The Church has always lived by robbing the home; the priest has always lived on the wages of the toiler. The gods of religion have never done aught to lighten the heavy load on the shoulders of labor. The priest has said to mankind that his Lord left this consolation to the world: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden and I will give you rest."
What the priest really means is this: Come unto me and I will do the rest; and by the time he has done it, there is nothing of manhood left.
The priest also teaches that his Lord and Master said, "Ask and ye shall receive," and adds, "The Lord will provide." How many poor wretches have believed those words; but their outstretched hands withered away day by day, and at last dropped empty by their sides. There they lay white and cold, holding not the bread they fondly expected, but holding the hand of death.
It may be pious and it may be beautiful to say, "The Lord will provide," but it is a lie just the same. When, the other day, the bodies of a mother and her two children were being carried to the grave with the words, "starved to death," written on their faces, but not written on their caskets, it was a sufficient refutation of the religious teaching that "The Lord will provide." It is the plain, unvarnished truth that the Lord will not even provide the coffin for the poor victim of such a false, deceptive, religious faith.
In olden times it was customary for the Church to say, God's light lights the world. Not so today. God's light has gone out. It is man's light that lights the world and the Church too. Our enlightenment is human, not divine. No altar of religion burns with the fire of truth. Science carries the torch of knowledge: liberty is the way and truth is the goal.
On our earth gods no longer make their homes. It was not safe for them to live any more. Their sons may once have married the daughters of men, but they can not get a license to do so today. Parents will not stand for it.
So the gods have gone, bag and baggage. Where they have gone, no one knows. The skies give no sign that they are hiding up there. The telescope has found seventy million stars, but not one god.
It is time for the pulpit to stop repeating the old superstitions about God and about what he has done for man. He has never done any more for man than he is doing today; never spoken to man any more than he is speaking today; never revealed himself to anybody any more than he stands revealed to you and me and to every human being everywhere.
Every word that ever came from the mouth of God man put in his mouth, and every book revealed by God was written by man.