Part 8

The Bishop, not content with such subtle logic, goes on to illustrations drawn from the Bible, and speaks of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. He said there is a moral to be drawn from this temptation story, because Jesus is said to have been with the wild beasts, and there was a deep meaning in this saying. I do read the Gospels sometimes, and therefore puzzled myself about these wild beasts, not having read much of them. I remembered the Jesus-God being taken up a high mountain and shown all the kingdoms of the earth, as a possible bribe if he would worship his own creature the devil. I remembered his being taken up to a pinnacle of the temple and invited to cast himself down; but I did not remember, nor do I now remember, anything about wild beasts, save a few words in the Gospel of Mark, and it is not even there shown that these wild beasts had anything to do with the Lord’s temptation. Whether the Bishop has a special version of his own I do not know.

Another point of the Bishop was, that when lower natures have to contemplate higher natures, there is some mystery or contradiction to the lower natures. The man who tries to predetermine your decision on an alleged matter of fact, by declaring that it is too mysterious for you to understand, and that being mysterious, you must accept it as he explains it, is a juggler with his intellect, and takes a position to which he has no right. The Bishop was good enough to talk of our degrading creed. Let him talk of his own degrading creed. Our creed has not invented a bottomless pit filled to its brink with brimstone for everlasting torture, nor has it manufactured a devil more mighty than God to destroy God’s work. Our degrading creed, at any rate, does not despair of human kind, nor tell us that we should be poor here in order to be rich hereafter, and be miserable here that we may be happy bye and bye, when the life-ability for happiness is entirely gone. We don’t despair of human kind, we assert the improvability of the human race and we say if we make this life as good as we can, we shall not be affrighted from our task by any declaration that we may be unhappy hereafter.

But the Bishop went further, and carrying the war into our camp, he declared that it was in consequence of faith in Christ that men did Christian work, and he spoke of men doing good work among the sick, and poor, and ignorant, and wretched, day by day because they were Christians. Does he mean to say that Mohammedans, and Buddhists, and Brahmins have amongst them no kindly work for one another? Does he mean to say that men cannot be human unless they have the special Christian’s creed? But this Christian work has been going on for 1800 years, so at least the Bishop says. Let us turn the pages of its history over and read what it has really done. When Christianity was cradled in the world, Italy and Greece had their poets, painters, sculptors, men of literary fame, orators, comedians, and tragedians. Wait for a century or two till your much-vaunted Christianity has, by the aid of forgery, fraud, and manufactured miracle, acquired some force. Wait till the priests, crushing out all other learning, have become the sole literary power in Europe. Did they teach the people? No, they kept the people ignorant. (A voice, “No.”) If any one says no, I will show century after century what Christianity has been. Your first century I will not trouble with until you show me its actual pages; your second and third centuries are crowded with the fabrication of forged evidences, the canonisation of pretended saints; your fourth century shows the same work, and marks also the quarrels commencing amongst yourselves for the spoils now large enough to excite good Christians against each other; in the fifth century Salvian one of your own presbyters, said the Christian Church had become such a sink of vice, that it was a species of sanctity for any one to be a little less vicious than the others. He says of his fellow Christians that they lie and cheat, are adulterers and murderers; that it is easier to find a Christian guilty of all these crimes than one guilty of none. Take the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries of Christianity, when infidelity was almost powerless, before Voltaire lived, before Spinosa wrote, before Bruno trod Europe round, and you have in these centuries, when Christianity was the most powerful, the dark ages of this European world, when all literature was stopped, all philosophy was hindered, all science manacled by the Church. What was the Christian work in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, when Christians marched to the Holy Land? Let the plundered and miserable countries tell; let burned villages and ravished women show the way in which the soldiers of the Cross manifested their religion even to their fellow Christians. Let these pages of blood and rapine be read for Christian work. Where then was liberty or popular rights? When the king, the barons, and the priests were in power, did Christianity help the people to get liberty? It is only within the last 300 years, since the rise of heresy in Europe, that the people have gained any freedom. The Church of England may say, This is not our work; but it is a branch of the Church of Rome, and ought not to repudiate the trunk it grew from. Nay, it has not even the same right to plead to us as the Church of Rome. The Church of Rome is consistent, and says to its followers, You on religion are unable to think, we will and we do think for you. The Church of England says, You have a right to think for yourselves, but damns you if you think differently from the Church. You say that hospitals are the fruits of Christianity. Where, save in the monasteries, were the hospitals for 1500 years? You boast of schools. Where were these at all for 1500 years? There were even in this country none worthy of the name for little children till Robert Owen set his example at New Lanark. You talk of going into the back streets, but is it not true that squalor, misery, and vice, crowd the back streets because the Bishops and the English Church have taken so much from the people, and have so hindered the populace from self-improvement, that they have only back streets themselves to live in, while they build palaces for the king, and magnificent structures for the Church? I attack the Church of England because the Church has challenged me. I attack it as a leech that for centuries has sucked the life-blood out of the people, and which, with the power to aid and help civilisation, has done nothing but retard it.

