Chapter 3

In ancient times a grand safeguard against this debasing practice was found in the law that said, "Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of my people." This evil, like all others, when it becomes a strong habit, is well calculated to stir up anger, and wrath, and hatred; to stir up the passions, and destroy confidence, which is always and only disastrous to the social state. This growing evil needs to be checked by some means, otherwise our country will experience tumults growing out of maddened party ambition, and party interests, which will cause disaster and grief. The ballot-box needs to be guarded with wise and severe laws, because it is the pivotal wheel in our government. And next to this, because of the relation it sustains to our government's welfare, is the reputation of our public officials. I would not screen them from their just deserts, but I do say that the leaders in political affairs should be, in common with all others, too high-minded to indulge in slandering each other, as many are in the habit of doing. It reminds me in some of our political campaigns of the cursing-matches of the Popes, in some of the councils that were held during the dark ages. It is possible that we have in Indiana, and perhaps in some of the other states, sufficient law upon the subjects of slander, but law that is disregarded, being seldom enforced, amounts to nothing. Then, there is a disposition growing out of the pride of character to disregard the slanderer's tongue. Yet licentiousness tends to civil and social ruin all the same. That is to say, it destroys confidence, breeds retaliation and corruption, and inflames all the baser passions known in the dying agonies of a civil government. As an American citizen I would warn our people to manufacture all the public sentiment possible against this low, vile, and debasing practice, by pleading with our countrymen against it. And let us never hold our peace until we shall have thrown such safeguard around our ballot-box as will put an end to all the abominable corruptions that now threaten our existence as a free people. Is it true of us, that we carry the seeds of our own destruction as a nation in our own bosom? Are we to die as a nation, over the ballot-box? Shall we be so foolish? Let statesmen and politicians look well to the essential elements of the nation's life, by the advocacy of reform at this point where reform is most needed. And let Christians of every name plead for morality as an essential qualification for a place at the head of so great affairs as belong of right to the people of counties, states and nation. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. It is time for us to look after the moral elements of every man's life who proposes himself as a candidate for office in our midst, but we can well afford to be satisfied with the truth. Shall we look to this?

While we pray as Christians for such rulers and authorities as will look to the permanent and lasting interests of our country, let us vote as we pray. Do we pray one way and vote another? If so, let us repent. Do we pray for righteous rulers and for a good government and then vote for profane, wicked men; for men of intemperate habits, men who are perfectly indifferent to the moral welfare of our country; men who will disregard the welfare of the nation by neglecting the elements of national greatness? If political parties triumph in this government through slander, trickery, whisky and corruption, and continue to do so, the time will inevitably come when we will realize the facts of national ruin. We might as well think of a man having good health and living long upon the earth who takes poison into his stomach continually, as to think of future glory as a nation if we carry out our purposes by dishonest, illegal measures and by railing, in a slanderous and unjustifiable manner, against the best men of the nation. It has been said that political parties are necessary as checks to corruption, but when parties themselves indulge in all manner of corruption in order to succeed as parties, they are no longer checks, but abettors of corruption.

Let the preachers, whose business it is to reprove sin, and who have been kept from taking the risk of being shut out of Paradise, by being kept out of politics(?) open their mouths and be heard all over this country against all these immoral, vile practices indulged as a means of political success. The ignorant, fossilized partisan who looks no higher than party will perhaps raise a yell of indignation against them, but at the same time he will continue the use of the same old argument, viz: the pool of politics is too filthy for preachers to meddle with. Is it a filthy pool? Then let us bring all the purifying elements of the nation to bear upon it and see if there is anything in it besides corruption. If there is not, the sooner we find it out the better, and if there is, the sooner we get it separated from its corruption the better.

THE RELIGION AND SOCIETY OF GREECE.

HOW DOES IT COMPARE WITH OURS.

From the Egyptians and other nations to whom the Grecians were indebted for their earliest laws, they derived their established religion. To the worship of the twelve principal divinities the gratitude of the succeeding ages added the deification of heroes and legislators renowned for their important services to society. Various degrees of adoration were paid to the gods and to the souls of departed heroes. Temples were erected, festivals were instituted, games were celebrated, and sacrifices were offered with more or less pomp and magnificence to them all. A regular gradation of immortal beings was acknowledged to preside throughout universal nature from the Naiad, who was adored as the tutelary guardian of a stream to Jupiter, the father of gods and men, who ruled with Supreme power over heaven and earth.

