The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

are so

small!

 

The following facts result from our investigations:

Supernatural Christianity is false. God-worship is idolatry.

Prayer is useless. The soul is not immortal. There are no

rewards and there are no punishments in a future state.

 

It now remains to be considered whether it is right to say so.

It will doubtless be supposed that I shall make use of the plea

that a writer is always justified in publishing the truth, or

what he conscientiously believes to be the truth, and that if

it does harm he is not to blame. But I shall at once

acknowledge that truth is only a means towards an end — the

welfare of the human race. If it can be shown that by speaking

the truth an injury is inflicted on mankind, then a stubborn

adherence to truth becomes merely a Pharisee virtue, a

spiritual pride. But in moral life Truth, though not

infallible, is our safest guide, and those who maintain that it

should be repressed must be prepared to bring forward

irrefutable arguments in favour of their cause. If so much as

the shadow of a doubt remains, their client, Falsehood, is non-suited, and Truth remains in possession of the conscience. Let

us now hear what the special pleaders have to say. The

advocates for Christianity versus Truth will speak first, and I

shall reply; and then the advocates for Deism will state their

case. What they will endeavour to prove is this, that even

admitting the truth of my propositions, it is an immoral action

to give them to the world. On the other hand, I undertake to

show that the destruction of Christianity is essential to the

interests of civilisation; and also that man will never attain

his full powers as a moral being until he has ceased to believe

in a personal God and in the immortality of the soul.

 

“Christianity, we allow, is human in its origin, erroneous in

its theories, delusive in its threats and its rewards,” say

the advocates for Christianity. “Jesus Christ was a man

with all the faults and imperfections of the prophetic character.

The Bible is simply a collection of Jewish writings. The

miracles in the Old Testament deserve no more

attention from historians than the miracles in Homer. The

miracles in the gospels are like the miracles in Plutarch’s

Lives; they do not lessen the value of the biography, and the

value of the biography does not lessen the absurdity of the

miracles. So far we go with you. But we assert that this

religion with all its errors has rendered inestimable services

to civilisation, and that it is so inseparably associated in

the minds of men with purity of life, and the precepts of

morality, that it is impossible to attack Christianity without

also attacking all that is good, all that is pure, all that is

lovely in human nature. When you travelled in Africa did you

not join in the sacrifices of the pagans? Did you not always

speak with respect of their wood spirits and their water

spirits, and their gods of the water and the sky? And did you

not take off your shoes when you entered the mosque, and did

you not, when they gave you the religious blessing, return the

religious reply? And since you could be so tolerant to savages,

surely you are bound to be more tolerant still to those who

belong to your own race, to those who possess a nobler

religion, and whose minds can be made by a careless word to

suffer the most exquisite pain. Yet you attack Christianity,

and you attack it in the wrong way. You ought, in the interests

of your own cause, to write in such a manner that minds might

be gradually trained to reflection and decoyed to doubt. It is

not only heartless and inhuman, it is also unwise, it is also

unscientific, to say things which will shock and disgust those

who are beginning to inquire, and it is bad taste to jest on

subjects which if not sacred in themselves are held sacred in

the, eyes of many thoughtful and cultivated men. You ought to

adopt a tone of reluctance and to demonstrate, as it were

against your will, the errors of the popular religion.

Believers at least have a right to demand that if you discuss

these questions upon which their hopes of eternal happiness are

based, you will do so with gravity and decorum.”

 

To this I reply that the religion of the Africans, whether

pagan or Moslem, is suited to their intellects, and is

therefore a true religion; and the same may be said of

Christianity among uneducated people. But Christianity is not

in accordance with the cultivated mind; it can only be accepted

or rather retained by suppressing doubts, and by denouncing

inquiry as sinful. It is therefore a superstition, and ought to

be destroyed. With respect to the services which it once

rendered to civilisation, I cheerfully acknowledge them, but

the same argument might once have been advanced in favour of

the oracle at Delphi, without which there would have been no

Greek culture, and therefore no Christianity. The question is

not whether Christianity assisted the civilisation of our

ancestors, but whether it is now assisting our own. I am firmly

persuaded that whatever is injurious to the intellect is also

injurious to moral life; and on this conviction I base my

conduct with respect to Christianity. That religion is

pernicious to the intellect; it demands that the reason shall

be sacrificed upon the altar; it orders civilised men to

believe in the legends of a savage race. It places a hideous

image, covered with dirt and blood, in the Holy of Holies; it

rends the sacred Veil of Truth in twain, It teaches that the

Creator of the Universe, that sublime, that inscrutable power,

exhibited his back to Moses, and ordered Hosea to commit

adultery, and Ezekiel to eat dung. There is no need to say

anything more. Such a religion is blasphemous and foul. Let

those admire it who are able. I, for my part, feel it my duty

to set free from its chains as many as I can. Upon this point

my conscience speaks clearly, and it shall be obeyed. With

respect to manner and means, I shall use the arguments and the

style best suited for my purpose. There has been enough of

writing by implication and by innuendo; I do not believe in its

utility, and I do not approve of its disguise. There should be

no deceit in matters of religion. In my future assaults on

Christianity I shall use the clearest language that I am able

to command.

