I. THE BIBLE SANCTIONS MURDER.
We find a scriptural warrant for the highest crime known to the law,—that of murder. God is represented as saying to his holy people, "Go ye out and slay every man his brother, every man his companion, and every man his neighbor" (Exod. xxii. 27). And, relative to the dissenter from the faith, he is represented as saying, "Ye shall stone him with stones that he die." Now, if such texts are not calculated to foster the spirit of murder, and to extinguish the natural repugnance to cruelty and bloodshed in the human mind, we can conceive of no language that would have such an effect, especially when it is taken in connection with Christ's injunction, "He that hath not a sword, let him sell his coat, and buy one."
And the practical lives of Christian professors, from the earliest establishment of the Church, furnishes proof of the demoralizing influence of such texts as these upon the readers of the Bible. These injunctions to murder and slaughter have been faithfully obeyed; and the effect has been to submerge Christendom in a sea of blood. Look, for proof, at the war among the churches for many years about the doctrine of the Eucharist, which resulted in the destruction of three hundred thousand lives; the fight about images, in which fifty thousand men, women, and children were murdered; the war of a dozen churches against the sect of the Manicheans in the ninth century (A.D. 845) about some trivial doctrine of the Christian creed, and which left on the battle-field no less than a hundred thousand murdered human beings; the Church schism, in the time of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, followed by the war of the Hussites, which resulted in a bloody slaughter of a hundred and fifty thousand fellow-Christians; the war known as "The Holy Inquisition," established in the year 1208, made a record in its history of human butchery of two hundred thousand Christian professors who had to atone in blood for assuming the liberty to differ from the popular creed; and, finally, the Thirty Years' war which strewed the earth with bloody corpses to the frightful number of five millions of human beings, The whole makes a sum total of eighteen millions, a large portion of which were Christian professors,—all the work of Christian hands and Christian churches, professed followers of the "Prince of peace." But, if the text quoted above means any thing (requiring his followers to buy swords), he appears also to have been the Prince of war. All the bloody tragedies cited above, which form but a small number of the cases which indelibly stain the records of the Christian Church,' show how faithfully Christian professors have lived out the demoralizing injunctions of their Bible, and prove that the Book has been a powerful lever for evil as well as for good. Even the shocking cruelties displayed in the execution of these bloody tragedies finds a warrant in the Bible. In their efforts to carry out the Bible injunction to exterminate heretics, no species of cruelty was left untried as a punishment for the honest dissenter from the faith. The sword of the Church was unsheathed, and plunged with a fierce and relentless ferocity into the bosoms and bowels of their neighbors and fellow-Christian professors, whose only offense was that of believing and worshiping God according to the dictates of their consciences. With a burning hatred for heretics, stimulated by reading the Bible injunction to put them to death in a cruel manner, they leaped upon them with the ferocity of tigers, and tortured them to death with every species of cruelty their ingenuity could invent. They tied them to the whipping-post, or chained them to the fiery fagot; lacerated their bodies; cut their tongues from their mouths; tore their flesh from their bones with iron hooks, tongs, and pincers; cut off their lips, and tore out their tongues, so that their piercing cries and heart-rending agonies could convey no intelligible sound; tore their nails from their fingers, and thrust needles into the bleeding wounds; melted red-hot metal, and poured it down their throats; plucked out their eyes, and threw them to beasts; and, in some cases, their bodies were "stretched upon the rack, and flayed alive, or torn limb from limb". But I forbear: the picture is too shocking. Oh that the waves of oblivion could roll over and cover such deeds of cruelty for ever! I rejoice that the age for such atrocities is passed, and, I trust, can never return. I hope the churches will never again hold the reins of government, and shape all the laws of the country. The reason we do not witness such horrible scenes now is, that many church-members have outgrown their Bible; and, if there are any who have not, they are restrained by laws enacted by liberal minds of too much good feeling and good sense to permit the churches to thus cruelly persecute each other, or those who conscientiously differ from them. I have stated that the shocking cruelties and barbarities practiced by Christians upon each other in past ages, find a warrant in the Bible. The act of David, "the man after God's own heart," in placing the children of Ammon under saws and harrows of iron, is scarcely equaled in atrocity by any act recorded in the history of the Fiji cannibals. It is revolting to every impulse of benevolence, every feeling of humanity, and all ideas of mercy or justice. And his wicked prayer, contained in the one hundred and ninth Psalm, breathes forth the same spirit. It is a series of fiendish imprecations poured out upon the heads of those who differed from his creed, and worshiped a different God. We will quote some of his language: "Set thou a wicked man over him. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him; let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow; let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg; let his posterity be cut off, and their name blotted out; let the extortioner get all that he hath; let his prayer become sin; let the stranger spoil his land; let not the sin of his mother be blotted out."
Here is a series of most malignant imprecations issuing from a mind rankling and burning with a feeling of implacable revenge, which is shocking to contemplate. It is murderous in its intent, and demoralizing in its effect upon those who accept it as being in accordance with the will of God. No person can contemplate the cruelties practiced by this "man of God" upon his unoffending neighbors, or read his vengeful prayer, and accept it as emanating from "the man after God's own heart," without having his moral strength and resolution weakened, his moral standard lowered, and his ideas of the moral perfection of Deity degraded. And it was by deriving their conceptions of God from such a source that the Christian world has come to entertain such low, belittling, and dishonorable views of "the Supreme Ruler of the universe," as is shown in their preaching and their writings; and it furnishes their children with a low and imperfect standard of morality. And this must always be the condition of things while the Bible, with its numerous bad examples and bad morality, is accepted as a guide by those teachers and preachers who mold the moral sentiments of the people. It will be observed, that "the man after God's own heart" invokes the divine vengeance upon innocent children, and prays that they may beg and starve, merely because their father was not a worshiper of the savage Jewish Jehovah which exhibits a mind devoid of all idea of justice or humanity.
And this is a part of the religion of the Christian's "Holy Bible," claimed as the product of divine inspiration. Now, who can not see that such a religion as this is calculated to engender bad feelings, bad ideas, and bad morals, and to repress the lofty moral emotions of the human mind?