E.—REFORM.
Time is the test of truth; and the fallacies of the “Brotherhood in Christ” plan have been abundantly demonstrated by their consequences. Instead of being a bond of union, the doctrine of renunciation has been found to be a root of discord and rancor, and in times of need the fellowship of its converts has proved a most rotten staff. Even the wretches who betrayed their friends to the spies of the Holy Inquisition had no difficulty in palliating the infamy of their conduct with the sanction of scriptural precepts. For centuries the appeals of martyrs to the cause of freedom and Freethought have been answered with the advice of Christian submission to the “powers that be,” and our modern pharisees rarely fail to reprove the “worldliness” of a poor neighbor’s lament for the loss of his earthly possessions.
The founder of “Positivism,” the Religion of Humanity, proposes to dedicate the days of the year to the leaders of progress, and inscribe our places of worship with the names of discoverers, reformers, and philosophers rather than of bigots and world-despising saints. And for the sake of those who would not wish to repeat the mistake of sacrificing [[182]]the present to the past, the builders of those sanctuaries should add a temple of Friendship. From the adoration of self-torturing fanatics, from the worship of sorrow and the love of enemies, mankind will at last revert to the ancestral plan of elective affinities, and the dread of preferring natural to theological duties will not much longer prevent our fellow-men from recognizing their obligations to their earthly benefactors.