Chapter 3

For the Man Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter's carnate son, the mystical Essene and occultist, Shelley exceeded in love and reverence many of the most earnest Christians, and in no theological writings can there be discovered such beautiful sentiments concerning the "The Regenerator of the World," and the "Meek Reformer," of whom he speaks as contemplating that mysterious principle called God, the fundamental of all good, and the source of all happiness, as every true poet and philosopher must have done. It is impossible to turn to any page of his works, where, in speaking of Christ, he fails in this--he expatiates with as great fervor as Renan, Seeley, or Strauss, on Christ's exposing with earnest eloquence, like all true members of the brotherhood of Illuminati, to which he belonged, the panic fears and hateful superstitions which have enslaved mankind for ages, and extols

"His extraordinary genius, the wide and rapid effects of his unexampled doctrines, his invincible gentleness and benignity, (and) the devoted love borne to him by his adherents."

For the God Christ, as depicted by the Sacerdotal order, he had the greatest contempt. It was impossible for a mind constituted like his to tamely rest contented with the incredible story forced on mankind's intelligence, that the Supreme Power could or would for any wise purpose be transformed into a dove, and re-enact the mythical part of Jupiter with a Christian Leda, the Jew carpenter's wife, Mary, under the disguise of a bird. Such a story and the theory on which it rests Shelley summarised as follows:

"According to this book, God created Satan, who, instigated by the impulses of his nature, contended with the Omnipotent for the throne of Heaven. After a contest for the empire, in which God was victorious, Satan was thrust into a pit of burning sulphur. On man's creation, God placed within his reach a tree whose fruit he forbade him to taste, on pain of death; permitting Satan, at the same time, to employ all his artifice to persuade this innocent and wondering creature to transgress the fatal prohibition.

"The first man yielded to this temptation; and to satisfy Divine Justice the whole of his posterity must have been eternally burned in hell, if God had not sent his only Son on earth, to save those few whose salvation had been foreseen and determined before the creation of the world."

The hero of this fabulous episode, beneath which a great truth lies hidden, the Christian Ahrimanes or Typhon, the Devil, as painted by Milton, he considered a moral being, far superior to the God depicted by the same author, and who, under the form of the second person of the Christian Trinity, Shelley tells us of coming humbly,

"Veiling his horrible God-head in the shape Of man, scorn'd by the world, his name unheard, Save by the rabble of his native town, Even as a parish demagogue. He led The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace, In semblance; but he lit within their souls The quenchless flame of zeal, and blest the sword He brought on earth to satiate with the blood Of truth and freedom his malignant soul."

Elsewhere, in extension of the same, he puts the accompanying words in the mouth of God the Father, to illustrate the doctrine of Christian Atonement:

"I will beget a son, and he shall bear The sins of all the world; he shall arise In an unnoticed corner of the earth, And he shall die upon a cross, and purge The universal crime; so that the few On whom my grace descends, those who are marked As vessels to the honor of their God, May credit this strange sacrifice, and save Their souls alive. Millions shall live and die, Who ne'er shall call upon their Saviour's name, But unredeem'd go to the gaping grave; Thousands shall deem it an old woman's tale, Such as the nurses frighten babes withal; These, in a gulf of anguish an I of flame, Shall curse their reprobation endlessly, Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow, Even on their beds of torment, where they howl, My honor and the justice of their doom. What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts Of purity, with radiant genius bright, Or lit with human reason's earthly ray? Many are call'd but few will I elect."

The popular faith of Europe and America, which experience demonstrates to this age has, even as a means of reforming humanity, been a complete failure, Shelley correctly believed, had the same human foundation and origin as that of other revealed theologies--he sums up the proofs on which Christianity rests, miracles, prophecies, and martyrdoms, with great clearness; proves the absurdity of the doctrine of miracles, as taught by Christian writers, shows the falseness of the so-called prophecies, even granting the utmost warping of the real meaning of the Old Testament texts for Christian purposes, which he asserted were to be compared unfavorably with the oracles of Delphos, and points out that the Mohammedan dying for his prophet, or the Hindoo immolating himself under the wheels of Juggernaut could be cited equally as a proof of the divine origin of their faiths, as the reputed martyrdoms of Christians could of theirs.

