I don't know, do you?

by Marilla M. Ricker

DECAY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY

HERE is a great deal of exaggerated rhetoric employed in praising what is called "Christian Morality." I have examined with considerable care everything that may justly come within the meaning of this expression, and I am bound to say, out of respect for the truth, that such morality does not deserve praise and can not be praised by the honest lips of an honest person.

I am perfectly aware that I have made a statement which challenges the sincerity of the Christian pulpit, but every one knows that there is not a minister in Christendom whose practise agrees with his preaching.

While it is common to hear a clergyman in pious ecstasy exhaust the vocabulary of laudation in his praises of the beautiful morals of the "Sermon on the Mount," it is exceedingly rare to see one of these parsons sacrifice his commonsense to the nonsense of Jesus.

We are learning that the theological morality of the Christian faith is not the right kind of morality to make manhood and womanhood. The great weakness of Christian morality is this: It depends upon the Christian idea of Jesus, and when the world has outgrown the superstition about this person, all of his moral precepts will lose their value and their splendor.

Men and women of any intellectual penetration know that the New Testament story is founded upon unreliable tradition; that its heart is a myth.

Where men live independent of the foolish faith of the Gospels, there is a character of self-reliance which towers like a mountain-peak above the dead level of Christian endeavor. The person who accepts the Christian theology is no more in sympathy with the best thought of the age than is the man who wanders about the streets, begging his food and sleeping wherever he can, in harmony with the highest comforts of our civilization.

There is a nobler purpose in a train of cars carrying grain and produce across the continent than in a conference of clergymen trying to keep alive a theology which teaches that God was born of a Jewish maiden who lived and died in Palestine, and devising ways to make the people believe the ridiculous superstition.