Part 6

That revelation, according to the gospel itself, I take to be, that, as knowledge is the only distinction between man and any other animal, the more can be accumulated for him in the Church, the more good will be done, and the more he will be saved from evil. Existing things can alone be the subject of man's knowledge, and it is of more importance to him to know their properties than their time or history. Now, nothing of the properties of existing things is taught in the Church; but through the medium of the mystery remaining unrevealed, unexplained, or untranslated in our language, every thing is falsified to man's credulous view and consideration, by the ministers of the Church; nature appears to him distorted, and he lives without certainty, and dies deceived as to the future. Knowledge is as infinite as existing things, and man's power of acquisition illimitable. It is, then, a proper labour and business, and moral duty, of each generation of men, to leave behind them, for their successors, the largest possible amount of knowledge. This is true wealth, and will increase the value of all other wealth: without knowledge, other wealth is mere animal gratification. The spirit of knowledge gives life and new properties to everything, as far as man's use of it be in question. The Church is the proper fountain of this knowledge; should be the public library, the parish laboratory for investigations, the school for infants and adults, and everything that is auxiliary to the acquisition and extension of knowledge. From all I can trace, I verily believe that such was the original purpose and construction of the Christian Church; and that back to this it may be easiest and best reformed.

I am confirmed in the opinion, that putting knowledge under the form of an allegorical mystery, for the purpose of confining it to a class, has been the cause of the mistake and its declension, and of the scholar's fall from a former higher estate of knowledge. Decidedly do I conclude, that our stock of knowledge is much below the quantity possessed some two or three thousand years ago, when the holders of the sacred books held the revelation with the mystery. I am sure it may be recovered, if fairly and earnestly sought. I see an impulse gathering over both Europe and America for the recovery of that knowledge. The Church was instituted to become the repository of knowledge; and all would have gone on well, but for the ancient system of deceiving what were and are called the vulgar--of having a double doctrine, the exoteric and esoteric, telling the people one thing and understanding quite another among themselves. Such were deceivers and not teachers of the people; and though the revelation has really been lost, lost I may say, as a just punishment for the wickedness of so deceiving the people, the successive Clergy has been ignorantly deceivers and not teachers of the people. They have inherited the exoteric or mysterious doctrine, and have not inherited the esoteric doctrine or the revelation of the mystery. This they have to learn, before they can reform their Church, or, before any one can reform it for them.

I am confident enough to say, that you have no other ground on which to reform the Church, than that which I am proposing. Whatever other step you take will only be an aggravation of the evil of which you have now to complain; or of which others complain. If the Bishops have one item of wisdom among them, they will take me by the hand, and put their houses in order this way: if not, you and they may dissipate the existing Church Property, which you say you will not do; and after, we shall begin to form such a-new, and recover what we can of that property. I shall not despair of taking an active part in this thorough Reform of the Church while life remains: the People can do it for themselves, if Clergy, Ministers and King will not consent. It is what I began to do in my house in the year 1828, in critical and philosophical lectures and free discussion on the Sunday: an example which I am happy to see followed in many parts of this metropolis, and which will go on, if it be not cordially met, until it swallows up the Church and all the Churches.

The true meaning of Church, is STATE OF MIND. Church is the state of mind. It is not made up of building and clergy; but of the people, the proper depositaries of mind. Property belonging to the Church is property belonging to the People, sacred to the preservation, strengthening, and increase of mind or knowledge. It has been monopolized dishonestly by the Clergy; and, in that sense, they have been robbers as well as deceivers of the people. This is the matter to be reformed, and nothing short of this will be reform. In Tithes, the people stand as the original proprietors of the land, the true inheritors of its tithes and first-fruits. Other rent is a minor consideration of value in labour or capital bestowed on the land. We must come back to this by some means or other.

The office of King, as head of the Church, is a clerical office--the crown both of the Church and the State; and, for the sustentation of its true splendour and dignity, the man or woman filling the office should be the first scholar and most wise and virtuous being of the Nation. Whether this is a principle to be conveyed by hereditary descent, I do not stop to enquire; but the true hereditary principle of church office is talent and moral character; upon which, I doubt if any improvement can be made for purposes of state. Originally, in this island, Church and State were but one. The branching into two has been the result of wars and evil passions, to distinguish between the instructive and the destructive offices, hierarchy founded upon knowledge would be equal to all that society wants as government. State, as well as Church, signifies the People. As the latter relates to their minds, knowledge, or spiritual affairs, so the former expresses their politics and civil arrangements, their local and temporal affairs: they may be well united in one common interest, and under one common authority, in the reign of a people devoted to the acquisition of knowledge.

