If, however, Mr. Wendling challenges us to name an era or school in which the brotherhood of man (as we understand it) was taught before the time of the "Ideal Man," we unhesitatingly accept his challenge. It was taught by Buddha, Confucius, and numerous Pagan writers and philosophers long before the time of Jesus, for proof of which I refer the reader to Prof. Max Muller, Sir Wm. Jones, Lord, Amberly, &c, or to the writings themselves. Mr. Wendling desires us to "Tell me (him) why it is that all the creeds of Christendom and all the civilized nations unite in accepting the Ideal Man of Christianity despite the laws of climate and of race?"
I will answer this question in the Irishman's fashion, by asking one or two others. Tell me why it is, if Christianity is a divine system, and its author omnipotent, that, after eighteen centuries of active propagandism and aggression, compassing sea and land to make proselytes, it has to-day, according to recent statistics, but the meagre following of 399,200,000; while Buddhism has 405,600,000, and Brahmanism, Mohammedanism, etc., 500,000,000? Not nearly one-third of the world's population Christians, and the number rapidly diminishing! Tell me why it is, if Christianity is true that its foundations are melting down like wax in the light of Modern Science?' Tell me why it is, if the Bible is an inspired book, a divine revelation, that scarcely a single really eminent scientist or scholar of the present day accepts it as such? Tell me why it is that Atheism, Agnosticism, and Rationalism are making such rapid headway among the educated and intelligent, in every civilized country, both in the church and out of it? That the dogmas upon which Christianity rests are doomed; and as Froude, the historian, says, "Doctrines once fixed as a rock are now fluid as water?"* If the Bible can bear the light of science and historical research, how is it that these have already irrevocably sapped its very foundations; and that, as a consequence, the world is completely "honey-combed with infidelity," as a Toronto paper recently asserted of that city? The only answer Mr. Wendling can give to these questions is this: Because Christianity is unable to show its titles; because the Bible, being human in its origin, and, as a consequence, abounding in errors, both in science and morals, cannot bear the penetrating light of modern science and criticism.
* "Science and Theology, Ancient and Modern."—The
International Religio-Science Series.—Rose-Belford
Publishing Company, Toronto.
REPLY TO LYNCH
A CRUSHING (?) EDICT FROM ST. MICHAEL'S PALACE.
(Brutem Fulmen,) BY "Yours in Christ, (Signed), John Joseph Lynch."
Since Ingersoll's visit to Canada, Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto,-has also felt called upon to issue a bull against the Freethinkers; and, I propose to take this "bull" by the horns and lynch him (I may say sub rosa that the Bulls of Rome were long ago emasculated, yet, strangely enough, they still keep multiplying!) Under the circumstances, I think such a work (lynching the bull) will not be one wholly of supererogation,—though it may be more than a venial offence—indeed possibly a mortal sin for which I can get no absolution—to presume to criticise an Archbishop, and break a lance with his holy bull! I have, however, desperately resolved to take my chances of purgatory or limbo and go in for the bull.
Some of the Archbishop's flock, it would seem, had ventured to exercise the natural rights of man to the very modest extent of going to hear Mr. Ingersoll lecture, and also attending some of the meetings of the Toronto Liberal Association. Hence the fulmination of the aforesaid "bull," wherein his Grace, with that meekness, charity and toleration born of piety and infallibility, orders his people to "avoid all contact with these Freethinkers, their lectures and their writings," and threatens all Catholics who "go to the meetings and lectures of the Freethinkers or Atheists" with refusal of "absolution," which priestly function, he patronizingly tells them, he "reserves" to himself.
Now, may we not indulge the hope, in this age of reason, and land of at least professed liberty, and esoteric freedom of conscience, that every man, be he Catholic or Protestant, will look upon this attempted exercise of medieval bigotry and intolerance with practical disregard, and deserved contempt. As for the Freethinkers, they can afford to smile at the impotent Archbishop, who seems to imagine himself in the ninth instead of the nineteenth century, and in Rome or Spain instead of the Dominion of Canada. They can but look at him and his foolish "bull" as most ridiculous anachronisms. On reading this precious document it is plain that all this deputy "Vicegerent of God" requires to make him a first-class modern Torquemada is the power—the outward authority to carry out his subjective hatred of "brutalized" Freethinkers. But this, thanks to science, and consequent civilization, he has not got. The Rationalist can, therefore, at this day, afford to deride the malevolent, though fortunately impotent, ravings of this zealous bishop of an emasculated Church. He and his Church (the whole Christian Church) are, fortunately for humanity, shorn of their wonted strength, which, in the past, they have used with such fiendish ferocity and brutality on human kind. The day has gone by when the Church may light an auto-da-fé around the body of a Bruno. The time has passed when she may thrust a Galileo into prison and force him to recant the sublime truths of Astronomy. She can no longer cast a Roger Bacon into a noisome dungeon because of his scientific investigations. True, she can still, if she choose, excommunicate a Copernicus for what she denounced as his "false Pythagorean doctrine," but that is all. Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Proctor and the rest are safe. This relentless enemy of Science and liberty, and consequently of mankind, can no longer clutch every young science by the throat and strangle struggling truth, which, crushed to earth has risen again in its might; and history will scarcely repeat itself in the case of Bruno the Atheist, or Galileo the Astronomer, or Roger Bacon the Philosopher, or a thousand other victims of this ruthless "Bourbon of the world of thought"—the Church. She may still continue to fulminate her absurd and innocuous anathemas, but this is about all. The Holy Inquisition, with its two hundred and fifty thousand human victims; the Crusades with its five millions; the massacre of St. Bartholomew with its fifty thousand; to say nothing of the religious horrors of the Netherlands, of England, Scotland, and Ireland since the reformation—all these holy horrors, let us hope, are "hideous blots on the history of the past never to be repeated." Or will it be said of the future history of Christianity, as has been frankly admitted of its past by one of its ardent disciples, Baxter, that "Blood, blood, blood stains every page?"