* Vide Matt x., 84.
** In the headlong inexperience of youth, the sexes, under
an innocent impulse of Nature, enter into the perpetual
snare of marriage, with tempers and dispositions as
different as are their sexes; and in a state of penury
scarcely able to subsist themselves, they engage to give
subsistence to a numerous family. Here is the beginning of
that unhappy state of matrimonial life which exhibits the
darkest portraiture of human existence—a procreative nest
of nuptial misery. But as that abject condition of toilworn
bondage mainly entails and fosters ignorance, by allowing
the laborer no leisure for the cultivation of his mind, it
has ever been cherished as the safeguard of "Church and
State" despotism.
All these questions are answered in five words:—the artificial religion of priestcraft.
So shall the priest-ridden world go on, till
"From the lips of truth one mighty breath,
Shall, like a whirlwind, scatter in its breeze
The whole dark pile of human mockeries."
[Publishers' Note.]—Since this was written vast changes have been made in England in the laws relating to marriage and divorce, and if Logan Mitchell could rewrite this he would probably be satisfied with such increased facilities for divorce as exist now in the State of Massachusetts, coupled with more complete recognition by the law of the parental rights of the mother.
END OF LECTURE SECOND. [ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]
LECTURE THIRD. THE CHRISTIAN FATHERS, AND THEIR DOGMAS
On the back-ground appeared the Christian fathers, rearing a
form of superstition the most sanguinary and destructive of
human happiness that has ever afflicted the world. Her limbs
bestrode the prostrate nations to the extremities of the
earth; her head lowered to the clouds, whilst the right hand
of the gigantic monster brandished a burning torch.
Beware of a bull before, a horse behind, and a priest all round.
Old Proverb.
It has constantly been assumed by church chronologists that the Jewish sect of Galileans, who afterwards took the old Pagan appellation of Christian, had writings of their own as early as the first century; but this is mere gratuitous assumption, and rests only on the authority of men entirely undeserving of credit. As for this new Christian Theogony, and how it came to receive the first stitches of its patchwork during the second and third centuries, we know nothing about the matter, except what we have on the authority of Eusebius (see preceding lecture), Bishop of Cæsarea, a man who was confessedly the most notorious of all the Church historians for forgery and every other species of pious falsehood.* In getting up his history, he confesses that he entered upon "a solitary and untrodden way" that he could nowhere find as much as the bare steps of those who had passed the same path before him; that he had "not found any ecclesiastical writer which unto this day hath in this behalf employed any diligence."
* Vide Baronius.