The religion of the people extended little beyond the external honors paid to the gods of their country and the attendance upon sacrifices and processions. The sacred ceremonies were magnificent and public, except that the votaries of Bacchus and Ceres were indulged in their secret mysteries. The festivals were observed with every circumstance of pomp and splendor to charm the eye and please the imagination. A sacrifice was a feast attended with gayety and even licentiousness. Every temple was the resort of the idle and the dissolute, and the shrines of the Cyprian Venus and the Athenian Minerva could attest that devotion, far from being a pure and exalted exercise of the mind, was only the introduction to dissoluteness and debauchery.

The northern regions of Greece were particularly renowned for temples from which oracles were issued. The temple of Apollo at Delphi, situated upon a lofty rock near Parnassus, and that of Jupiter in the groves of Dodona, were celebrated for the responses of the Pythia and the priests; they were held in the greatest veneration for many ages, and their oracles were consulted even in the most enlightened times by philosophers themselves, who, in this instance, as well as many others, conformed to the popular superstitions.

The spirit of the religion of ancient Greece was included in these principles, that the worship of the gods was of superior obligation and importance to all other duties, and that they frequently displayed their power in this world in the punishment of the bad and the prosperity of the virtuous. Such were the opinions inculcated by the most celebrated philosophers and poets but the common people, more gratified by the fictions of the received mythology, than by tenets of pure morals, found in the actions recorded of their gods and goddesses a sufficient justification of every species of licentiousness. With respect to a future state of existence, the philosophers themselves appear to have fluctuated in uncertainty, as may be collected from the sentiments of Socrates. The poets inculcated a belief in Tartarus and Elysium. They have drawn a picture of Tartarus in the most gloomy and horrific colors, where men, who had been remarkable for impiety to the gods, such as Tantalus, Tityus and Sisyphus, were tormented with a variety of misery ingeniously adapted to their crimes.

The prospect of Elysium is beautiful and inviting, as described by Homer, Hesiod and Pindar. In that delightful region there is no inclement weather, but the soft zephyrs blow from the ocean to refresh the inhabitants who live without care and anxiety; there the sky is always serene and the sunshine is perpetual. The earth yields delicious fruits for their sustenance three times per year. But these enjoyments were confined to the persons who were of rank and distinction. Their Elysium was a sensual heaven. How very different is the Christian's future happy home?

Proteus informed Menelaus that he would be conveyed to the Islands of the Blessed, because he was the husband of Helen, and the son-in-law of Jupiter. No incentives to goodness from the consideration of a future state are held out by the older poets to the female sex, or to the ignoble or common people, however pure their conduct or exemplary their virtue. In later times we find that Pindar extends his rewards to good men in general; but Euripides is sometimes skeptical, and Iphigenia without hesitation expresses her disbelief of the popular mythology.

The learned Jortin says, It gives us pleasure to trace in Homer the important doctrine of a supreme God, a providence, and a free agency in man, supposed to be consistent with fate or destiny; a difference between moral good and evil, inferior gods or angels, some favorable to men, others malevolent, and the immortality of the soul; but it gives us pain to find these notions so miserably corrupted that they must have had a very weak influence to excite men to virtue and deter them from crime.--Jortin, Dissertation vi, p. 245.

This observation may be applied to the state of opinions even in the most enlightened times of Greece, when the credulity and ignorance of the common people, and the errors and doubts of the greatest philosophers, proved the _necessity_ and the importance of the Christian religion.

The possible attainments of a religious nature were very different from ours. In the times of Lycurgus there were two hereditary kings or presidents; their power was controlled by Lycurgus, through the gift of equal authority to twenty-eight senators. The two kings commanded the armies and high-priests of the temples. The senators were the executive and legislative council of the state; with them the laws originated. The assembly of the people elected the senators by saying yes or no to the measures proposed to them, but had no right to discuss their propriety--were not allowed the privilege.

Lycurgus allowed every family an equal amount of land; prohibited the use of gold and silver, and made iron money the only currency of the country, in order to check the avarice of the people. He forbade foreign travel in order to retain the morals of his people, or keep them from the corruptions of other nations. To produce a hardy people, he required the women to indulge in all the athletic exercises of his government. The children were inspected as soon as they were born, and those considered worthy were handed over to the public nurses, and the unworthy, that is, the deformed and sickly, were taken out and left in the woods and upon the mountains to perish. All the children of the Spartans were considered as the property of the state, and their education consisted in accustoming them to endure the cravings of hunger and thirst, with the scourge of discipline and every degree of suffering. The business of Spartans consisted in preparing themselves for war. They were disciplined in such a manner that it was necessary to curb them constantly, lest they should rashly undertake to make conquests. Out of this character of the Greeks arose that old saying, "When Greek meets Greek then comes the tug of war."

