This hardly requires an explanation. Every farmer and cattle-breeder understands it. We have every day illustrations with our race-horses, cattle, etc. Two black persons cannot breed white children. They can mix them, yes. God had nothing at all to do with the selection of either the black man or white woman, or the white man or black woman.
Whatever seed is planted, that will grow, and no other. Cabbage seed will yield cabbages, and nothing else. That law holds good in nature—like will produce like; subject, however, to modification of soil, temperature, moisture, of the immediate surroundings. But it will not change the cabbage. It may be finer, of improved quality, larger—that’s all.
The prevailing notion that we are all created free and equal, is nonsense.
1. We are not created. We are simply the offspring of our parents and inherit all the characteristics and qualities of our parents, which are subject to betterment, improvement, and a higher degree of culture, or deterioration, depending on circumstances and surroundings.
2. We are not born equal by any means, either in muscular strength, brain power, size, constitution, or wealth. Therein lies the difference in the condition and surroundings of man, while we are spending this short-lived existence on this earth.
3. Whether we are born free, depends upon what form of government we live under. We are free to comply with the laws of the government under which we are born, comply with the recognized moral and social laws in the midst of which our parents reside, where we first saw daylight.
Dismiss the silly notion from your mind that anything can help you, either priest or any supernatural agency. The priest may help as one man may help another.
Prayers can avail you nothing, nor blessings. Every man, to be a man, must act the man! Training, education, culture, makes him one. Free yourself from priestly influence and church dominion, if you would be free. Think and reason. Throw off the shackles of ecclesiastical slavery. Let your own brain work out your own salvation. Never mind the Jehova, the God of barbarism, the Christ of delusion, or the Holy Ghost of the imagination. Shake off the dust of superstition and ignorance if you would be free.
It is the noblest work of man to make himself free—to make himself equal, not muscular—free from prejudice, free from superstitions, free from bigotry, free from ignorance, free from vice, free from passions, free from wrong-doing either to yourself or to your fellow-man. Equal you can be in brain power, brain culture, in brain force, by brain culture, education, in the improvement and perfection of the intellectual faculties, so that we may exercise our understanding and judgment, free and untrammeled, to the benefit of ourselves and to the benefit of our neighbors.
The perfection you imagine your God ought to be, exalt yourself to that perfection, and be an intelligent free man.