The Bishop said, Let us suppose the existence of a supremely righteous, true, and holy being; let us suppose a revelation from such a being; what do you suppose such a revelation should be like? and he urged that the Christian possessed such a revelation as groundwork for his faith. I hold the supposed revelation in my hand. What does it reveal? That God made man and woman in the same day, but that he made them separately, the man long before the woman. That God gave them the fruit of every tree for food, but prohibited them from eating the fruit of one tree, and never intended that of another to be eaten by them; that he placed the man and woman in a garden within reach of the tree whose fruit they were forbidden to eat on pain of death, but the fruit of which was made good for food and pleasant to the eyes; that God made a serpent more subtle than all the beasts of the field; that this serpent tempted Eve, and she ate the forbidden fruit, and gave to the man who ate also, and thus both fell; that God, who had foreseen and predestined all this terrible farce, cursed for Adam’s sake all human kind, millions being thus involved in Adam’s ruin. That all this was the work of an all-wise and all-good God, with whom is no variableness nor shadow of turning. This God, who is not a man that he can repent, afterwards repented that he had made man, and, although not subject to passions, it grieved him at his heart, and he resolved to destroy all mankind. That, man’s thoughts being wicked, this God of love and forgiveness, of long suffering and loving kindness, destroyed not only the full-grown man and woman, but also the little child as yet without thought. Man’s thoughts being wicked, God drowned the whole world, including bird, beast, and creeping thing. Did you ever picture to yourselves this story of the flood? Just paint in imagination a mother with her child in her arms, wearily toiling up some hill, slippery with the falling waters. See her fleeing from the waves coming swift behind, like ravenous wolves, with gaping mouths greedy for her life. Imagine her cry to heaven for mercy, not for herself alone, not so much for herself, but for her child, a child, which sucking at her breast, as yet knows no sin. Then picture your all-loving and merciful God shutting his ears to her wild shrieks for mercy, and drowning her and her babe in the flood.

Did you ever picture to yourselves the scene when, the world being again peopled, its inhabitants intended to build a tower that would reach to heaven, and God, the all-wise, hearing of it in heaven, where he then resided, came down to earth to see whether the rumour was true, and finding that it was, confounded the language of men? Do you recollect how God chose Abraham—and I don’t deny that he was worth choosing, a man who was just 75 years old when he had lived 135 years—how God, the infinite and omnipresent, came down from heaven and told Abraham that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed; and that Abraham, though so old that his body was “as good as dead,” should have a son in his old age? Have you read how God, who cannot lie, with a covenant and an oath promised a certain land to Abraham, and how he never gave him “so much as to set his foot on?” Have you read how Sarah, it having ceased to be with her after the manner of women, laughed when God made the promise of a son; how God asked why she laughed; and how Sarah, whose faith is praised, denied to God’s very face that she had laughed at all? Have you read that God said, I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob; that Jacob proved to be a knave and a liar; that Jacob made a conditional bargain with the Almighty God, that if the Lord would do certain things for him, then the Lord should be his God? Have you read how God promised to protect Abraham’s children, and how they became slaves in Egypt, and how he left them to be oppressed? Have you read how, hearing their cries, God took them out of Egypt, amongst a number of nations who had committed no crime against the Jews, but were created by God to be destroyed by his chosen people? Have you traced the track of blood and murder from Egypt to Palestine? Have you read how God gave the Israelites the right to make war on any city, and if the inhabitants made peace, then they were tributaries, but if not “I, the Lord God, will deliver them into thy hands; thou shalt smite them utterly, and leave alive nothing that breatheth?”

