Down to Eighteen Hundred Fourteen every paper in the world was printed one side at a time, on an ordinary hand-press; and a nail, or a brick, or a knife, or a pair of shears or scissors, or a razor, or a woven pair of stockings, or an ax or a hoe or a shovel, or a lock and key, or a plate of glass of any size, was not made in what is now the United States.
In Seventeen Hundred Ninety, there were only seventy-five post-offices in the country, and the whole extent of our post-routes was less than nineteen hundred miles; cheap postage was unheard of; so were envelopes; and had any one suggested the transmission of messages with lightning speed, he would have been thought insane. The microscope on the one hand and the telescope on the other were in their infancy as instruments of science; and geology and chemistry were almost unknown, to say nothing of the telephone and all the other various phones, and the X-rays, and hundreds of other new things.
In Seventeen Hundred Sixty-two there were only six stagecoaches running in all England, and these were a novelty. A man named John Crosset thought they were so dangerous an innovation that he wrote a pamphlet against them. "These coaches," he wrote, "make gentlemen come to London upon every small occasion which otherwise they would not do, except upon urgent necessity. The conveniency of the passage makes their wives come often up, who, rather than come such long journeys on horseback, would stay at home. Then when they come to town they must be in the 'wade' [probably that is where the word swim comes in now], get fine clothes, go to plays, and treats, and by these means get such a habit of idleness and love of pleasure that they are uneasy ever after."
We can all see how much improvement there has been in all things but creeds. Improvements can come, and old things go, but creeds go on forever! A creed implies something fixed and immovable. In other words, it means you have a "heel-rope on."
The word "creed" is from credo, "I believe." We have had a great deal of compulsion of belief, and a thousand years of almost absolute unanimity. Liberty was dead and the ages were dark. We call them the Middle Ages because they were the death between the life that was before and the life that came after. Then came a new birth of thought—a "Renaissance"—and after this, some reformation in the form of a Protestantism.
Since then, the Protestants have continued to protest, not only against the old, but against each other. And this is the best thing they have done. Thus liberty has been saved, for each would have coerced its fellow organization, as did their infamous mother, the Roman Catholic Church, before them. From "creed" comes "credulous" and "credulity." And they have filled the world with their kind. In the United States alone, there are about one hundred forty types. Each is a system of credulity pitted against a hundred and thirty-nine others. They all rest on authority. They all denounce investigation—unless it has for its end the support of their authority.
Hence, with the exception of two or three denominations, to become a professed Christian means to accept credulously and without question a system of belief about Nature and man and the world which you would deny in toto if you reasoned as you do about other things, and which you do practically deny by re-explaining and refining it into anything but what is stated. Down deep in your heart you do not, and never did, believe it in the same honest way in which you form your other opinions.
Think for a moment of the Christian idea of the world, its origin, its shape, place, importance, and its final end. Does any man or woman who has been through a common-school geography believe the ideas implied in the common Christian dogmas regarding the world? We must remember that the world taught in the geography is not the Christian world.
The world taught in the Christian dogmas is beneath the heavens—not a rolling sphere flying through space. It is flat, and the sun and stars pass over it daily. It is the chief object of God's creation on which to place man. It is God's footstool, and his throne is Heaven above. He created it just four thousand and four years before the Christian era began. Now we all know that this is not true; that there is no up nor down; that the earth is not the center; that it is not flat; that the sun does not go round it; that it is a very insignificant little orb; that "up in Heaven" is an utterly meaningless expression; and that the world is not a creation, but an evolution.