At the dawn of, and during the first stages of their civilization,
the people of the Earth found themselves surrounded with natural
forces which, in their scant knowledge of the laws of the universe,
were ascribed to the arbitrary and willful caprices of a great hidden
being. They found a mysterious power above them, and everywhere an
overwhelming evidence of design. The unthinkable and unknown character
of the infinite and eternal was not then acknowledged; and the failure
of any to explain this unseen intelligence and power incited their
imaginations to do for them what the closest investigation had failed
to accomplish. As may have been expected, they clothed their imaginary
deity with the qualities, propensities, and passions of themselves. Any
violent convulsion of nature was taken by them as a certain sign of his
anger; while the normal state of rest, and the undisturbed processes
of animal and vegetable development and growth were looked upon as
concessions in their special favor. From a belief in the supervision
of the deity over every single one of the innumerable processes of
nature, they naturally imbibed the idea that they each were objects of
his personal watchfulness and attention, and as a consequence, that all
the fortunes and vicissitudes of their lives were dependent upon his
moods. It may very well be supposed that with this conception of the
deity, the chief purpose of life would be to find favor with Him, to
discover his wishes, and to learn his commands; since, in accordance
with this simple and crude idea, every one’s success and comfort in
life depended upon his conciliation. With these views of nature and
the universe, they came in due time to observe that within themselves
were feelings and sentiments entirely apart from the ordinary epicurean
impulses which governed them. We may imagine in those cruel times
the warrior standing over his prostrate victim with upraised club,
stayed in the act of killing him by a sentiment of pity, and enjoying
afterward as a result of his compassion a pleasure which was as strange
and unaccountable to him as his first sight of a comet. There was no
apparent motive whatever for his humane act. On the contrary, it had
deprived him of spoil, and reduced the honor of his victory. And so,
all the inclinations to virtue which brought no material and immediate
rewards were regarded as mysterious and inexplicable as the great
hidden power, and by a very natural sequence of reasoning, a part of it.
As your civilization advanced, it was to be seen that the virtues, and
especially those which had a direct influence upon material welfare,
grew and enlarged. The path to honor was no longer exclusively through
carnage and victory, and the possession and cultivation of certain
virtues brought consideration and respect. It was at this critical
stage of your progress that there was inflicted upon you an evil
greater than any your people have known. You were not content with
viewing the deity as we do from afar, and with accepting the impulses
of virtue as a part of yourselves, instituted for the wise purpose of a
continuous self-development toward a better earthly life; but instead,
in your unreasonable yearning to communicate with the supreme Author,
you surrendered yourself to the wiles of the seers, and became the
willing dupes of their delusions.
There is nothing more unhappy to tell of you than the consequences
of this grave error. Your assumed possession of the commands and
wishes of the Deity in the shape of a revelation, has proved more a
misfortune than a blessing to you. In the first place, it has lowered
your conception of the Deity below ours. It has turned your religion
into a contest. It has rendered possible the establishment of certain
ecclesiastical bodies among you, who, while assuming entire control
of the morals of your people, are beset in their internal parts with
all the vices which come from cruelty, cupidity, and love of power.
Besides, your formulated conditions of punishments and rewards have
degraded religion from a cultivation of virtue for itself, and the
immediate good it brings, to a selfish scramble, each one struggling to
shoulder his way into the midst of celestial delights.
It can be easily understood why your religion, with all its crudities
and superstitions, has taken so firm a hold upon your society. You are
constituted as we are, with the same inherent elements of progress.
The steady increase of your affinity for the virtues, and those who
practice them, is a marked quality of your career, and as they all
lead, in one way or another, towards that union of interests which
constitutes the perfect social state, you are thereby impelled by a
natural and providential desire to build them up. So that, as a matter
of fact, there being an inherent love of goodness ingrafted in your
very natures, your religious creeds have attracted you to them, and
held you in fetters, under the false theory that the good within you is
but a contribution from their exclusive and abundant sources of supply.
It has been your misfortune to be held captive throughout your progress
by the shrewd designs of your seers and prophets, who have not failed
until recently to supply you with an occasional change of supernatural
pabulum, to meet the new wants of a steadily advancing development.