Many of the laws of the Spartans would, in this country at least, destroy all the finer feeling, and inaugurate a reign of despotism utterly at variance with Christianity. God's time to give to the inhabitants of the earth the glorious system of our holy religion was not until our race was educated, so as to be no longer the slaves of the reigning ambition and passion of such men as Lycurgus. The Savior's hour was several centuries from Lycurgus. Here it is appropriate to remark that God, in his providence with the nations of men, has during all the ages given to men just as fast as they were able to receive.

THE RELATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY TO HUMAN GREATNESS.

Some who deny the existence of spirit apart from matter allow that the greatness of man consists in his being an eating animal. Others allow that it lies in the fact that he is a working animal; while some have allowed that it was found in the fact that he is a fighting animal. And all _infidels_ agree in one thing, viz.: that man is simply an animal. But the animal nature of man is not to be considered, with any degree of truth, his crown of glory; his true greatness can not be identified with it. We are acquainted with animals that can eat more, and seem to do it with a greater relish. Others can run faster, jump higher, overcome greater weight and outdo him in all manner of physical labor. They are in possession of greater courage and fight with greater ferocity. So we must search for man's greatness outside of all these elements of character. Can we find no brighter, higher principles in the human character? To do so we must lay aside the animal nature of man altogether, and consider his character as it is blended with his intellectual and moral nature. In other words, we must consider man as man, not as an animal. We must consider him as a mind or spirit, and look to something higher than eating, laboring at the helm, and fighting, if we would discover his true greatness. In the improvement of mind is the true improvement of man in all his relations. Without this he is unqualified for all the various obligations that are necessary to be discharged in order to the development of true greatness. To be great a man must rise above the little, the mean, the vile and the degraded. To do this he must be educated, trained, until the fruits of a virtuous and useful intelligence are seen in his every-day life. Men are not considered great nor admired for the simple development of physical nature.

Infidels claim that cultivated literature is incompatible with religion. It has been said that a man of ardent piety can not produce a work that will live in after ages. This is a libel upon the truth, and upon him who said: "I am the truth."

Faith in God certainly places the maximum of greatness upon the human mind. The man who believes in the existence of mind apart from matter, and consequently looks upon death as a blessed state of rest to the good man which lies between the two great activities of time and eternity, and also believes in God and future rewards, has stronger motives to sound moral rectitude than the man who denies and ridicules these great truths. "The seat of law is the bosom of God, and her voice is the harmony of the world." It is respect for law that brings responsibilities home to the heart. Where there is no faith there is no respect for law pertaining to future rewards; and where this is the case there is no sense of moral obligations connecting man with the future retribution. So there is nothing resting upon an unbeliever's heart that will serve as a check upon his passions, and deter him from living with reference to the gratification of a mere animal nature. Skepticism, by shutting God out of the mind, destroys the very idea of law. Cicero's description of law is in these noble words: There is one true and original law conformable to reason and to nature, diffused over all, invariable, eternal, which calls to the fulfillment of duty and to abstinence from injustice, and which calls with that irresistible voice which is felt in all its authority wherever it is heard. This law can not be abolished or curtailed, nor affected in its sanctions by any law of man. A whole senate, a whole people, can not dispense from its paramount obligations. It requires no commentators to render it intelligible; nor is it different at Rome, at Athens, from what it was ages ago, nor is it different now from what it will be in ages to come. In all nations and in every age it has been, is, and forever will be the same--_one_, as God, its greatest author, _is one_. Man is man, _truly_, as he yields himself to this divine influence. Faith in God implants this law in the individual and national heart. Infidelity excludes its authority and influence and leaves man to the mercy of his undisciplined appetites. The fruits of infidelity have always been selfishness. The Christian believer regards himself as subordinated to a higher power, and labors under a sense of obligations which begets habits of self-control that are the life of morality. The ideal character of the Christian religion is such that faith in God and future rewards tend to make the earth life an image of the divine. This is the glory of both reason and faith, that it perceives the invisible. The students of the present have no trouble to see that the true greatness of the nation of antiquity was in their attribute of morality. Virtue and morality in an ancient ruler shines in history even across the dark ages, and makes glad the heart of the student of the nineteenth century. Faith in God has been the great leading thought in the rise of nations--that is, in reformations. Luther and Melancthon preceded Lord Bacon, Newton and Locke. The few stars that lit up the gloomy night that preceded the reformation and the revival of literature were lighted by the faith of God. Speaking of this fact, Dr. Goode says: "We behold a flood of noonday bursting all at once over every quarter of the horizon and dissipating the darkness of a thousand years; we behold mankind in almost every quarter of Europe, from the Carpathian Mountains to the pillars of Hercules, from the Tiber to the Vistula, waking as from a profound sleep to a life of activity and bold adventure; ignorance falling prostrate before advancing knowledge; brutality and barbarism giving way to science and polite letters; vice and anarchy to order and moral conduct.

