Chapter 4

We should not be surprised when wicked men of every grade of character assail our religion, for its great Author erected a standard of duty too perfect to suit their unruly passions and lusts. Opposition to Christianity is the natural correllate of an unregenerated heart. This fact was the cause of all the sufferings of the primitive Christians, not the only cause, but the _first_ and _leading_ cause. One striking circumstance is worthy of notice, which is, that they have censured Christians for their zeal with an unsparing tongue, and, at the same time, they have shown as much if not more vehemence and obstinacy in their own good-for-nothing opposition. Every kind of opposition has been manifested which the ingenuity of man could dictate. Indeed, there is little urged against Christianity in our day that is original. Almost every cavil and argument may be traced to Voltaire, Porphyry, Celsus and Julian, the old enemies of the Christ. Infidels, who dislike (will you hear it?) the labor and trouble of investigating the question of the claims of the Christian religion upon their intelligence, seize with avidity upon the labors of others and parade them before the public mind. Just now there is no question put so often by men who feign to be unbelievers as, "What do you think of Colonel Ingersoll?" "He stirs you up." The little city of Logansport was favored not a great while in the past with a visit and lecture from the Colonel. After the lecture was over some half a dozen gentlemen were taking a lunch at an eating restaurant, and there was one very talkative creature in the group who had much to say of the Colonel's effort and of the "unscientific and absurd character of the Bible." Finally, one noble-hearted gentleman said to the boasting skeptic, Now you have said a great deal about the Bible, and I venture the assertion that you can't quote one verse that is in it. I challenge you to do it. Just give us one, long or short, from any chapter in all the Bible. The man failed. He couldn't do it. Then, said the Christian gentleman, you fellows are always talking about science and about the "unscientific character of the Bible," so I will now ask you one of the most simple questions known in science, and we will see whether you will answer it. It is this: How many teeth have you got in your mouth; how many does a man have? To the utter astonishment of the company the man failed again, and the company told him laughingly that he must treat to the cigars. Such fellows know comparatively nothing, and yet they are always championing their men, who contain all their knowledge and do their thinking for them. Ask the infidel who his leaders are and he will point you to Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, etc. Are Christians always holding up their great minds? Suppose we test the merits of the case in this manner, then who are your infidels that will compare with Jesus Christ and his apostles? or, with such men, even, as Milton, Clarendon, Hale, Bacon, Boyle, Locke, Newton, Addison, Lyttleton, West, Johnson and Campbell? Where are your persons of such profound understanding? To compare such persons as these with Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon and Thomas Paine, is as silly as to compare manhood with infancy. No infidels try Christianity upon its own merits. If they were candid men they would separate Christianity from all foreign and irrelative circumstances, and test its evidences seriously, as the magnitude of the question deserves. Apply the same unbelief to the common and ancient records of history and you will at once get the credit of being rash and foolish. The scoffs and sarcasms and sophistries of infidels are not from a love of truth. Whatever the cause or causes may be, one thing is certain, and that is, that they do not understand Christianity itself, nor the nature and magnitude of its evidences. They condemn that which they never gave themselves the trouble to investigate.

Whoever investigates the religion of Jesus Christ will find that the character of its founder is far superior to any other character, and his apostles far superior to any other fishermen. To believe that his religion is of simple human origin is like believing that a first-class ship of war is the invention of a child. "The majesty of Christ and the divinity of his religion appears in nothing more than this, that in proportion to our acquaintance with the Scriptures of the New Testament does the light of truth shine upon the mind." The seeming successes of infidelity, and the multitude of apostates scattered over our country, makes us naturally more anxious to warn the rising generation against the errors of those who would mislead them. But there is nothing in these fearful signs of the times to shake our faith or excite our fears, because the faithful Bible student finds the condition of our world just such as the Scriptures have foretold. All the surroundings that characterize the conduct of infidels; their expertness in ridicule; their extreme folly and resoluteness; their licentiousness and anxiety for change in laws as well as society; the snares laid out by them to catch the unsteadfast, and their vain professions to free the world from slavery, while they themselves are in bondage to corruption, are drawn by the divine pencil of prophecy with so much exactness that "he who runs may read." By examining the word of God you will find that the _Free-thinkers_ of our country, the _Illuminati_ of Germany, Darwin, Strauss, Huxley, Tyndal, Renan, and the man of our own land who is most noted in our midst for oratorical accomplishments without logic, argument or truthfulness of statements touching the Christian religion, are all present evidences of the divinity of the prophetic words of the New Testament.

