"Yes," he said, "that certainly _is_ a good text, but I am monstros
'fraid it will produce a coolness in my congregation!"
Doubtless it would produce a coolness in many a congregation today.
* * * * *
Now I want to talk a little about _law_ and its penalty. We want to
consider the invariable laws of Nature. Let us look at it in the way in
which we became acquainted with it--through experience.
To the child, law is an educator; he plays with fire and is burned.
Law and its penalty have done their work. A burnt child dreads the
fire. On that point his education is complete. He cuts himself with a
knife; again the law works. Do not play with edged tools is the lesson.
And so, whenever he comes in contact with external objects, he learns
something very definite from them; and if he has any sense, he soon
conforms to the order which he sees in force all around him. He does
what he can to act in such a way as not to run counter to Nature's
laws; or, at least, Nature teaches him to do so by repeated suffering
when he acts otherwise. The law thus far is all in favor of life,
and is teaching the child to preserve it. He must eat not to starve;
he must be clothed not to freeze; he must not be burned, or cut, or
crushed. In one word, he must take care of himself, and be careful of
external objects, or he must be hurt.
But his education has another connection with law. If he has proper
parents he learns that he can not lie, or steal, or do many other
things without suffering a penalty. If he has no home education in
this matter, the reform-school and the jail step in and take up the
lesson.
And so the law teaches him that his actions must be of a certain
quality, both with respect to external Nature and his fellowmen, or
that he must pay a penalty.
Thus he comes to man's estate, and law has been to him an educator and
a good one. He has learned that Nature's law means punishment every
time it is violated, and that man's law, whatever it may attain to,
_aims_ at the same object as Nature's law.
But neither his education nor his contact with law ends with his
youth. Hitherto he has obeyed blindly for fear of the penalty. He now
obeys intelligently, and connected with the penalty to be incurred by
disobedience is the reward to be obtained through obedience. He finds
that every act, every thought, of his brings him in direct contact
with law. He can not elude it by standing still, for no man can stand
still. He must go forward, or backward. This is an inexorable law;
with progress, improvement; without progress, what? Rest? Repose?
No! Deterioration. No man can stand still in this universe for a day
without losing something. The man who means to do anything in life must
go forward; if he falters, another goes ahead; and then he learns that
the penalty of faltering is failure.
Nature works no special miracles in any one's favor. Nature works
no miracles, anyway. The sun and the moon did _not_ stand still at
Joshua's command!
No riches and influence can buy exemption from Nature.
Law says to the poor man who is dependent on his daily toil: "You have
only yourself to rely upon. Take care of your health; be temperate,
honest and industrious, for sickness, imprisonment, idleness, mean to
you death."
It says to the rich man: "Inherited wealth has exempted you from
_daily_ labor of body, but it has not earned for you rest. Go to work;
do something, or your mind and body will be enfeebled; your sympathies
will disappear; you will become dry as the summer's dust; you will sink
into a nonentity."
The whole cry of Nature's law is onward and upward. Evolution is the
word--there is no God about it. It is not alone the survival of the
fittest--that is only a part of the process. It is the fittest of one
generation becoming something better and higher for the next.
It is the fashion now to say that the struggle for existence becomes
yearly more fierce, but that is not so. The truth is that those who
struggle become with each survival fitter to struggle, and that for
which they struggle is placed one step forward. Men used to want
thousands and hundreds of thousands; now, they want millions and
hundreds of millions. They used to want general knowledge; now, they
are all specialists, and cry out that life is too short. Steam used
to content them; now, electricity does not satisfy them, and they are
grasping at the possibilities of the mighty currents of air caused by
the revolutions of the earth itself.
The law of progress is not limited to the mind. The body shares in
it. Men are stronger, larger, longer-lived than they have ever been.
Even with the animals, finer, better breeds are constantly producing
themselves under law.
This law of the survival of the fittest and the elevation of the type
of the fittest pronounced against slavery, and a nation paid the
penalty in blood, as Spain has, and other nations will pay it. It has
pronounced against the subjection of women, and let those who stand in
the way, beware, lest some ruin crush them as it falls!
The type of sympathy has become higher and tenderer. Sweet hands of
mercy are now stretched down even to the brutes. Let those lovers of
the past who can see no progress in the present, who would question
this onward tendency, and the result of law, let them remember
that they must run rapidly to keep from being overwhelmed by the
_expansionists_.
Nature's law teaches us that like begets like. You plant a grain of
wheat, and you reap wheat. You breed Morgan stock and the foal is of
Morgan blood. The child is the offspring of certain parents, and it
inherits their blood. If parents choose to unfit themselves to be
healthy parents, who shall be blamed?
* * * * *
Shall gravitation cease as I go by? Teach children that no amount of
so-called religion will compensate for rheumatism; that Christianity
has nothing to do with morality; that "vicarious atonement" is a fraud,
and a lie; that to be born well and strong is the highest birth; that
to be honest and pay one's debts spells peace of mind; that the Bible
is no more inspired than the dictionary; that _sin_ is a transgression
of the laws of life, and that the blood of all the bulls and goats
and lambs of ancient times, and the blood of Christ or any other man,
never had, and never can have, the least effect in making a life what
it would have been had it obeyed the laws of life. If you have marred
your life, you must bear the consequences. If you have made a mistake,
be more careful in the future. Let the thought that the past is
irretrievable make you more careful in the present and for the future.
And, above all, teach children that prayer is idiotic. There may be
one God or twenty. I do not know or care. I am not afraid, and no
priest or parson can make me believe that my title to a future life, if
there be one, is defective. And the great and good man Thomas Paine,
who wrote the _Age of Reason_, and said, "The world is my country, and
to do good my religion," is a good enough god for me. And the great
Ingersoll, who said, "I belong to the great Church that holds the world
within its starlit aisles; that claims the great and good of every
race and clime; that finds with joy the grain of gold in every creed
and floods with light and love the germs of good in every soul," is
in my opinion an excellent god--as good as any that ever lived, from
Confucius to Christ. A friend of mine said to me, "Ingersoll should
have been a Christian." I replied, "The dog-collar of Christianity did
not belong on his neck: he preached the truth; he preferred that to the
Bible. I can not imagine the great Ingersoll preaching from II Kings
xiv: 35."
_When I was a child I heard very little about Christmas and nothing
about Lent and Easter. I was taught to be honest and truthful and
to pay one hundred cents on a dollar. In my opinion there is no
Bible extant so good as Ingersoll's Complete Works._