When one once grasps the beauty and splendor of the monistic idea, how mean and small become all those little, fearsome "schemes of salvation," whereby men were to be separated and impassable gulfs fixed between them. Those who fix gulfs here and now are hotly intent on showing that God will fix gulfs hereafter; thus we see how man is continually creating God in his own image.
His idea of God's justice is always built on his own; and as usually our deities are more or less inherited, heirlooms of the past, we see that it is not at all strange that men should be better than their religion. They drag their dead creeds behind them like a stagecoach, with preachers and priests on top; kings and nobles inside; and coffins full of past sins in the boot. A man is always better than his creed—unless he makes his creed new every day. These hand-me-down religions seldom fit, and professional theology, it seems to me, is mostly a dealing in ol' clo'.
n the month of September, Nineteen Hundred Four, Haeckel was a delegate to the Freethinkers' Congress at Rome. To hold such a convention in the Eternal City, right under the eaves of the Vatican, was surely a trifle "indelicate," to use the words of the Pope. And it was no wonder that at the close of the Congress the Pope at once ordered a sacred housecleaning, a divine fumigation.
Forty years ago he would have acted before the Congress convened, and not afterward. Special mass was held in every one of the Catholic Churches in Rome, "partially to atone for the insult done to Almighty God."
Over three thousand delegates were present at the Congress, every civilized country being represented.
A committee was named to decorate the statue of Bruno that stands on the spot where he was burned for declaring that the earth revolved, and that the stars were not God's jewels hung in the sky each night by angels.
On this occasion, Haeckel said:
"This Congress is historic. It marks a white milepost in the onward and upward march of Freedom.
"We have met in Rome not accidentally or yet incidentally, but purposely. We have met here to show the world that times have changed, that the earth revolves, and to prove to ourselves in an impressive and undeniable way that the power of superstition is crippled, and at last Science and Free Speech need no longer cringe and crawl. We respect the Church for what she is, but our manhood must now realize that it is no longer the slave and tool of entrenched force and power that abrogates to itself the name of religion."