* To the shame of credulous and priest-degraded mankind, the
present superstition of Europe hath been established, as it
were, in defiance of the light of Nature, reason, common
sense, and all experience; and what is still more strange
and revolting, by those very means and agencies which men
ought to hold most in contempt and detestation; viz., fraud,
forgery, pretended miracles and prophecies, hypocrisy,
avarice, tyranny, cruelty, massacres, and wars which have
deluged the earth with blood, and sacrificed hundreds of
millions of human beings to its frenzied demon.
In no age of the world was morality ever found more pure and virtuous than amongst the Epicureans of old; and no ancient sect has been so much traduced and vilified by Christian priests of all denominations, who, in lauding the most revolting system that ever insulted the understanding of man,* have been utterly regardless of truth in their foul aspersions of Paganism; and have represented these amiable rationalists as reckless sensualists—profligate voluptuaries; which is just the reverse of their true characters. With them the preservation of health was the fundamental principle, since there can be no enjoyment of life without that pre-requisite; and the means they used to secure its permanence was the strict observance of temperance in everything, according to the dictates of Nature; all excess of any kind whatsoever was avoided as injurious, and the full and proper exercise of the body was enjoined as indispensable. Free from the restlessness of ambition, the utility of their maxims was evinced in their lives, and they were generally esteemed as the most exemplary and virtuous of all the ancients, and the most noted for the value of their moral actions. We may gather from the writings of Cicero and Diogenes Laertius, that they did more scrupulously observe the laws, piety, and fidelity among men, than any other sect whatsoever, not excepting even the Stoics themselves. Like the philanthropist, Owen, they held that a man was either good or bad according to education and custom. Being, above all others, strict observers of truth and honesty, they were often chosen to manage the inheritances of orphans, and it was common with them to rear and educate, at their own expense, the children of deceased friends; their known integrity frequently procured for them offers from the Roman consuls and emperors, to fill high places of employment and trust; but these offers were often declined, from the strong desire they had to lead private lives, free from care and anxiety. They had no desire for posthumous renown, and denied that there was any future state of existence for man, more than for any other animal; and teaching that mind or soul is wholly dependent on animal organisation*—the mere creature of the brain, without which it has no existence; and that the matter composing the bodies of men and other animals, is alone eternal, though subject to thousands of millions of different forms, modes, or states of being.
* Intelligence is the result of the animal organisation of
matter, and cannot be separated from, or have existence
without it. "Animated matter is not the result of
intelligence." Thought, mind, soul, or breath, call it
which you will, is as much the offspring or effect of
organisation as music is of the instrument that produces it.
One of the great luminaries of the church, even the Bishop
of Llandaff, has given us his own creed respecting what is
called soul, which savors of something more than mere
scepticism. Speaking of its supposed flight into
immortality, after death, he says,—"This notion was,
without doubt, the offspring of prejudice and ignorance; I
must own that my knowledge of the nature of the soul is much
the same now that it was then" (in childhood). "I have read
volumes on the subject, but I have no scruple in saying that
I know nothing about it"—Anecdotes of his own life,
written by himself.
But in modern times, under the triune mythology (or the three-god fable), society is in a great measure destitute of such pure morality, and sound philosophy; all being mixed up with the deleterious alloy of theology, and its ever-changing inventions in its own peculiar element of unproved existences. This supernaturalism is the only delusion that deserves the name of atheism, because it beguiles man to set at nought the immutable revelations of Nature; and its very essence being to prevent all correct views of that Power, the pretension to look beyond it nullifies or vitiates everything good on earth. Whilst mankind shall not only continue to be advocates for those impositions which destroy their own pleasure and happiness, but pay for their degradation by supporting a mischievous canker-worm priesthood, they deprive themselves of a fair trial to see what a state of affluence and ease they might attain by very moderate labor; and by repudiating all doctrines and dogmas founded on spiritualism, immaterialism, or any other nothingism, because they are words absolutely without meaning, as they represent nothing that has a real existence; and therefore, until some immaterial entity can be made palpable to the senses, they will remain downright contradictions in terms, though they have hitherto served as the principle machinery of theologie deception.* Contemning all such visionary mummeries, our divines of the present day are at no loss to find you a vast difference between a spiritual body, and a bodily spirit!
