(June, 1882.)
Editing a Freethought paper is a dreadful business. It brings one into
contact with many half-baked people who have little patent recipes
for hastening the millennium; with ambitious versifiers who think it
a disgrace to journalism that their productions are not instantly
inserted; with discontented ladies and gentlemen who fancy that a
heterodox paper is the proper vehicle for every species of complaint;
and with a multitude of other bores too numerous to mention and too
various to classify. But the worst of all are the anonymous bores,
who send their insults, advice, or warnings, through the post for
the benefit of the Queen's revenue. We generally pitch their puerile
missives into the waste-paper basket; but occasionally we find one
diverting enough to be introduced to our readers. A few days ago we
received the following lugubrious epistle, ostensibly from a parson in
Worcestershire, as the envelope bore the postmark of Tything.
"The fool hath said in his heart 'there is no God'--I have seen one
of your blasphemous papers; and I say solemnly, as a clergyman of the
Church of England, that I believe you are doing the work of the Devil,
and are on the road to hell, and will spend eternity with the Devil,
unless God, in his mercy, lead you, by the Holy Spirit, to _repentance_.
Nothing is impossible, with him. A Dean in the Church of England says,
'Be wise, and laugh not through a speck of time, and then wail through
an immeasurable eternity.' Except you change your views you will most
certainly hear Christ say, at the Judgment Day, 'Depart ye cursed into
everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels.' (Matt, xxv.)"
This is a tolerably warm, though not very elegant effusion, and it is
really a pity that so grave a counsellor should conceal his name; for if
it should lead to our conversion, we should not know whom to thank for
having turned us out of the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire.
Our mentor assures us that with God nothing is impossible. We are sorry
to learn this; for we must conclude that he does not take sufficient
trouble with parsons to endow them with the courage of their
convictions, or to make them observe the common decencies of epistolary
intercourse.
This anonymous parson, who acts like an Irish "Moonlighter," and masks
his identity while venting his spleen, presumes to anticipate the Day
of Judgment, and tells exactly what Jesus Christ will say to us on that
occasion. We are obliged to him for the information, but we wonder how
he obtained it. The twenty-fifth of Matthew, to which he refers us,
contains not a word about unbelievers. It simply states that certain
persons, who have treated the Son of Man very shabbily in his distress,
shall be sent to keep company with Old Nick and his imps. Now, we have
never shown the Son of Man any incivility, much less any inhumanity, and
we therefore repudiate this odious insinuation. Whenever Jesus Christ
sends us a message that he is sick, we will pay him a visit; if he
is hungry, we will find him a dinner; if he is thirsty, we will stand
whatever he likes to drink; if he is naked, we will hunt him up a clean
shirt and an old suit; and if he is in prison, we will, according as he
is innocent or guilty, try to procure his release, or leave him to serve
out his term. We should be much surprised if any parson in the three
kingdoms would do any more Some of them, we believe, would see him
condemned (new version) before they would lift a finger or spend
sixpence to-help him.
We are charged with doing the work of the Devil. This is indeed news. We
never knew the Devil required any assistance. He was always very
active and enterprising, and quite able to manage his own business.
And although his rival, Jehovah, is so dotingly senile as to yield up
everything to his mistress and her son, no one has ever whispered the
least hint of the Devil's decline into the same abject position. But if
his Satanic Majesty needed our aid we should not be loth to give it, for
after carefully reading the Bible many times from beginning to end, we
have come to the conclusion that he is about the only gentleman in it.
We are "on the road to hell." Well, if we must _go_ somewhere, that is
just the place we should choose. The temperature is high, and it would
no doubt at first be incommodious. But, as old Sir Thomas Browne says,
afflictions induce callosities, and in time we should get used to
anything.
When once we grew accustomed to the heat, how thankful we should be
at having escaped the dreary insipidity of heaven, with its perpetual
psalms, its dolorous trumpets, its gruesome elders, and its elderly
beasts! How thankful at having missed an eternity with Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, David, and all the many blackguards and scoundrels of the Bible!
How thankful at having joined for ever the society of Rabelais, Bruno,
Spinoza, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and all the great
poets, sages and wits, who possess so much of that carnal wisdom which
is at enmity with the pious folly of babes and sucklings!
On the whole, we think it best to keep on our present course. Let the
bigots rave and the parsons wail. They are deeply _interested_ in the
doctrine of heaven and hell beyond the grave. We believe in heaven
and hell on this side of it; a hell of ignorance, crime, and misery; a
heaven of wisdom, virtue, and happiness. Our duty is to promote the one
and combat the other. If there be a just God, the fulfilment of that
duty will suffice; if God be unjust, all honest men will be in the same
boat, and have the courage to despise and defy him.