Everyone who reads the newspapers learns something about Mars, and ventures to give his opinion, whether it is like the earth—inhabited, has seas or atmosphere, etc. So that, whatever new facts are revealed, new truths announced, the minds of men are made so much richer.
Knowledge, the progress of science, the discoveries of important facts, the improvements of political, social, or civil laws, do not come to us spontaneously, nor do they come to us suddenly in overpowering quantities; it is a process of gradual acquirement, a slow accumulation, to which every generation contributes its quota of observation and experience that makes up the total wealth of aggregate thought, and is handed down from generation to generation, our common inheritance.
This common inheritance is neither all true nor all good. A large proportion that has been handed down to us by the ancients is not true or good, though it is believed to be true and good.
The revelations of absolute truths, of actual facts, are of more recent date—discoveries made within the last few centuries. The spurious, so-called revelations are the works of antiquity, which are not based on truth or fact or knowledge or experience. The mental faculties of pristine men were primitive, and their ideas were as primitive. They lived in an age of infancy; it was all surprise, wonder, astonishment, and miracle.
When Kepler discovered the law that “Planets revolve in ellipses with the sun at one focus,” he worked hard for many days, and after many trials succeeded. He also discovered a second law, which he defines, “A line connecting the center of the earth with the center of the sun passes over equal spaces in equal times;” and his third law, “The squares of the times of revolutions of the planets about the sun are proportioned to the center of their mean distance from the sun.”
No one ever claimed for Kepler, nor has he laid claim himself, that he was inspired by God, or received the idea through any supernatural agency.
The hostile and bitter opposition that Galileo met on the part of the Christian Church is too well known; but the importance of his discoveries, and the truth, remains.
All intelligent persons ought to understand Newton’s law of gravitation. If they understood the full import and significance of that law, they would never believe in the absurd miracles of Moses, Joshua, Elijah, Christ and Company. The law: “Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle of matter with a force directly proportional to its quantity of matter, and decreasing as the square of the distance increases.”
It is most remarkable—that man discovering great truths, concerning which there has never been any dispute, or controversy, or fight; that stand, unaltered and unchanged, forever. Such men have not been inspired by God, Jehovah, Christ, or the Holy Ghost, or anything supernatural. They have accomplished their works by their powers of observation, great mental efforts, skillful explanation and elucidation, accomplished by hard and untiring work.
It is astonishing that, in the presence of so many revealed natural truths, so many ascertained scientific facts, and numerous discoveries in this century, which is claimed to be much advanced in civilization, intelligent persons—teachers, preachers, priests, and those laying claim to scholarship—still believe that the visionary figures, the product of distorted imagination or hallucination, of men like Isaiah, Ezekiel, etc., were of supernatural origin.