The New Testament tolerated the slavery upheld by the Old Testament, and we not only find no protest whatever against it, but we even find Paul returning a runaway slave to his master. Not only Paul, but John also, taught both predestination and hell-fire for idolaters and unbelievers, as well as for the fearful and doubtful, equally with murderers, whoremongers, and liars: Rev. xvii. 8; xx. 15. Christ himself plainly proclaims the damnation of unbelievers—Matt. xxii. 13, 14; xxiii. 14, 33; Mark xvi. 16; etc.—and he at the same time asserts a very positive doctrine of predestination, avowing that he himself takes special pains that many of those to whom he preaches shall not be able to understand him, believe, and be saved: Mark iv. 11, 12; John xii. 39, 40. His language on these subjects is very clear, and bears no sign of being intended as figurative, though modern Christians prefer to regard it as such rather than to relinquish a religion the morals of which would, by other interpretation, be proved inadequate to the demands of the standards of higher civilization; the same method of exegesis applied to the sacred books of Confucianism or of Buddhism, from which it now appears probable that very many of the Christian ideas were derived, would suit them ill. But even if Christ's language were figurative, it must have some meaning; the wrath and vengeance of God are continually spoken of in the New Testament as well as in the Old. Such expressions were not looked upon, until of late, as figurative, and they doubtless did much to justify, to the minds of earlier Christians, the burning of heretics. The justification of all sin in God's elect, a permanent indulgence, is plainly taught by Paul, Rom. viii. 33; iv. 5-8; 1 Cor. vi. 12. Let us take the Buddhist Scriptures, and, in the light of the better passages, or in the light of Siddhartha's devotion to truth and to his fellow men, interpret the passages which, morally, we find wanting, and we shall find this religion as beautiful as the Christian.
A chief reason often advanced by Christians for continued faith in their religion, is the comfort conferred by a belief in immortality and the forgiveness of sins through Christ; that is, the rescue of men from the "wrath of God" through the offering of an innocent being, a "human sacrifice," which was to bear this wrath, and appease it, according to the old Jewish idea of the scapegoat. The morality of the last doctrine we have already condemned; there is no real making atonement in this world; we should recognize this fact, bear the responsibility of our deeds, and in the light of past experience, avoid the repetition of our old sins. And the moral question as to mortality or immortality is not: "What is the pleasanter to believe?" but "What is the truth?" In this recommendation of the pleasant in belief, we have but an illustration of one of the chief defects of Christian theory, which lays most stress upon faith and far less upon a love of the Truth at all costs. The peace of the Christian's death-bed is often made one of the chief arguments in favor of the Christian religion. But the mind in which there exists the noble love of truth will seek this only at the cost of all peace and blind content.
On the general connection of faith and morals, Clifford writes: "Belief in God and in a future life is a source of refined and elevated pleasure to those who can hold it. But the foregoing of a refined and elevated pleasure, because it appears that we have no right to indulge in it, is not in itself, and cannot produce as its consequences, a decline of morality."[274] Indeed, Christianity, as has been already remarked, and as is conclusively shown by any conscientious and unprejudiced examination of the Bible itself, leaves room for an ease of conscience and a self-excuse in even very great sins, which no high standard of morals can tolerate. How many of those who attend church regularly, on Sunday, are restrained by their religion from practising vice and injustice on week-days, under the consolation, if their conscience troubles them at all, that their prayers for forgiveness and the bestowal of charity, or even, in extremity, a death-bed "repentance" will make their peace with God? In place of an attempt at reparation towards men, against whom sin is really done, Christians are taught to seek the "forgiveness" of God. Some there are, indeed, who remember only the law of love and endeavor to follow it. All honor to them. But they are adherents of a modern Christian Philosophy, the product of many good men who have winnowed out the wheat of their religion and left the chaff; they are not followers of the Bible, or even of the New Testament, as a whole. Many there are who are perceiving this, and the old system needs replacement with a newer and higher—with a system which affords clear and evident grounds for moral action, leaves no room for mysticism, self-justification, or inaction, offers no opiate to conscience. Such a system must be founded on the solid rock of scientific Truth; not on any doctrine of blind obedience to traditions; it must take into account man's evolution, that it may progress with his progress.
Many term the Ethics of science dry and uninspiring, and turn, with preference, to religions which, if they give us mysticism or pessimism, give us poetry also; for man is an emotional as well as an intellectual being; and there may be much poetry in pessimism. But again, it may be said that the Truth is that which we should first seek. And especially let it be remembered that, if poetry is lacking, it may be that the deficiency is in ourselves. It is a history many times repeated, that men call their age and its ideas dry and uninteresting, and seek their ideals and inspirations in the past, until the master-mind arises, who boldly faces and interprets the realities about him; and then men exclaim and wonder, and find that their own blindness, and not the age, was at fault. We cling by habit to the old and fear the new; and so we have yet to inspire these new ideals with the beauty gained by association and habit; in themselves, they do not lack beauty. In truth, as I believe that there is more of poetry in the gray wires strung across our streets and guiding the swift, silent, fearful forces in which lies power to light a city or destroy a life, than ever was in any feeble-flamed Grecian lamp, so I believe also that, in the dry, hard, cold-seeming facts of modern science there lurks more poetry than all the ages gone have known; though we may need the poet to interpret it to us. The highest poetry is that of love; and it is the realization of this poetry that the Ethics of Evolution teaches, promises, and enjoins. Certainly the superficial Utilitarianism which looks only at external forms of government and customs and the arithmetically calculated relations of men, not at their inner character and the organic complexity of moral questions, cannot satisfy in the long run. Nor can the bald Materialism satisfy which, standing by its analysis in physical terms like the physiologist in the dissecting-room with his chemicals about him and the dead nerves and muscles in his hand, exclaims with a triumph that is half a sneer: "This is all." It is not all. The synthesis of nature and of life cannot be represented by its parts merely; the bond of organization wanting, all is wanting. Nor is the action in the brain more real, more forceful, more spontaneous, or freer, than the love for a friend, the thought of him, or the will to do him a kindness.
FOOTNOTES:
[256] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 292; Part I., this book, pp. 250, 251.
[257] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 287, etc.; Part I. p. 249, this book.
[258] "Moral Order and Progress," pp. 307, 312; Part I. pp. 250, 252, 253, this book.
[259] "Moral Order and Progress," Book I. Chap. II.; Part I. pp. 231, 232, this book.
[260] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 332.