It is matter of curious observation to see how the use of names among political parties is abused, and how they get reversed in applicable meaning. The class that has lately taken the title of Conservatives, is the class that, by the showing of this letter, has been destructive of everything valuable in our Institutions, so that we have the name only left, without any virtuous principle that formerly existed in those Institutions. We have the evidence of this in all the present difficulties of the country, both in Church and State. The ancestors of this class have not known how, or not cared to preserve those ancient Institutions in their original purity; and the class now wanted is the class of Restoratives, of men whose knowledge, wisdom, honesty and virtue, will enable them to purge out the accumulated errors of centuries, and restore the Institutions of the country to their pristine purity. I grant that this class is not found among the men who are commonly called or claim to be called Radical Reformers: there is as much ignorance in that class as in any other. But they certainly are not likely to be more destructive than they who call themselves Conservatives; for these have left nothing to be destroyed. The true and real aim of the men now called Radicals is to begin something a-new. Their profession of respect for existing Institutions is hollow, hypocritical and deceitful. I have had acquaintance enough with them to know that; and more than for the reminiscence of which I can now find respect. Still they will supersede both Tory and Whig, if these do not something upon the principle of a true restoration of Institutions to original and best principles. I would have the Radicals treated as the Dissenters: leave them no ground of complaint, and so annihilate them. A wise King or a wise Minister would see that the time is now come at which that step should be taken, and that further delays will be dangerous to every man in office. Necessary Institutions, if destroyed for a time, will rise again. I fear no kind of change as to the prospect of future advantage.

Is not the idea horrible, and of the worst description, that a Church and King, or Church and State, should exist and hold together on no better tenure than a military power; than that of an army constantly under arms to keep the people from carrying their complaints to an extent disagreeable or alarming to the men in office? Yet such is all that you can boast of in the present state of the Institutions of the country. These Institutions did not originate under the protection of an army; nor did they, at their origination, require an army to protect and keep them in existence. An army is a disgraceful appendage, and destructive of every good principle in the Church:--it is not an honourable appendage to the office of King. To the people, it is a burthen and an immoral pest; less requisite in this island than in a continental nation. Give the people knowledge in their Churches, and they will soon dispense with an army.

Evils accumulate because there is error at the bottom. There is now no People's Church: it is, as now existing, a Church of the Clergy, engrossing and wasting a large property of the people's due to a most valuable social purpose. The Dissenters have only made the matter worse, in new exactions for no new benefits. Not one tittle of good, not a particle of utility, now proceeds from the Clergy toward the people. They are obstacles to the people's welfare, and their use of means of provision for a new and better Church.

God is the subject of man's adoration. But what is God? Man is but an idiot if he professes adoration beyond his understanding. Indeed, worship is but a synonymy of reason and its cultivation; and as we say:--_how can we reason but from what we know?_ so we may as truly say:--_how can we worship what we do not know?_ There is no worship without knowledge; all other pretence to it is idolatry and superstition. I have not space to enter upon this topic largely here; but a voluminous treatise on the word GOD will be the subject of my next Essay. For the purpose of this illustration of what the Church is, and what it ought to be, I can say correctly, that God, as the aggregate of existence, is known to be a physical and moral power. We have distinct ideas of this two-fold power. The American Indians, who speak of God as a Great Spirit, make the best general definition of the word that can be made, and appear to me to have the clearest, purest and wisest idea of Deity, as far as the regulation of their actions by that word is in question,--the pursuit of knowledge, by the use of letters and figures excepted. It corresponds with the emphatic declaration of the Gospel according to Saint John, chap. iv., v. 24:--"God is a Spirit, and they that worship must worship in spirit and in truth"--which means what I have before stated, that they must know what they worship before they can worship. There is evidence of physical as well as moral spirit. Both are seen in man, and constitute what may be termed the Spirit of Man. The one in man is worshipped or cultivated by attention to health; the other by attention to mental improvement or increased acquisition of knowledge. Speaking of God, as the aggregate and source of physical and moral spirit, of which man is a part or unit, we experience that we cannot alter our physical construction, or physical spirit, other than by attention to rules of health in the law of nature; but we can, by study and labour, greatly alter the state of mind or moral spirit. It is here we draw from God as from a fountain; and this asking, seeking, drawing from God, constitutes the whole principle of right prayer and worship, and the structure of the true Christian Church; other than which, I declare, is worship of the Devil and not of God. And I do not shrink from saying, that, as revelation is light and knowledge of God, and mystery is darkness and presence of the Devil, there has not through the last fifteen hundred years, the dark ages, throughout Europe, been carried on any other kind of worship than Devil-worship, and evil has been the fruit thereof. It was under this knowledge that I was moved to exhibit the effigy of the Devil arm in arm with the Bishop, in the front of my house and in several prints, for which I am now suffering imprisonment, like all other martyrs to truth, punished for acting upon my knowledge. My purpose was good, to open the eyes of my neighbours and passers by. It might have inconvenienced some of them; but such is the effect of every newly-published truth in eradication of error: your Reform of the Church, be it what it may, will inconvenience the Bishops and some of the Clergy. There would be no Devil, if there were not pleasure in Hell as well as in Heaven; as pardon can be had by asking for it. If all evil were naturally punished, we should not want penal laws.

