Part 2

Being competent to bear witness to a new fact, to one heretofore unexperienced, I would have been competent to bear witness to the death, burial and resurrection of the Christ, in case I had lived in his day, and had been as familiar with him as his witnesses. By which I mean to say, they were competent witnesses; every way qualified to know assuredly whether the Savior rose from the dead. _They could not be deceived_ about the matter. They were not. If they were honest men they told the truth, for they say, We saw, and heard, and our hands have handled. Then the entire Christian religion, with its immortal blessings, stands or falls upon the honesty of the Savior’s witnesses. Martyrdom has been universally conceded to be an evidence of sincerity; there may be a few exceptions to this general rule, but even they are not parallel cases. There is a story of a man who endured with great fortitude all the tortures of the rack, denying the fact with which he was charged. When he was asked afterwards how he could hold out against all the tortures, he said: I painted a gallows on the toe of my shoe, and when the rack stretched me, I looked on the gallows, and bore the pain to save my life. This man denied a plain fact under torture, but he did it to save his life.

When criminals persist in denying their crimes they do it with the hope of saving their lives. Such cases are not parallel. Who ever heard of persons dying _willingly_ in attestation of a false fact? Can we be made to believe that any set of rational men could be found who would _willingly die_ in attestation of the false fact that the President of the United States is now on the throne of England? The witnesses of Christ died in attestation of those facts which they say they saw, and heard, and knew, among which was the great fact of the resurrection of Christ. It was their privilege to quit their evidence, at any instant, and save their lives, but they did not do it. Who can account for this strange course of conduct upon the ground of dishonesty?

If a man reports an uncommon fact that is a plain object of sense, and we do not believe him, it is because we suspect his honesty and not his senses. If we are satisfied that the reporter is sincere, of course we believe. So our case is now in this shape: First, the great facts of the gospel of Christ addressed themselves, as simple facts, to the senses of men; second, no witness could affirm those facts honestly unless they took place; third, the witnesses to those facts gave all the evidences of sincerity and honesty that are possible. Reputation for truthfulness and honesty has never rested upon any evidence that is not found in great abundance in the lives of the witnesses of Christ. It is said that men die for false opinions: very true, but their sufferings and death, nevertheless, prove that they were sincere. True philosophy does not charge men who die for their opinions with dishonesty. Men may be mistaken in some things, but mistaken men are _not cheats_; are not insincere or dishonest. But the witnesses of Christ could not, in the nature of the case, belong to this class; they could not be mistaken about any such facts as those of the gospel. The only fort to be held in order to hold the gospel of Christ is the sincerity of his witnesses. When a man gets rid of the evidence upon which the reputation of those witnesses for honesty rests, he has removed the only evidence upon which it is possible for him to build a reputation for truth and honesty. So, if a man succeeds in sinking the gospel of Christ, he succeeds, at the same time and by the same means, in sinking himself. This is the philosophic and logical conclusion, from which there is no escape.

Let us look around one of the Savior’s witnesses and see what we can discover. First, we find Saul, a bold and fearless Jew, a Roman citizen by birth, and a pharisee in the Jews religion; a legalist by profession; laboring under all the prejudices of the straitest sect of the pharisees; persecuting the Savior’s disciples to the death. He was a man of no mean attainments. His worldly prospects were greater than those of any other man known to be converted from among the Jews. The testimony which he submits for our consideration is like the evidence of all the others. It consists in simple facts about which there was no possibility of being mistaken, for the facts were seen and heard. Allowing that Saul did neither see nor hear the Savior, he was insincere. And if he was, then we shall always be at a loss to know what constitutes the basis of an honest reputation. Did he give his evidence, knowing that it was false, with the intention of deceiving? If so, what were his motives? He could have had no reasonable inducements. Christianity could not furnish him with temporal power, credit, or interest during all his lifetime. So far as credit was concerned, in the affair of his conversion, he knew that the world had none to give. He knew that preaching Christ crucified was “to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness.” He knew that the Christ himself had been crucified. Credit or reputation was lying upon the anti-christian side of the gospel. He was already in high esteem among the Jews; a “_ring-leader_,” pursuing the course of action calculated in the very nature of things to advance him higher in their estimation. His entire life demonstrated the fact that he expected nothing of the Jews, for it was spent, with trifling exceptions, among the Gentiles. His enterprise was with them, for he was sent to them.

The difficulties lying in the way of any worldly emoluments were many and great. He had to contend with the authority and policy of the rulers; with the interest, credit and clique of the priests; with the prejudices and passions of the people; with the shrewdness and pride of the philosophers. Every man acquainted with ancient history knows that the established religion with which he would necessarily come in conflict, was interwoven with their civil institution, and supported by the rulers as _an essential_ part of their government. The Romans allowed a great many religious systems to exist, but they allowed no such thing as a religion destructive of the genius of paganism. The existing religions were many, and embraced the system of many gods ruling under one “Master God,” as “his members,” or representatives. The antagonism between Paganism and Christianity may be seen at once, in the fact that the Gospel of Christ was death to all the lower gods. On this account the first Christians became at once the object of national hatred and scorn. This accounts for the fact that bloody Rome baptized herself in Christian blood in spite of all her tolerance of religion.

