As a part of our moral system, we hold the education of our people to be an indispensable and necessary adjunct. In that we go a great deal further than what appear to us your narrow and mercenary views. In a representative government like your own, you have been constrained to adopt a system of free education, for the purpose of securing the safety and permanence of your institutions; and with no other motive even, it is surprising that you will be divided in opinion touching the extent to which learning may be profitably imparted for this end alone; because, to us it seems that when you have conveyed to your youth no more than the elementary branches of learning, you have provided but little else than a convenience to them in the business affairs of life. It is only when the higher branches are acquired that the government receives an equivalent for its outlay, in the well-disciplined and safe citizen returned to it.
We have, however, motives beyond all this in the education of our masses, and chief among them is the purpose to furnish knowledge to the minds of all, out of which good may be naturally evolved; and thus you will see at once how learning has become the chief part of our religion. You are slow to acknowledge the great value of your purely secular education as a moral agent, because of its disturbance recently with your cherished traditions; but this reason, great as it is, is supplemented with another one, which fully accounts for the earnest opposition of your ecclesiastics. So long as the learning of your schools was mixed up with creed influence and teachings, it was virtually a part of the church, and in harmony with it, but on a separation of the two, they became enemies by a well known social law; your churches with their avowed purpose of improving your morals, and your secular schools, while in the performance of their duties, occupying the same competing field.
You may easily imagine that, with the religious impulse added, we have carried our education a good deal further than you. We consider the proposition unjust, that learning should only be bestowed in accordance with the occupation or station in life. Your planet has always been beset with the evil of social classes, which only increases with the advance of your civilization. You can never rid yourselves of this fruitful source of disturbance except by our method, which, as a matter of public policy, pushes the education of every individual to the point of his capacity. In this way we have completely obliterated the class interests and feelings. We have been enabled to do this under conditions which you do not at present possess. Instead of the military or martial spirit which prevails with you, and which is cultivated for purposes which appear to us unworthy of your age, we have generated among ourselves an ambition in the ways of knowledge which takes its place.
We have leaders and heroes as you have, but not one who has not gained his honors by some act in furtherance of the material, intellectual, or moral progress of his race. The memories of your greatest men are more honored by us than by yourselves. Men go down to their graves yearly among you whose achievements are the admiration and talk of our whole people. He of you who discovered the theory of planetary motion, he who found the law of gravitation, and he also who ascertained the principle of evolution in organic life, are scarcely known upon the Earth, except among the cultivated few; while the whole world of Mars is impressed with the services they have bestowed, and discuss the great and everlasting effects of their work.
We have found much in the path of science that would astonish you, and at each discovery the achievement was applauded and echoed from one side of our planet to the other. At each one of these advances we feel ourselves getting nearer to the Deity. A triumph of science with us is a triumph of religion, and while we go on strengthening ourselves, and taking new heart at each step in the direction of knowledge, a like progress with you only brings the superstitious framework upon which your religion is built into decay.
Our religious devotion is essentially buoyant, even joyous. The sorrows of life which are not the direct and indirect results of indiscretions, and violations of natural laws, we regard as an inheritance and not a punishment, and we endeavor in all conceivable ways to lighten them and make them easier to bear. For those in sickness among us, the hand of love and sympathy is never absent; and among the firm and undisturbed convictions of philosophic thought, death is only a regret and never a terror. Your creeds administer to the final end in all ways to a point of agony; they have ingeniously devised a theory of horrors for it, out of which has been made to come their chief sustenance and support. The path of life which they declare as the only one leading into the promised eternity of bliss, is the tortuous and difficult footway winding like a maze among the shadows of their churches.
Although attentively guided throughout in this prescribed journey of life by your ecclesiastical teachers, and your entrance and exit made difficult without their help, yet, by the very nature of their doctrines, they could only bestow upon you at the last scene of all a torturing doubt. We have promoted the serenity of death by removing as far as possible its sorrow. With us, the individual in his last moments is not overcome with any sympathetic dread of that approaching suffering for the wants of life among dependents, which so often couples the agony of separation with an overwhelming sense of despair, as your society is constituted. The end comes placidly to us, in the belief that as we came from the Deity, so in the last we go back to Him; that the life beyond must be a higher life, because the moral sense grows constantly within us; and that the region ahead of us must be a free, open, and hospitable one, with no agonizing barriers separating families and friends, because, in the growth of our tenderness and attachment to each other, we can safely predict the evolution of a better and happier state.
Prayer, in the sense that it is understood and performed by you, we regard as mere superstition. It is an outcome of your lowest stages of mental evolution. It is the spirit of that willing self-abasement and fear, which prostrates the savage before his idol, soliciting aid in his works of carnage, or immunity from some violated law of nature, or safety from some convulsion of the air, land or sea. Carried forward into your civilization, it has become no less unreasonable. For thousands of years you have been daily calling on the Deity for favors, not one of which has been granted, except seemingly by a coincidence. The most conclusive tests have failed to convince the devout among you of the fallacy of prayer, because, as an institution of your churches, under their theory of atonement, it furnishes a ready escape to the conscience; and for the reason also that it affords to the imagination, in its striking and novel situations of converse with the author of worlds, a semblance of that pleasure which the lowly feel for concessions from the great.
It is quite in keeping with your conceptions of the Deity that you should grovel and debase yourselves before Him. The whole tenor of your religious thought has been made to take on this color of self-degradation, which, while serving to throw you more completely into the hands of your theological superiors, is not warranted by any possible relations with the being you address. You represent upon the Earth, as we do on our planet, the very highest form of life. We both are the triumphant outcome of a process established by the great Author infinite ages ago. On us only, among all beings, has He bestowed the wonderful attributes of thought and reason, which make us a part of Himself. We are the only inheritors, by his own beneficial act, of the power to discover and enjoy his beautiful methods of work, and those magical transformations of mind and matter which convert, out of the dead ashes of the past, the blooming present, with its assuring hope of a fruition to come.
What hint have we, therefore, in all his works, that He has created us otherwise than as a labor of love, and as the fullest expression of an evolutionary skill, which marks all things about us? By what authority, then, are you called to bow yourselves in constant self-abasement before your great Father, who, with parental solicitude, has thrown open the whole Earth for your household, has given you the power of domination over all creatures upon it, and has taught you to make playthings of the very elements which surround you? By what authority, except the unworthy example of your own barbarian instincts, which demand for place and power a homage, whose degree of prostration marks, with a singular exactness, your career all along, from the savage ruler to the cultivated monarch?