"A paid priesthood blocks evolution. These men are really educated to uphold and defend the institution. They can do nothing else. Most of them have families dependent upon them—do you wonder that it is a fight to the death? It is not truth that the clergy struggles for—they may think it is—but the grim fact remains, it is a fight for material existence."
We all confuse our interests with the eternal verities—the thing that pays us we consider righteous, or at least justifiable. This is the most natural thing in the world. An artist who painted very bad pictures once took one of his canvases to Whistler for criticism.
Jimmy shrugged his shoulders and made a grimace that spoke volumes. "But a man must live some way!" pleaded the poor fellow in his extremity.
"I do not see the necessity," was the weary reply.
Preachers must live; their education and environment have unfitted them for useful effort; but they are a part of the great, seething struggle for existence. And so we have their piteous and plaintive plea for the obsolete and the outworn. Disraeli once in an incautious moment exclaimed: "If we do away with the Established Church, what is to become of the fourteen million prepared and pickled sermons? Think for a moment of the infinite labor of writing new sermons, all based upon a different point of view—let us then be reasonable and not subject a profession that is overworked to the humiliation of destroying the bulk of its assets."
Science deals directly with the maintenance of human life and the bettering of every condition of existence through a wider, wiser and saner use of the world. Civilization is the working out and comprehending and proving how to live in the best way. Theology prepares men to die; science fits them to live.
Science deals with your welfare in this world; theology in another. Theology has not yet proved that there is another world—its claims are not even based upon hearsay. It is a matter of belief and assumption.
Science, too, assumes, and its assumption is this: The best preparation for a life to come is to live here and now as if there were no life to come.
Your belief will not fix your place in another world—what you are, may. The individual who gets most out of this life is fitting himself to get most out of another if there is one.
And this brings us up to that paragraph in the "Cosmos" where Humboldt says: "I perceive a period when the true priesthood will not be paid to defend a fixed system of so-called crystallized truth. But I believe the time will come when that man will be most revered who bestows most benefits here and now. The clergy of Christendom have stood as leaders of thought, but to hold this proud position they must abandon the intangible and devote themselves to this world and the people who are alive."