When at a certain stage of your civilization, about two thousand years
ago, you had attained a point of intellectual culture among the few,
the fruits of which have been reflected upon you to this day, in some
of the grandest recorded achievements of human thought, and while
the masses were left to take their undirected way among the empty
superstitions which conceded nothing to the growing human sympathy, a
seer appeared among you, who served rather as a suggestion than as an
immediate success. After the lapse of sufficient time from his death to
allow full scope for romance, there was built up out of his memory by
your seers a picture of all the virtues which had been growing within
your hearts, so entirely adapted to the new age that all the pent-up
forces of human sympathy within its scope and influence surrendered to
it. But what might have been a triumph and a boon to you in the new
impetus to a better and broader humanity, unfortunately held concealed
within itself the subtle machinery of your seers and prophets, and
was guarded by their evil eyes, so that with this tremendous lever
to move you in the direction of their purposes, instead of advancing
you, they have turned your civilization back upon itself more than a
thousand years. No historical fact is more capable of demonstration
than this. None has been more persistently and ingeniously denied, and
no natural sequence ever followed more directly a moving cause. From
a free and independent exercise of the intellectual activities in the
direction of science, art, philosophy, and all knowledge pertaining to
yourselves, the Earth upon which you dwell, and the universe, so far
as your vision extends, the whole current of your thoughts was turned
by the new doctrines toward a paradise, compared with which all things
of the Earth were trifles. When you were brought by the fascination
of these promises, and the unflagging efforts an interested body of
ecclesiastics, to a general belief in these doctrines, you sank into an
intellectual torpor, from which you only emerged by a protest of your
reason not yet wholly suppressed.
You cannot fail to see the utterly dehumanizing tendency of the
influences which surrounded you for so many centuries. The common aims
and purposes of your lives were submerged by the one engrossing wish
to reach heaven; and while your imagination was carried away by its
picture, you were led, without hesitation, to place your feet upon the
neck of any earthly enterprise that seemed to stand in its way.
From the beginning of your history you have accepted one object of
worship after another, each an ideal impersonation of the goodness
which was inseparately a part of yourselves, and which was given to you
for the wise purpose of making your society possible, and to perfect
it; just as the parental instinct was bestowed upon you to protect your
infants. All these subjects of adoration have perfectly reflected your
intellectual condition, and have been discarded, one after another, as
they outlived their uses; until you are just now beginning to realize,
that for all these many centuries you have been virtually worshipping
yourselves. Your present ideal will, in time, share the fate of those
which preceded it, and in the absence of a prevailing superstition,
your seers luckily cannot build up for you another one. Your long
period devoted to the pursuit of phantoms is rapidly passing away, and
your new age of rationalism is approaching. You have no just conception
of the evils it will remove, and the glories it has in store for you.
The difference between your present and future religion can be easily
outlined. Your present religion, from a long course of erroneous
teaching, is intense, aggressive and hysterical. It feeds and fattens
itself upon the miseries of life, which it does not undertake to
remove, except in a meretricious way for effect. Your religion of the
future will be tranquil and voluntary, and its chief mission will be
to permanently reduce the evils and misfortunes of life to a minimum.
The impulses of your present religion are entirely apart from the
moral sense, a significant fact easily substantiated by a glance over
the every-day life of your people. Except in their observance of
religious forms, your devout are not distinguished from your profane.
The practical virtues are no greater among believers than among
unbelievers. Your coming religion will be founded upon the moral
sense, and will be inseparable from it. It will support no doctrine
of a ready and convenient atonement for bad acts, as the present one
does. It will teach you that there can be no complete reparation of an
evil deed except in its undoing, and that such an act, once performed,
spreads its dire consequences in accordance with its enormity over a
part or the whole career of the doer. It will not undertake to unburden
the conscience of a crime, nor to give assurance of celestial bliss
to the most heinous of offenders, upon the trifling and fallacious
compliance with religious forms.
Your peculiar religious beliefs have so shaped and moulded your
character that we have observed, what you are not likely to see of
yourselves, certain traits or inclinations which are not promising as
factors in your ultimate regeneration. Your churches, with the shrewd
purpose of rendering their services invaluable, have given you to
believe that your natural tendencies are evil, and that the unavoidable
misfortunes and sorrows of your lives are but penalties for your many
misdeeds. The general acceptance of this belief has lowered your
pride, and given you, to some extent, that character of dejection and
submissiveness which is entirely subversive to the attainment of any
destiny to be reached by yourselves.
