And Dean Stanley, the leading ecclesiastic of Great Britain, only the other day in Winchester Abbey, said science will be the only theology of the future. Morality is the only religion of the years to come. Not withstanding all the infamous things laid to the charge of the Church, we are told that the civilization of today is the child of what we are pleased to call superstition. Let me call your attention to what they received from their fears of these ghosts. Let me give you an outline of the sciences as taught by those philosophers. There is one thing that a man is interested in, if he is in anything, and that is in the science of medicine. A doctor is, so to speak, in partnership with Nature. He is a preserver if he is worthy of the name. And now I want to show what they have gotten from these ghosts upon the science of medicine.
According to them, all of the diseases were produced as a punishment by the good ghosts, or out of pure malignity by the bad ones. There were, properly speaking, no diseases; the sick were simply possessed by ghosts. The science of medicine consisted in knowing how to persuade these ghosts to vacate the premises and for thousands of years all diseases were treated with incantations, hideous noises, with the beating of drums and gongs; everything was done to make the position of a ghost as unpleasant as possible; and they generally succeeded in making things so disagreeable that if the ghost did not leave, the patient died. These ghosts were supposed to be different in rank, power and dignity. Now, then, a man pretended to have won the favor of some powerful ghost who gave him power over the little ones. Such a man became a very great physician. It was found that a certain kind of smoke was exceedingly offensive to the nostrils of your ordinary ghost. With this smoke the sick room would be filled until the ghost vanished or the patient died. It was also believed that certain words, when properly pronounced, were the most effective weapons, for it was for a long time supposed that Latin words were the best, I suppose because Latin was a dead language. For thousands of years medicine consisted in driving the devils out of men. In some instances bargains and promises were made with the ghosts. One case is given where a multitude of devils traded a man off for a herd of swine. In this transaction the devils were the losers, the swine having immediately drowned themselves in the sea. This idea of disease appears to have been almost universal and is not yet extinct. The contortions of the epileptic, the strange twitching of those afflicted with cholera, were all seized as proof that the bodies of men were filled with vile and malignant spirits. Whoever endeavored to account for these things by natural causes; whoever endeavored to cure disease by natural means was denounced as an Infidel. To explain anything was a crime. It was to the interest of the sacerdotal class that all things should be accounted for by the will and power of God and the devil. The moment it is admitted that all phenomena are within the domain of the natural, and that all the prayers in the world cannot change one solitary fact, the necessity for the priest disappears. Religion breathes the idea of miracles. Take from the minds of men the idea of the supernatural, and superstition ceases to exist; for this reason the Church has always despised the man who explains the wonderful. The moment that it began to be apparent that prayer could do nothing for the body, the priest shifted his ground and began praying for the soul.
After the devil was substantially abandoned in the practice of medicine, and when it was admitted that God had nothing to do with ordinary coughs and colds, it was still believed that all the diseases were sent by Him as punishment for the people; it was thought to be a kind of blasphemy to even stay the ravages of pestilence. Formerly, when a pestilence fell upon a people, the arguments of the priest were boundless. He told the people that they had refused to pay their tithes, and they had doubted some of the doctrines of the church, that in their hearts they had contempt for some of the priests of the Lord, and God was now taking his revenge, and the people, for the most part, believed this issue of falsehood, and hastened to fall upon their knees and to pour out their wealth upon the altars of hypocrisy.
The Church never wanted disease to be absolutely under the control of man. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, preached a sermon against vaccination. His idea was that if God had decreed that through all eternity certain men should die of small pox, it was a frightful sin to endeavor to prevent it; that plagues and pestilence were instruments in the hands of God with which to gain the love and worship of mankind; to find the cure for the disease was to take the punishment from the Church. No one tries to cure the ague with prayer because quinine has been found to be altogether more reliable. Just as soon as a specific is found for a disease, that disease is left out of the list of prayer. The number of diseases with which God from time to time afflicts mankind is continually decreasing, because the number of diseases that man can cure is continually increasing. In a few years all diseases will be under the control of man. The science of medicine has but one enemy—superstition. Man was afraid to save his body for fear he would lose his soul. Is it any wonder that the people in those days believed in and taught the infamous doctrine of eternal punishment, that makes God a heartless monster and man a slimy hypocrite and slave?
The ghosts were also historians, and wrote the grossest absurdities. They wrote as though they had been eye witnesses of every occurrence. They told all the past, they predicted all the future, with an impudence that amounted to sublimity. They said that the Tartars originally came from hell, and that they were called Tartars because that was one of the names of hell. These gentlemen accounted for the red on the breasts of robins from the fact that those birds used to carry water to the unhappy infants in hell. Other eminent historians say that Nero was in the habit of vomiting frogs. When I read that, I said some of the croakers of the present day would be better for such a vomit. Others say that the walls of a city fell down in answer to prayer. They tell us that King Arthur was not born like other mortals; that he had great luck in killing giants; that one of the giants that he killed wore clothes woven from the beards of kings that he had slain, and, to cap the climax, the authors of this history were rewarded for having written the only reliable history of their country. These are the men from whom we get our creeds and our confessions of faith.
In all the histories of those days there is hardly a truth. Facts were not considered of any importance. They wrote, and the people believed that the tracks of Pharaoh's chariot were still visible upon the sands of the Red Sea, and that they had been miraculously preserved as perpetual witnesses of the miracles that had been performed, and they said to any man who denied it, "Go there and you will find the tracks still upon the sand." They accounted for everything as the work of good and evil spirits; with cause and effect they had nothing to do. Facts were in no way related to each other. God, governed by infinite caprice, filled the world with miracles and disconnected events, and from his quiver came the arrows of pestilence and death. The moment the idea is abandoned that everything in this universe is natural—that all phenomena are the necessary links in the endless chain of being—the conception of history becomes impossible that the ghost of the present is not the child of the past; the present is not the mother of the future. In the domain of superstition all is accident and caprice; and do not, I pray you, forget that the writers of our creeds and confessions of faith believed this to be a world of chance. Nothing happens by accident; nothing happens by chance. In the wide universe everything is necessarily produced, every effect has behind it a cause, every effect is in its turn a cause, and there is in the wide domain of the infinite not room enough for a miracle.
When I say this, I mean this is my idea. I may be wrong, but that is my idea. It was believed by our intelligent ancestors that all law derived its greatness and force from the fact that it had been communicated to man by ghosts. Of course, it is not pretended that the ghosts told everybody the law, but they told it to a few, and the few told it to the people, and the people, as a rule, paid them exceedingly well for the trouble. It was a long time before the people commenced making laws for themselves, and, strange as it may appear, most of their laws are vastly superior to the ghost article. Through the web and woof of human legislation gradually began to run and shine and glitter the golden thread of justice.
During these years of darkness it was believed that, rather than see an act of injustice done, rather than see the guilty triumph, some ghost would interfere and I do wish, from the bottom of my heart, that that was the truth. There never was forced upon my heart a more frightful conviction than this—the right does not always prevail; there never was forced upon my mind a more cruel conclusion than this—innocence is not always a sufficient shield. I wish it was. I wish, too, that man suffered nothing but that which he brings upon himself and yet I find that in nine districts in India, between the 1st day of last January and the 1st day of June, 2,800,000 people starved to death, and that little children, with their lips upon the breasts of famine, died, wasted away. And why, simply because a little while before the wind did not veer the one hundredth part of a degree, and send clouds over the country, freighted with rain, freighted with love and joy. But if that wind had just turned that way there would have been happy men, women and children, all clad in the garments of health. I wish that I could know in my heart that there was some power that would see to it that men and women got exact justice somewhere. I do wish that I knew—the right would prevail—that innocence was an infinite shield.
During these years it was believed that rather than see an act of injustice done some ghost would interfere. This belief, as a rule, gave great satisfaction to the victorious party, and, as the other man was dead, no complaint was ever made by him. This doctrine was a sanctification of brute force and chance. Prisoners were made to grasp hot irons, and if it burned them their guilt was established. Others were tied hands and feet and cast into the sea, and if they sank, the verdict of guilt was unanimous; if they did not sink then they said water is such a pure element that it refuses to take a guilty person, and consequently he is a witch or wizard. Why, in England, persons accused of crime could appeal to the cross, and to a piece of sacramental bread. If he could swallow this without choking he was acquitted. And this practice was continued until the time of King Edward, who was choked to death; after which it was discontinued.
Ghosts and their followers always took delight in torturing with unusual pain any infraction of their laws, and generally death was the penalty. Sometimes, when a man committed only murder, he was permitted to flee to a place of refuge—murder being only a crime against man—but for saying certain words, or denying certain doctrines, or for worshiping wrong ghosts, or for failing to pray to the right one, or for laughing at a priest, or for saying that wine was not blood, or bread was not flesh, or for failing to regard rams' horns as artillery, or for saying that a raven as a rule, was a poor landlord, death, produced by all the ways that ingenuity or hatred could devise, was the penalty suffered by these men. I tell you tonight law is a growth; law is a science. Right and wrong exist in the nature of things. Things are not right because they are commanded; they are not wrong because they are prohibited. They are prohibited because we believe them wrong; they are commended because we believe them right. There are real crimes enough without creating artificial ones. All progress in legislation for a thousand years has consisted in repealing the laws of the ghosts. The idea of right and wrong is born of man's capacity to enjoy and suffer. If man could not suffer, if he could not inflict injury upon his brother, if he could neither feel nor inflict punishment, the idea of law, the idea of right, the idea of wrong, never could have entered into his brain. If man could not suffer, if he could not inflict suffering, the word conscience never would have passed the lips of man. There is one good—happiness. There is one sin—selfishness. All laws should be for the preservation of the one and the destruction of the other. Under the regime of the ghosts the laws were not understood to exist in the nature of things; they were supposed to be irresponsible commands, and these commands were not supposed to rest upon reason; they were simply the product of arbitrary will. These penalties for the violations of those laws were as cruel as the penalties were absurd. There were over two hundred offenses for which man was punished with death. Think of it! And these laws are said to have come from a most merciful God. And yet we have become civilized to that degree in this country that in the State of New York there is only one crime punishable with death. Think of it! Did I not tell you that we were now civilizing our gods? The tendency of those horrible laws, the tendency of those frightful penalties, was to blot the idea of justice from the human soul. Now, I want to show you how perfectly every department of human knowledge, or rather of ignorance, was saturated with superstition. I will for a moment refer to the science of language.