I say that this is not a revelation of love; it is the revelation, the outgrowth of the instincts, of a barbarous and brutal people. My Lord Bishop, not content with relying on this revelation, after telling us that the existence of a Deity cannot be demonstrated, seeks to supply us with a demonstration by a vague reference to the argument from design. He says that there are in the universe evidences of a designer. This argument from design is a most dangerous one, for the existence of stings and fangs may be evidences of a designing malevolence; but permit me to dismiss the argument with a quotation from Sir William Hamilton. He says:

“We are utterly unable to conceive that it is possible for the complement of existence to have been either increased or diminished. We cannot, on the one hand, conceive of nothing becoming something, or on the other hand, of something becoming nothing.”

I challenge the Lord Bishop to show that it is possible to imagine any time when the whole of the universe did not exist. Creation! who is it that really believes in creation? Do any of you? Let us fathom the depths of the past as far back as we will, there is still the great impenetrable beyond. No man, even in thought, can annihilate existence, or bring to light a first evolution of nature, and say, Here the universe began. There can be no origination of the universe conceivable by the human mind. But suppose you could in thought annihilate the universe. You say that God is unchangeable. Was there a moment when he began to create? Then is not that an assumption of an act of change? I will not stop to argue on this point. The bishop did not on this head condescend to argue at all. His third sermon was only a torrent of ably delivered words, and however fitting it might be for those whose faith was firm, it was useless for drawing to the Church those without faith. The Bishop says, Our faith in Christ is confirmed by the story of his life as recorded by his disciples. He says that whether the Gospel of John is true or untrue, it contains the delineation of a perfect being. He spoke of Christ as being better than any man the world has yet seen, as the only teacher whose life was better than his teaching. What is the history of his life? Jesus was born without a father. His mother’s husband had two fathers. Jesus was descended from David, through Joseph, who was not his father. He was born in the reign of Herod, but was not born till after the death of Herod. Jesus passed his early life in Egypt, but he was during the same time in Judæa. He was baptised by John, who knew him before the baptism, but who did not know him till he had been baptised. Jesus was taken into the wilderness, where he fasted forty days, but he was during part of the same time at a marriage feast in Cana of Galilee. During the forty days’ fasting, the devil took Jesus to the top of a high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and said, All these will I give thee, it thou wilt fall down and worship me. Yet this Jesus was, as the Bishop teaches, very God of very God; and if so, could not be tempted with an offer of his own creation by his own creature; and the temptation must have been a sham. Jesus is said to have worked miracles, but the people who had the opportunity of seeing them never believed in them or him. He fed 5,000 persons with five loaves and a few fishes, and yet his own disciples—who, he promised, should sit on twelve thrones, judging the tribes of Israel—when many persons had to be fed at another time, wondered how it was to be done. Jesus was betrayed by Judas with a kiss; but he was not so betrayed, for when the armed men came to Jesus he asked them, Whom seek ye? and they answered, Jesus of Nazareth; he said, I am he. Jesus was crucified early in the morning, and yet at noon he was still on his trial. Jesus was three days and three nights in the grave; but he was crucified on Friday, his body was taken down from the cross on Friday evening, and it must have been late on Friday evening when he was put into the sepulchre; the first people who looked into it on Saturday night, as it began to dawn towards Sunday morning, found that the body was gone; so that from Friday night till Sunday morning, made three days and three nights! Jesus appeared to two of his disciples, and they did not know him; he walked with them till the evening, and then they knew him. When it was daylight they did not know him, but when it was dark then they knew him. While they could see him, they did not know him; when they knew him, they could not see him. Such is the story of Jesus. It is not true that his life was better than that of any other man.