The apostle met with sufferings on all sides; and having perfect liberty of recantation at any moment, how did it come to pass, if he was insincere, that he did not recant? Was he rational? Let his writing answer! They are admired by the best minds of earth. If he was irrational, let us have many more insane writers! Was he honest? If not, who is honest? Could he be deceived about the facts which he saw and heard? No! If he was, who can’t be? He could not be mistaken, for he _saw_, and _heard_, and _felt_—even to _blindness_, and, also, to the receiving of his sight. He was sincere. He suffered long as a bold defender of the Christian religion, and died a martyr’s death at last. Let us work on, suffer on, hope on, “hope in death,” and live forever! So mote it be.

“BROAD-GAUGE RELIGION.”—SHALL THE CONFLICT CEASE?

First. “A portion of the Church of England, comprising those who claim to hold a position, in respect to doctrine and fellowship, intermediate between the old High Church party and the modern Low Church, or evangelical party, a term of recent origin,” having originated in the last half century, “which has been loosely applied to other bodies of men holding liberal or comprehensive views of Christian doctrine and fellowship.”—_Webster._

Side by side with these various shades of High and Low Church, another party of a different character has always existed in the Church of England. It is called by different names: Moderate, Catholic, or _Broad Church_, by its friends: Latitudinarian or Indifferent, by its enemies. Its distinctive character is the desire of comprehension. Its watchwords are _charity_ and _toleration_.—_Conybeare._

_Broadgauge._ This word is connected, in its origin, with railroads. Its radical idea is that of distance. It is credited by Webster to Simmonds in these words, “A wide distance (usually six or seven feet) between the rails on a railway, in contradistinction from the narrow gauge of four feet eight inches and a half.” The watch-word, “charity,” is a term that has been much abused. “Charity is a grace of heavenly mien.” It is the “end of the commandment.” “The law was not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless, and the disobedient, etc.” It is love, in the New Testament sense of the term, as modified by all the essential elements of the Christian religion, so it is “the fulfilling of the law.” It is not passion, _but affection_. To my sensuous life all my passions belong. The brute has also a sensuous life. But man has, in addition to this, an intellectual life. Passion always passes away with its object, but affection remains to soften the heart years after its object is gone.

My intellectual nature is the field of all legitimate gospel operations with reference to the production of a Christian life and character. As a divine affection, charity or love springs out of union with God, or being made a “partaker of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lusts.” Such being the height of its bed-rock, it is said, “Every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God.” And it is also said, “He that saith I know him and keepeth not his commandments is a liar.” This strong language correlates with the fact that charity expresses the idea of love as an attribute of divine life, known as the life of God. It is an attribute belonging to those who have made the high attainment of a spiritual or mental condition which places them beyond the need of penal laws to restrain them from crime. Its _measure_ is the _love of God_. Its full import may be expressed in these words, _loving as God loves_.

After enumerating many of the Christian graces an apostle said, Above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness. So charity, or rather its possessor, is no willful truth “butcherer,” for charity believeth all things (_or all truth_); hopeth all things (_promised_); rejoiceth, not in iniquity, but in the truth. It has no “stock” in known error, for it “abounds in all knowledge and judgment,” and “approves things that are excellent.” It is noble and right to let “love,” or “charity have her perfect work,” to be, or rather try to be, as charitable as God himself; but it is absurd and preposterous to go beyond or try to be more charitable. “It is enough that the disciple be _as his master_.”

Men are guilty of this presumption when they, in feigned charity, go beyond the word of the Lord, or beyond the truth in their expressions of kindness.

There is a great deal of love in this world that lacks the elements of _perfectness_. It is not the “love of God,” or loving as God loves. It is not the attribute of a divine life. There is no charity in influencing a person, willfully, to stop short or go beyond the truth in Christian faith or obedience. There is no charity in giving a man money knowingly to purchase whisky to get drunk upon. Charity never conflicts with truth or right. On the contrary, it endeavors to bring all men to the standard of truth and rectitude.

The phrase “Broad-gauge” seems to have been gotten up to express the idea of an intelligent relaxation from “human creeds” as bonds of union and fellowship. In this sense we all ought to be the advocates of “Broad-gauge religion.” We should cultivate the spirit of gospel liberality until we utterly disregard and put away all human creeds.

