Show me a grade of society that buckles its little belt of belief and
faith around its members, and you will show me a collection of hopeless
mediocres. The thinkers move out or die out. They object to being
fossilized. They decline to go down to history as physical members of
the nineteenth century, and mental members of the third.
I would rather have the right to put on my monument, "She was abreast of
her time," than have all the sounding texts and all the feathered tribes
chiseled upon it. I would prefer that it be said of me, "She was a good
woman because she had a pure heart," than to have this record: "She was
a Christian. She was afraid of hell. She cast her burdens on the Lord,
and went to heaven."
You have been told, "Blessed are they who die in the Lord." Rather let
us say, "Blessed are they who live clean lives."
But the Church does not allow you to regulate your lives by what you
believe to be right. It always did and it always will hate a thinker. It
proposes to do the mental labor for great minds by means of brains large
enough to hold nothing but Faith. It says, "I cannot, and you shall not
outgrow the past. The measure of my capacity shall be the limit of your
attainment."
The laws of a nation presume to regulate only what you may do. The
Church is kind enough to say what you may think. It proposes to control
the mental condition of every man and woman for time and eternity, and
its first command is that we shall not grow.
It seems to me rather a queer admission to make, but the Church says
that a child or a fool knows quite enough for its purpose--and it does
not seem to be my place to question that fact. Now that may be all very
well for the child and the fool, but it is rather binding on the rest of
us.
Once in a while a minister outgrows the doctrines that were big enough
for him in his youth; but that minister, though his life be as pure and
his character as sweet as a flower, would be safer to be cast into
the sea than that this instrument of torture, this court of injustice,
should discover that he had laid aside the outfit of his undeveloped
years. His mind may have grown to be a giant in strength, but it must be
compressed into the nut-shell of superstition--dwarfed to the capacity
of intellectual pigmies.
Christ was a thinker, a man of progress, an infidel, a man who outgrew
the Church of his time; and the Church of his time crucified him. Those
who oppose the spirit of religious stagnation to-day meet the same
spirit in the Church that Christ met, and receive the same treatment so
far as the law will permit.
It is a sentiment as true as it is beautiful that asks us to reverence
the great men, the thinkers of the past; but it is no mark of respect
to them to rest forever over their graves. We show our respect and our
appreciation better by a spirit of research that reaches beyond them,
than by a simple admiration which takes their gifts and dies. The
lessons they left were not alone lessons of memory and acceptance, but
examples of effort and progress.
A pupil who stops content with his teacher's last words is no great
credit either to himself or to his master. If he has learned only
to accept, his lesson is only begun; and until he knows that he must
investigate, his education is that of a child, his development that of a
clown.
It is no compliment to Christ, the man of progress 1800 years ago, that
his followers clip the wings of thought. He struck for freedom from
ecclesiastical bondage. He added a new link to the chain of intellectual
growth, and his followers have riveted it back to the immovable rock of
superstition. He offered a key to open the door of individual liberty.
They have wrapped it in the folds of ignorance and laid it in the closet
of fear. He said in effect, "When you have outgrown the Church, leave it
and bless the world." They say, "Leave it and be damned." For what is a
Christian to-day without his hell? The chief objection I hear offered to
the last arrangements made for us by the revisers is that they left out
some of the hell, and gave the part they kept a poetical name.