WOMAN AND HER RANK.

I presume that Adam knew nothing of the subject of woman's inferiority. I do not think that he ever said to Eve, Don't soar so high nor dive so deep into philosophy, science and religion, because you are a woman. I don't think he ever said to his wife, Astronomy is beyond your reach, nor Science is too deep for your slender powers.

Home is a woman's empire, but this very fact demands that her intellectual powers should not be inferior to her husband's. A vast majority of people have their minds influenced and their characters formed by their mothers. Foolish and silly, as well as lazy women generally, have their counterparts in their offspring. By following the outlines of nature in her facts we have become scientific, and all the wisdom we can get from this source will be still more advantageous. The woman's physical nature should ever teach us that she is not to be taxed with physical labor beyond her strength and sphere of life. Such taxation is barbarism and savageness. This heathenism always _destroys home_. The American Indian has no home; he lives an idle, lazy, good-for-nothing life, while his wife, or woman, as the case may be, does all the drudgery. For this _very reason_ he was never elevated, as a general rule, above a shot-gun and a hound dog, and never had a home superior to Doolittle's birth-place, which, he said, was "at Cape Cod, Nantucket, and all along up and down the shore."

It is said that the English is the only language in which the word "home" occurs. What infamous hours many bachelors keep; many of them die of dissipation because they have no mother, sister, or wife to look after them and render their homes pleasant and attractive. What an odd looking thing a house is without a female occupant. "Won't you tarry awhile?" "Can't you stay awhile?" "O, don't be in a hurry." Such is often heard, and the reply is, "No, I am much obliged to you, I must go, for my mother, my sister, or my wife, is expecting me." But for these sentiments he would stay until midnight; so some unmarried men are the most contemptible _bores_. When you get acquainted with them you naturally hate to see them coming. Some married men fall into the same way of _boring_ their neighbors. When I see a man doing this I suspect that he has lost his love of home associations, and ask myself the question, What is the trouble?

There is always an adequate cause for every effect. Modern "Freeloveism" looks to the annihilation of home, for the reason that it proposes no definite home for male or female. No people destitute of the light of the Bible ever possessed a home, such an one as ours.

One of the great abominations of infidelity is often met within the advocacy of _Freeloveism_, and matrimony binding at the option, simply, of the parties. What is a vagabond on the earth but a man without a home? Slaves have been the same in every age, and a government that does everything for its subjects will always keep them in degradation. A father and mother who would not effectually ruin their children must not raise them in indolence and affluence, doing everything for them and teaching them nothing in a practical way; even so a woman must be elevated until her post is one of honor. You might as well tie a man hand and foot, and command him to run a race, as to deprive women or others of their natural rights, and then expect them to rise or progress the same as those who are in the full possession of all their liberties. Give to all freedom and scope for their talents, and allow them to rise or fall at pleasure, but ever point them upward and onward.

Women were slaves in Egypt, in Babylon, in Ninevah, in Persia, in Greece and Rome, and all those nations _sunk_. She is now a slave in China, in India and in Turkey.

Adam said: "She is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman for she was taken from man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh."

Say what you will of gallantry, and of the flattery of the sex, but here you have the intelligent and affectionate language of the first man, which, for beauty and love, as well as simplicity, has never been surpassed. "She is bone of my bone," and consequently of my own rank. We are one. She is flesh of my flesh and therefore is my equal. "She shall be called woman," that is, a female man.

It is authoritatively asserted that the Hebrew term translated woman signifies a female man, just as in Latin "equa" is the feminine of "equus," "Julia" is the feminine of "Julius." But if she was a female man she possessed all the attributes of humanity, and therefore her dignity was and is the same as the other sex. Adam gave to Eve a position, an honorable position, for he took her in as a part of himself. His honor was her honor, his rank was her rank, and she was his helpmeet. My ideal woman is not one who is good for nothing, "bred only and polished to the taste of lustful appetence; to sing, to dance, to dress, to troll the tongue and roll the eye." She should be a helpmeet as termed in the Bible. She should be a creature not too bright and good to labor in her proper sphere, that is, to prepare daily food, serve it up and guide the house. A high legal dignitary placed an epitaph upon the tomb of his wife, that read: "An excellent woman and a good cook."

