Closely related to the Heresy of God the Avenger, is that kind of
miniature God the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the overtaxed
parent are so apt to appeal. You stab your children with such a God and
he poisons all their lives. For many of us the word “God” first came
into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational restraint, as Bogey,
as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye. God Bogey is a great
convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to leave Fear to mind her
charges and enforce her disciplines, while she goes off upon her own
aims. But indeed, the teaching of God Bogey is an outrage upon the soul
of a child scarcely less dreadful than an indecent assault. The reason
rebels and is crushed under this horrible and pursuing suggestion. Many
minds never rise again from their injury. They remain for the rest of
life spiritually crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a
persuasion of relentless cruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.
I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered. He and his Hell
were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still believed
in him, and who could help but hate? I thought of him as a fantastic
monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening, perpetually waiting
to condemn and to “strike me dead”; his flames as ready as a grill-room
fire. He was over me and about my feebleness and silliness and
forgetfulness as the sky and sea would be about a child drowning in
mid-Atlantic. When I was still only a child of thirteen, by the grace of
the true God in me, I flung this Lie out of my mind, and for many years,
until I came to see that God himself had done this thing for me, the
name of God meant nothing to me but the hideous scar in my heart where a
fearful demon had been.
I see about me to-day many dreadful moral and mental cripples with this
bogey God of the nursery-maid, with his black, insane revenges, still
living like a horrible parasite in their hearts in the place where God
should be. They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not be kindly to
formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish observances;
they dare not look at the causes of things. They are afraid of sunshine,
of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of science, lest that old
watching spider take offence. The voice of the true God whispers in
their hearts, echoes in speech and writing, but they avert themselves,
fear-driven. For the true God has no lash of fear. And how the
foul-minded bigot, with his ill-shaven face, his greasy skin, his thick,
gesticulating hands, his bellowings and threatenings, loves to reap this
harvest of fear the ignorant cunning of the nursery girl has sown
for him! How he loves the importance of denunciation, and, himself
a malignant cripple, to rally the company of these crippled souls to
persecute and destroy the happy children of God! . . .
Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children. There is a real
wickedness of the priest that is different from other wickedness, and
that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and strange perversions
of instinct affect it. Let a former Archbishop of Canterbury speak
for me. This that follows is the account given by Archbishop Tait in a
debate in the Upper House of Convocation (July 3rd, 1877) of one of the
publications of a certain SOCIETY OF THE HOLY CROSS:
“I take this book, as its contents show, to be meant for the instruction
of very young children. I find, in one of the pages of it, the statement
that between the ages of six and six and a half years would be the
proper time for the inculcation of the teaching which is to be found in
the book. Now, six to six and a half is certainly a very tender age, and
to these children I find these statements addressed in the book:
“‘It is to the priest, and to the priest only, that the child must
acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him.’
“I hope and trust the person, the three clergymen, or however many there
were, did not exactly realise what they were writing; that they did not
mean to say that a child was not to confess its sins to God direct; that
it was not to confess its sins, at the age of six, to its mother, or to
its father, but was only to have recourse to the priest. But the
words, to say the least of them, are rash. Then comes the very obvious
question:
“‘Do you know why? It is because God, when he was on earth, gave to
his priests, and to them alone, the Divine Power of forgiving men their
sins. It was to priests alone that Jesus said: “Receive ye the Holy
Ghost.” . . . Those who will not confess will not be cured. Sin is a
terrible sickness, and casts souls into hell.’
“That is addressed to a child six years of age.
“‘I have known,’ the book continues, ‘poor children who concealed their
sins in confession for years; they were very unhappy, were tormented
with remorse, and if they had died in that state they would certainly
have gone to the everlasting fires of hell.’” . . .
Now here is something against nature, something that I have seen time
after time in the faces and bearing of priests and heard in their
preaching. It is a distinct lust. Much nobility and devotion there are
among priests, saintly lives and kindly lives, lives of real worship,
lives no man may better; this that I write is not of all, perhaps not
of many priests. But there has been in all ages that have known
sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest; priestcraft and priestly
power release an aggressive and narrow disposition to a recklessness of
suffering and a hatred of liberty that surely exceeds the badness of any
other sort of men.