 

Ridicule is a destructive instrument, and it is my

intention to destroy. If a man is cutting down a tree, it is

useless asking him not to strike so hard. But because I make

use of ridicule, it does not follow that I am writing merely

for amusement; and because I tear up a belief by the roots, it

does not follow that I am indifferent to the pain which I

inflict. Great revolutions cannot be accomplished without much

anguish and some evil being caused. Did not the Roman women

suffer when the Christians came and robbed them of their gods,

and raised their minds, through pain and sorrow, to a higher

faith? The religion which I teach is as high above Christianity

as that religion was superior to the idolatry of Rome. And

when, the relative civilisations of the two ages are compared,

this fetish of ink and paper, this Syrian book is, in truth,

not less an idol than those statues which obtained the

adoration of the Italians and the Greeks. The statues were

beautiful as statues; the book is admirable as a book; but the

statues did not come down from heaven; the book was not a

magical composition; it bears the marks not only of human

genius, but also of human depravity and superstition.

 

As for the advocates of Deism they acknowledge that

Christianity is unsuited to the mental condition of the age;

they acknowledge that the Bible ought to be attacked as

Xenophanes attacked Homer; they acknowledge that the fables of

a god impregnating a woman, of a god living on the earth, are

relics of pagan superstition; they acknowledge that the

doctrine of eternal punishment is incompatible with justice,

and is therefore incompatible with God. But they declare that

Christianity should not be destroyed but reformed; that its

barbarous elements should be expelled, and that then, as a pure

God-worship, it should be offered to the world. “It is true”, they say,

“that God is an idol, an image made of human ideas which, to

superior beings, would appear as coarse and vile for such a

purpose as the wood and the stone of the savage appear to us.

But this idolatry is conducive to the morality of man. That

exquisite form which he raises in his mind, and before which he

prostrates him self in prayer, that God of purity and love,

becomes his ideal and example. As the Greek women placed

statues of Apollo and Narcissus in their chambers that the

beauty of the marble form might enter their wombs through the

windows of their eyes, so by ever contemplating perfection the

mind is ennobled, and the actions born of it are divine. And

surely it is a sweet and consoling faith that there is above us

a great and benignant Being who, when the sorrows of this life

are past, will take us to himself. How can it injure men to

believe that the righteous will he rewarded and that the wicked

will be punished in a future state? What good can be done by

destroying a belief so full of solace for the sorrowful, so

full of promise for the virtuous, so full of terror for the

workers of iniquity? You do not deny that ‘much anguish and some

evil will be caused’ by the destruction of this belief; and what

have you to show on the other side? What will you place in the

balance? Consider what a dreadful thing it is to take even from

a single human being the hopes of a future life.

 

“All men cannot be philosophers; all cannot resign themselves with

fortitude and calm to the death-warrant of the soul. Annihilation has

perhaps more terrors for the mind than eternal punishment

itself. O, make not the heart an orphan, cast it not naked and

weeping on the world! Take it not away from its father, kill

not its hopes of an eternal home! There are mothers whose

children have gone before them to the grave, poor miserable

women whose beauty is faded, who have none to care for them on

earth, whose only happiness is in the hope that when their life

is ended they will be joined again to those whom they have

lost. And will you take that hope away? There are men who have

passed their whole lives in discipline and self-restraint that

they may be rewarded in a future state; will you tell them that

they have lived under an illusion, that they would have done

better to laugh, and to feast, and to say ‘Let us make merry,

for to-morrow we shall die’? There are men whom the fear of

punishment in a future life deters from vice and perhaps from

crime. Will you dare to spread a doctrine which unlooses all

restraints, and leaves men to the fury of their passions? It is

true that we are not demoralised by this belief in the

impersonality of God and the extinction of the soul; but it

would be a dangerous belief for those who are exposed to strong

temptations, and whose minds have not been raised by culture to

the religion of dignity and self-control.”

 

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