"The modern opposers of Christianity, reasoning in a retro-grade motion--that is, going backwards--ascribe every improvement to science and philosophy, but it was religion that took the lead in _both_ the great revival of learning and the reformation. Aldhelm, Bede and Alcuin were three great Anglo-Saxon luminaries of the eighth century. Alcuin was the tutor and confidential friend of Charlemagne. Ingulph, made abbot of Croyland by William the Conquerer, was the bright light of the eleventh century. To him we are indebted for much that has come down to us. John of Salisbury, Girald the Cambrian, and the monk Adelard, and Robert of Reading were all religious leaders. The last two traveled in Egypt and Arabia, studied mathematics at Cordovia. Adelard translated Euclid out of Arabic into Latin. Such also was Alfred the Great, who was victorious in prosperity and adversity, as a legislator and philosopher, as a soldier and politician, a king and a Christian; he was the pride of princes, the flower of society and the delight of mankind." Roger Bacon, of notoriety on account of his superior knowledge of physics, was the bright Christian light of the thirteenth century. From this century all the way through the reformation the revival of faith in God was the revival of the golden age of learning or literature. When faith in God expired in France the entire social fabric steadily declined until all crumbled and fell as in the ruins of an earthquake. At the same time the inhabitants, loosened from the restraints which faith in the living God imposes, stained every part of the country with blood, and its glory and grandeur perished. It has been well said that the rights of man can not be well secured and enjoyed unless he is viewed in his relations to God. Where government aims at and subserves this end it is a blessing. Blackstone has well remarked that the whole should protect all its parts, and that every part should pay obedience to the will of the whole; or, in other words, that the community shall guard the rights of each individual member, and that in return for this protection each individual should submit to the law of the community. Faith lets God down into the hearts of lawmakers, and a sense of accountability to him must, most certainly, have a grand tendency to refine laws in their first conception. At least it happens to be true that wherever God is feared and law made the basis of the legislation and policy of a nation, that nation is, in fact, found to excel in those interests which are essential to a nation's well-being and glory. We challenge any man, or set of men, to an estimate of the comparative purity and morals of the nations of the earth. It is, and forever will be, found to correspond with their religious systems. The great conflict which is now going on in every civilized country is a conflict between faith and infidelity. For the triumph of light and truth the very throne of God is pledged. There may be difficulties to encounter, but these will be vanquished. As well undertake to pluck the sun and stars from the heavens, and spread the black curtain of one long protracted night over the world, as to try to quench the light of immortal truth as it flows freely into the hearts of so many millions and stirs up the deep fountains of human spirits.

* * * * *

"Owing to the attitude of the churches for the last fifteen hundred years truth-telling has not been a very lucrative business."--_Col. Ingersoll._

The Colonel's business _has been very lucrative_, therefore his _has not been a truth-telling business_.

THE THEORY OF THE ORIGINAL FREE-THINKERS.

_See how they have advanced!_ "Free-thinking Christians," a name lately adopted by a society which arose in the year 1799, and has ever since regularly assembled in London, calling itself _a church of God_ founded on the principles of free inquiry. Their first members separated from a congregation of Trinitarian dissenters in Parliament Court Chapel, Bishopgate street; they rejected the doctrine of the trinity, the atonement, and other points of Calvinism; then the sacraments and the immateriality of the soul; and lastly, the inspiration of the scriptures and public worship, for they have neither singing nor praying in their assemblies, and regard the Bible only as an authentic history.

These free-thinking Christians readily admit that, since their first assembling as a body, their sentiments have undergone considerable alteration on points of primary importance, but they contend that this is the natural consequence of free inquiry; that men who had heretofore been the slaves of error could not but advance in the attainment of truth after adopting a system which left thought _unrestrained and conscience free_, and they are still ready to renounce any opinion whenever it shall appear to them untenable. In consequence, their public meetings, which are mostly on Sunday forenoons, resemble rather a debating society than a Christian Church. The elder opens the meeting by stating the subject for consideration, and, at his call, several speakers successively address the meeting. It is not unusual to hear among them difference of opinion, and they are all prompt to controvert the current doctrines of the Christian world, to show their dissent from all sects and parties, and their aversion to the clergy and to Christian ministers of all denominations.