I will take a noble life, and put it against the life of Jesus, the life of the Infidel Bruno against the life of your God Jesus. Bruno was born near Naples, and trained as a monk. Leaving his ministry, to teach people in their vulgar tongue, he was driven out of Italy. Going to Switzerland, bigotry was too strong, and he was driven thence. At Paris he debated with the doctors of the Sorbonne, until arguments failing them, they drove him away with threats of the faggot. From Paris he went to England, there debating at Oxford and Cambridge; thence to Germany; and thence back to Italy, where a prison awaited him, as a full refutation of his heresies, where he was confined in a dungeon for eleven years, where the rack was the answer to his arguments, and where he at last died, a gallant martyr at the stake. He died fearlessly confronting his enemies, having truly told them that they had more fear in condemning him to be burned alive, than he had in being condemned.

Jesus was God, and could not die; but if your Bible be true, his last words were a despairing cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Compare these two men in their lives and their deaths, and see which was the nobler and the braver. Jesus did not come to save the world. He said, I am sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Jesus told his disciples not to go to the Gentiles, be forbade them even to visit the Samaritans, and it was not till after his resurrection that he said, Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. I have spoken in language which you may think unfitting for such a theme. Do you believe the Bishop, that Jesus died to save all mankind? Do you believe the doctrine, that only those who have faith in Jesus can be saved? What is to become of those who have never heard his name? Do you believe that all the Chinese will be damned? If you believe this, what must you think of God? If you believe that the Chinese will be pardoned, because they cannot be expected to believe in Jesus of whom they have not heard, how can you be so wicked as to send them Bibles and missionaries, which may bring them to damnation? I plead here for what some call infidelity, for what some call heresy. I plead for the rights of humanity. I plead against a system which, to my mind, has greatly hindered the education of the world, and impeded its improvement; and if you tell me that my language is coarse and blasphemous, I will ask you in what language do your missionaries describe the Mohammedan and his Koran, the Brahmin and his Vedas? You call me an Infidel; what are you? You disbelieve all the religions of the world save one, I disbelieve that one also; my disbelief is but one degree greater than yours.

A Bishop comes now in the nave of the Cathedral, to answer modern Infidelity. Why does modern Infidelity exist? Why has Infidelity grown? It has grown because the Church has grown fat and the people lean. It has grown because Convocation quibbles over rites and formularies, instead of devising schemes for the redemption of mankind from ignorance; because the Church said nothing while back streets were built for the poor, and grand abbeys and cathedrals for the priest. The rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer, while the Church pretends to regard as a blessing the poverty she carefully avoids. The Church pretends to have the authority to speak in the name of God, and the Bishop, on that last evening, prayed for my conversion. You see the effect of that prayer in these lectures. Clergymen threw down the gauntlet, and it has been taken up. We have been attacked, and we will compel the Church to afford us a hearing. You have now no right to say that we are too insignificant, after you have yourselves challenged us to the fray. You must not pretend that modern Infidelity is too blasphemous; you have undertaken to confute it by competent persons. I appeal to Christians of every sect for one thing only; I don’t ask you to give me your faith, but to remember that amid the hundreds of religions with innumerable antagonistic Churches and Chapels, that amid the multiplicity of error, you may be wrong. We do not pretend to be perfect thinkers, nor thinkers free from error; we claim only to be earnest thinkers, desiring to be set right where wrong. I deny the right of any Church to pretend to be the only true Church. I take the right to utter my thoughts. The Church of England is a rotten Church, a falling Church, a Church divided against itself, a Church with Colensos and Voyseys, as against Puseys and Mackonochies, a Church which by the admission of her own divines is illogical, which cannot defend her Thirty-nine Articles, nor her Athanasian Creed.

I have finished these lectures, and I ask those who intend to follow me to remember that Freethought has done something since the days of Spinoza, Carapanella, and Bruno. It is only since Freethinkers began to fight against the Church that there has been any real popular progress made by you Liberals. The Church has not helped you at all. It has by its bench of bishops hindered your reforms as long as it could, and maintained tithes and exactions and bad laws till humanity rebelled against the obstruction. Whether right or wrong, we have at least done something to make the world better worth living in. (Applause.)

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