“If you discard the Bible, what,” asks the Christian, “will you give us as a moral guide?” Enter a public library blindfolded; take from its shelves a volume at random, and you will scarcely select a worse one. The book you select may not pertain to morals. It may not even contain the word “moral.” But neither does the Bible. Must we go to the ignorant past for our morality? Does human experience count for nothing? Have the most marvelous advances been made in every other department of human knowledge during the past two thousand years and none in ethical science? Read Bentham, Mill, and Spencer. Let your children study Count Volney’s “Law of Nature,” and Miss Wixon’s “Right Living.” These books are not infallible and divine, they are fallible and human; but they are immeasurably superior to any books that supernaturalists can offer. Not in Moses nor Jesus, not in the Decalogue nor Sermon on the Mount, is there to be found a statement of moral duties so just and so comprehensive as the following from Volney:
“What do you conclude from all this? I conclude from it that all the social virtues are only the habitude of actions useful to society and to the individual who practices them; that they all refer to the physical object of man’s preservation; that nature having implanted in us the want of that preservation, has made a law to us of all its consequences, and a crime of everything that deviates from it; that we carry in us the seed of every virtue, and of every perfection; that it only requires to be developed that we are only happy inasmuch as we observe the rules established by nature for the end of our preservation; and that all wisdom, all perfection, all law, all virtue, all philosophy, consist in the practice of these axioms founded on our own organization:—Preserve thyself; Instruct thyself; Moderate thyself; live for thy fellow-men, that they may live for thee.”
The Bible moralist would have us believe that from this book all morality has been derived; that God is the author and the Bible the revelation and sole repository of moral laws. But it is not from Gods and Bibles that these laws have come. In the words of Tyndall, “Not in the way assumed by our dogmatic teachers has the morality of human nature been propped up. The power that has molded us thus far has worked with stern tools upon a rigid stuff.... That power did not work with delusions, nor will it stay its hands when such are removed. Facts, rather than dogmas, have been its ministers—hunger, shame, pride, love, hate, terror, awe—such were the forces, the interaction and adjustment of which during the immeasurable ages of his development wove the triplex web of man’s physical, intellectual, and moral nature, and such are the forces that will be effectual to the end.”
Accepting the Bible—not for what it is claimed to be, the word of God, but for what it is, the work of man—I can excuse, in a degree, the crude ideas of right and wrong and the laxity of morals that prevailed among the people whose history it purports to record. The age in which they lived, the circumstances that surrounded them, must palliate, to some extent, their deeds and theories. But it is humiliating to think that in these better times, illuminated by the light of a glorious civilization, there are those who spurn the robes of virtue that Reason in the loom of grave Experience has woven, and who from the dark and musty closets of the past drag forth for use the soiled and blood-stained garments that barbarians wore.
With this chapter our review of the Bible ends. We have examined successively the authenticity of its books, the credibility of its statements, and the morality of its teachings. The authenticity of the Bible must be abandoned. It will be abandoned, and abandoned soon. Its credibility, impaired by a knowledge of its lack of authenticity and the exposure of its numberless errors, will be contended for awhile longer. But this, in turn, will go. When its credibility has been destroyed, and it is acknowledged to be mostly a volume of fables and legends, priestcraft continuing to survive, the clergy, as a dernier resort, will descant upon the divine lessons of morality taught by these fables and legends. But the relentless iconoclasts of criticism will break this image also, and the Bible as a moral guide and religious authority will be laid away forever.
APPENDIX.
Arguments Against the Divine Origin and in Support of the Human Origin of the Bible.
A celebrated theologian has used with much ingenuity and effect the watch as an argument in support of the divine origin of the universe. I have a watch. Like other watches it is not infallible. But supposing that I should claim for it infallibility and divinity; that while other watches are of human invention and workmanship, this particular make of watches is the work of God. The claim would be deemed too absurd for serious consideration. I would be regarded as a lunatic or a jester. Now, it is no more absurd to claim infallibility and divinity for a watch than it is to claim infallibility and divinity for a book. Yet millions of people of recognized sanity and intelligence profess to believe, and many of them do sincerely believe, that a book called the Bible is divine. How do we account for this? It is simply the result of centuries of religious education. I could have taken my children and taught them that my watch is divine. Had I kept them isolated as far as possible from other people, had I commanded them to shun discussion, and forbidden them to reason about it, as the clergy do in regard to the Bible, they would probably believe it. I was taught that the Bible is divine. I believed it. But in a fortunate hour I listened to the voice of Reason; I examined the claims of its advocates; I read it; and the halo of holiness surrounding the old book vanished.