But after all, what about the salvation of the race since the death of Christ? If salvation since his coming is only attainable thru personal faith in him as the miraculously begotten Son of God, and in his death as a vicarious atonement for sin; and that all are lost except those who have thus believed, how many are saved? Certainly very few. Take a mere glance at the world since the time of Christ. Leaving out of consideration the countless millions who never heard of him, and confining ourselves to those who have, how many of them fully met exactly these conditions? If such a doctrine is true, there are but few people in heaven except infants; and it is only in recent years that some of the orthodox have admitted infants indiscriminately into heaven!
I could comprehend to some extent how, if God had offered salvation and a home in heaven forever to all mankind on such easy terms as faith in the merits of the death of Jesus, He could visit condign punishment on such as knew it and wilfully rejected it. But I could not see the justice of such a punishment being inflicted on the countless millions of people who never heard of it, had no means of knowing it, and could not be justly blamed for not knowing it. Another thing that I now put the test of reason to, was the doctrine of salvation by faith itself. Was faith the only thing that could merit the favor of God? Was character of no avail? Was all moral purity, goodness and brotherly love but "filthy rags in the sight of God," unless buttressed by belief in the Deity of Jesus and the vicarious atonement? Was salvation after all as arbitrary as that described in "Holy Willie's Prayer"?
"O, Thou who in the heavens dost dwell,
Who as it pleases best thysel'
Sends one to heaven and ten to hell,
A' for Thy glory,
And not for any good or ill
They've done afore Thee."
I thought of such moralists and philosophers as Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, and thousands of others who have lived in the past, and left a lasting impression in the world for the good of mankind that continues to this day, some of them but little less than Jesus himself, in the moral sublimity of their lives and teachings, and wondered if these men were all in hell to roast and fry and burn forever because they had not "exercised faith" in the merits of a dying God of whom they had never known or even heard! And every nobler sentiment of my human nature rebelled against such an idea. To attribute such a character and proceeding to God is to make him, in cruelty and injustice, below the level of the most ferocious beast of the jungle. This was not all. I beheld the divisions in the church itself. Some hundreds of different denominations, all bearing the name Christian, each claiming to be right and all the balance wrong, each claiming to expound the only truth, and all the balance error; each claiming to direct to the only true and infallible way of eternal life and all the balance only deadly heresies. I found the history of the Christian Church written in blood. For fifteen hundred years Christian had slain Christian as a part of his religious duty. Fire and fagot, sword and rack and all the instruments of torture known to the ingenuity of mankind were employed for the torture and death of heretics—all in the name of Christ and for the salvation of the world. Catholics tortured and burned Protestants and Protestants murdered each other. Calvin consented to the burning of Servetus and the New England Puritans hung witches and persecuted Quakers and Baptists by burning holes in their tongues with hot irons, and driving them from their midst as they would the pestilence. I wondered how, if God ever takes any interest in affairs on earth and hears the prayers of his children, he could sit supinely by on his throne and permit such things to be done in his name and for his glory! If his spirit could enter into the hearts of men and direct their thoughts and minds, why did He not do it and stop this useless slaughter? Again I turned back to the beginning of things. If God foresaw what Adam would do and the dreadful consequences of it, why did He not make him different so he would not fall? Was it not just as easy? But if God can be better glorified by saving a fallen creature than by keeping him from falling, then why did He not make this "plan of salvation" so plain and clear that there could be no possibility of misunderstanding or misconstruing it? If God was to be ultimately glorified in the sacrifice of his son as a means of salvation for the world, and this salvation was to come simply by faith in this promise, why did He not make this promise so specific and clear that the most ignorant and benighted could not misunderstand and fail to accept it? Why did not God reveal this promise to all mankind alike, so that all might be saved, instead of to one family and one nation? And when this son came and "died for the world" why did not God make it known to the entire world instead of a handful of Jews in an obscure corner of the earth? And when this "plan" was completed, why was it not heralded in every nook and corner of the earth, wherever man was found, instead of being confined for centuries around the shores of the Mediterranean? Then again, I say, why was not this "plan" made so plain and unequivocal that no man, however ignorant, could possibly fail to comprehend it, and all men understand it exactly alike, and thus live in the bonds of a true brotherhood, the sons of the one great God, instead of butchering each other for fifteen hundred years in the name of religion, each sect claiming to be the only true followers of the Son of God, and all the balance reprobates and devils?