When a stout, able-bodied woman sits herself down and whines out, "I can't work," she gets down very low. What is such a woman good for?

It has been said that woman is man's imaginative side. Well, I imagine that there is a great deal of truth in the remark so far as many men are concerned, and this simple fact has ruined many a wife. A woman may operate very well upon a man's imagination, but that will never help him to make a living.

Let woman be, to all intents and purposes, the equal of man, trained for the work of every-day life, for this is what the word education means. Then throw open to her all the employments lying within her strength, which are now monopolized by men, and let this new advantage work a reformation in her education. What is her education even now, and in our own country? Instead of being educated for health and long life, they are trained in many instances for disease and a premature death. The history of woman, as woman, is not in our reach; at least I am not prepared to say it has been written. I wish it had, for I am persuaded that woman has been the great redeeming element upon the human side of bliss, without which our world could not exist.

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"And they charge that he (Thomas Paine) was a drunkard. That is another falsehood. He drank liquor in his day, as did the preachers. It was no unusual thing for the preacher going home to stop in a tavern and take a drink of hot rum with a deacon, and it was no unusual thing for the deacon to help the preacher home."--_Ingersoll._

Therefore, if a man stops at a hotel and drinks till he has to be helped home, he is no drunkard? No! Ingersoll is a temperance man (?) and he knows.

THE TESTIMONY OF AN INFIDEL IN WHOSE HEART EVERY SPARK OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE WAS NOT EXTINGUISHED.

J.J. Rousseau says: The gospel, that divine book, the only one necessary to a Christian, and the most useful of all to the man who may not be one, only requires reflection upon it to impress the mind with love of its author and resolution to fulfill his precepts. Virtue never spoke in gentler terms; the profoundest wisdom was never uttered with greater energy or more simplicity. It is impossible to rise from the reading of it without feeling a moral improvement. Look at the books of the philosophers with all their pomp, how little they are compared with this. Shall we say that the history of the gospel is a pure fiction? This is not the style of fiction, and the history of Socrates, which nobody doubts, rests upon less evidence than that of Jesus Christ; and, after all, this is but shifting the difficulty, not answering it. The supposition that several persons had united to fabricate this book, is more inconceivable than that one person should have supplied the subject of it. The spirit which it breathes, the morality which it inculcates, could never have been the invention of Jewish authors, and the gospel possesses characters of truth so striking, so perfectly inimitable, that the inventor would be a more astonishing object than the hero.--_J.J. Rousseau, vol. 36, pp. 36, 39._

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Have infidels been martyred on account of their infidelity? Men are not so foolish as to have themselves devoured by wild beasts or perish in slow fires rather than recant from a theory they never espoused, Col. Ingersoll to the contrary, _notwithstanding_. Men do not prefer red-hot iron chains to denying a Lord in whom they never believed. Infidels have nothing to lose by recanting. Colonel Ingersoll says, "I think I would. There is not much of the martyr about me," _so we think of the Colonel_!

THE JEWISH RELIGION AND INSTITUTIONS KNOWN AMONG HEATHEN WRITERS.

BY HENRY KETT, B.D.,

_Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford. Published first in 1812._

"The transactions and literature of the ancient Jews were too remarkable to escape the attention of the learned and inquisitive Pagans when Judea became a province of the Roman Empire. Many particulars relative to the eminent character of Joseph as a minister to Pharaoh, and as an inspired prophet, to the emigration of the Jews from Egypt, their miraculous passage through the Red Sea, their settlement in the Holy Land, the institutions and ceremonies of the law, the splendor of Jerusalem in its most flourishing times, the magnificence of the temple, and the supreme, eternal and immutable nature of their worship, are related by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus and Justin."

CENTURIES BEFORE CHRIST.

The fragments of Sanchoniathon, the most ancient historian of Phenicia, who is supposed to have flourished not long after the death of Moses, confirms the Bible account of the origin of the world and of many men and places mentioned in the Pentateuch. Berosus, the Chaldean, and Manetho, the Egyptian, who lived in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, represent several circumstances known in the accounts given by Moses. They wrote about the time when the Old Testament was translated into Greek. Their evidence, to say the least, shows the honor that was paid by the most learned persons of the East to the records of the Bible.

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I know the Bible is inspired, because it finds me at greater depths of my being than any other book.--_Coleridge._

Transcriber's Note

The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected.