Men, Women, and Gods; and Other Lectures

by Helen H. Gardener

According to the very theory of Divine revelation a religion would be most perfect at its beginning. It would be without flaw when born. It would be incapable of improvement or growth. In a word it would be immovable. It would possess the fixation of which Emerson speaks. It would not have to readjust itself to the changed and improved conditions of man, and its word would be always a higher light on every movement of progress. It would be to the Church and not to the State that the great principles of progress, of liberty, and of justice would look for the highest guidance and the last light. How far this is from the real state of things in any country or in any religion all readers of history know.*

* See Appendix B.

It is the State or Science which has proposed and made the steps of progress, and the Church has (often after the most bitter fight and denunciation) readjusted her creed to the new code, and then claimed that she had that light and knew that principle before, although neither she nor any one else had ever suspected it.

This has been the case with almost every important discovery that Science has ever made. The Church has retarded the acceptance of the new light, and has set her seal of "divine disapproval and damnation" on the brow of the thinkers who strove to bless mankind. It has been the rule in State reforms as well. It was so in the struggle to separate Church and State. It is so in the effort to sustain the belief in the "divine right of kings." The Church fought individual liberty and representative government, and she still contests the questions of individual conscience and universal equality and independence.*

* See reports of the last General Conference of the
Methodist Church held in Philadelphia, where, during a
heated debate, one member said that he was in favor of using
common-sense and the principle of justice in deciding
questions of right and wrong and of liberty of conscience;
whereupon a large majority voted him a dangerous man, and
decided that common-sense and justice had nothing to do with
religion. One member naively remarked that the whole career
and life of a good preacher fully disproved that any such
heretical doctrines obtained in the Church as that the use
of common-sense was admissible; and since the majority voted
with him it does not seem to be my place to question that
fact.

In these matters the Church has invariably been on the side that ultimately had to go to the wall, and she has become a party to the progress only after the principle has become an established fact.

Now it is the efforts of Science and Law towards the elevation of man and the bettering of his condition in this world—the procuring for him of greater personal advantages, dignity, and liberty—that have marked the progress of civilization.

The climate and soil decided man's occupation; his occupation determined what his higher needs should be; and his higher needs and the gained results of his occupations enabled him to strive for the bettering of his condition and surroundings. The man who lived in a climate favorable to mental and physical activity, and in a country with a rich and varied soil, was enabled to accomplish his ends as his less fortunate brother-lacking such support and stimulus and motive—has been unable to do.

If such a thing had been possible, thirty years ago, as that all knowledge of our religion had been utterly wiped out of America, and a thorough knowledge of Buddhism or Mohammedanism instilled into every Yankee brain in its stead, the Yankee brain would have simply adjusted its religion to its surroundings and not its surroundings to its religion; and America would have gone right on in the front rank of liberty and toleration and progress. There would have been social and political and religious contests over "caste" or "harems" or "Tripitaka," instead of over slavery as a divine institution, the right of a mother to her own offspring, or the inspiration of the Bible. The wheels of progress would have been blocked some days by devotees who preached damnation for those who believed in the "Trinity" instead of for those who did not. Hell would have been as freely promised to the man who suggested that Newton knew more than Mohammed, as it is to-day to any one who makes the same odious comparison between Darwin and Moses. The timid would have been terrified by sermons to prove the lost condition of a man who touched one of lower rank, in place of the edification our clergy offer in the shape of eternal damnation for unbaptized infants. And there would have been so little difference between the arguments for the divinity of the Tripitaka and the Bible, and for the miracles of each, that if any devout Presbyterian had by accident left his barrel of sermons on the latter subject behind him, his Buddhist brother could have utilized them without the change of an argument. But the wheel would turn and the devotee would either go down or change his creed, and it would depend chiefly upon his age and consequent flexibility which course he would adopt.

No known religion could transfer the conditions of civilization in China to America or England or France, and no amount of christianizing (if such a thing were possible) could transform China into a like condition with us, so long as her climate, her soil, and her population remain what they are to-day. You may make the Arab or the Jap digest the whole Westminster catechism, but he will, he must, be an Arab or a Jap still—if he lives through it all. If his constitution is good, and he gets over it, his condition and grade of civilization will continue to conform to his environment; and the trifling difference involved between turning-off prayers on a wheel and counting them off on beads will be simply the difference between tweedledee and tweedledum.