As true worship is a getting of a knowledge of God, so it follows, that the Ministry of the Church should consist of a teaching that knowledge, which is not now the case; for nothing as knowledge is in the Church taught.

There can be nothing more clear in mathematical demonstration, than that, as God is a Spirit, of which man may partake, the participation must increase with that only which can increase in man--the amount of his knowledge. The whole declaration of the Christian Creed, read by the spirit, is, that God is the Spirit of Knowledge, the thing known, the principle of omniscience; and that man approaches and lives with God, as his mind expands in the accumulation of knowledge. A Bishop may write or preach spiritually or metaphysically by the year, and he can make no more of the word God, of his Church, or of himself, than I have made. The subject now wants a radical reform in the human mind.

I have mentioned, in a former page, that the Jews can trace no nationality to the time of the Emperor Alexander of Macedon. The highest antiquity that can be given to them as a colony, is the time of Ptolomy Lagus, who began to encourage science and literature in Alexandria; and, from that time, nothing but a colony could they have ever been. It is not in a nationality that the original character of a Jew is to be estimated, but in a philosophic character dispersed among the nations; a people devoted to science; and so a chosen or select, because a learned people. There is no resemblance in character between an ancient and a modern Jew:--the name is an Asiatic name of God; and can only apply to a race of men in the sense of having perfected human nature, which it is very probable the ancient Jews had done, as far as it was then possible to do it, according to the system of initiation, through a series of discipline, into all the schools and mysteries of that time and country. The first public reference to a stated existence of the Books of the Old Testament is the reign of Ptolomy Philadelphus. Egypt appears to have been the only country in which it can be said that a series of Kings gave encouragement to science, which appears, as far as history is witness, to have brought in the Augustan era. It became, as far as wars and tumults would permit, fashionable so to do, until superstition overwhelmed it and usurped all its names, leading on to the dark ages of what has been since mis-called the Christian era. Cultivation of science is the restorative power, and the only public or private act that confers true dignity on man. This is the only remedy for the disorder of the Church; and I have introduced this historical view of the Jewish name, to show how flimsy is that web of superstition which has been woven in the existing Church on the foundation of a supposed national history and origin of the Jews. Truth nowhere finds opposition in fact, date, or principle: error is opposed by endless proofs of the kind.

It remains now only that I give an outline of the historical defects of the present received view of the mystery of the Christian Religion, and then draw to a conclusion.

No record extant, or referred to, that, having been written in the first century, has mentioned the human existence of an individual of the name of Jesus Christ.

A passage now in Josephus is a declared interpolation, inasmuch as it was first known to the world in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, written in the fourth century, after Photius and Origen, of the third century, had written, that Josephus had not made mention of Jesus Christ.

In the writings of Philo Judæus, an Alexandrian Jew of the first century, much is said about the Logos, in carrying out the philosophy of Plato; but not a word about Jesus Christ.

Pliny the younger, in his letter to the Emperor Trajan, written from Bythinia between the years 106 and 112, is the first to mention the name of Christ. This mention is as of a God and not as of a man: no reference is made to Judea or to Jews; and the worshippers of this God he describes under the name of Christians, and as having long existed as a sect in that province. He writes as if he had heard nothing of the sect at Rome, and describes their worship as an excessive superstition.

