The real infidels of the day are the theological liars and pretenders who are wilfully ignorant, or too dishonest and cowardly to publish what they know. Infidelity is breach of trust, disloyalty to truth. He who would do the most good must tell the whole truth. If we regard the Gospels as simple compilations from earlier documents and traditions, with occasional additions and alterations to meet occasions and times, we shall find in them very many things to admire and to adopt into our problems of life and systems of morals, many things worthy of imitation, many things to give courage and comfort in the struggle for existence, many things which would be just as true and just as useful if they had only been written yesterday by some one whom we have known from our childhood.
Regarding the Gospels as human, we can excuse their absurdities and errors, and while we cast these errors aside we joyfully accept what is true and good and beautiful; but by claiming for them what they are not we bring even what is true into disrepute.
It was a master-stroke of worldly wisdom and policy when Irenæus in the second century (who first mentioned our four Gospels) sanctioned the monstrous assumption of all ecclesiastical authority by divine right by the bishops and priests, which power soon became centralized at Rome; but it was the greatest misfortune of the ages for the cause of true religion and sound morality. It not only made the Church of Rome with its immense machinery a necessary result, but it made the not less false systems of Protestant dogmatic theology possible. There is no use in attempting to disguise the fact that the so-called scheme of redemption is in principle and substance the same in the Catholic and orthodox Protestant Churches. Many intelligent persons feel that they would as soon belong to one as the other, while they secretly regard the Romanists as logically the more consistent.
The Romanists are strong in that they place the Church first (jure divino) and make the scriptures the product of the Church, and of course subject to its interpretation. Protestants are weak in that they make the Church subject to written scriptures, which were selected by the founders of Catholicism, and then for centuries altered, forged, interpolated, and manipulated by popes and priests to strengthen their authority and secure the absolute submission of the people.
The one fatal blunder of the Protestant Reformers was to found their system of theology upon a written book of the origin of which so little is known, and yet regarding which so much is known that it is impossible for persons of a rational, judicial mind to accept it as an infallible supernatural revelation.
The conclusion is inevitable that in the absence of everything that, by even a strain of language, can be called evidence as to the genuineness and authenticity, of our Gospels we cannot safely accept them as an infallible authority in religious matters. We have a right to examine them critically, just as we would read and study any other ancient writings of uncertain authorship and date.
The Reformation was in part the substitution of a book which was pronounced infallible, but which has proved to be very fallible, for a Church which claimed infallibility, but which had shown itself not only very fallible, but exceedingly corrupt and dangerous. Infallibility belongs to neither men nor books. Infallibility in books is an absurdity. A religion founded upon a printed book must submit to examination of both the origin and character of that book, and must shoulder the imperfections and errors which the discoveries of modern research have fully exposed. The principles of true religion inherent in human nature, an ineradicable constituent of the constitution of man, as has been shown, are to-day obscured and shackled by the false position in which its professed friends have placed it. It will be shown before these papers are concluded that a religion manacled by a printed book claiming infallibility, and made to depend solely upon an historical character who, if admitted to be historical, wrote nothing himself and commissioned no one to write anything for him, and of whose verbal teachings and actual mode of life we can never be sure,—a religion thus encumbered must suffer great loss, if not total failure, as men shall progress in knowledge and science shall uncover the past and demonstrate the absurdities of the superstitious dogmas of the ancient faiths. It is impossible to compress the largest brains of the nineteenth century into the smallest skulls of the twelfth century. The true friend of religion is the fearless man who dares attempt to rescue it from the accretions and perversions of the Dark Ages, and to establish its eternal principles of truth and righteousness in the very nature of man, in the elevation of moral character, in strict agreement with the demonstrated facts of the present, as opposed to the bigoted and degrading fancies of the past. To defend religion from the follies of its mistaken champions, and show that its foundations are secure and its ultimate triumph certain, may now be denounced as treason to the Church, but in coming years it will be seen to have been the work of men of whom the Church of to-day is not worthy.
The fact is, very little is known of the New Testament, but too much is well known to receive it in evidence in a matter of so much importance. The narratives it contains would be ruled out of court in any civilized country on the globe. It is evidently a huge compilation of what was at best only traditions among the nations of the earth, and even these traditions, mixed and mangled as they are, must have another and a more rational explanation than an historical or a literal one. This book cannot be an infallible divine revelation. Let us see whether we cannot find out what was really intended to be taught by the different writers.
[CHAPTER X. THE DRAMA OF THE GOSPELS]
“Great is the mystery of godliness.”—1 Tim. 3:16.