But does this atonement serve only to redeem the human family from the curse inflicted by Deity in Eden's garden for Adam's sin, or does it operate as satisfaction for all sin? If the salvation is from the punishment for Adam's sin alone, and if belief and baptism are, as Jesus himself affirms, to be the sole conditions precedent to any saving efficacy in the much-lauded atonement by the Son of God, then what becomes of a child that only lives a few hours, is never baptized, and, never having any mind, consequently never has any belief? Or what becomes of one idiot born who, throughout his dreary life, never has mental capacity for the acceptance, or examination of, or credence in, any religious dogmas whatever? Is the idiot saved who can not believe? Is the infant saved that can not believe? I, with some mental faculties tolerably developed, can not believe. Must I be damned? If so, fortunate short-lived babe! lucky idiot! That the atonement should not be effective until the person to be saved has been baptized is at least worthy of comment; that the sprinkling a few drops of water should quench the flames of hell is a remarkable feature in the Christian's creed.
"One can't but think it somewhat droll
Pump-water thus should cleanse a soul."
How many fierce quarrels have raged on the formula of baptism among those loving brothers in Christ who believe he died for them! How strange an idea that, though God has been crucified to redeem mankind, it yet needs the font of water to wash away the lingering stain of Adam's crime.
One minister of the Church of England, occupying the presidential chair of a well-known training college for church clergymen in the north of England, seriously declared, in the presence of a large auditory and of several church dignitaries, that the sin of Adam was so potent in its effect that if a man had never been born, he would yet have been damned for sin! That is, he declared that man existed before birth, and that he committed sin before he was born; and if never born, would, notwithstanding, deserve to suffer eternal torment for that sin!
It is almost impossible to discuss seriously a doctrine so monstrously absurd, and yet it is not one whit more ridiculous than the ordinary orthodox and terrible doctrine that God, the undying, in his infinite love, killed himself under the form of his son to appease the cruel vengeance of God, the just and merciful, who, without this, would have been ever vengeful, unjust and merciless. The atonement theory, as presented to us by the bible, is in effect as follows: God creates man, surrounded by such circumstances as the divine mind chose, in the selection of which man had no voice, and the effects of which on man were all foreknown and predestined by Deity. The result is man's fall on the very first temptation, so frail the nature with which he was endowed, or so powerful the temptation to which he was subjected. For this fall not only does the All-merciful punish Adam, but also his posterity; and this punishment went on for many centuries, until God, the immutable, changed his purpose of continual condemnation of men for sins they had no share in, and was wearied with his long series of unjust judgments on those whom he created in order that he might judge them. That, then, God sent his son, who was himself and was also his own father, and who was immortal, to die upon the cross, and, by this sacrifice, to atone for the sin which God himself had caused Adam to commit, and thus to appease the merciless vengeance of the All-merciful, which would otherwise have been continued against men yet unborn for an offense they could not have been concerned in or accessory to. Whether those who had died before Christ's coming are redeemed the bible does not clearly tell us. Those born after are redeemed only on condition of their faith in the efficacy of the sacrifice offered, and in the truth of the history of Jesus's life. The doctrine of salvation by sacrifice of human life is the doctrine of a barbarous and superstitous age; the outgrowth of a brutal and depraved era. The God who accepts the bloody offering of an innocent victim in lieu of punishing the guilty culprit shows no mercy in sparing the offender: he has already satiated his lust for vengeance on the first object presented to him.
Yet sacrifice is an early and prominent, and, with slight exception, an abiding feature in the Hebrew record—sacrifice of life finds appreciative acceptance from the Jewish Deity. Cain's offering of fruits is ineffective but Abel's altar, bearing the firstlings of his flock, and the fat thereof, finds respect in the sight of the Lord. While the face of the earth was disfigured by the rotting dead, after God in his infinite mercy had deluged the world, then it was that the ascending smoke from Noah's burnt sacrifice of bird and beast produced pleasure in heaven, and God himself smelled a sweet savor from the roasted meats. To reach atonement for the past by sacrifice is worse than folly—it is crime. The past can never be recalled, and the only reference to it should be that, by marking its events, we may avoid its evil deeds and improve upon its good ones. For Jesus himself—can man believe in him? —in his history contained in anonymous pamphlets uncorroborated by contemporary testimony?—this history, in which, in order to fulfill a prophecy which does not relate to him, his descent from David is demonstrated by tracing through two self-contradictory genealogies the descent of Joseph who was not his father—this history, in which the infinite God grows, from babyhood and hus cradle through childhood to manhood, as though he were not God at all—this history, full of absurd wonders, devils, magicians, and evil spirits, rather fit for an Arabian Night's legend than the word of God to his people—this history, with its miraculous raisings of the dead to life, disbelieved and contradicted by the people among whom they are alleged to have been performed; but, nevertheless, to be accepted by us to-day with all humility—this history, with the Man-God subject to human passions and infirmities, who comes to die, and who prays to his heavenly father (that is, to himself) that he will spare him the bitter cup of death—who is betrayed, having himself, ere he laid the foundations of the world, predestined Judas to betray him, and who dies, being God immortal crying with his almost dying breath, "My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?"
WERE ADAM AND EVE OUR FIRST PARENTS?
This question, Were Adam and Eve our first parents? is indeed one of most grave importance. If the answer be a negative one, it is, in fact, a denial of the whole scheme of Christianity. The Christian theory is that Adam, the common father of the whole human race, sinned, and that by his sin he dragged down all his posterity to a state from which redemption was needed; and that Jesus is, and was, the Redeemer, by whom all mankind are and were saved from the consequences of the fall of Adam. If Adam, therefore, be proved not to be the first man—if it be shown that it is not to Adam the various races of mankind are indebted for their origin, then the whole hypothesis of fall and redemption is dissipated.
In a pamphlet like the present it is impossible to give any statement and analysis of the various hypotheses as to the origin of the human race. I frankly admit that my only wish and intent is, to compel people to examine the bible record for themselves, instead of making it their fetich, bowing down before it without thought. I am inclined to the opinion that the doctrine of a plurality of sources for the various types of the human race is a correct one; that wherever the conditions for life have been found, there also has been the degree of life resultant on those conditions. My purpose in this essay is not to demonstrate the correctness of my own thinking, but rather to illustrate the incorrectness of the Geneiacal teaching. Were Adam and Eve our first parents? On the one hand an answer in the affirmative to this question can be obtained from the bible, which asserts Adam and Eve to be the first man and woman made by God, and fixes the date of their making about 6,000 years, little more or less, from the present time. On the other hand, it seems to me that science emphatically declares man to have existed on the earth for a far more extended period; affirms that, as far as we can trace man, we find him in isolated groups, diverse in type, till we lose him in the ante-historic period; and, with nearly equal distinctness, denies that the various existing races find their common parentage in one pair. It is only on the first point that I attack the bible chronology of man's existence. I am aware that compilations based upon the authorized version of the Old Testament Scriptures are open to objection, and that while from the Hebrew 1,656 years represent the period from Adam to the Deluge generally acknowledged, the Samaritan Pentateuch only yields for the same period 1,307 years, while the Septuagint version furnishes 2,242 years; there is, I am also informed, on the authority of a most erudite Egyptologist, a fatal objection to the Septuagint chronology—i. e., that it makes Methusaleh outlive the flood.*