Glance at the big centres of our Christian civilisations. Look at the jails, the court and the prison-houses, the tribunals, and the police; see the distress, with starvation and prostitution as its results. Look at the host of the men of law and of judges; and then see how far the words of Christ, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, Judge not that ye be not judged,” apply to the whole structure of our modern civilised life, and how far we may be called Christians.
How well the commandment—“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone”—is now obeyed, may be seen by following day after day, the law reports for slander, calumny and defamation. Obedience to the injunction, and warning against the sin of offending children, “these little ones,” of whom is the Kingdom of Heaven, is found in the brutal treatment of fatherless children on the streets by the Christian police, of other children by their parents, and finally, in the merciless flogging of wee bits of culprits driven to crime by their own parents and starvation. And is it those who denounce such an anti-Christian spirit in legislation, the Pharisaical church and society, who shall be branded for speaking the truth? The magistrate, who has sworn on the Bible—contrary to Christ’s express injunction—to administer justice; the pious defaulter, who swears falsely on it, but cannot be convicted; the sanctimonious millionaire who fattens on the blood and sweat of the poor; and the aristocratic “Jezebel” who casts mud from her carriage wheels on her “fallen” sister, on the street, a victim perchance, of one of the men of her own high caste—all these call themselves Christians. The anti-Christians are those who dare to look behind that veil of respectability.
The best answer to such paradoxical denunciation may be found in one of “Saladin’s” admirable editorials. The reader must turn to The Secular Review for October 22nd, 1887, and read some pertinent reflections on “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” and the “Child-thieves” flogging. Well may a “heathen Chinee” or a “mild Hindu” shudder in horror at the picture in it of that “drawing of blood” out of the baby-bodies of infant thieves. The process is executed by a Christian policeman acting under the orders and in the presence of a righteous Christian magistrate. Has either of the two ever given a thought during the “child-torture” to the words of their Christ: “Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the sea”?
Yes, they are walking “in the ways of the God of Israel”! For, as “it repented the Lord that he had made man” so wicked and so imperfect, that “Lord” drowned and destroyed him “from the face of the Earth,” without more ado. Verily so, “both man and beast, and the creeping thing and the fowls,” though the latter had neither sinned, nor were they “wicked.” And why shouldn’t the righteous men on Earth do likewise? It repents the Christian citizens of pious Lugdunum perchance also, that they create the starving little wretches, the foundlings abandoned to vice from the day of their birth? And the truly good Christian men, who would believe themselves damned to hell-fire were they to miss their Sabbath Service, forbidden by law to drown their creatures, resort to the next best thing they can; they “draw blood” from those little ones whom their “Saviour” and Master took under his special protection.
May the shadow of “Saladin” never grow less, for the fearless honest words of truth he writes:—
“And whose blood was in the veins of these two boys? Whose blood reddened the twigs of the birch? Peradventure that of the magistrate himself, or of the chaplain of the prison. For mystical are the grinding of the wheels of the mill of misery. And God looks on and tolerates. And I am accounted a heretic, and my anti-Christian writings are produced against me in a Court of Justice to prevent my getting justice, because I fail to see in all this how Christianity “elevates” woman and casts a “halo of sacred innocence round the tender years of the child.” So be it. I have flung down my gage of battle, and the force of bigotry may break me to death; but it shall never bend me to submission. Unsalaried and ill-supported, I fight as stubbornly as if the world flung at my feet its gold and laurels and huzzas; for the weak need a champion and the wronged an avenger. It is necessary that Sham find an opponent and Hypocrisy a foe: these they will find in me, be the consequences what they may.
“Saladin.”
This is the epitomized history of the “Unpopular Philosopher”; aye, the story of all those who, in the words of “Lara,” know that “Christianity will never save humanity, but humanity may save Christianity,” i.e., the ideal spirit of the Christos-Buddha—of Theosophy.
[31]. Not all the members of the Theosophical Society are Theosophists; nor are the members of the so-called Christian Churches all Christians, by any means. True Theosophists, as true Christians, are very, very few; and there are practical Theosophists in the fold of Christianity, as there are practical Christians in the Theosophical Society, outside all ritualistic Christianity. “Not every one that saith unto me ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father.” (Matthew, vii. 21.) “Believe not in Me, but in the truths I utter.” (Buddha’s Aphorisms.)