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

others, a curious fact may be

observed. Those who overthrow an established system are

compelled to attack its founders, and to show that their method

was unsound, that their reasoning was fallacious, that their

experiments were incomplete. And yet the men who create the

revolution are made in the likeness of the men whose doctrines

they subvert. The system of Ptolemy was supplanted by the

system of Copernicus, yet Copernicus was the Ptolemy of the

sixteenth century. In the same manner, we who assail the

Christian faith are the true successors of the early

Christians, above whom we are raised by the progress, of

eighteen hundred years. As they preached against gods that were

made of stone, so we preach against gods that are made of

ideas. As they were called atheists and blasphemers so are we.

And is our task more difficult than theirs? We have not, it is

true, the same stimulants to offer. We cannot threaten that the

world is about to be destroyed; we cannot bribe our converts

with a heaven, we cannot make them tremble with a hell. But

though our religion appears too pure, too unselfish for

mankind, it is not really so, for we live in a noble and

enlightened age. At the time of the Romans and the Greeks the

Christian faith was the highest to which the common people

could attain. A faith such as that of the Stoics and the

Sadducees could only be embraced by cultivated minds, and

culture was then confined to a chosen few. But now knowledge,

freedom, and prosperity are covering the earth; for three

centuries past, human virtue has been steadily increasing, and

mankind is prepared to receive a higher faith. But in order to

build we must first destroy. Not only the Syrian superstition

must be attacked, but also the belief in a personal God, which

engenders a slavish and oriental condition of the mind; and the

belief in a posthumous reward which engenders a selfish and

solitary condition of the heart. These beliefs are, therefore,

injurious to human nature. They lower its dignity; they arrest

its development; they isolate its affections.

 

We shall not deny that many beautiful sentiments are often mingled with

the faith in a personal Deity, and with the hopes of happiness in a

future state; yet we maintain that, however refined they may

appear, they are selfish at the core, and that if removed they

will be replaced by sentiments of a nobler and a purer kind.

They cannot be removed without some disturbance and distress;

yet the sorrows thus caused are salutary and sublime. The

supreme and mysterious Power by whom the universe has been

created, and by whom it has been appointed to run its course

under fixed and invariable law; that awful One to whom it is

profanity to pray, of whom it is idle and irreverent to argue

and debate, of whom we should never presume to think save with

humility and awe; that Unknown God has ordained that mankind

should be elevated by misfortune, and that happiness should

grow out of misery and pain.

 

I give to universal history a strange but true title—The Martyrdom of Man.

In each generation the human race has been tortured that their children

might profit by their woes. Our own prosperity is founded on

the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust that we also

should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come? Famine,

pestilence, and war are no longer essential for the advancement

of the human race. But a season of mental anguish is at hand,

and through this we must pass in order that our posterity may

rise. The soul must be sacrificed; the hope in immortality must

die. A sweet and charming illusion must be taken from the human

race, as youth and beauty vanish never to return.

 

THE END

 

In 1872

The slave trade in Cuba was abolished by law in 1886.

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