In return, I suggested that I would gladly help in his work if he needed money, so his subscription paper came out, and he left, probably happier in his pocket than in his mind.
After he left I had some such thoughts as these with my books: All religions start with remarkable personages, gradually elevated into gods and semi-gods. A distinguished English writer says of Buddha, “It has almost invariably happened that the later followers of such a teacher have undone his work of moral reform. They have fallen back upon evidence of miraculous birth, upon signs and miracles and a superhuman translation from the world, so that gradually the founders in history become prodigies and extra natural, until the real doctrines shrink into mystical secrets, known only to the initiated disciples, while the vulgar turn the iconoclast into a mere idol.” Would not this apply to Christians as well?
Another says, “All popular theology, especially the scholastic, has a kind of appetite for absurdity and contradiction. If that theology went not beyond reason and common sense, her doctrines would appear too easy and familiar. Amazement must of necessity be raised, mystery affected; darkness and obscurity sought after and a foundation of merit afforded to the devout votaries, who desire an opportunity of subduing their rebellious reason by the belief in the most unintelligible sophisms.”
Ignorance begets superstition. Then easily comes a belief in the miraculous, and from this, creeds are formulated and faith placed in them. People have but little sense where their hearts are concerned, in religion as in love. There has never been a proposition so absurd or outrageous but has had believers in it. The more impossible and mysterious a thing can be made, the more readily it will be accepted. Mystery not only fascinates many people but makes them its devotees.
One of the strange things is, that people who demand a reason for everything about them, become dupes of that which is afar off, which they cannot know and which no mortal can explain. Objecting to that which is reasonable, they rush to accept that which is absurd and incredible. Human nature is fascinated by the mysterious. The clergy have to perform and preach something, and that something would lose all its awe and force if there were no mysticism in it. What would jugglery be if every one understood the tricks of the juggler?
If human testimony could establish anything, there has never been an error but could be made an apparent fact by any number of witnesses. Probably hundreds of thousands could be found to testify to miracles at Lourdes, and to any number of so-called miracles elsewhere, and here in India millions of people could be got to affirm the reality of events as improbable. Before science was known every mystery was a miracle. Miracles are not required to prove a truth. Facts need no authority. Yet a belief in a personal devil and a literal hell seems to be a necessity to restrain and influence those who could be reached in no other way. As ghost stories are used to frighten children to be quiet, so a belief in hell seems to be required for a certain class of people of infantile mental capacity, or of vicious propensities and habits, that no refined, moral instruction could reach. They are below philosophy, art or science, and must be cudgeled or frightened into decent behavior.
To the poor, who have never had a shilling ahead in their lives, a heaven paved with gold is the greatest thing to be desired. To those who have spent their lives in a one-roomed hut, a heavenly mansion of many rooms is their notion of comfort. To those whose lives have been filled with weeping and sorrow, a hereafter, where there shall be no more trouble or tears, is a hope of greatest bliss. To a Greenlander, a hell of fire would be heaven. One who has no intellect or capacity of thought, and hence no conscience, could not appreciate a spiritual condition of the soul as heaven or hell, and must be reached through his body, his material nature, which makes up ninety-nine hundredths of his being. He can realize no other than a hell of fire, a gehenna of physical torture. For such people a real, live demon of a devil, and a real hell fire, is an ecclesiastical necessity. Uneducated people, like children, must be kept in order by bugbears.
Said Dr. Johnson, “Sir, I would be a Catholic if I could, but an obstinate rationality prevents me.”
Strip Christianity of its mythology and its doctrines are simplicity itself. The moral law is as plain and simple as the multiplication table. Tell a child that two and two make four, and it needs no argument to make him believe it. The laws of God, either in the religious, moral or scientific world, are self-evident. Thou shalt not commit sin. Everybody, even the most illiterate savage, knows what it is to sin. The soul that sinneth, it shall die. This every one can readily comprehend. These two facts are enough, without any of the mumble of mysticism or any ecclesiastical trickery.
Says Savonarola, the martyr for freedom and truth, “God is essentially free, and the just man is the free man after the likeness of God. * * * The only true liberty consists in the desire for righteousness. * * * Dost thou desire liberty, O Florence? Citizens! would you be free? Love God, love one another, seek the general welfare. We despise no good works, nor rational laws, albeit they proceed from the most distant places, from philosophers or pagan empires, but we glean everywhere that which is good and true from all creeds, knowing that all goodness proceeds from God.”