have filled the world with violence and death
in defence of book and creed, and yet they all died the death of the
righteous, and no priest or minister describes the agony and fear, the
remorse and horror, with which their guilty souls were filled in the
last moments of their lives. These men had never doubted--they accepted
the creed--they were not infidels--they had not denied the divinity
of Christ--they had been baptized--they had partaken of the Last
Supper--they had respected priests--they admitted that the Holy Ghost
had "proceeded," and these things put pillows beneath their dying heads,
and covered them with the drapery of peace.
Now and then, in the history of this world, a man of genius, of sense,
of intellectual honesty has appeared. These men have denounced the
superstitions of their day. They pitied the multitude. To see priests
devour the substance of the people filled them with indignation. These
men were honest enough to tell their thoughts. Then they were denounced,
tried, condemned, executed. Some of them escaped the fury of the people
who loved their enemies, and died naturally in their beds.
It would not do for the church to admit that they died peacefully. That
would show that religion was not actually necessary in the last moment.
Religion got much of its power from the terror of death.