It is a trite saying, that one extreme begets another; against this error we should guard with great caution. To succeed in religion, we must remember, always, that we have in the word of God a standard of truth and right that will always govern us according to heaven’s will. Many persons, forgetting this truth, have been led to conclude that departures from the word of truth, as a matter of “liberality,” or “broad-gauge religion,” are justifiable. And, as “liberalists,” or “broad-gauge Christians,” they are disposed to recognize all the existing divisions in faith and practice that are known in Christendom. They even go further and allow that somehow all are right, and will stand upon an equality in the righteous judgement of God. This is not perfect love. Charity, over and above a kindly feeling towards those who are in error, is unfaithfulness to the truth, to God, and to the very best interests of our humanity. It is, in all such cases, _love run mad_! A man should never get so broad in his religion as to be unfaithful to truth.

The phraseology has also been appropriated by skeptics and semi-infidels to popularize their own semi-infidel philosophy, which they love to denominate “free thought.” Deists, Pantheists and Atheists have seized upon the phrase and appropriated it to their ungodly speculations. It is true that others, in getting away from their old creeds, have run past the standard of truth and right. All this wildness in the _standardless_ field of thought, where Hobbes and other infidels reveled, without any guide save the civil law, has been denominated “Broad-gauge religion,” and “Liberalism.”

We should always remember that going beyond the truth and the eternal laws of right is _libertinism_ or _lawlessness_.

“Charity,” extending, or reaching out thus, is no longer “charity,” or “perfect love.” Such expressions of love are misdirected, and, if knowingly done, are blameworthy. Charity is governed by the perfect law of truth; when it is not destitute of its own divine nature it conducts us in the “_straight and narrow way_.”

“Long as of life the joyous hours remain, Let on this head unfading flowers reside, There bloom the vernal rose’s earliest pride; And when, our flames commissioned to destroy, Age step ’twixt Love and me, and intercept the joy; When my changed these locks no more shall know, And all its petty honors turn to snow; Then let me rightly spell of Nature’s ways; To Providence, to him my thoughts I’d raise, And love as he throughout remaining days.”

—_Gray._

We should cherish a kind feeling for all our fellows, and in doing this we should not forget our duty to point them to truth in word and example, to be ever faithful to truth.

There are two great fields of thought for the exercise of the Christian intellect of the present times. One is the corruptions of Roman Catholic religion, and the other is the corruptions of Protestant religions.

That both are great feeder-dams to infidelity and skepticism is demonstrated by the infidel productions of the day. The dogma of ecclesiastic authority set up in opposition to reason and scientific discovery is the _infidel’s devil_, and a very poor devil at that. For, when the Pope has interfered to settle a question it has often happened that his decisions were wrong.

On March 5, 1616, the congregation of the Index published a decree condemning as “false, unscriptural and destructive of Catholic truth,” the opinion that the earth moves round the sun. It is denied by Roman theologians that Paul IV., who set the Index at work and agreed with its decisions, was responsible for this decree, but the preponderance of evidence is against them. It is known that this Pope presided in a congregation of the Inquisition on February 25, 1616, in which, after this same opinion, that the sun is the center of our universe, had been described as “absurd, philosophically false and formally heretical, because expressly contrary to holy scripture;” and the opinion that the earth is not the center of the universe, but moves, and that daily, “absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith;” Cardinal Bellamine was appointed to visit Galileo, the astronomer, and order him to give up these false opinions under pain of imprisonment for refusal. It was thus that the congregation of the Index took action and published its decree a week later.

In 1633 Galileo, having continued to propagate his views, was called on by the Inquisition to retract and abjure, and the formal notice to him to do so states expressly that the declaration of 1616 was made by the Pope himself, and that resistance to it was, therefore, heresy, contrary to the doctrine of the Catholic and Apostolic Church. On being brought to trial, Galileo made a formal abjuration, and on June 30th Pope Urban VIII. ordered the publication of the sentence, thereby, according to Roman ecclesiastical law, making Galileo’s compulsory denial of the earth’s motion binding on all Christians as a theological doctrine. Infidels have a vast deal to say about such an abominable manifestation of ecclesiastic tyranny and unscientific and unscriptural nonsense. All intelligent Roman Catholics of to-day reject the judgment of Popes Paul IV. and Urban VIII. as absurd, and scientifically and scripturally false. There is not so much as a hint at papal authority found in the three old creeds known as the Apostles’, the Nicene and the Athanasian, nor in any ancient gloss upon them. Neither can we find in them any of the distinguishing special doctrines of the Church of Rome.

Christianity came from the hands of Christ and his apostles in all its perfections, and as long as infidels stop short of the New Testament itself, and short of Christ and his apostles, in their warfare, we may well believe that all their efforts to blot out Christianity will be vain. Protestants themselves have demurred as much as infidels against the errors of the Roman Catholic Church, and fully as much against the errors of each other as denominations. “Truth stands true to her God, man alone deviates.”