But the most inconsistent and unreasonable phase of the whole thing is yet to come. If salvation is attainable only through the merits of the "death on the Cross" of Jesus Christ, then Jesus had to be crucified. It was a part of the "eternal plan." No other death would do. If Jesus had died a natural death there could have been no salvation. He must needs be punished, killed for the sins of Adam and all mankind. He was "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." To carry out this "divine purpose" somebody had to crucify him. Every actor in this great "drama of redemption" was a necessary factor. No one was either unnecessary or unimportant. Judas was necessary to betray him into the hands of his enemies. He and the part he performed were necessarily as much a fore-ordained and eternally predestinated factor in the "scheme of redemption" as that of Jesus himself. The Jewish priests who prosecuted him before Pilate were as equally necessary as the subject of the prosecution. The Jewish nation whom they represented, or some other nation, was equally necessary as a background for this prosecution, in whose name it was conducted. Pilate or some other was necessary as the judge to hear the trial and pronounce the sentence of death before it could be carried out. And finally, the Roman soldiers were necessary to execute the sentence. All these, Jesus, Judas, the priests, the Jewish nation, Pilate and the Roman soldiers, were necessary links in the one great chain of the "scheme of redemption," or "plan of salvation" by the vicarious atonement of the Son of God on the Cross. If either one of them had failed, the chain would have been broken, God's eternal plans and purposes thwarted, and man left without redemption to eternally perish!
And yet poor Judas was driven by remorse to a suicide's grave, and according to the doctrines of the Church, for these nineteen hundred years has been justly writhing, frying and burning in the bottomless pit of eternal torments, and will continue so to suffer forever,—and for what? For faithfully performing and fulfilling that part in the scheme of redemption which he was, by the eternal decrees of God, foreordained and predestinated from before the foundation of the world to perform; and which he could neither escape nor avoid, without breaking the chain, and thus defeating the eternal purposes of God in the redemption of mankind! For nineteen hundred years the Church has thus execrated and anathematised Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, the High Priests, the whole Jewish nation and the Roman Empire, and consigned them to eternal perdition, the tormenting flames of an eternal hell, and scattered the Jews to the four quarters of the earth, never ceasing its horrid persecutions, in many places even to this day; and all for what? For crucifying Christ; for carrying out the divine purpose planned from before the foundation of the world; for obeying the Eternal Will; for doing only what they were compelled by the eternal fates to do in order that mankind might be saved from the eternal burning!
Our author that I had been studying says on page 257, "No man can read the Bible with any faith in its teachings, and deny that this terrible calamity (the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation) overtook the Jews on account of their great sins, especially their rejection of the Son of God." (Italics mine.) Suppose they had not rejected him. Suppose they had accepted him as the Messiah of prophecy, as the Church insists he was, and had set about to make him their king and succeeded; and he had lived on a normal life and died a natural death, what would have become of the "scheme of redemption" by vicarious atonement? What about the "plan of salvation," the remission of sins only thru the "power of the blood"? "Apart from the shedding of blood there is no remission." Then if the Jews had not rejected Jesus and thereby caused his blood to be shed, what would have been the eternal destiny of the whole human race? According to orthodox Christianity, the whole plan would have failed, and the whole human race would have been irretrievably lost and plunged forever and ever into eternal torments, "where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched"!
I had now reached the crisis. After pursuing this course of study and this line of reasoning for a period of about three years after finishing the book I have herein described, does any one wonder that I threw the whole thing overboard, Bible, inspiration, revelation, church and religion, into the scrap heap of superstition, legend, fable and mythology? I gave up the whole thing as a farce and a delusion, as "sounding brass and tinkling cymbals." I could no longer honestly preach such a gospel; I could not be a hypocrite. I withdrew from the church and ministry and turned my attention to secular pursuits. And having nowhere else to go, I naturally drifted into that state of mind which the world calls agnosticism.