The development of Christianity, which was really founded by Paul, was a subject to which Shelley devoted much attention--he tells us that

"The same means that have supported every other belief, have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, assassination, and falsehood; deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity, have made it what it is. The blood shed by the votaries of the God of mercy and peace, since the establishment of his religion, would probably suffice to drown all other sectaries now on the habitable globe. We derive from our ancestors a faith thus fostered and supported; we quarrel, persecute, and hate, for its maintenance. Even under a government which, while it infringes the very right of thought and speech, boasts of permitting the liberty of the press, a man is pilloried and imprisoned because he is a deist, and no one raises his voice in the indignation of outraged humanity."

The numerical majority of Christians--the Greek and Roman Catholic--are as much pagans as their ancestors, the ancient Greeks and Romans were exoterically. And why? Simply because on the break-up of the Roman empire--like Mohammedanism afterwards, which was the natural reformation and revolution from Christian image-worship--Christianity, in a natural succession, and by fortuitous circumstances, took possession of the executive, and placed on the seat of power a Christian Byzantine emperor in lieu of a pagan. Basilicas, dedicated to Jupiter, Mercury, Adonis, Venus and the deities of High Olympus, were re-dedicated to God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, and the other saints (or gods) of the Christian Pantheon. Statues therein were rechristened, and the sacrificial altars were simply transferred for the use of the eucharistical sacrifice. The vestal virgins became nuns of the church; the _Sacerdotes_, her priests; the mysteries of Isis, her Agapae. Her incense, her pictures, her image-worship, her holy water, her processions, and her prodigies, too, all came from the same source. Thus were the socialistic and communistic teachings, based on the Philoic-Essenism of the Reformer of Nazareth, paganized, prostituted, and entirely misrepresented. His life and labors were transformed from the natural into what was considered by the vulgar the supernatural, and all those who dared--like Hypatia, with thousands of other pious and noble ancients--to deny his divinity, were sacrificed to this new Moloch, set up by parricide Constantines, or adulterers of the Theodosius caste. Thus through the ages, has the race suffered under such murder, rapine, and lust, as never disgraced tolerant ancient heathendom in the interests of paganism, even as recently happened in Central America,[C] and would happen everywhere else, if priestcraft had the power to act without restraint, so that, as Shelley says,

"Earth groans beneath religion's iron age, And priests dare babble of a God of Peace-- Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood, Murdering the while, uprooting every germ Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all, Making the earth a slaughter-house."

[Footnote C: I refer to the abominable outrages perpetrated a few months ago at San Miguel, Panama, where popular preachers were forced by the ecclesiastical powers to foment rebellion by violently denouncing the State authorities, who had refused to allow a pastoral of the Christian Bishop of San Salvador, hostile to the laws, to be read in the churches. Having been put into a state of frenzy by one Palacios, a canon of the cathedral, a fanatic mob revolted, liberated prisoners, murdered generals in command, massacred numbers of the best citizens, set fire to the city with kerosene, and destroyed over one million dollars' worth of property. After this theological revolt had been put down, passports, couched in the following terms, and sealed with the seal of the bishopric, were found on the bodies of some of these holy murderers;

"PETER.--Open to the bearer the gates of heaven, who has died for religion.

(Signed), GEORGE, Bishop of San Salvador."

Similar attempts were made by the Christian hierarchy in Brazil against the Masonic body; but, fortunately, the emperor, a liberal and an enlightened savant, crushed the attempt under foot, and unmistakably proved, to the satisfaction of humanity, that he was not to be transformed into a nineteenth century Charles the Ninth or Philip the Second, and act the cat's paw for Pio Nono, ex-carbonari and recusant mason, to wreak his vengeance on the brethren whom he had betrayed.]

To those who will look down the ages, I would ask, is this picture overdrawn? and further, to remember that in Shelley's own words:

"Eleven millions of men, women and children have been killed in battle, butchered in their sleep, burned to death at public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured, assassinated and pillaged in the spirit of the religion of peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God."

Is it amazing that he should have written such a "highly wrought and admirably sustained" tragedy as the "Cenci," founded on facts, and which has been deemed by competent critics the first since Shakspeare--that he should have brought forward, with vivid delineation, the crimes of the priesthood--and that he should have made us remember the terrors of the bloody wars on heretics and heathen, in words such as these:

"Yes! I have seen God's worshippers unsheathe The sword of His revenge, when grace descended, Confirming all unnatural impulses, To sanctify their desolating deeds; And frantic priests wave the ill-omen'd cross O'er the unhappy earth; then shone the sun On showers of gore from the upflashing steel Of safe assassination, and all crime Made stingless by the spirits of the Lord. And blood-red rainbows canopied the land. Spirit! no year of my eventful being Has pass'd unstain'd by crime and misery, Which flows from God's own faith. I've marked his slaves With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile The insensate mob, and whilst one hand was red With murder, feign to stretch the other out For brotherhood and peace; and that they now Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds Are marked with all the narrowness and crime That freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise?"

