open the box. Their schools and teachers resemble those feeble-minded folk who imagine they increase in knowledge by constantly talking to themselves.
Always boasting of their devotion to truth, they steadily repudiate it. That alone is true which will bear repeated, free, and unbiased investigation; but dogmatists cry,—“Never discuss your faith; never doubt your creed; for he that doubteth is damned.” What progress they make is not from within, but is forced on them from without by the free spirit of inquiry; and what they thus unwillingly accept, they audaciously claim as the product of their own efforts. Everywhere the spirit of ecclesiasticism is the secret or open foe of strict and complete veracity; and yet no permanent alleviation of the sufferings of mankind can come except from veracity. And from this it will come. No matter what the weather is, this seed is sure to grow.
What unspeakable unhappiness religions have brought on the race! Altars dripping with the blood of human victims, mothers casting their babes into the fires of Moloch, teachers crucified by the rabble whom they sought to instruct, millions perishing between the Crescent and the Cross, hideous chambers of the Inquisition, Bruno burning alive in Catholic Rome, and Legate in Protestant London,—a thousand such historic events would give no notion of the miseries which religions have inflicted on mankind, and continue to inflict.
Worse than these have been their blighting breath on
individual minds, darkening them with terrors of the supernatural, with racking doubts, despair, and madness; destroying the natural and beautiful growths of the affections; frowning on the attractions of the arts of beauty; crushing the desire of knowledge and the love of investigation; urging men in the ignoble egotism of self-salvation to sacrifice their own happiness and that of those nearest and dearest to them. These influences still exist; they are ever in the spirit of clericalism and dogmatism, and are restrained from plunging mankind again into the dark ages only by that higher and real religion which acknowledges neither form nor creed nor dogma, but only the might and right of Truth and Love.
I would ask what teachings do religions—and I have those in mind which are prevalent in civilized countries to-day—impart, which in any way compensate for the enormous unhappiness and intellectual degradation thus caused?
Most sects calling themselves Christian will at once reply that the happiness they promise is not of this world but of the next, and that he who looks for enjoyment here will forfeit it hereafter. Yet when the evidence for this daring statement is asked for, not an iota can be offered on which there is unanimous concurrence among the sects themselves.
What they do offer, and what gives them their real control over men’s minds, may be summed up as follows: A belief in the Divine government of the world and the
paternal care of God over each believer in Him; greater cheerfulness in the acceptance of the misfortunes of life as the wise and ultimately beneficent decisions of His will; an expectation of a life after death; the hope that sins will be forgiven; and the improvement in morals which follows these convictions.
These are undoubtedly valuable aids to human happiness. The question is, what part of them belong to Religion and what to religions; in other words, will not the religious sentiment itself, freed from the shackles of dogmatic belief, yield to man all the happiness offered by sectarian doctrines, relieved of the misery to which they condemn him? When I think of the mental agony caused in millions of lives by the pictures of hell, of eternal damnation, of the last judgment, and of a cruel and merciless God, which most Christian teachers hold before their congregations, I long for the time predicted by that apostle of the new life, Giordano Bruno,—“When the gods shall lie in Orcus, and the dread of everlasting punishment shall vanish from the world.”