It is safe to assume that the average Atheism is disbelief in the God of the dominant theology, and not in the Ultimate Power that makes for righteousness. Vulgar, anthropomorphic conceptions of God, which endow him with certain speculative attributes, are condemned by reason and science; but nevertheless phenomena have something behind them, and energy has something beneath it, and all things have something in them which is the source of all phenomena and energy; and this enduring, all-pervading Power is our sure guarantee of the order of the universe. And this Power theists persist in calling God. Theologians may call this Pantheism, but it is only seemingly so. There is a vast difference between saying that everything is God, and that God is in everything. The old watchmaker-mechanician idea, a God separate and outside of the universe, has become obsolete, and science and reason and the law of progressive development now compel men to reshape their conceptions of God as identical with the Cosmos, plus the Eternal Power.

Herbert Spencer has beautifully said: “But amid the mysteries, which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that man is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.” The felt and the seen have their fulness in the unseen and intangible, and the visible impels us to seek its counterpart and complement in the invisible.

  1. Our Faith in Religion remains.—And here the question comes up, What is religion? The commonly-accepted meaning of the word is as derived from the Latin religare, which means “to bind back or to bind fast.” We do not accept the definition, because it is suggestive of bondage. It implies a previous harmonious relation with God which had been lost. It favors the dogmas of the fall of Adam and man’s alleged reinstatement and “binding back” to the divine allegiance, through what is called, in theological parlance, a “redemptive scheme.” It is a significant fact that Lactantius, a theologian of the early part of the fourth century, was the first to apply the word religion to “the bond of piety by which we are bound to God.” Augustine of the fifth century followed his example, and so did Servius about the same time; and their example has been followed by theologians ever since, presumably because it favors the dogmas of the fall of Adam and the redemption by Christ. But the highest classical authorities derive the word religion from relegere or religere, signifying “to go through or over and over again in reading, speech, or thought—to review carefully and faithfully to ponder and reflect with conscientious fidelity.”

Cicero must have understood the original meaning and origin of the Latin word, and he took this view of the subject. He lived more than three hundred years before Lactantius, and he said: “But they who carefully meditated, and as it were considered and reconsidered all those things which pertained to the worship of the gods, were called religious, from religere.” The word religio was in common use in ancient Rome in the sense of scruple, implying the consciousness of a natural obligation wholly irrespective of the gods. The oldest popular meanings of the word religion were faithfulness, sincerity, veracity, honor, punctiliousness, and conscientiousness.*(1) Religion, then, in its true meaning, is the great fact of duty, of oughtness or right-fulness, of conscience and moral sense. Its great business is to seek conformity to one’s highest ideal. It consists in an honest and persistent effort by all appropriate means to realize ideal excellence and to transform into actual character and practical life.

  1. See A Study of Religion, by Francis E. Abbot.

Religion in this sense is universally approved. It is false religion which is condemned. It is what some men would require you to believe in spite of history, science, and self-consciousness. It is superstition, bigotry, credulity, creed, sectarianism, that men detest. Religion is innate and ineradicable in man, and there is a natural religion concerning which man cannot be skeptical if he would. Bishop Butler has well said that the morality of the gospel is “the republication of natural religion and it would be easy to show the evolution of religion from very small beginnings and how this work is going on to-day.

Regarding religion as an evolution, a development, and not as something as inflexible as a demonstrated proposition in mathematics, we are all the while expecting an improvement. We have a right to expect that Christianity should be better than more ancient religions, because it is the latest; and so it is in many respects. But we have a right to expect that this improvement will go on with the lapse of time. The religion of the nineteenth century is an improvement on the religion of the first century, but we are reaching forward to greater perfection. Even the system of morals taught in the New Testament is defective. We want something purer and better, and it is rapidly coming. All true religion is natural, and its morality relates to the mutual and reciprocal claims of men arising from organized society. If we are right in our dealings with our fellow-men, we cannot be out of harmonious relations with God. All happiness here and hereafter depends upon our knowledge of the order of the universe and the conformation of our lives to it. It is impossible to divorce true religion from real science, and the more we know of the latter the more we shall have of the former. Whatever tends to promote pure religion ought to be encouraged, and no man has any more reason to be ashamed of his religion than he has to be ashamed of his appetite. We sum up our ideas of religion by saying: Do all the good you can to all the persons you can by all the means you can, and as long as you can.

  1. The Scriptures remain for just What they are.—Portions of the Bible command our most profound reverence and our most unqualified admiration. We respond heartily to some of the truly excellent moral maxims of the Bible, and read with rapture some of the selections of poetry from the Hebrew prophets. But right in close connection we often find stories of uncleanness, fornications, adulteries, and incests that the vilest newspaper of to-day would not dare publish. Jael meanly murders Sisera, and is praised for it, while the deceit and treachery of Rahab are commended in the New Testament. The story of Boaz and Ruth is only fit for a dime novel. Solomon's Song is full of lasciviousness. Abram lies. Moses gets mad. David commits adultery and murders Uriah. Jacob is deceitful and a trickster; and so on to the end. Polygamy is shown to have been the rule, and not the exception, among Jehovah's favorites. War is everywhere tacitly justified, and slavery is practised and not an abolitionist opens his mouth. We go to the New Testament, and He who is called the “Perfect One” curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season, drives out with small cords men engaged in legitimate business, upsets their tables, and uses the most violent and reproachful language toward them. He shows want of respect for his mother, and is ambiguous and evasive in his conversation with the woman of Canaan—says he does not know whether he is going to the feast at Jerusalem or not, and then straightway sets out for the Holy City, and makes believe by his actions that he is going to one place, when he is actually going to another.

We want a higher morality than is taught in the Bible. We want higher and more noble conceptions than are given in the parable of the “Unjust Judge,” and more just and equitable principles than are taught in the parable of the “Unjust Steward” or the “Laborers in the Vineyard” or the “Ten Talents.” We want a morality that relates to this life rather than to the next We do not want the possession of property held up as a crime, and poverty represented as a virtue entitling one to a seat in the future kingdom. We want good homes to live in now, rather than “mansions in the skies.” We do not want a morality that appeals to selfishness only, that discriminates in favor of celibacy, and that only tolerates marriage as a remedy for lust, as taught in the seventh chapter of First Corinthians. We want a higher morality than the morality of even the New Testament.

It is difficult to speak to ears polite of the obscenity of the Bible. There are more than one hundred passages of the most coarse and vulgar description. To print these in a book and send it through the United States mails, if law were impartially administered, would put a man in the penitentiary. There are entire chapters that reek with obscenity from beginning to end. We cannot tell you about Onan, and Tamar, and Lot and his two daughters, and scores of other obscene matters. There are passages even in the New Testament that cannot be mentioned in the presence of a virtuous woman. When we enter a lady’s parlor and see the richly-gilded Bible upon the centre-table, we shudder as we remember the obscenity that is contained between its costly lids. When we see a young girl tripping along our streets, Bible in hand, we wonder if she knows that she carries more obscenity than Byron ever wrote, than Shelley ever dreamed of, than the vilest French novelist ever dared to print.