It seems that when they used to run ashore for big scare-stories, they just poked up the fire and went into the blastfurnace business—here and hereafter. But—seeing that a furnace—a real one—heated seven times hotter than it takes to melt iron, did not injure those three tropical innocents—did not even singe their eye-brows—it does look a little as if we should stand a pretty fair show with the spiritual fuel they now promise us hereafter. Still I must say I don't believe I should like the climate.
Speaking of Bible arguments, I must tell you of a new one I heard recently. A gentleman acquaintance of mine asked a colored woman, who had applied to him for money to help build a colored people's church, whether she thought God was black or white. She replied that the Bible implied that he was black—that it said, "And His wool shall be whiter than snow;" and that white men don't have wool!
WHAT YOU MAY THINK.
Show me a grade of society that buckles its little belt of belief and faith around its members, and you will show me a collection of hopeless mediocres. The thinkers move out or die out. They object to being fossilized. They decline to go down to history as physical members of the nineteenth century, and mental members of the third.
I would rather have the right to put on my monument, "She was abreast of her time," than have all the sounding texts and all the feathered tribes chiseled upon it. I would prefer that it be said of me, "She was a good woman because she had a pure heart," than to have this record: "She was a Christian. She was afraid of hell. She cast her burdens on the Lord, and went to heaven."
You have been told, "Blessed are they who die in the Lord." Rather let us say, "Blessed are they who live clean lives."
But the Church does not allow you to regulate your lives by what you believe to be right. It always did and it always will hate a thinker. It proposes to do the mental labor for great minds by means of brains large enough to hold nothing but Faith. It says, "I cannot, and you shall not outgrow the past. The measure of my capacity shall be the limit of your attainment."
The laws of a nation presume to regulate only what you may do. The Church is kind enough to say what you may think. It proposes to control the mental condition of every man and woman for time and eternity, and its first command is that we shall not grow.
It seems to me rather a queer admission to make, but the Church says that a child or a fool knows quite enough for its purpose—and it does not seem to be my place to question that fact. Now that may be all very well for the child and the fool, but it is rather binding on the rest of us.