Protestant Christians may urge that all this is not Christianity; if it be not--for it is the record of the Church--I would ask, what is? and where shall we find the history of Christianity for the fifteen centuries before Luther's time? and where, to-day? Their predecessors plucked the plumage from the dying bird of mythology, as they, themselves, have robbed the liberal orchard of all its choicest fruits and palmed them off as of their own growth. Protestants would not, I dare say, now countenance the persecutions of the past, but yet, I would tell them that their Protestantism has been a great mistake; and that, at this moment, there is no unity among the opposers of Catholicism, who are split into a thousand sects, wrangling for superiority, like wolves over offal; and that their churches are gradually converging toward Rationalism on the one hand, and Catholic Sacerdotalism on the other; in regard to which last, the Historical Roman Church--the only Christian body which presents a solid phalanx--one must not be too iconoclastic, remembering that, in the monastic houses and great ecclesiastical libraries we have had conserved for us, although, perchance by accident, the records of all the philosophy, all the jurisprudence, all the polity, all the literature, and all the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome, that remained from the Alexandrian library and pre-Christian times--the mediaeval clerics were the great conservators of knowledge, which we inherit directly from Europe; and we should be, therefore, grateful to them equally with Mohammedanism, from which we received, through the Crusaders and the Moors, the basis of nearly all science and luxury, from Asia. There were, undoubtedly, many bad popes, men as bad as the incestuous, and, according to the recent dogma, the infallible Alexander Borgia; priests who are not all vile, but many nobler than their system, acknowledge this with regret, and among whom there are some whom I can reverence, such as John Henry Newman, for instance, whose life would favorably compare with that of Shelley, or any liberal. There have been popes, also, whose lives have been as pure, as disinterested, and as virtuous as that of any stoic or epicurean. We owe much to Sixtus the Fifth, founder of the Vatican Library, and would-be regenerator of order in his temporal dominions; to Leo the Great, whose patronage of the arts has sent us down the wondrous statuary, painting, and works of genius, which are the admiration of the world; and to Hildebrand, who brought together, in one harmonious whole, the struggling elements of European society. It is well to note, too, in order that I may not be misunderstood, that Catholicism is better than savage Fetishism, and Rationalism in degree superior to either; and, further, that Liberalism should only war with evil principles, and not with men whom they are generally the exponents of ignorantly, and to the best of their knowledge. Comtism[D] acknowledges the fact that Christianity was not simply a mere advance on, but where we shall only find the civilization of Europe as it was during mediaeval times, and recognizes this most strongly, by placing over fifty of these great geniuses and luminaries, popes, bishops, and saints of the Catholic Church, in the Comtist Calendar, under the sixth and seventh months dedicated to St. Paul or Catholicism, and Charlemagne or Feudal Civilization respectively. We should thank the followers of Comte for thus bringing to our notice what we might be liable to occasionally forget in our bigotry and frequent over-anxiety.

[Footnote D: Comtism, or Positivism is that casuistical system of modern Atheism, founded by Auguste Comte, the Ignatius Loyola of Materialism, and which that learned pantarchical madman strung together in Esquirol's lunatic asylum. It is an insidious philosophy, full of Jesuistry, and teaches a _soi-disant_ Religion which is Ir-religion, a pseudo-God, which has no conceivable existence, and an impossible immortality of the soul, ignoring a future state. The present crusade of Comtism in our midst, with false colors flying can be justly compared to that of St. Francois Xavier in Hindostan.]

In popularizing terms wrongly, lies much mischief. If the misapplied term Christianity, signify the current notion, zeal for truth, the good of mankind, and active virtue or Christism, the reputed precepts of Christ, then Shelley taught that ethical system, and the so-called Christian world which persecuted him, the opposite.

No one believed, better than Shelley, in the necessity of continuity, and that all theological systems are a portion of the development of Humanity.

It should likewise be remembered, that even in the grossest superstition, as in the highest belief, the underlying aspiration, veiled perhaps, under some beautiful myth, is a straining after the pure and the good, and, as Shelley puts it:

"All original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true."

It should also be considered, that it is better not to interfere with the faith of the ignorant, but let them remain in an exoteric condition, until they are properly developed by sufficient education and consequent intelligence. It is just as much the duty of advanced thinkers not to tamper with the beliefs of men who are in an early stage of progress, as it is not to put a flaming torch in the possession of a lunatic, or a razor in the hands of a child.

