1st. That repentance grows out of education.
2d. That it depends entirely upon previous convictions as to what it may sanction, and what it may condemn.
No Christian ever repents in favor of Mahomedan-ism; and no Mahomedan ever lifts up his dying voice in favor of Christianity as being superior to his own religion; and no Hindoo has ever been known to indulge in death-bed lamentation for not having previously embraced either Christianity or Mahomedanism; because their earlier education never turned their minds in that direction. The mind has to be educated over again before it can embrace a new religion, or even condemn a wrong act, which, up to that period, it had always believed to be right.
Hence it is evident repentance may lead a person to condemn what is right and sanction what is wrong. How profoundly ignorant of religious history and mental science must those persons therefore be who attach any importance to those diseased and often incoherent utterances, called "death-bed recantations," or who believe a thing the sooner because sanctioned by a dying man or woman, or that they do anything toward proving what is right or what is wrong with respect to either our belief or our moral conduct! And yet we find the orthodox churches printing every year, through their tract societies, stories of death-bed repentance in tract form, and scattering them over the country by the million. As they prove nothing but the honesty of the dying man or woman, they are not worth the paper on which they are printed.
The phenomenon of repentance is simply the operation of a natural law, by which the last impressions made upon the mind are generally cancelled from the memory first, by the progress of fever and disease, thus leaving the earlier impressions to rule the judgment. The person is then virtually a child, controlled by his early youthful convictions, with which, if his late belief and conduct disagree, it causes a mental conflict, called repentance. Thus, instead of being the visitation of God, as Christians claim, repentance is shown to be the product of natural causes. The conclusion is thus established beyond disproof, that the mental processes called conversion, repentance, and "getting religion" are simply natural psychological operations, depending upon education, organization, and intelligence. They depend also upon intellect and scientific knowledge. For persons of large intellectual brains, or extensive scientific culture, never fall victims to these mental derangements. Hence those priests who claim God as their author are either deplorably and inexcusably ignorant, or lacking in moral honesty.
CHAPTER XLIV. THE MORAL LESSONS OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY.
1. The most important lesson deducible from all the religious systems, commemorated in history, and noticed in this work, is, that all religious conceptions, whether in the shape of doctrine, precept, prophecy, prayer, religious devotion, or a belief in miracles, are a spontaneous outgrowth of the moral and religious elements of the human mind. And to assign them a higher origin is to ignore the developments of modern science, and insult the highest intelligence of the age.
2. From the elevated scientific plane occupied by the most enlightened portion of the present age, there is no difficulty in finding a satisfactory solution for every event, every occurrence, and every performance recorded in any of the numerous bibles which have long been afloat in the world, and which have always constituted the sole basis for the claim to a divine origin of all the religious systems of the past; so that such a claim can be no longer vindicated by historically intelligent people.
3. We have shown in this work that all the miraculous incidents related in the history of Jesus Christ as a proof of his divinity can find a more rational explanation than that which assigns them to divine agency. Some of them are now known to lie within the natural capacity of the human mind to achieve, others are explained by recently discovered natural laws. Another class are now well understood mental or nervous phenomena. Other stories, now regarded by the Christian world as referring to miraculous achievements, were probably designed by the writer as mere fable or metaphor. All the events in Christ's history, we have shown, are susceptible of a hundred fold more rational explanation than that which regards them as the feats of a God in violation of his own laws.