* The learned amongst the Fathers were materialists.
Tertullian says, "Nihil incorporale nisi quod non est."
Saint Hilary, in the fourth century, affirmed that, "there
is nothing but what is corporeal" Yet and attending to the
principles of their own nature, together with the physical
realities that surround them, and upon which alone depends
every atom of their welfare and happiness, mankind will be
able by perseverance to remove the overwhelming evils of
their present condition; but in vain will they expect such
results, while they continue mere automata, to be played at
pleasure by superstition and despotism.
Amongst the many immoral corruptions which the present superstition of Europe has entailed on the laboring man, few have a worse tendency than the compulsory exaction of one seventh of his time, which its priests have procured to be dedicated to their purposes alone; whereby he is compelled either to be idle, or to swell their vain pageant train to that shrine of hypocrisy called church. The observance of Sunday is, like everything else in Christianism, borrowed from the heathens; and is merely a continuation of the Pagan festival that was held in the temples of the Sun, in adoration of that luminary, as the name attests beyond all contradiction; with this difference alone, that the Fathers, as if it were to make the thing more expensive and intolerable in their Scripture traffic, changed it into a weekly festival, substituting the triune machinery of the church for that of the temple. But as the present observance of this day throughout Christendom is nowhere enjoined in the New Testament, it was customary with Christians, even in the fourth century, to perform their usual work on that day; and, according to Mosheim, many of them held Thursdays and Fridays to be as sacred as Sunday. The entailing upon human industry this weekly curse of idleness was reserved for, and was worthy of, the Emperor Constantine, a man who had the guilt of seven family murders upon his head: and as the priests of Paganism refused to expiate those crimes (so Zosimus and others say), he abandoned their religion, and adopted that of Christianity, whose less scrupulous priests absolved him, and white-washed his crimes to the purity of snow. In return for this scouring, the imperial murderer felt himself prompted by gratitude to do all in his power to establish a new hierarchy, who could make themselves so subservient to the purposes of tyranny; so he began by paving the way for finally depriving the industrious man of one seventh of his time, which was to be appropriated in promoting the importance, the riches, and the power of his newly adopted priesthood.
But even this pious man of blood (who to the very last, kept two strings to his bow, but was rather more willing to pay his respects to Jupiter than to Jehovah), wedded as he was to that priesthood, which had so kindly effaced the stains of so many inhuman murders, durst not gratify them all at once, lest he should bring a famine upon the empire; and therefore by his edict issued on the subject, the observance of Sunday was compulsory only upon magistrates, and the inhabitants of cities generally; but in regard to the people in the country, and all agriculturists, he says:—"On the venerable day of the Sun, let those who are situated in the country, freely and at full liberty, attend to the business of agriculture." After the death of this emperor, the church which he had planted soon grew strong in wealth and power; and the consequent influence of the hierarchy enabled them, gradually to extend the forced respect for their own harvest-day, over both town and country.
This clerical usurpation is so far from being sanctioned by any authority, that the New Testament suffers no man to "judge another in respect to the Sabbath day, or of any holy days" (see Coloss, ii., 16). It asserts the right to esteem every day alike, "agreeably to the persuasions of a man's own mind" (Romans, xiv., 5). It binds no man "to the observance of days, and months, and times, and years" (Gal. iv., 10) Jesus did not enjoin respect for the Sabbath, but justified the contrary (Matt, xii., 5). There being no gospel authority requiring this waste of time for the benefit and gratification of priests alone, it was not until some time in the fourth century that they fully succeeded in palming upon industry this weekly inlet to every vice; nor was it legally enforced, we believe, until a considerable time after the Council of Nice, that foulest combination of fraud, knavery, and priestcraft that ever degraded the human race, Let us now attend a little to the glaring immoralities and crimes which are the inevitable effects of compulsory idleness on this day, that was originally the heathen festival of the glorious solar deity.
There are few exceptions to the general rule, that the industrious man is the virtuous. "By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," is the universal decree of Nature; and every violator of this law of health shall be unhappy in the precise ratio of its violation. Hence it follows that when men are compelled either to be idle vagrants, or give up their minds mechanically to a worship which appears to them at once useless and irrational, they cannot do otherwise than prefer the former; and being thus compelled to be idle, they are virtually forced to be vicious, which leads to the reverse of happiness. The profligacy and crime arising from this weekly idleness, is amply set forth in those scenes of drunkenness, debauchery, gaming, and quarrelling, which are of constant Sunday occurrence in our beer and gin palaces: but as the various poisons vended in these sinks of ruin pay high duties to government, and are, next to its oppressive ally, a rapacious priesthood, the surest means of keeping the multitude in poverty and ignorance, that virtuous and salutary legislation which would suppress or regulate them according to public health and good morals, is not to be expected from our present lawgivers, aristocratical and clerical, who feel a deep interest in the ignorance and debasement of the laboring classes. The orthodox Paley, who "could not afford to keep a conscience" alludes to such places of public resort, when he says, "the laboring classes" (being doomed to idleness) "consume their time in rude, if not criminal pleasures—in stupid sloth or brutish intemperance." He might have added, that vast numbers of young men who have ended their career by an ignominious death, have dated the commencement of their vicious courses from what the pampered harpies in black are pleased to call "sabbath breaking," or "profanation of the Lord's day." And who is to blame for all this? Verily none but that powerful phalanx of hypocritical delusionists, who pretend to be delegated from the immaterial, invisible "Persons," who rule the upper regions; and who, in confederacy with hereditary lawgivers on earth, have, amongst other conventional impositions, not only deprived the wealth producers of their right to spend the seventh part of their time in the way most suitable to their circumstances, but enforced idleness during that time, which, coupled with that lurid ignorance called religious instruction, most commonly leads to vice and debasement. With a dissimulation and effrontery that is matchless out of the sacerdotal order, they pretend an interest in the laboring man's ease and welfare; that he requires the seventh as a day of rest, which day should be dedicated to the "Lord" but as their Levitical authorities are derived from the rankest species of priestcraft that ever degraded man, they will no longer pass in the present age; for those must be mentally blind who do not see, that in all times, whatever was ostensibly dedicated as "God's share," was appropriated solely for the benefit of the priests. It is most true that the working man wants rest; but is not he the best judge when recreation or rest becomes necessary? The simple fact is, he never can have either peace or rest, or live under equitable and salutary laws, nor enjoy the fruits of his labor, whilst his mind is kept in darkness by the delusions of supernaturalism, and his industry preyed upon by its priests. To perpetuate the stultifying influence of this wizard power, whose nature it is to be adverse to the natural enlightenment of the bulk of mankind,* every corner of the country is assiduously studded with expensive temples, devoted to the exercise of its Sunday spells; but particularly for the nursing of popular ignorance. Against such an overwhelming antagonist, abetted by the government and riches of the country, all in deep array to frustrate his intellectual improvement, the laboring man has nothing to oppose but self-cultivation alone, which will lead him to the knowledge that it is better to think for himself than to be cheated; and that all the miseries he suffers are in reality rooted in unearthly chimeras—nonentities which, in all ages and religions, have been invented for similar purposes of deception and slavery. Until he so relieves himself from this bondage (no other power will do it for him), his condition must continue to be more abject and pitiable than that of the sturdy savage, who stalks in the pride of his mental and bodily independence; or even that of the beast of the field.
* Hobbes calls the pretended science of theology the kingdom
of darkness. It is indeed a perpetual insult to human
reason, debasing and debauching the mind.