The modern kindergarten of Protestant fashionable church organizations, the society churches, the scholarly preachers, entertain their congregations with a novel sort of oratory and classic music. These represent a God at ease, a gentlemanly and mild sort of a God, with a constant aristocratic smile round his lips, as irresistibly attractive as money can make him.
Strong drastic terms, as purgatory, hell, and brimstone, are seldom heard. That sort of doctrine is usually reserved and dished up in furnace-like fashion to the poor, half-starved, ignorant sinners.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE ECCLESIASTICAL KINDERGARTEN.
What shall we do to be saved? is a question asked by every religious fanatic.
Saved from what? Ignorance? Superstition? Bigotry? Or stupidity? From idiocy or imbecility? Or, are we to be saved from poverty, hunger, starvation, misery and wretchedness, distress and degradation? Barbarism, savagery, or uncivilization does not enter into consideration of these unfortunate conditions. They exist right in the midst of us, in the highest centers of human civilization. Of what good is the talking of spiritual welfare, salvation, and heaven to a hungry stomach? Of what good is it to grow eloquent over celestial conditions when the poor wretch has sunk into the mire of sloth and apathy, when darkness, misery, and disappointment hang over him like a pall at a funeral? Is this the man that is sinning—when tempted to steal some trifle to satisfy hunger? Self-preservation is the first law throughout organic nature. This poverty-stricken individual occupies the lowest strata of civilized life. He must be civilized—for the law makes him so. The starving must not eat, unless charity extends a helping hand. In the state of want and helplessness, all the inherent failings loom up into prominence, and aid to weaken the little resisting force remaining to withstand the temptation of wrongfully supplying his wants. The higher indulgences, either gustatory or sexual, are not within reach of the hungry and depressed; and salvation contemplated in the pleasures derived from overindulgence or excesses certainly does not apply to them. The class of persons in a position to satisfy both digestive and sexual pleasures we find in quite another catalogue of sinners. For some of these there is no salvation, for others there is what may be termed a reparatory saving power, viz., confession and atonement, for which the spiritual part of the body is not held responsible, but only the flesh.
It is precisely the men who practice these flesh-begotten sins which the church from the time of St. Paul to the present period has been trying to save, with little or no success.
St. Paul is the man who contributed more towards laying the foundation for the entire Christian system than any other man in the Bible. Of course he claims to be an Israelite of the seed of Abraham and of the tribe of Benjamin. Jesus was of the same tribe—and probably the other apostles that figure in the New Testament belonged to the same tribe. That tribe is of mixed blood on the mother side. Whosoever desires to be fully informed upon that subject, let him read [Judges, xix, ]xx, and xxi chapters—a story of licentiousness, barbarism, and butchery the like of which cannot be found in any history. A Levite with his concubine or wife came to Gibeah to lodge overnight. Some Benjamites used and abused the woman till she died. The Levite cut the woman up into twelve parts and sent one part to each tribe. Israel came together in battle with the Benjamites and slaughtered man, woman, and child. Six hundred men escaped to the wilderness, unto the rock of Rimmon. Israel had sworn not to give them their daughters to wife, so they helped them to get wives elsewhere, by means that are very interesting, very savage, and very godly. I simply mention this incident to show that the tribe of Benjamin was of mixed blood. It was not what would be called a natural divine selection, but a forced.
Paul with his half-Grecian ideas, whose mind was permeated with Grecian philosophy, used it largely in his argumentations, theologico-philosophic, and in his epistolary correspondence to enlighten and instruct his disciples.