When a debt is paid, it is canceled, and dismissed from memory, and nothing more said about it. But in this case the sinner is told he must still suffer the penalty for every sin he commits, notwithstanding Christ died to atone for and cancel that sin.
Where, then, is the virtue of the atonement? Like other doctrines of the orthodox creed, it is at war with reason and common sense, and every principle of sound morality, and will be marked by coming ages as a relic of barbarism.
CHAPTER XXII. THE HOLY GHOST OF ORIENTAL ORIGIN
OF all the weird, fanciful, and fabulous stories appertaining to the Gods and other spiritual entities of the olden times, whose capricious adventures we find so profusely narrated in oriental mythology—of all the strange, mythical and mystical feats, and ever-varying and ever-diverging changes in the shape, appearance, sex, and modes of manifestation which characterize the hobgoblins or ghostly beings which comprise the esoteric stock of the ancient mysteries, that appertaining to the third member of "the hypostatic union," the Holy Ghost, seems to stand pre-eminent. And I propose here to submit the facts to show that the Holy Ghost story of the Christian Gospels, like the more ancient pagan versions of the same story, is marked by the same wild, discordant and legendary characteristics which abound in all the accounts of gods and ghosts found recorded in the religious books of various nations.
The following brief exposition of the history and exploits of this anomalous, nondescript, chameleon-like being will clearly evince that the same fanciful, metaphorical and fabulous changes in the size, shape, sex and appearance of this third limb of the triune God are found in the Christian Scriptures which are disclosed in the more ancient oriental traditions.
We will first exhibit a classification of the names and characteristics of this imaginary being drawn from the gospels and epistles of the Christian bible, by which it will be observed that scarcely any two references to it agree in assigning it the same character or attributes.
1. In John xiv. 26, the Holy Ghost is spoken of as a person or personal God.
2. In Luke iii. 22, the Holy Ghost changes, and assumes the form of a dove.
3. In Matt. xiii. 16, the Holy Ghost becomes a spirit