The greatest difficulty that Christianity ever encountered is the ignorance and imperfections of its own friends. Protestant errors are many and serious. But why should the genuine be discarded on account of the existence of the counterfeit? And why should we shut our eyes to the importance of the great work of establishing truth, to the destruction of all Catholic and Protestant errors of faith and practice by becoming the advocates of false charity through the adoption of “broad-gauge religion,” in a “broad-gauge church?” Infidels who, like Col. Ingersoll, assert that “no man can control his belief,” had better look in a glass and see themselves as others see them, before they _strive to_ conquer a victory for the _black __ demon_ of despair, by fastening the absurd philosophy of _fatalism_ upon all the world. If men can not help their belief, who is to blame? Surely, neither Roman Catholics, nor Protestants, nor those who managed “thumbscrews” and “hot irons,” and other condemned instruments of the dark ages, nor yet those who now live to be the “butt” of Colonel Ingersoll’s satire and ridicule. A kind feeling for all, and unfaithfulness to the truth—never!

PAPAL AUTHORITY IN THE BYGONE.—THE INFIDEL’S AMUSING ATTITUDE.

The doctrine of papal infallibility amounts to this: that the decisions of the Pope on faith and morals, being divinely inspired and infallible, are, when placed upon record, so much more holy Scripture. This infallibility dogma has been a great source of mischief and of unbelief. It has accomplished no good, but a great deal of harm. Some Roman theologians claim that the Popes have _only once_, up to the present time, spoken with the formalities necessary to make their utterances “_ex cathedra_” and infallibly binding, and that was when Pius the Ninth, on December 8, 1854, decreed the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary; which, if true, belongs to the realm of unpractical speculation. It was denied as heresy by orthodox Catholics, including _fourteen Popes_, for a thousand years, and is contrary to the well-nigh “unanimous consent of the fathers.” _See Dr. Pusey, Letter 1, to Newman, pp. 72-286._ To use such an engine but once in all the centuries, and then to accomplish so little, aside from furnishing infidels with something to say, is much like constructing a vessel of twenty thousand tons capacity to carry one man across the Atlantic. There is such a thing as Parthenogenesis known in nature. The Vatican decrees declare that the Christian religion came perfect from God’s hands; that it is not like a human science, such as medicine or mechanics, which can be improved or altered by the skill of man. In view of this conceded fact we have no kind of use for the decree of Pius the Ninth upon the “miraculous conception”—“Pope Pius decreed it.” Well, well, if Christianity really stood in need of such a decree it would not have been left off until December 8, 1854. It has been a bone for infidels to contend over from that time to the present. The New Testament is not responsible for it.

Men of sense, who are not already traditionized nor Christianized, find facts enough in the line of papal bulls and decrees to disgust them so thoroughly as to drive them at once to reject religion entirely. Sixtus the V., in 1590, declared, by a perpetual decree, an edition of the Vulgate, just then out, the sole authentic and standard text, to be received as such under pain of excommunication. He also decreed that future editions not conformed to it should have no credit nor authority. But its errors were so numerous that it was immediately called in, and a new Vulgate was published by Clement VIII., in 1592, differing, in several thousand places, from the one of 1590. This last publication was also issued under penalty of excommunication for any departure from it. So Roman Catholic faith rests very largely upon the assumed authority of the Pope, and this authority has often been exercised in the wrong, they themselves being witnesses. This authority, opposed to human progress, has been and is one of the greatest feeders to Atheism and infidelity. Mr. Draper, in his work entitled “Conflict between Religion and Science,” wishes his readers to understand that he uses the term Christianity in the sense of Roman Catholicism. The entire work is one grand scientific effort against popecraft and priestcraft. His work is well worth a reading; but it is to be remembered by all who would do Mr. Draper justice that his great antagonist is the Roman Catholic Church. Will she defend herself against the charge of being in conflict with science? Is she in the way of human progress? How does she compare with Protestants in morality and virtue?

Let us give you a few figures, by the way of negative evidence, upon the question of comparative morality, remembering that it is a sad necessity of our nature to have to determine which of us has the least of moral miseries in order that we may know which has the most of virtue. Let this be as it may, these moral miseries show themselves under two principal phases, acts of profligacy and acts of violence; corrupt manners and assassinations. Here is what we read in Jonnes:

Assassinations And Attempts To Assassinate In Europe.

Protestant—Scotland, 1835, 1 for 270,000 Protestant—England, 1 for 178,000 Protestant—Low Countries, 1824, 1 for 163,000 Protestant—Prussia, 1824, 1 for 100,000 Catholic States—Austria, 1809, 1 for 57,000 Catholic—Spain, 1826, 1 for 4,113 Catholic—Naples, 1 for 2,750 Catholic—Roman States, 1 for 750

_Jonnes, vol. 2, p. 257._