Scientific Villainies.—If anyone comes to you and says, "I don't understand the proof for the existence of God," you should answer, "You don't understand because your wickedness darkens your understanding." All atheists are rascals, and all rascals are atheists. Their intelligence is so beclogged with sin that they cannot understand the simplest teachings of Christianity, the Incarnation and, consequently, Immaculate Birth of God, His Resurrection and Ascension.
When the sectaries came to Luther and said that they could not understand him, because they had another Spirit, he answered, "I smite your Spirit on the snout! God rebuke thee, Satan!" A godless man or a so-called free-thinker is a rascal who permits himself everything. His natural sympathy for scoundrels is so strong that he will swear a false oath in order to save the guilty from condemnation by a false alibi. He will accuse an innocent man, and persecute him from one court of appeal to another, in order to get him into prison, and will demand a large sum of money as a reward for his ill-doing.
When the guilty is acquitted they give him a banquet, his companions write odes in his honour, he is promoted and finally appointed to be an instructor of youth. When an atheist adopts the pursuit of science, one is sure only villainy will result. He says falsely that he has seen such and such things under the microscope, in order to be able to write a treatise on them. If he is an astronomer he will see as many canals in Mars as his professor wishes. If his professor does not believe in the canals in Mars, he will not see any.
[1] The Last Athenian, title of a work by Victor Rydberg.
Necrobiosis, i.e. Death and Resurrection.—During the winter I found the chrysalis of a cockchafer and laid it on my writing-table. One evening in the lamplight it began to click and make small movements. Believing that the warmth had developed my beetle I opened its black coffin, but found to my astonishment only a white slime without a sign of organisation; it smelt of sour gastric juice. This half-fluid mass, however, possessed the capacity of movement. Later on, when I had a microscope with a large field of view, I opened the chrysalis of a butterfly and examined it. On a clear yellow background of fluid matter there was sketched, as it were, the outline of the future butterfly in half-shadow, without, as yet, any bodily organisation. That is called "necrobiosis," or the dying-off of living tissue. And the deliquescence of the chrysalis in slime is termed "histolysis." Its reorganisation is said to take place by means of corpora adiposa, or particles of fat. More than this I do not know. I wrote to Germany (where they are accustomed to know everything) and asked for some works treating of the metamorphosis of the chrysalis, but there were none on this most important and interesting question. Father Darwin and his son Haeckel knew nothing and wished to know nothing about the resurrection; they only knew about birth and death. Finally I bought for five-and-twenty kroners a large work on butterflies composed by a professor. There was not a word in it regarding the necrobiosis of the chrysalis. But sometimes I see on a gravestone within a church wall this symbol: caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly.
Secret Judgment.—When one sees a fact repeated regularly and under defined conditions, one believes one has discovered a law. I think I have discovered a law, and consequently a tribunal whose decisions we see, but whose inner working we can only guess at. I had a relative who had reached a certain age without "ever having time" to think of death. On the 18th January of the year 18— he had a stroke and fell. That was the first warning. Then he began to think about death and the life after this, and occupied himself thus for six years; then he died exactly on the same day, on the 18th of January. The fact of the interval being six years made me think of Bismarck's six years in Sachsenwald, when he sat alone and brooded on the transitory character of greatness, and curiously enough injured his reputation through being betrayed by vanity into making incautious revelations. Then it occurred to me that Napoleon was six years on St. Helena, and finally became so well "prepared" that he received the sacrament on his death-bed. Whether Heine lay on the ground for exactly six years, with his body wasted to the size of a child's and tormented by the fear of losing his wife, I cannot say definitely; but it was about six. It is well known that the pious Linnæus had to spend his last years seated in a chair, lamed by paralysis; nor did even he escape being worried by a quarrelsome wife, God alone knows why!
Our great and glorious Tegner received his first warning in 1840. It was accompanied by a condition like that described in my Inferno, during which, among other things, he saw his whole poetical work in a depreciatory light, and even at last wished to cancel it all. After just six years' preparation he died on November 2, 1846, in a cheerful state of mind, the sky being lit up at the time by a splendid aurora. Goldschmidt mentions that and still more remarkable things in his excellent Nemesis Divina. I read lately how Fersen was murdered in his carriage on June 20, 1810. I recalled to mind that it was the same Fersen who drove the carriage in which Marie Antoinette fled to Varennes. I referred to the History of the World, and found that the flight to Varennes took place on June 20, 1791. The question arises: "Was it a crime to wish to save the queen?" The author of the article in the Biographical Lexicon mentions the crime by name; but it was something other than the attempt to further her escape.
Hammurabi's Inspired Laws Received from the Sun-God.—The laws of Hammurabi occupy fifteen quarto pages. That is the whole find! And these pages are to nullify the Bible, which is so unsearchably rich and possesses such mysterious depths that everyone in trouble, who with humility seeks for counsel and comfort there, finds it forthwith, although he may first receive some blows which strike the nail on the head!
Hammurabi's laws in fifteen pages resemble Deuteronomy to a certain degree, but are much more meagre; they often recall our old Swedish law with its trivialities. For instance: "If anyone strikes out a man's teeth, his teeth shall be struck out; but if he strikes out the teeth of an emancipated slave, he shall pay one-eighth of a mina of silver."
In any case God is one, and His laws are in principle the same. The Bible may have used the same source as Hammurabi. But when the heathen try to use the laws of the Assyrian clay tablets in order to prove that the Bible is not inspired, they miss the mark. "Inspired" means "received from God." See how the heathen has adorned his paltry pamphlet with a frontispiece, which asserts, against his will, that Hammurabi's laws were also inspired. For the frontispiece portrays Hammurabi receiving his laws from the Sun-god.