Young Men; In Business

by William Guest; J. D. Wells

2. He believes that the earlier narratives of the Bible were fabrications intended to glorify the Jewish nation: but somehow these fabrications are totally unlike the legendary traditions of Greece and Rome; for instead of making their ancestors gods and heroes, they make them slaves, and tell a history of Jacob and his sons which covers their progenitors with infamy; and strange to say, these fabrications imposed upon later prophets, who were the sternest denouncers of falsehood, and are now imposing upon six millions of Jews, who, with a tenacity unparalleled and sacrifices ceaseless, cling to the ritual and history of their ancestors.

3. He believes that by some unaccountable species of literary deception, unlettered or fanatical men have pretended to give four narratives of the founder of Christianity, which the greatest modern critics confess are “the very gold of simplicity, integrity, and truthfulness,” and which present an image of Jesus Christ that brings most vividly into view the very perfection of humanity, that has furnished a model for the noblest spirits among men, and that surpasses in beauty and grandeur all that poetry ever sung of human genius ever conceived.

4. He believes that the writers of the New Testament were either knaves or fools; and yet they taught the purest, wisest, most elevated, and most self-sacrificing system of morals the world has ever seen.

5. He believes that in the most enlightened and skeptical age of the Roman Empire, thousands of men were such arrant fools as to give credence to a history of Christ which was full of lies, and to a record of miracles which had never been worked, and this at a time so near to the events, that an imposture could not have escaped detection for an hour.

6. He believes that “a vast multitude” of Romans, Greeks, and Jews deserted, for a fanatical superstition, the splendid temples of their fathers, the schools of philosophy of which they had been proud, and the religion of their ancestors, which had been enriched by the grandest historical associations.

7. He believes that the early propagators of Christianity, and the believers in it, acted altogether contrary to ordinary motives of weak or bad men; they embraced a creed which, instead of gaining them aught, exposed them to the most diabolical cruelties, and held to their testimony in the face of tortures, banishment, and a shameful death.

8. He believes that, although Christianity is a lying system of priestism or fanaticism, it nevertheless, according to irrefutable testimony, abolished the ferocious deeds of the amphitheatre, overthrew the horrid rites of paganism, introduced an era of benevolence, and marked a new starting-point of progress for the human race.

9. He believes that twelve obscure, penniless Jews, with a higher wisdom than was claimed by Socrates, Cicero, or Plato, taught the only religion which has been proved to be adapted to every country and every condition of man on the surface of the wide globe.

10. He believes that the Christian Sabbath, or the weekly seventh-day rest, is an institution indispensable to the present physical condition of men and animals; that without it modern civilization would bring to myriads of men and beasts unbroken toil, disease, and premature death; but that this seventh-day rest is a purely human institution, having come, he scarcely knows how, from men who were foisting on the world false and illiterate traditions under the name of divine revelations.