That Eurasian

by Aleph Bey

I often called on my friend Mr. Jasper. One morning he had just laid down his daily paper as I entered. “Did you see this?” he asked, “that the Pope and the Romish Church propose to dedicate England to the blessed Mother of God, and to St. Peter, to consecrate the whole country to the Holy Mother of God, and to the blessed Prince of the Apostles.” These are the exact words. Where does God come in? He, the Creator and Preserver of the universe, and, as we believe, of England, is left out, ignored altogether. How can one read such blasphemy as this without being shocked and angry? Such a proposal is not only an insult to all the Protestants and non-Christians of the British Empire, but is an outrageous imposition on the common sense of mankind! It is a sin against God. What must be the cheek and impudence of any men to dare propose such a thing as giving England over to the protection of a woman and a man who died nearly two thousand years ago, and taking it out of the hands of Almighty God?

The world is shocked at the idolatry of the heathen, but what is there in their systems worse than this deifying a woman and a man, and placing them above God? It is awful, profane, wicked and insulting! “Most holy!” No stronger words could be used of God himself, and these applied to a woman! As if the eternal, infinite God without a beginning, should have a mother, and she a woman, an ordinary finite being! I had rather be a heathen, an infidel, or even an atheist, than to be guilty of such sacrilege and driveling nonsense.

But who is this they set up as the most holy mother of God? A woman, a Jewess, the wife of Joseph. She was not known except as the mother of Jesus, no claim that she was more than an ordinary woman, but blessed in being the mother of an excellent son. Taking the New Testament, which gives the only account we have of her, it scarcely mentions her, and then without giving her any prominence. No allusion is made either to the time or place of her birth, or of her death. Even her son Jesus scarcely treats her with common respect. When he wandered away from his parents, and gave them great trouble and anxiety in finding him, he did not show her any special regard when they found him. At the marriage in Cana, when she spoke to him, he addressed her in the style of orientals, not even calling her mother, but “Woman! what have I to do with thee?” He apparently neglected her, and never mentions her, his own mother, and at his death he had little to say to her. The apostles seldom refer to her, and then only as the wife of Joseph, the mother of Jesus. I defy any one to show a word or line in the Bible to indicate she had any special regard shown to her by either her own son Jesus, or by his apostles. It was not until several centuries later that she began to be reverenced, then prayed to, and finally to be deified and worshiped in the place of God. Her virginity was of no importance to the evangelists, as they never refer to it, and the theory was not taught during the first three centuries. In the fourth century she was first styled the mother of God. Augustine repeatedly asserts that she was born in original sin. Anselm declares that the virgin herself when He (Jesus) was assumed was conceived in iniquity, and in sin did her mother conceive her, and with original sin was she born, because she, too, sinned in Adam, in whom all sinned. Others expressed the same views.

The explicit doctrine of the immaculate conception was first taught about 1140, at which time a festival was established in favor of it. Bernard of Clairvaux opposed this. “On the same principle,” said he, “you would be obliged to hold that the conception of her ancestors in ascending line was also a holy one, since otherwise she could not have descended from them worthily, and there would be festivals without number.” The Franciscans favored the feast of the conception without the immaculation, which the Dominicans under Aquinas opposed, and a severe and bitter controversy ensued between these rival sects. In 1854 Pope Pius IX promulgated the bull ineffabilii deus, by which the doctrine of the immaculate conception became an article of the Romish faith, to disbelieve which is heresy. All history shows that this doctrine is but a modern invention. There is not a particle of proof that God had anything to do with it. It is assumed that God could be born of a woman, then that he must be without a human father, his mother a virgin, and to improve the situation that she must be immaculate, born without sin. The frame-work once set up, the fabric has been completed by additions from century to century, until this obscure Jewish mother of the man Jesus has become in the Roman church the most holy mother of God. The very idea is sensuous, born of the flesh and not of the spirit, repulsive to a refined mind, and degrading to the character of God.

The whole structure reminds one of an English medieval house that has been added to and patched upon, and so changed that the first occupant, should he come to the earth, would not recognize his own birthplace. Without a doubt, if Mary and Jesus should rise from the dead, they would be astonished at their modern portraits; and Jesus, honest man that he was, would lash these libellers out of the house of God for making it a place of lies, deceit and merchandise. Among the heathen or pagan nations such an apotheosis was not uncommon or strange, but that an intelligent people, claiming to have exalted views of almighty God, should invent such wicked, degrading nonsense, is astonishing. It was customary among the earlier Romans to deify their rulers, and place their prominent men among the gods, but it was reserved for the modern Romans to bring God down and make him a man among men.

As to Jesus, he was the son of Joseph, as much as any man is the son of his father. Leo, the patriarch, published in A. D. 726, an edict prohibiting the worship of images, declaring that Jesus was but a mere man, born of his mother in the common way. It is evident that Jesus was an observant, studious youth, given to devout meditation, and on this account greatly esteemed by the ignorant people around him, and stimulated by this admiration, he became somewhat of a fanatic, but a good one, absorbed in grand and noble thoughts, and fell in with the Jewish notion of the redemption of their race from the enemy, but he took a still higher view, the deliverance of his people from their slavery to rites and ceremonies, from their hypocrisy and wickedness, to a life of purity and uprightness. A noble effort of a noble man, worthy of the world’s profoundest respect and admiration. Not a word was said while he was alive, or until centuries after his death, of his being God, or equal with God, or anything but a great teacher, a noble man, worthy to be styled the son of God, as all good men were and are the sons of God.

John Stuart Mill says of him—and his opinion is worth as much as the Pope’s—“A man charged with a special, express and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue.”

If Jesus was God he must have been conscious of it, and would have shown or disclosed the fact in his life, but nowhere did he do this. He was aware that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country, thus likening himself to a prophet. When in the course of time he was deified, and as they could not do away with God, they made Jesus a part of God, or one of three Gods in one, a medley the most absurd ever attempted by the human mind, and tried to explain it in the Athanasian creed, the most nonsensical puzzle of the world. If the greatest of modern lawyers or scholars should now go into any court on the globe and try to make a statement of a fact in such a jugglery of words and nonsense, he would at once be sent out of court or be committed to a lunatic asylum.

I cannot understand how religious people, believing in one God and accepting the Ten Commandments, can accept this doctrine. I cannot comprehend how, obeying the first and second commandments, any one can take the likeness of a man born of woman and put him before God, and worship him as God. How can they, believing in one God, the Eternal one, the Creator of all things, take this, as they say, part man and part God, created only a few centuries ago, deify him and worship him as the Creator, and place the eternal destiny of all the souls in the world in his hands! It is awful, the extent of human credulity! It is a monstrous assumption and a fearful sin, contrary to common sense and abhorrent to the moral and enlightened sense of mankind. How is it possible for Christian people to tolerate such a degradation of God! Yet Christian people wonder that men of intelligence and judgment do not accept without a murmur this heathenish jargon as truth, or bow down along with them in their idolatry.

The Romish Church very likely will soon drop God altogether, and put in His place the Jewish woman. One of its most prominent priests, in a sermon not long ago, said, “He prepared her virginal and celestial purity, for a mother defiled could not become the mother of the Most High. The Holy Virgin, even in her childhood, was more pleasing than all the cherubim and seraphim, and from infancy to the maturing maidenhood and womanhood, she grew more and more pure. By her sanctity she reigned over the heart of God. When the hour came the whole court of heaven was hushed, and the trinity listened for the answer of Mary, for without her consent the world could not have been redeemed.” What could possibly be more impudent and blasphemous than the statement that the Almighty maker of the Universe could not save mankind, whom he created, unless he got the consent of a woman!