The situation is about the same in England. When Mr. Huxley saw fit to attack the Mosaic account of the creation, he did not deem it advisable to say plainly what he meant. He attacked the account of creation as given by Milton, although he knew that the Mosaic and Miltonic were substantially the same. Science has acted like a guest without a wedding garment, and has continually apologized for existing. In the presence of arrogant absurdity, overawed by the patronizing airs of a successful charlatan, it has played the role of a "poor relation," and accepted, while sitting below the salt, insults as honors.
There can be no more pitiable sight than a scientist in the employ of superstition dishonoring himself without assisting his master. But there are a multitude of brave and tender men who give their honest thoughts, who are true to nature, who give the facts and let consequences shirk for themselves, who know the value and meaning of a truth, and who have bravely tried the creeds by scientific tests.
Among the bravest, side by side with the greatest of the world, in Germany, the land of science, stands Ernst Haeckel, who may be said to have not only demonstrated the theories of Darwin, but the Monistic conception of the world. Rejecting all the puerile ideas of a personal Creator, he has had the courage to adopt the noble words of Bruno:—"A spirit exists in all things, and no body is so small but it contains a part of the divine substance within itself, by which it is animated." He has endeavored—and I think with complete success—to show that there is not, and never was, and never can be the Creator of anything. There is no more a personal Creator than there is a personal destroyer. Matter and force must have existed from eternity, all generation must have been spontaneous, and the simplest organisms must have been the ancestors of the most perfect and complex.
Haeckel is one of the bitterest enemies of the church, and is, therefore, one of the bravest friends of man.
Catholicism was, at one time, the friend of education—of an education sufficient to make a Catholic out of a barbarian. Protestantism was also in favor of education—of an education sufficient to make a Protestant out of a Catholic. But now, it having been demonstrated that real education will make Freethinkers, Catholics and Protestants both are the enemies of true learning.
In all countries where human beings are held in bondage, it is a crime to teach a slave to read and write. Masters know that education is an abolitionist, and theologians know that science is the deadly foe of every creed in Christendom.
In the age of Faith, a personal god stood at the head of every department of ignorance, and was supposed to be the King of kings, the rewarder and punisher of individuals, and the governor of nations.
The worshipers of this god have always regarded the men in love with simple facts, as Atheists in disguise. And it must be admitted that nothing is more Atheistic than a fact. Pure science is necessarily godless, It is incapable of worship. It investigates, and cannot afford to shut its eyes even long enough to pray. There was a time when those who disputed the divine right of kings were denounced as blasphemous; but the time came when liberty demanded that a personal god should be retired from politics. In our country this was substantially done in 1776, when our fathers declared that all power to govern came from the consent of the governed. The cloud-theory was abandoned, and one government has been established for the benefit of mankind. Our fathers did not keep God out of the Constitution from principle, but from jealousy. Each church, in colonial times, preferred to live in single blessedness rather than see some rival wedded to the state. Mutual hatred planted our tree of religious liberty. A constitution without a god has at last given us a nation without a slave.
A personal god sustains the same relation to religion as to politics. The Deity is a master, and man a serf; and this relation is inconsistent with true progress. The Universe ought to be a pure democracy—an infinite republic without a tyrant and without a chain.
Auguste Comte endeavored to put humanity in the place of Jehovah, and no conceivable change can be more desirable than this. This great man did not, like some of his followers, put a mysterious something called law in the place of God, which is simply giving the old master a new name. Law is this side of phenomena, not the other. It is not the cause, neither is it the result of phenomena. The fact of succession and resemblance, that is to say, the same thing happening under the same conditions, is all we mean by law. No one can conceive of a law existing apart from matter, or controlling matter, any more than he can understand the eternal procession of the Holy Ghost, or motion apart from substance. We are beginning to see that law does not, and cannot exist as an entity, but that it is only a conception of the mind to express the fact that the same entities, under the same conditions, produce the same results. Law does not produce the entities, the conditions, or the results, or even the sameness of the results. Neither does it affect the relations of entities, nor the result of such relations, but it stands simply for the fact that the same causes, under the same conditions, eternally have produced and eternally will produce the same results.