There is a quality of mind which we acknowledge as, above all others,
the one which has assisted us to our present very desirable social
condition, and that is the feeling to resist the perpetration of a mean
or bad act, on account of the sense of degradation it inflicts upon
the feelings of the doer. This motive of conscience, so plainly the
offspring of self-esteem, and growing out of a cultivation of the mind
alone, without any regard whatever to creed influences or teachings, is
totally ignored, either as a promoter of virtue or preventive of vice,
by all the religions that have existed upon your planet. The reason
for this is easily explained. Under the knowledge that a cultivation
of the mind and conscience, without creed influence, was capable of
doing for you a better service in the advancement of your morals than
your churches have performed, it has been made a part of their doctrine
to belittle and abuse your purely intellectual faculties, under the
unwarranted and unreasonable imputation that the free exercise of your
reason was an assumption beyond your right. And all this, too, in face
of the overwhelming evidence about you, that the most corroding and
dangerous of your vices germinate and seed themselves only in places
where the mind lies in fallow.
There comes to us from our remote ages, through tradition and history,
an account of some superstitious beliefs, but it has been our good
fortune never to have had them built up into a system so overbearing
and harmful as yours has been. It cannot be said of us that we ever
denounced honest intellectual efforts in any direction, or that we ever
regarded the expression of opinions founded on the dictates of reason
as crimes, and your punishment of such, with all its atrocious and
heart-rending details, serves as a lesson for the whole universe of
worlds never to put trust in the smooth tongues and insinuating ways
of the seers, for the spirit of fairness and truth is not in them.
Your restrictions and punishments of the free expression of thought,
inaugurated by the corporate organization of your present religion,
and maintained with more or less rigor to the present, has left its
blighting effects upon your society by encouraging some of the meanest
of your vices. The assumption that one of you shall not have the right
to convey to another his opposing convictions upon any religious
question is so outrageously unjust, that it never could have been
carried out in any other way than by the general belief that it was in
accordance with the wishes and purposes of the Almighty. Such a denial
of the natural right of mankind could only be enforced when a majority
of the multitude became converts to the doctrines which favored it.
The leaders of religious persecution, during the centuries of church
control, were merely carrying out the wishes of this majority. The
spirit of intolerance, once abroad, became the parent of those habits
of concealed thought, moral cowardice and hypocricy, which even to the
present, so rule among you, that sincerity in expressing religious
belief is not universal. In deference to the lingering opinion among a
large body of your people that a dissension from old modes of religious
thought is displeasing to the Almighty, and dangerous to society, many
of you are constantly led to veil their thoughts on these questions,
in dread of the social consequences which would follow their frank
avowal. Many of skeptical tendencies are thus induced to hide their
convictions in fear of disturbing their safe and comfortable positions
in society. By silently working the penalty of withholding their
political and social support, your great illogical multitude backed by
their vigilant church organizations still maintain a terrorism over
you. Consequently, your writers are guarded in their lines, your public
speakers in their language, your teachers in their instruction, and
your statesmen in their legislation, that each shall not get beyond
the soundings of orthodox religious belief, while with the knowledge
of your time, most of them are conscious in their inner thoughts that
they are trimming to avoid truth, in the full knowledge, that to this
day upon the earth, the surest human preferment is only for those who
support error in this direction.
The most lamentable instances to be found among you of this evasion are
your chief institutions of learning. Of all places these should be the
first to lead in truth, as they are best provided in all the equipments
to find it; yet under the prevailing terrorism their predicament
is embarrassing and pitiful. While holding class instructions in
evolution, geology, astronomy and kindred sciences, they hesitate to
openly deny those scriptural fallacies to which their knowledge is
opposed, and the farcical spectacle is daily enacted among many of them
of a ceremonious reverence for these fallacies, and at all times an
artful evasion of any denial of their truth, every one of which it is
their especial business to disprove in the course of instruction.
I hope you will not infer from what I have said that the people of Mars
have not great reverence and veneration for the Deity. Indeed, it is
the universal belief amongst us, that the animus which is within us to
do good to ourselves, and to make pleasant the ways of life among each
other, is but the prompting of that divine presence which is leading
us aright in the direction of the still better things to come. As we
see in all living things a constant development upward toward a state
of perfection, and having, of all creatures else, that within us most
susceptible and easy of advancement in the universal march, we simply
take our place in the line. What we have accomplished in that direction
in our government, society, and morals, gives us new heart to further
efforts, and if our methods may be of any service to you, I will give
you some further account of them.