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.
This society was little known till the year 1808, when they advertised their intention of publicly inquiring into the existence of a being called the devil. So singular a notice could not fail of drawing a considerable number of persons to their assembly, especially on a Sunday morning. The landlord of the house at which they met in the old 'Change, alarmed for his personal security, obliged them to remove, and they engaged the large room at the Paul's Head, Cateaton street. Here the magistracy interfered, but as they had taken the precaution to license themselves under the toleration act, nothing could be done legally to restrain them. Since then they have set up a periodical publication under the title of the "Free-thinking Christian's Magazine," in which they profess to disseminate Christian, moral, and philosophical truth, and they have erected a handsome meeting-house in the crescent behind Jewin street, Cripplegate, where this weekly assembly, consisting of members and strangers, is said to amount to between four and five hundred persons.
The following appears to be the latest summary of their opinions: "The Christian religion," they say, "consists in the worship of one God, eternal, just, and good, and in an obedience to the commands of Jesus, his messenger on earth, who taught the wicked to repent of the error of their ways and that God was ever ready to receive them. Forms and ordinances, parade and show, are no points of his system, but virtue and purity of heart can alone prepare man for a blissful existence beyond the grave, the wisdom and hope of which were furnished by the resurrection of the teacher of their faith, a member of earth and an heir of immortality."—Free-thinking Christians' Magazine; Hannah Adams's Dictionary of all Religions, page 82.