The passage in Tacitus is rejected, as not noticed by Eusebius or any one before the fifteenth century; that it was found in a copy by Johannes de Spire at Venice.

This brings us to Justin Martyr, who can only be considered a Christian of the Platonic order, making no reference to Gospels or Epistles.

Thence we come to St. Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, who has very much the appearance of a Druidical Bishop rather than as a newly-appointed Christian Bishop. Irenæus mentions the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and gives the reason why there should be four; as because there are four seasons in the year. He has many other allegorical extravagancies in his writings, and is not deemed the most respectable of the Fathers of the present Church.

In the third century, and toward the latter part of that century, near three hundred years after the supposed birth of the man Jesus Christ, we have a recognition of all the Books in the New Testament, which received the stamp of the authority of a Council of Bishops, as a selection from many similar and dissimilar books under similar titles, in the fourth century; but whether the revelation of the mystery was then understood by the Bishops does not appear.

The Epistles of the New Testament have no dates nor reference to any persons who were known to have lived at any particular time. They are not supported by, nor do they support, the Gospels. The idea of allegorism prevailed in the third century.

The Christian era was not reduced to chronology until the sixth century; and that chronology was very little used or referred to until the tenth, that the era of the Hegira of Mahomet had come much into use. The real struggle of the present Christian Church was not with the Pagan but with the Mahometan Religion, and they are near a balance of numerical power to this day. A battle in France, in the reign of Charles Martel, checked the progress of the Mahometans, and saved the entire overthrow of the mysterious Christian Church on the continent of Europe. There was a much greater similarity between the Pagan and the Christian, than between the Christian and the Mahometan Religion.

I have no objection to the religion of the Jew or the Christian, that is founded on the spiritual reading of the Bible. Mahometanism is superior to both, while founded on the reading of the letter. The restoration of the Jews to original character and the millennium of the Christians is only to be brought about by the spiritual reading, which will lead to a devotion to science. The future Temple of the New Jerusalem must be a Temple devoted to the promulgation of truth and all sciences, and such must be the Church of Rome, and such our English Church, under any real state of reformation.

The practical part of my proposition for a Reform in the Church, is, that all indefensible superstition or mystery be banished or explained, that it be made the best possible general school for the people, to which the knowledge of the time is equal; that the people being the Church, and the Ministers not being the Church, the property of the Church in each parish shall be managed by the parishioners as their property, and the best provision be made with that property, including tithes, that can be made for all the physical and moral necessities of the people. The property must be put under some authority, cannot be allowed to remain as it is, cannot be well put under extra parochial authority; but may be well and honestly left to parochial management, as the property of the parish.

As our Institutions were all so first arranged for this purpose, so it will be found, that every thing emanating will fall back easily into its natural, moral, and original use. I cannot see the least difficulty, beyond the dishonesty and reluctance to yield of existing spirit. Such as are so weak in mind as to desire the present Church ceremony, may have it as long as they like, so as they do not exclude more useful business. I repeat, that, if the Bishops and Clergy be wise, they will take this advice: if they do not, they will very soon be where their predecessors were in the seventeenth century, not to be restored again.

I flatter myself, that, in this letter, I have produced a pamphlet that will not be dead-born. As far as possible, or as clearness of purpose would permit, I have endeavoured to avoid the use of offensive language. Whatever the world may think of me, I know nothing more of myself, than that of having a passion to be useful, to my country and fellow-men generally, in and previous to the critical coming time of change. It is not now to be mistaken as near. It is near, and very near. The present system may be dragged on through several years; but no one can insure it a twelve months' existence. I know that all bad passions are allied to ignorance, and I desire to see all those passions softened down by knowledge. I am sure that the new man, the spiritual man, the good and moral man, must be created by knowledge and independent individuality of action; and as I prefer (the Government having the choice) a moral to any other revolution, brought about by words rather than by harder and harsher weapons, I feel, that I have but performed a social, a civil, and a religious duty, in presenting this letter to your notice. That it may be read, marked, learned and inwardly digested, is the prayer of

Your humble Servant,

And prisoner in the business of Church Reform,

RICHARD CARLILE.

Giltspur Street Compter,

January 29,1835.

TENTH YEAR OF IMPRISONMENT.