Shelley, in his philosophy, accepted all this, with the full consciousness that in the end truth would prevail--he yearned for the time when priest-led slaves would

"Cease to proclaim that man Inherits vice and misery, when force And falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babe, Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good,"

and for that epoch when "the Mohammedan, the Jew, the Christian, the Deist, and the Atheist will live together in one community, equally sharing the benefits which arise from its associations, and united in the bonds of charity and brotherly love."

With Shelley we can turn with delight to the gospels of the future, as of the ancient past; and the ramifications of the Trinity of a truly Rational Religion, Mature, Science, and Art, where we have, instead of idle prayers, addressed to gross material idols, or the impossible entities hitherto depicted in theological systems, a feeling of real satisfaction in learning how to live rather than to die, and in practicing virtue and benevolence for their own sakes, than for improbable rewards in the unsatisfactory hereafter, enunciated from the theological platform.

Like a true religionist, Shelley tells us that aspirations to "Madre Natura," like the following, should be poured out in silent, grateful communion with Omnipresence, and not in temples made by hands:

Spirit of Nature! here! In this interminable wilderness Of worlds, at whose immensity Even soaring fancy staggers, Here is thy fitting temple. Yet not the slightest leaf That quivers to the passing breeze Is less instinct with thee; Yet not the meanest worm That lurks in graves, and fattens on the dead Less shares thy eternal breath. Spirit of Nature! thou! Imperishable as this scene, Here is thy fitting temple.

From such a soul-inspiring altar should praises like these be raised, and with what sacred feeling would the pure worshipper revel "where spirits live and dream--where all that is sweet in sound, or pure in vision floats on the air, or passes dimly before the sight," for as the late Professor J.G. Hoyt, in his essay on Shelley beautifully points out--"To him everything was God, and God was everything. Every place was peopled with forms of beauty and animated with living intelligences. Hills and valleys, forests and fountains, were each thronged with presiding deities--bright effluences from the Diving that stirred within, and shone above the whole."

In leaving the first portion of my paper, I will make the following quotation from a remarkable article on Shelley in the pages of the _National Magazine_, which all minds unshackled, and free from prejudice, must acknowledge to be correct in the main, and which admirably sums up his efforts in metaphysical philosophy. Our attention is called to the fact that we discover in all Shelley's writings "a freer and purer development of what is best and noblest in ourselves. We are taught in it to love all living and lifeless things, with which in the material and moral universe we are surrounded--we are taught to love the wisdom and goodness and majesty of the Almighty, for we are taught to love the universe, his symbol and visible exponent. God has given two books for the study and instruction of mankind; the book of revelation and the book of nature. In one at least of these was Shelley deeply versed, and in this one he has given admirable lessons to his fellow-men. Throughout his writings, every thought and every feeling is subdued and chastened by a spirit of unutterable and boundless love. The poet meets us on the common ground of a disinterested humanity, and he teaches us to hold an earnest faith in the worth and the intrinsic Godliness of the soul. He tells us--he makes us feel that there is nothing higher than human hope, nothing deeper than the human heart; he exhorts us to labor devotedly in the great and good work of the advancement of human virtue and happiness, and stimulates us

"To love and hear--to hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates."

It is observed by Shelley that

"The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women and children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain."

The vast impetus, which these extraordinary geniuses gave to freedom in metaphysical strongholds, led to a corresponding degree of liberty in the political and social relations.

Shelley was not one who

"beheld the woe In which mankind was bound, and deem'd that fate Which made them abject, would preserve them so."

but on the contrary was aware of the progressive character of the race, and threw himself with all his heart and soul into the cause of Republicanism, and never slackened in his efforts till death took him from his work. His noblest endeavors were directed toward the cause of suffering humanity, crushed under the weight of despotism; and his tuneful lyre was ever struck in behalf of the Goddess of Freedom, to whom, in that soul inspiring "Ode to Liberty," he offers chaplets of the most glorious verse to rouse the nations from their apathy. He has given us his reflections on the English Revolution, when Cromwell crushed royalty under his feet in the person of the tyrant Charles Stuart, and which, notwithstanding, rose again to befoul, in the profligacy and debauchery of the second Carolian epoch; on the French Revolution, when an intelligent people drove out a brood of vampires, who had drained the blood of France too long, to be replaced by atrocious demagogues, hateful priest-ridden Bourbons and a Napoleon Bonaparte, the wholesale Jaffa poisoner, on whose death Shelley wrote lines pregnant with republican feelings: