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THE RISING GENERATION
A
DISCOURSE
BEFORE THE
SOUTH PLACE SOCIETY,
JUNE 27TH, 1880,
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
LONDON :
SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY.
PRICE TWOPENCE.
�LONDON :
Wateblow & Sons Limited
LONDON WALL.
�THE RISING GENERATION.
<^OME of us can remember the time when the
heart of England was stirred by Elizabeth
Barrett’s poem, “ The Cry of the Children.” A revela
tion had come from the dark mines of the country
telling how little children were held all their lives in
gloomy imprisonment, knowing nothing but work. In
the mines were subterranean villages gloomy as the
chambers of Dante’s Hell; some children were born
there, lived, laboured, and died there, and only
when dead did they come into the upper world—for
burial. Little children were found who did not know
what a flowrer was—they had never seen a flower.
Then the “ Cry of the Children ” was heard. They
uttered none for themselves; down in the pit they
silently worked through their miserable lives, while the
children of the world danced and were gay; yet their
voices were heard in the poet’s lamentation, in the
stateman’s eloquence, in the people’s sympathy, and
the wrong was swept away.
It seems to us now almost incredible that such an
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evil should have existed within our own memories. So
clear to our eyes are the evils of other times than our
own. But, alas, the need is always for eyes that can
see the evils of their own time, and how few are they !
In Dante’s Inferno one of the saddest places was the
abode of those who moved about in a spiritual fog
which obscured everything that was near to them.
They could clearly see events in the far past, they
could see into the future, but they could not see the
present. These, during life, had given no effect to
the experience of the past, exerted no influence on
the future, because they did not study to discern the
facts at hand, the conditions around them. They
could not see time’s flowing stream at the point where
it passed them, where must be dropped what is to
reach the future. It is but a too faithful picture of
multitudes who do not seem to themselves to be
in any Inferno at all. There are many who can hear
the cry of the children in the last generation, but can
hear no cry in the present. Yet there is a cry. It
comes no longer from subterranean mines, but it
comes from unhappy homes; from the gloomy realms
of pauperism, ignorance, and disease; and it comes
from the sunless dungeons of dogma, where millions
of children live and die, never seeing any flower of
life, of beauty, or of joy.
In speaking to you this morning of the rising
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generation I do not propose to enter upon ideal
speculations about the future, nor to propose quixotic
schemes for abolishing all the evils of the world. I
wish rather to limit your attention to facts near at
hand, and conditions more or less within our reach.
And, first of all, to impress upon you, as practical
people, the fact that the visible conditions of the world
have invisible foundations. Things are founded on
thoughts. The world that man has built up,—the
world of society, politics, nationality, religion,—is a
phenomenal world, supported by causes always causing
it; having for its beams and rafters moral and mental
sustainers; and every change of thought or belief in
the human mind is followed by a change in the visible
conditions of the world. For example, were the
Sabbatarian superstition removed from the mind of
this country, the bars and bolts which close the
refining institutions of the country would also be
removed. If the Christian superstition were to die out
of the English mind, the wealth and power it freezes
up in an iceberg would melt, and streams would flow
through the deserts where hearts and brains are
famishing. Beware therefore of undervaluing thought,
knowledge, beliefs, principles, because they are in
visible. There are many thousands of Christian people
who industriously battle with visible sufferings and
vices. They do a little good here and a little good
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there, in particular cases ; but the evils invariably
return. Like the fabled daughters of Danaus they fill
their sieves with water, but it always runs out again,
because they do not stop the holes in the sieve’s
bottom : they do not stop them because they are
invisible; they are the unconscious falsities of their
creeds, diverting, human minds and efforts away from
the work of practically saving themselves from actual
evils, to the fruitless work of saving themselves from
unreal evils.
The only way'to help men permanently is to enable
them to help themselves. To give them resources is
to shield them from want and sorrow; to educate
their mental and physical strength is to make them
rich; to surround them with social interests is to
make them good citizens; and all these, and other
conditions of human welfare, depend upon the pre
vailing doctrine of what is the chief end and aim of
human life. He who lifts that aim even a little, lifts
the lives of millions with it; and a man is never so
charitable, never so practical, as when he is destroying
an error and affirming a truth. If benevolence wishes
to bestow or bequeathe real benefit, let it not give too
largely to the institutions which deal with the annual
crop of evils that ignorance sows, let it attack the
ignorance ; let it not build temperance coffee-houses
to be closed on the only day they are much needed,
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but attack the superstition which locks the people
out of the splendid art-houses already existing, and
leaves them no resource but debauchery. I do not
disparage the disposition to relieve suffering whenever
met with ; but let it not be supposed that such is the
highest or the most practical charity to mankind. A
single pound given for human culture, for spiritual
liberty, for advancement of a high cause or principle,
is worth a thousand bestowed to salve over wounds
which only knowledge and justice can heal. And 1
will add that as the pound given for the transient
mitigation of an evil is but a drop of oil on an ocean
of misery, that which is bestowed in freeing a mind
from error is strictly economised, and has a fair
prospect of being multiplied through generations.
This high charity must not only be thus practical
and economical in its object, but also in its method.
The regeneration of the world must be through its
successive generations. You cannot change the habits
of an old man. What troubles grow from those habits
you may assuage, but they can only be eradicated
with the constitution around which they have formed.
The best thing a matured generation can do is to run
to seed—the seed of experience—to select from these
-seeds those that are largest and soundest, and sow
•them in the quick soil of youth and vigour. It is the
principles so entrusted to the rising generation which
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grow with its growth, transmute decays into life,
failures into success, and transmit an ever-increasing
volume of wisdom and happiness.
What then is the present cry of the children ? their
perhaps inarticulate, but all the profounder cry ? What
are their needs ? How are they being taught ? It is
not our business to boast that much has been done,
that the children have been taken from the streets and
put to school. That was the work of a generation now
closed. What work the next is to add to that, is a
question more inportant than what has been already
done; we can rightly rejoice only if we feel that the
best is now being done.
It is to be feared we have little reason to felicitate
ourselves upon our dealings with the rising generation.
To a large extent the young are being taught over
again what their elders have painfully unlearned ; they
are solemnly and deliberately crammed with that
which the best thought of our time has proved to be
untrue.
A young man recently emancipated from Roman
Catholicism gave me an account of how he wasbrought up. When the poor little papist is born, his
inborn demon is exorcised. Water is thrown on his
head, also salt and oil; the cross signed on its fore
head ; a candle is held beside it, a Latin formula
muttered, and a half-crown demanded. The mother
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is also subjected to an exorcism for having borne a
demon into the world, and another half-crown is'
demanded for the churching. Both of these cere
monies remain in the Church of England. The water
exorcism remains in all denominations. Even some
Unitarians are not ashamed to practice a form which
is either a mockery, or a proclamation of the diabolical
nature of the child.
Fortunately the little papist is unconscious of these
proceedings ; but unfortunately, his training is on the
belief that the exorcised demon is always trying to get
back into the form from which he was expelled. He
is taught to regard this as the chief danger of his life;
he must continually make the sign of the cross, and
pray to Jesus, Joseph, Mary, and other saints. He
must bow to holy pictures and crucifixes, wear holy
medals and charms, and is taught that these are the
things which alone protect him from danger every
moment. When he enters church or school he
sprinkles himself with holy water, bends his knee
before an altar, and understands that he inhales
mysterious good things with incense. At school he
utters “ Hail Mary ” every time the hour strikes. He
is fed on miraculous stories of the marvels wrought
by saints and holy objects. The Catechism is the
. only thing taught him with any real industry : the
■ three principal ideas with which he is impressed are
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his utter depravity, his utter inability to help himself
without the priest, and the diabolical iniquity of
presuming to ask any question about the “sacred
mysteries.’ At the age of seven or nine he is prepared
for confession by what is called ‘ examining the
conscience ’ which consists in making him read over
a list of all the abominations ever committed by man.
The purity of the child’s mind being thus poisoned,
he is made to confess all the evil thoughts so awakened.
He is then taught the sacredness of penance; worship
of the Eucharist as God himself; and so he is given
to society. But if all that should succeed in really
moulding-him he would be hardly better off mentally
than were those children of the mines who never saw
a flower.
This is the pit from which the Christian child of
this country was dug by the Reformation, but was
very soon plunged into others where much of its
little life is still passed. Puritanism was even a
darker pit than Catholicism, and most of the sects
were mere variants of Puritanism.
The English
Church being the church of royalty and wealth, had
to accommodate its dogmas to the indulgencies, tastes
and sports of the upper classes. The aristocracy
preserved many traditions from its barbaric origin,
and has steadily refused to be captured by asceticism,
or tamed by Puritanism. But unfortunately it did
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not refuse to submit to hypocrisy; and it goes on still
with the supplications of terror on its lips and
indifference in its heart.
Its catechism indoctrinates
in asceticism, its life in worldliness. It cries for
mercy on Sunday, and hunts foxes on Monday. It
calls itself a miserable sinner at church, and resents
the slightest aspersion of its character elsewhere. It
were hard to conceive a more continuous drill in
hypocrisy than that child undergoes who is taught the
church catechism in the intervals of a life practically
absorbed in worldly schemes. It is to the credit of
human nature that there are so many g&pdjent
characters which survive the training of Catrmn8fta,
and the repressions of Puritanism; but, still more to
its credit that so many frank and earnest men survive
the teachings of a church which so baldly separates
theory from practice.
But statistics show a vast population never going
to any church at all.
A large number of these are working men, who feel
that the church is their enemy, and to whom the
sects are unattractive. The labouring masses find in
sleep, drink, and public-house gossip, the best
compensation for six days’ toil. And there are many
literary men, men of science, and gentlemen, who
stay away from church and sect out of sheer disbelief
and disgust. Yet the families of these generally go to
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church, their children are baptised, catechised, and
generally taught the dogmas which their parents
despise. With the exception of the comparatively few
Liberals who have formed Societies of their own, the
rising generation is thus instructed in the same
catechisms, creeds, confessions in which their prede
cessors were instructed.
Even the learning of the
country abnegates its paramount duty to see that the
women and children of the nation are taught truth,
and consecrated in every way possible to the diffusion
of truth.
Thus the Catholic procedure, rejected in theory,
characterises the actual treatment of the Protes
tant child, too often of the disbeliever’s child. He
is not dealt with as one possessed, but as a moral
invalid who must go to the holy doctor every week,
and be dosed with piety and texts.
It is a terrible misdirection of that child’s mind,
and many are mentally hunch-backed for life by it.
It is by children being committed to the parsons as
to dress-makers. Through this indifferentism, which
may almost be called hardened, society goes on
repeating the old routine from generation to genera
tion.
Every year rolls up its steady average- of
abuses unreformed, evils unchanged, falsities laughed
at and maintained. Some progress is made but it is
'mainly through the slow working of natural necessity,
�the accompaniment of physical changes incident to the
pursuit of wealth.
It is as nothing compared with the progress that
would be made if all the thinkers and educated people
of the community were to seriously set themselves to
the work of securing to their families, especially their
children, the full benefits of their best knowledge
and experience, treating every attempt to teach them
fashionable falsities as they would attempts to indoct
rinate them in sorcery. It is the abstract verdict of
science that Christian dogmas are false. That is equally
the verdict of moral and mental philosophy. But their
verdict remains unexecuted. Until they feel also that
these dogmas are so many poisons, the Creeds and
Catechisms so many bottles of poison steadily infused
into the springs that feed society; until they besiege
those sects which so poison spiritual springs as they
would water-companies sending corruption through the
community, or adulterators of the public food; until
then, we need not hope that the best knowledge of this
age will enter upon its duty of bringing social institutions
out of their barbarous constitution into conformity
with reason and right.
What is the Creed taught to the millions of children
around us ? That they are born totally depraved; that
they are in danger of eternal damnation; that they
have incurred this danger by no act of their own, and
can be saved by no act of their own; that they were
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corrupted by a man and woman who lived six thousand
years ago, and must be saved by the murder of a man
who lived over eighteen hundred years ago. This is
what is taught every child, with few exceptions.
What does human culture believe? That such
teaching is utterly preposterous. It believes every
child is born innocent, liable to actual dangers, to be
saved from them by others’ care in early life, ultimately
by its own intelligence and activities, quite irrespective
of any apple eaten in Paradise or murder committed in
Palestine.
The dogmas are just the reverse of the knowledge,
and yet there is no serious combined effort among the
intelligent people to substitute knowledge for proven
falsities in the training of children.
It is too obvious to be insisted on that such a
phenomenon is immoral, not to say criminal. Yet
many who see the evil are unable to see or suggest
the remedy. The impediment that seems to lie in the
way is the principle of patriarchal liberty under which
the various sects have been able to combine in a
political community. We cannot step in between
parent and child and interfere with any teaching which
professes to be religious. Were such a principle
adopted it would be the Liberals who would suffer
most. Liberalism cannot afford to advocate any in
terference by law, not even to protect a child from
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having its eyes put out—its intellectual eyes—or its
moral back broken by the weight of false dogmas
parentally imposed.
We are not, indeed, responsible for not doing what
we cannot do, but we are responsible for doing our
very best with what ways and means are at our
disposal. There is no call to quarrel with our tools
until we have made the most of them. Have we done
that ? Are we aiming to do that! Consider this, for
instance : suppose it were no longer for the interest
of any social institution, such as a Church, that these
dogmas should be taught to any. Suppose, if your
imagination is equal to it, that the endowments of the
Church were all transferred to institutions which teach
no creeds ; all national property going to endow that
which all agree to be real knowledge; all sectarian
property being taxed because it is private property.
That would be the simplest political justice. Because
that is not the state of the law, you and I are made to
pay every year to support dogmas we abhor. Sadi
said that if there were a tax upon reading the Koran
in public many holy men would be dumb. Though I
would not say that of the Bible, it may safely be
said of the Athanasian Creed : if every time those
anathemas are uttered from the pulpit the curser of
his opponents were taxed instead of bribed, that
solemn blasphemy would cease. And many other
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things would cease if law, fashion, and respectability
did not throw around them a glamour which hides
their monstrosity.
Without disestablishment of the Church, the dis
establishment of dogmas generally,—removal of the
immunities of the dissenting sects,—cannot take place ;
and without disendowment, and the taxation of church
property, a vast power would be given up to the
unchecked control of superstition. It is, therefore, a
plain, legitimate, and not intolerant aim for Liberalism
to labour for the total disendowment of all creeds.
Parents would then have no inducement, no bribe to
submit their children to a catechetical tuition which
they did not approve ; and it is very doubtful if
many parents, were the matter thus thrown absolutely
upon themselves, would summon the catechist to their
families. If we could only compel common sense to
act upon what is now left to sacerdotal self-interest,
many a child would be shielded from inoculation in
error.
You may smile at the idea of our succeeding in
disendowing all creeds. But we may succeed in dis
endowing them in many minds. Every clear agitation
for a rational cause is a process of education; it
commands the attention, and if it be right and
reasonable it must make its way with the process of
of the suns.
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Besides this political direction of our influence, we
may turn our social advantages, whatever they may
be, to the side of what we believe true. The great
power of error lies in the social advantages it can
bestow upon the young, who can feel such advantages
long before they can realise the falsities gilded by
them. The desire for polite and attractive society is
not only natural but worthy, and liberal thinkers owe
it as a duty both to truth and to society that they
should contribute all they can to associate their views
with the standards of good taste, refinement, beauty,
and innocent gaieties. It must be remembered that
in the world the decorations and enjoyments of life
represent its unorthodoxy. The Church has come to
patronise them through compulsion of long experience.
It began with nunneries and convents, dust and ashes,
cowls and hair-garments; ugly anti-social habits and
habiliments were the natural insignia of creeds that
taught man’s depravity and despair. Every earthly
beauty and joy is a protest against orthodoxy, and
they legitimately belong to the religion of Liberalism
and Humanity. Social enjoyments, mirth and beauty,
are heresies which appeal far more to the young
generation than scientific statements. The liberal
movement in this country was historically evolved out
of the Puritan movement, and some of those sombre
traditions still adhere to it; but these should be
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outgrown. Carefulness in dress, observance of fashion
■so far as it is healthy, dancing, interchanges of hospi
tality, should not be regarded as frivolous, but as
related to the progressive civility of the world, the
true accompaniments of its liberation from sacrificial
ideas of religion. Liberalism will be largely benefitted
by more generous outlays in this direction, and by
■each thinker taking care to do his and her part that
the tastes shall not be starved while the intellect and
moral nature are fed. It is of the utmost importance
that in the steady effort of the young to improve the
style and position of their families, they should less
and less have to seek their society chiefly outside of
liberal circles at cost of their religious and intellectual
principles.
It is equally incumbent upon all liberal thinkers to
¿o something towards raising the moral tone of society
from its theological depravation into harmony with the
standard of personal veracity and honour. It is not
veracity and it is not honour that men should submit
without an effort to having their children taught pious
falsehoods and placed under the influence of priests
whose creeds they despise. We need a severer
standard of veracity and honesty than that. It is a
poor subterfuge to say that the rising generation should
be left free to form its own opinions. As well say a
garden should be left free to produce what it pleases.
�(
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It will produce weeds, and so will the mind not
carefully cultured. We owe to all we can influence
our very best thought, our maturest experience, and
we cannot escape that responsibility. We must tell
our children just what we believe true, and let them
know that it is a basis for them to build on. They
are to think for themselves.
Occasions are not wanting to realise for ourselves,
and to impress upon the young, the steadily corrupt
ing influence of proven errors established by law. We
have just witnessed in the legislative assembly of this
great nation how easily, when a constitutional super
stition is touched, men, who in worldly affairs are
gentlemen, relapse into coarseness, calumny, and
lawlessness. In the name of what they call God, but
which is no more a God than Mumbo-Jumbo,—a
fetish made up of the aggregate ignorance of church
men who find it a paying stock, recreant Jews
courting Christian favour, Catholics sniffing again the
burning flesh of Smithfield once mingled with their
incense,—in the name of that God who cursed
nature, kindled Tophet for man, and founded in the
world as under it a government of fire and faggot,
they have not hesitated at any meanness, falsehood,
or injustice to inflict a blow upon intellectual liberty,
and even national liberty which dares disregard
dogma. We have seen one bearing the title of Knight,
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which used to mean defender of woman, dragging up
the name of a lady of spotless character amid brutal
laughter, trying to rob of reputation one whom an
unjust judge had already robbed of her child. All
this we have seen done in the name of an established
phantasm called God. The outbreak of fanaticism in
some deputies from wild districts is far less base than
the partizan fury, which, in its eagerness to strike their
conqueror, led a party to vote like one herd upon a
question of fact and law. By a remarkable coincidence
the law is just what will most annoy their opponentsand
most delay public business, so punishing the country
for taking its business out of their hands. There’s truth
and honour for you! These are the followers of Jesus
and protectors of Omnipotence ! These be thy gods,
O people of England, who demand that woman should
be insulted, law defied, and the sanctuary of law
turned into a bear-garden, rather than that a man
holding the opinions of the majority of scientific men
in Europe shall be admitted to sit beside sanctified
sporting squires, priest-ridden papists, and capacious
city-men, making gold out of his blood who had not
where to lay his head ! The Member for Northampton
no doubt has his faults; but now when he suffers not
for his faults but for his virtues, and when in his person
are assailed the rights of every independent thinker in
this nation, I will undertake to affirm that he is nearer
to that man whom the Sanhedrim scourged than the best
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of his assailants, and that the spirit which pursues him
because of his testimony against priestcraft and his
fidelity to the people, is the self-same spirit that
crowned Christ with thorns and pressed poison to the
lips of Socrates.
We need not much regret this revolutionary out
break of superstition allied with the class-interests pre
served by superstition. A more salient illustration of
the wolfish hunger for power underlying the unholy
alliance of pious and political tyranny was never
given to a people. If the Member for Northampton
had lived to Methuselah’s age, and made a daily
speech in Parliament, he could not have done so much
as his enemies have done in a few days to advance the
cause of atheism, so far as that means disbelief in
the God of his oppressors. The Bishop of Peter
borough says the French Revolutionary Assembly
decreed the suppression of God; but the revolutionary
House of Commons has decreed his disgrace. Their
deity is unmasked and turns out to be only a party
whip. If John Milton were living he might see in
this disgrace of the political deity the hand of the
real God overthrowing the usurper of his place. In
his time also imperialism made God into a prop of its
despotism, and Milton then wrote, “ Sure it was the
hand of God to let them fall, and be taken in such a
foolish trap as hath exposed them to all derision ;
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........................ thereby testifying how little he accepted
(prayers) from those who thought no better of the
living God than of a blind buzzard idol, fit to be so
served and worshipped.”
This nation is more hopelessly sunk in superstition
than I believe it to be, if it be not now awakened to
the politically destructive tendencies of dogmas
imported from barbarous tribes. It is, however, of
importance that we should see to it that the lesson is
not lost upon the rising generation. We have in this
country a great literature in which the highest
principles of morality and honour are reflected. On
the other hand, we have a so-called religion in which
all the massacres of Judaism and Christianity, their
treasons to humanity, are sanctified.
We have
simply to let every unsophisticated mind look
on this picture and on that.
We have only
to point to theological morality in Parliament
putting a premium on hypocrisy, by declaring that
it is ready to receive an atheist if he conceals his
opinions; to theological morality trampling law for
party ends; to theological morality foul-mouthed,
insolent, treating honesty of mind and honesty of
speech as crimes. We have only to ask the con
science of the mother, whether she would be glad
to have her child grow up to so encourage conceal
ment of thought, so brow-beat honesty, so over-ride
�law, slander man and insult woman, all for the sake
of God ? We have only to ask the heart of youth
whether it is prepared to worship a God so upheld,
or for any success or ambition to pretend to believe
in a religion so built on baseness ?
I believe that these questions are stirring millions of
hearts this day, and that the rising generation will
show it when fully risen. I believe that it is largely
because lessons like this have been impressed
upon past generations that the present struggle of
freedom against sacerdotalism has come.
It is also because our wise fathers taught those now
grown gray that their trusty weapons were to be free
and honest thought, fact, argument, lawful, that we
now see Oppression taking to violence, to revolution,
and Progress standing by the law. Let us better their
instruction. Let us impress upon the rising generation
that in calmness and justice is their strength. Let us
teach them the gentle, irresistible force that goes
with intellectual power, with study, mastery of their
cause, and above all the might that ever gathers to
the higher standard of morality and humanity.
�SOUTH PLACE
CHAPEL*
WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY.
BY M. D. CONWAY, M.A.
Prices.
The Sacred Anthology: a Book of Ethnical s. d.
Scriptures......................................................... 10 0
The Earthward Pilgrimage.................................
5 0
Do.
do.......................................... 2 6
Republican Superstitions .................................
2 6
Christianity .....................................................
1 6
Human Sacrifices in England
.......................
1 0
Sterling and Maurice...........................................
0 2
Intellectual Suicide...........................................
0 2
The First Love again...........................................
0 2
Our Cause and its Accusers......................
... 0 1
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The rising generation: a discourse before the South Place Society, June 27th 1880
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Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 23, [1] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 2. Printed by Waterlow and Sons, London Wall. With list of works to be obtained in the Library of South Place Chapel at end of pamphlet.
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Child rearing
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Child Rearing-Moral and Ethical Aspects
Children
Dogma
Education
Free Thought
Moral Education
Morris Tracts
Rationalism
Youth-Great Britain-Religious Life
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Text
HUMAN SACRIFICES
IN
ENGLAND.
FOUR
DISCOURSES
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.,
Minister of South Place Chapel, and at the Athenaeum,
Camden Road.
LONDON:
TRUBNER AND CO., LUDGATE HILL.
1876.
�CONTENTS.
PAGE
1.
Human Sacrifices
2. The Daughters
of
...
...
...
$
Jephthah ...
...
7
3. Children, and their Moloch ...
... 19
4. The Sabbath-Jugernath
33
5. The Martyrdom
51
of
Reason
�HUMAN SACRIFICES.
I passed a morning of the last week in the St.
Marylebone Police Court, having been summoned
there as a witness. As I waited through the hours
there passed by a dismal gaunt procession or chain
gang of the captives of the ignorance, the brutality, the
shame, sorrow, despair, of this vast metropolis. There
were young men arrested in one drunken brawl, and
women arrested in another. A shop-girl of twentyone, who had been sent by her humble parents from
the country to earn her living, had stolen a little
finery, perhaps for a babe that would soon be born.
A young “ gentleman,” as he was described, who had
run through an estate, was sentenced for assaulting a
young woman, whose downcast eyes and deep blush
of shame confessed to the judge what her lips could
not utter. A woman of twenty-two, who might once
have been comely, had been arrested for intoxication.
During the night she had three times attempted
�4
suicide, and was barely saved for a life of despair. It
is terrible to look upon a face which tells only of a
life in ruins, and to listen to sobs broken by no plead
ing or word indicating any interest, however faint, in
what the next moment may bring. A little boy five
or six years old, wretched and ragged—with hardly
rags enough to cover him—charged with being “ desti
tute.” Every eye that saw him could testify to the
truth of that charge. The poor boy had been found
asleep on the pavement, and said he had slept there
for three weeks. The magistrate set himself to ferret
out the facts, and little by little was revealed his
story. He was one of six children who had been
living with their father and mother, in utter poverty,
all in one room. At length the mother left that
miserable room to wander and live as she could. But
this little boy had followed her, clung to her; she
carried him about with her for one day, in some
strange place he slept with her the same night; but
in the morning she sent him back home. The father
drove him out because he had gone off with his
mother, and so he had found a London pavement the
only pillow extended to his little head.
The magistrate was consideratej he did his best to
do justice to all, but he must have known—it was
plain—that in no case did he judge or sentence the
real criminal. The visible offenders before him were
�5
victims. Behind each stood the grim and awful
shadow of some ghoul that had fastened upon him.
As the wretched men, women, and children were led
away in custody, free and unfettered beside them stalked
their demons,—Ignorance, Strong Drink, Neglect,
Injustice, Hereditary Taint, Malformation of Brain.
These are the real criminals, and it is they that elude
the grasp of the law which can only deal its penalties
to the already punished, the utterly helpless creatures
on whom the ghastly vampires of our time are
battening.
I am about to speak for a few Sundays of what seem
to me the heaviest wrongs of the present time; but I
do not wish to point out wrongs for which there are
no remedies. Indeed, we can only very dimly dis
cover evils, we can not feel deeply concerning them,
until the light of its remedy falls upon each wrong.
The remedies may be, as yet, ideal; but that is not
their fault; they are necessarily ideal until they are
applied : it is the fault of those great Interests, em
bodying public Selfishness or Superstition, which reject
the truth and the justice which threaten them. But I
believe in the power of ideas. In the end they are
stronger than armies. Waiting there at St. Marylebone—as it were in some weird whorl of Dante’s Hell
__till, to my eyes, all present seemed impersonal,
types and shadows of remorseless forces which once
�6
St. Mary-the-Good tried to conjure down with her
tender image, and then departed, leaving only her
name, made way for the police,—there came upon me
by some association, a memory of early days passed
in a land where the Black-tongued Plague was raging.
Hundreds were struck down daily with swift death;
mourning was heard along the streets of every town
and village ; cries were heard in many homes that
had been happy. Every face was pallid ; the strong
est men and women moved about in the silence of
fear. One night the thermometer fell a degree, and
the Plague was dead.
Not swift and sudden, but just as certain is the in
visible power of the air which works through ideas.
“ God is a spirit.” There is an intellectual, a religious
atmosphere, in which lurks the miasma of moral
death, or through which breathes the spirit of life ;
and any least change in that ideal region will tell
upon the earth as surely as on it is recorded in frost
or flower the viewless march of the seasons.
�THE DAUGHTERS OF JEPHTHA.
Jephtha, Judge of Israel, marching against the
Ammonites, made a vow unto the Lord that, if
victorious, he would offer up as a burnt-offering to
Jehovah the first person that should come forth from
his house to meet him. Wife or daughter it must have
been : Jephtha had no other offspring but an only
daughter, and who so naturally should hasten to
welcome a father’s return from war and danger as an
only daughter? So went forth the happy maiden
with timbrels and dances to meet her father, the
Prince. The father was in distress, but it never
occurred either to him or his daughter that the Lord
might sympathise with their love and their reluctance
rather than with the vow, and so the fair maid was
slain and burnt on the Lord’s altar. Some efforts
have been made by casuists to show that Jephtha’s
daughter was not sacrificed literally, but only consesecrated to the Lord by not marrying : but such
attempts are unworthy of notice. Human sacrifices
were a recognised part of the Jewish religion, and
�8
careful provisions were made for the redemption of a
man or woman vowed to the Lord by money,—except
when devoted by anathema, in which case the man or
woman the law declared (Lev. 27) “ shall surely be
put to death.” I do not wonder that theologians
would like to escape the effect of the story, for it is
said “ the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephtha,” in
the Old Testament, and in the New that king who
sacrificed bis daughter is enumerated among saints of
whom the world was not worthy.
Well, the story drifted about the world and had its
effect. Jephtha’s daughter was caught up by the Greek
imagination, and reappeared as Iphegenia (probably
Jephthagenia), the daughter of Agamemnon, who was
nearly sacrificed in obedience to a similar vow made
by her father to Artemis. Human sacrifices were
unknown to the ancient Aryan race until it came in
contact with this dark and horrible Shemitic belief
that the deity required blood—and especially the blood
of some spotless being, as the dove, or the lamb, and
finally the most beautiful virgin. This wild and guilty
superstition may be tracked in blood wherever the
Jewish religion passed, and when Humanity had by
reaction revolted from it, the spirit of it was caught up
and preserved in the Christian idea that the world was
to be saved only by the sacrifice of the one most vir
ginal unblemished Soul, the Lamb offered up on Cal
vary to soothe the wrath of God.
�9
But even after that offering, though it was said to
be a final satisfaction of Jehovah’s universal claim
and thirst for blood, the old superstition survived to
the extent of teaching women that it was a holy
thing to vow their virginity to the Lord, to seclude
themselves from the world, and to count themselves
especially happy if they lost their lives by ascetic
devotion to their invisible Spouse. All the nuns of
Christendom were, and are, Jephtha’s daughters.
But that has been by no means the worst result.
The ancient Hebrew idea that woman is the natural
sacrifice to God coloured the whole relation of that
religion and its civil laws towards the female sex.
Woman became the law’s normal victim. We never
read of a Jewish Queen; we rarely read praises of a
woman of that race, except as part of the estate
of some man who was to her the representative of God.
She is sold and bought with her dead lord’s assets. It is
deemed no blot on Abraham when he drives Hagar
from his door. There is no law in the decalogue, or
elsewhere in the Bible, that mitigates the masculine
decree—“ Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he
shall rule over thee.”
All this was reflected in Christianity. It taught
women to submit to their husbands as to the Lord
himself; never to speak in public, or to appear there
unveiled; to stay at home and obey their husbands,—
�IO
“ as also saith the law,” adds Paul,—and understand
that woman is made for man and not man for woman.
I need not pause here to discuss the origin of this
view of the position of woman. We may admit that,
far away in some hard wilderness, or amid certain
primitive exigencies of society, such a theory of
woman was inevitable as a phase of social evolution.
To keep at home and obey might have been the only
way of continuing to exist, or to escape capture. But
when a particular phase of human evolution gets asso
ciated with divine sanction, it gains a permanence
which fetters progress. Most gods have been the
means of perpetuating the barbarism of the age which
invented them.
The Christian system brought this idea of woman
into Europe. Whatever relation it may have had to
Arabia or Syria, whatever justification it might have
had in savage periods, surely it was out of place and
out of time when imported into Europe. And there
is not a more cruel chapter in history than that which
records the arrest by Christianity of the natural growth
of European civilisation as regards woman. In
Germany it found woman participating in the legisla
tive assembly, and sharing the interests and counsels
of man, and drove her out and away, leaving her to
day nothing of her ancient rights but a few honorary
idle titles, titles that remain to mark her degradation
�11
and ours, as they remind us that a peeress, a duchess,
a baroness, a princess, a queen, are not the political
equals of many an illiterate sot who calls himself a
man. Even more fatal was the overthrow of woman’s
position in Rome. Read the terrible facts as stated
by Gibbon, by Milman, and Sir Henry Maine, read
and ponder them, and you will see the tremendous
wrong that Christianity did to woman. All the laws
by which women were protected in their individual
existence were overthrown. The sum of money which
Roman law demanded should be settled by her father
on every married woman, the new Christian code
caused to be paid to the husband instead of her, as a
dowery, or consolation for taking her off her father’s
hands. The idea that the virgin belonged to God
survived, and her espousal to a man could only be by
payment of redemption-money, which is the marriage
fee.
Christianity struck the fatal blowat the independence
of woman by allowing her but two alternatives,—im
prisonment in a nunnery or servitude in a husband’s
house; anything else was for generations accounted sin.
But am I speaking of the far past ? Is it not true
also this day that women are sacrificed to this old
Jewish regime and its Lord? What woman needs to
day is to have her rights and her wrongs decided in
accordance with the conditions and the needs of
�12
Europe, not those of Judea; what she requires is the
unbiassed verdict of the sense and sentiment and
science of the present day ; and yet her case is yielded
up to the authority and law of an ignorant tribe, whose
very Judge knew no better than to burn his daughter as
an offering to his god.
It is to that same Jehovah,
to the laws he is supposed to have proclaimed, the
Bible he is said to have written, and the religion in
which his ferocity is still reflected through all later
mitigations,—it is to him that womanhood is still
sacrificed; and so long as the name of Jehovah,
the god of Jephtha, is bowed to with awe and
fear, so long will the victim-daughters of Jephtha
surround us.
But how are women sacrificed ?
First of all in education. The intelligence and
common sense of Europe declare that there can be
nothing more important, both for themselves and for
man, than the right and thorough education of women.
As the physical mothers of the race they have the
utmost need to know the laws of life, the nature of
their own frame, the principles of health. As the
intellectual and moral guides of all human beings
during the years when they are most susceptible of
impressions and influences, women have need of the
very best knowledge. Their need of scientific drill
is, if anything, greater than that of men. Yet in
�education they are thrown the mere crumbs that fall
from the table of our male youths. It has been shown
that over ninety per cent, of the provision for education
in this country is devoted to boys and young men. It
has been shown that in our universities there are large
sums of money inadequately used,—wealth accumu
lated from ancient endowments, furnishing annual
revenues to the extent of ^500,000,—and yet amid
all the discussions as to what shall be done with that
money, hardly one voice is heard demanding that it
shall be devoted to redressing the heavy wrongs
which woman has suffered through ages, and now
suffers as she sits famishing in sight of such abun
dance. And while the universities are thus barred
against her, and the keys of knowledge denied her,
she is compelled to hear the very weakness and
ignorance so entailed quoted for her further disparage
ment. We are told, woman cannot reason; she is
not logical; she acts by mere impulse and sentiment;
she is superstitious. Well, why is it so ? Who has so
made her? The god of Jephtha, the deity who
exacted the sacrifice of the fair virgins of Israel, and
who by his Bible still demands that we hold English
women mere appendages to man, against all the best
light and conscience of our own time.
Again, women are morally and physically sacrificed
by the denial to them of the right of freedom to enter
�i4
into all the avocations of life by which human beings
may find support, livelihood and independence. In
the laws made by the worshippers of Jephtha’s god it
was enacted that every woman should be sold to some
man as wife or concubine. It was strictly obligatory.
Even that miserable means of obtaining a livelihood
is impossible in this country, where women are in ex
cess of men by nearly a million; but still we find
male prejudice and law providing that marriage shall
be regarded as the only recognised profession, trade,
or vocation by which women may obtain an honour
able livelihood. Compelled by the over-powering
exigencies of modern life we are tolerating them in a
few other simple occupations, but without according
social equality to such; and we make no adequate
provision for their apprenticeship or training for occu
pations which would yield them that independence
which our theology and conventionality most dread.
The sacrificial results of such a state of things are so
appalling that I can hardly name them. By shutting
the usual lucrative professions and occupations to
women, society is driving them by thousands to sell
that which is alone left to them to sell, their own
honourj that which not one woman in a hundred
would part with, were not pauperism and starvation
the dread alternative ; and thereby society sacrifices to
ancient superstition the health and the purity of both
manhood and womanhood.
�i5
I have named but two out of the many forms in
which women are bound hand and foot on the altar of
Jephtha’s god. Why need I repeat the long catalogue
of her wrongs as a wife and a mother ? Even after
the battles and the appeals of generations have wrung
from the reluctant hand of her master a link or two
from the chain with which she was so long fettered, sheis still liable to alienation of her children, and other
wise subject to the caprice and the cruelty of man.
And yet we are told that her interest and necessities
may safely be entrusted to the care of a legislature in
which she has no voice or representation j and that
personally she is not equal to the task of political
deliberation and voting. The ballot is not my idol. My
desire to see woman enfranchised is not because of
any abstract theory of human rights. I admit that
because of the long thraldom that sex has undergone,
and because of the long denial of education and all re
lation to the large affairs of the world, it would be
better if men could be induced to relieve them of their
oppressions—liberate them from the altar to which
they are in large part bound by chains of their own
superstition, and so prepare them for that share in
political power which should be accorded only to
intelligence and moral freedom. Women need the
full advantages of education far more than they need
votes. What they are perishing for is not a ballot,
�i6
but the opening of all the work and culture which
make the equality and secure the liberties of man.
But, with them, I despair of such practical results until
they are admitted among the constituencies of Par
liament. They have amply proved their case. They
have clearly defined their wrong and its remedy.
They have appealed for redress in vain. They are
met by frivolous sneers, by sentimental evasions, not
by reason and argument. Their sufferings have edu
cated them sufficiently to know at least their own needs,
and the unwillingness of men to respond to them.
Their cry for enfranchisement is the cry of victims
bleeding on the altar of established error j it is the
cry of despair ; and it can only increase in painful in
tensity and grief until it shall be redressed. Indeed,
the very sentiment, no doubt sincere with the great
majority of men, which dreads the departure of woman
from the sacred sphere of domestic life, must ere long
be enlisted on the side of her enfranchisement. It will
become more and more clear that there can be no
peace with injustice ; that women in increasing num
bers are, and will continue to be, excited to protest
against the wrongs of their sex. They will appear on
platforms; they will be public speakers; they will be
stimulated to that very life of political agitation which
so many fear, but are blindly engaged in promoting.
For the sake of peace and quietness, if for no higher
�motive, this justice must assuredly be done to woman,
and my own apprehension is that it will not be done
until society has suffered yet more serious disturbances
through the obstinacy and folly of the opposition to a
measure which, if adopted, could not cause anything
more revolutionary than has been caused by the ad
mission of woman to the municipal franchises they
now possess. That which is to-day demanded in the
name of justice, must to-morrow be conceded in the
interest of social order. But this is a poor, mean way of
securing any measure of justice. When wisdom pre
vails the right will be conceded to reason, not wrested
by agitation. But however men may throw away
experience, it still remains true that trouble tracks
wrong like a shadow, and justice alone is crowned with
peace.
2
��I9
CHILDREN AND THEIR MOLOCH.
Five years ago I clipped from a newspaper the follow
ing letter, addressed to the Editor from Shetland :—
“Lerwick, July, 7, 1871.
“ Sir,—It may interest some of your readers to know
that last night (being St. John’s Eve, old style) I
•observed within a mile or so of this town, seven bon
fires blazing, in accordance with the immemorial custom
■of celebrating the Midsummer solstice. These fires
were kindled on various heights around the ancient
hamlet of Sound, and the children leaped over them,
and ‘passed through the fire to Moloch,’ just as their
ancestors would have done a thousand years ago on
the same heights, and their still remoter progenitors in
Eastern lands many thousand years ago. This per
sistent adherence to mystic rites in this scientific epoch
seems to me worth taking note of.—A. L.”
In ancient times, however, the children had to leap
into the bonfire—which is defined in Cooper’s “ The-
�20
saurus ” as 11 Pyra, a bonefire, wherein men’s bodyes.
were burned,”—and not over it. I have often leaped
over a bonfire myself, with little thought that my sport
was the far away relic of the tragedies of human sacri
fice. Our bonfires of Virginia had been lighted from
those of Scotland, whence the first settlers of the neigh
bourhood had come; and there is some reason to
believe that in some obscure nooks of Scotland the
Midsummer fires are yet kindled, and some may still
be found who believe that it is good for a child to passover them.
The Reformers of Scotland made a tremendous
effort to trample out these survivals of ancient super
stition, and measurably succeeded in suppressing the
outward manifestations of them. But they preserved,
the very atmosphere of superstition amid which such
practices were bred originally, and there is reason to
fear they made matters worse. The sacrifice of chil
dren to Moloch had become a pastime, but their
subsequent sacrifice to Jehovah ofSabaoth was serious.
The Scottish Reformers also exterminated with
fierce piety the superstitions of the Church of Rome.
They particularly punished pilgrimages to the so-called1
holy wells which abounded in that region. On the
28th November, 1630, Margaret Davidson, a married
woman, residing in Aberdeen, was adjudged in an
“unlaw” of £5 by the Kirk Session “ for directing
�21
her nurse with her bairn to St. Fiack’s Well, and
washing her bairn therein for recovery of her health
- . . and for leaving an offering in the well.” The
point of idolatry, as stated by the Kirk Session, was
“in putting the well in God’s room.” After the fine
Margaret, perhaps, put God in the well’s room; but
we may doubt whether the change was of any advan
tage to the bairn. Pure water has its sanative effects,
and it is very likely that the wells became holy because
they were healing. But St. Fiack—a Scottish saint—
had to go, leaving only his name to a vehicle {fiacre),
in which his French devotees travelled to his shrine,
and instead of him was set up a Judaic deity whose
providence was not associated with anything so rational
as the use of pure water. Not one particle of super
stition the less remained in Scotland when the fires of
Moloch and the candles of Rome were put out. The
only religious advantage one could have hoped from
the revolution was not gained. It might have been
hoped that when popular Superstition was divested of its
picturesque features, its pilgrimages to holy wells and
shrines, and bonfires and images, its grim and ugly
visage would have been simply repulsive, and its
further reign impossible. But, strange to say, the
Scotch seemed to cling more to superstition the
uglier it became. A Puritanism arose in which all the
Molochs were summed up, and all human joys were
�22
represented, in Shakspeare’s phrase, as 11 the primrose
way to the everlasting bonfire,” the flowery path tohell. It is passing strange that this hideous system
should have been able to desolate beyond recovery
the “merrie England of the olden time,” and to over
shadow America for more than a hundred years.
There is a singular society which met last week, called
the Anglo-Israel Society, whose object is to persuade
this people that they are the lost tribes of Israel, and
the eagerness with which the majority of this nation
has always laid hold upon everything Semitic, gives
some plausibility to their notion; but one thing is
certain, if we are the tribes that Israel lost, we have
never lost Israel. We have hebraised for ages, made
long prayers, sung psalms, named children Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, and otherwise pertinaciously adhered
to the Semitic idolatry.
When Jehovah was brought to Scotland, Moloch
was nominally dethroned, his bonfires extinguished;
but the change was only nominal; all that was dark and
cruel in Moloch was superadded to all that was dark
and cruel in Jehovah; and the result was a Scotch
Jehovah more harsh and oppressive than the phantasm
which haunted the Jews.
For the ancient Jews do not seem to have generally
entered into the spirit of Moloch,—that old brass
deity, whose head was that of a calf, and whose stomach
�23
was a furnace in which children were consumed. The
Jews generally were careful of their children, and those
of them that worshipped Moloch and sacrificed their
children were sternly denounced. That old idol which,
according to Amos (v. 26) the Israelites bore with
them from Egypt through the wilderness, would per
haps have faded away had it not been for Solomon.
Solomon is odiously memorable for two things. He
erected a temple for Moloch on the Mount of Olives,
where children were burned to death, and he wrote
the sentence—which might appropriately have been
inscribed on that Temple—“ Spare the rod and spoil
the child.” The man who wrote that sentence had, of
course, no idea that any people would exist foolish
enough to believe it the very word of God; but,
nevertheless, in conjunction with human superstition,
he has been the cause of more evil to the human race
than any other one man that ever lived. The rod is
a little thing, but it is full of deadly poison ; it has
fostered in the world more deceit, meanness, cowardice,
servility, stupidity, and brutality than our race will
outgrow for many generations. Mr. Edward Tylor
recently exhibited at the Royal Institution the poison
ous Calabar bean used as an ordeal in Africa,
whose consecration enables the savage kings to put
out of the way every man who proposes any change
in their government; and he (Mr. Taylor) expressed
�24
his belief that the continued savagery of Africa was
in large part an effect of that little bean. And I be
lieve that it can be shown that the rod has been the
means of preserving the savage rule of physical force
in the greatest nations of the world. The parent or
teacher who strikes a child does so because his parent
or teacher struck him; and the child that is struck
catches the idea, transmitted all the way from Solo
mon, that the way to deal with people who don’t do
what you like is to strike them. That is, if you are
stronger than they. If they are little and you large,
that is a sign that the Lord has delivered them into
your hand. You must make the child yield his will
to yours, not by love and persuasion, but by brute
force and pain; break his spirit, though that harms
him far more than breaking his back-bone; make the
child another you : so will your child do the like by
his children, and they by theirs, and independence
and individuality be beaten down by violence, genius
crushed, character made characterless, as
“ To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,”
and all our yesterdays light us on the highway of
commonplace, though not, I hope, to the last syllable
of recorded time.
Does it not strike you that a child consists of an
individuality, a will, a spirit, a mind, and that its real
�25
existence depends upon these; and that if these are
not trained, encouraged, cultivated, the child has no
real existence at all? An animal existence it may
have, but beyond that it were a mere appendix or
sequel to somebody else, unless its peculiar powers
are healthily carried forward to maturity. If these are
sacrificed the child is sacrificed, and the man that is
folded up in him. Will a gardener beat his rose-buds
with a stick to make them grow ? The growing of
thoughts and emotions is more tender work than the
culture of roses. But children will be naughty; of
course they will sometimes be naughty if they are
healthy, and they will require restraint until they can
restrain themselves : they must learn morals as they
learn letters. But one might as well flog a child for
not knowing Greek as to flog it for a deception or for
selfishness. Every blow is an appeal to selfishness,
and a lesson in deception. We pardon our parents
and predecessors in this, for they knew not what they
did. But it is a scandal that the rod should linger in
the homes and schools of England, after Herbert
Spencer and others have proved the evil of it. For
many months now I have been trying to find a school in
Kensington for a boy in his eleventh year, and in that
great parish I cannot find one in which they do not
insist on two things,—Beating and the Bible. I must
leave the parish to find a school which will give me a.
conscience clause on these points.
�26
Now, I may ask any person of intelligence, not
hopelessly blinded by superstition, is the Bible a fit
book to put into the hands of a child ? I do not
believe that a child as it advances to boyhood and
girlhood should, with prudish jealousy, be kept in
ignorance as to the follies and vices of the world in
which it lives.
But our children do not live in
ancient Judea. The Bible, moreover, is not limited to
any years. It is believed by bibliolaters to be so holy
that it can do no harm even to a child of tenderest
years, who so soon as he or she can read is permitted
to receive the unnatural stimulant of perusing narra
tives obscene, shocking and cruel. What would be
a glass of gin in the child’s throat, compared with its
first familiarisation with the grossest vices of semibarbarous tribes; vices many of which are even unfit
for more advanced youth to read about, for they are
not those which they will now find in the world
around them, or require to be guarded against. The
very memory of some of the primitive brutalities of
mankind is kept alive only by the Bible. With its
pages are broadcast narratives which the law does not
permit to be printed in any other book. And when
these crimes and vices are laid before a child as the
word of God ; when it reads in that book that many
of the worst of them were instigated by Jehovah,—
that he hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and ordered persons
�27
to be stoned to death, and children to be put to thesword, and so on,—why it is enough to slay theirreverence on the spot, and strike them with moral
idiocy. This is, indeed, the way in which, morallyspeaking, the sins of the father are visited on the
children, to much more than the third and fourth
generation. The Bible is an invaluable book, but it
is not a book for children : there are many forms in
which the incidents and chapters suitable for them
can be separately procured; and for the rest, the
volume may be safely left on the shelf to be searched
out when it is wanted.
The Rod, and the Bible which consecrates the Rod,
along with many other barbarities, make up princi
pally the Moloch of children in the present time. The
sacrifice of the young among us is mainly moral and
intellectual. Physically a great deal is done for the
average of them. There are indeed terrible regions
where children are caught up in the great engine of
commerce and labour, and crushed. There are mines,
and fens, and factories where the struggle for existence
means a joyless existence—hunger and pain, and pre
mature death to many a child ; and yet, because it isa struggle for existence we can only look upon it with
sympathy and with resolution that no man shall add tothe anguish of it. But when we follow even such appa
rently inevitable evils as these to their causes, we dis-
�2S
•cover that they could not continue but for the radical
•error of English Christianity—the principle of sacrifi
cing man to God. We can never hope thoroughly to
master the evils of society while the great religious
organisations of the country, and their vast endow
ments, are directed to divine service instead of
human service, and the poor are taught that their
■chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.
When the wealth and the religious earnestness of this
nation are devoted to the benefit of humanity, instead
•of to the childish notion of personally pleasing and
■.satisfying the deity, there cannot long remain an
unhappy home in it.
But until that Gospel of Pure Reason is heard round
the world, bringing its glad tidings, the weak and
ignorant must still bleed as victims on the altar of an
imaginary being who may be called God, but is much
nearer the ideal of a Demon.
Dogma, too, has still its altar in England upon
which the child is sacrificed. It is true that among the
educated the old doctrine that every child is at birth
a child of the devil, and human nature totally de
praved, has ceased to exist; and even among the
illiterate parental affection has been too strong to
admit of its practical realisation. But still it is taught
by vulgar sects to many millions, and avails to mis•»direct many fathers and mothers, and teachers, in their
�29
dealing with the natural instincts and needs of child
hood. The mirth, the love of beauty, the longing for
amusement, in the young, so indispensable for a healthy
and happy growth, are forbidden, the dance is held tobe sinful, the theatre immoral, and thus many thousands
of children never have any real joy, and pass on to a
youth of precocious anxiety, and a manhood or woman
hood of hard, morose alienation from nature.
The only relief to the gloom of this unnatural
religion, which casts its shadow over so many young
lives, is that dogmatic preaching has become so inhar
monious with the enlightenment of civilised society,
that it tends more and more to sink into the hands of
pulpit mediocrities, who rehearse it in such a dull,
perfunctory way that it loses all impressiveness, and
can now hardly keep congregations awake. Sermon
ising is almost another name for boreing.
In an admirable story just published, called “ The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain,” the
author presents a picture of an average congrega
tional assembly on Sunday, among whom his little
hero was a sufferer. After the lugubrious hymn came
the long, long prayer. “ The boy,” says the author,
“ did not enjoy the prayer, he only endured it—if he
even did that much. He was restive all through it;
he kept tally of the details of the prayer, unconsciously
-—for he was not listening, but he knew the ground of
�3°
old, and the clergyman’s regular route over it—and
where a little trifle of new matter was introduced, his
■ear detected it, and his whole nature resented it; he
considered additions unfair and scoundrelly. In the
midst of the prayer a fly had lit on the pew in front
of him ”—but I will pass over the fate of that fly.
The sermon came on. “ The minister,” writes our
author, il gave out his text and droned along monoto
nously through an argument that was so prosy that by
and by many a head began to nod, and yet it was an
argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone,
and thinned the predestined elect down to a company
so small as to be hardly worth the saving. The boy
counted the pages of the sermon; after church he
always knew how many pages there had been, but he
seldom knew anything else about the discourse.”
Once, indeed, he became interested for a moment. It
was when the preacher, instead of his own dreary
thoughts, drew from an ancient poet the picture of the
hosts of the world gathering at the millennium, when
the lion and the lamb should lie down together, and
a little child should lead them. The boy said to him
self that he would like to be that child, if it was a
tame lion.
I suppose there are many poor little sufferers like
this lad, dragged this day into the chapels and churches
of the world, but we may console ourselves partially
�3r
with the reflection that in their sufferings many a false
hood is smothered. The deadly dogma is happily
also dull, and sinks through the vacant mind into the
gulf of oblivion. And yet that boy is passing through
the years which should be sown with the seeds of
truth, and the germs of thought and purpose. His
faculties need encouragement : they say briars and
thorns are non-encouraged buds. So long as those
sweet, susceptible years are passed amid such errors
that apathy to them all is the child’s best hope, we
must still confess that in this age of light innumerable
children are still passing through the fire to Moloch.
�_______ _ __
�33
THE 8ABBATH-JUGERNATH.
On the sands at Puri, in India, stands the famous
temple of Jugernath. It is nearly seven centuries old,
and the building of it cost as much as a half million
sterling. It is six hundred and fifty feet square, and
its sanctity consecrates the soil for twenty miles around
it,—that land being held rent-free on condition of the
tenants performing certain sacred rites in honour of
Jugernath. There are twelve great festivals held every
year at this shrine, and the alleged performances at
these festivals have been the never-ending theme of
mission meetings ever since we can remember. You
must have been fortunate children if you have no
memories of Sunday School days when your childish
heart was harrowed by accounts of poor Hindoos
crushed under the wheels of Jugernath, and a tithe of
all you possessed annually sent away to convert that
hard god into a Christian, and stop that terrible car.
Some old missionary once estimated the immense
amount of money and labour devoted to the care, the
3
�34
ablutions, and other affairs of this temple, and he said
the same amount of wealth and toil usefully bestowed
might make every barren spot of India into a garden ;
and that missionary might have added that the amount
of money which has been evoked from Christian
pockets by that one idol might have made an equal
number of gardens there, or here,—whereas it has all
been spent, and the car rolls on just as grandly as
ever.
And not only this, but we have now learned on the
best authority that all those pictures of Hindoos cast
ing themselves beneath the Jugernath car to be crushed
were purely imaginary. When the car is drawn, with
the sacred image of Vishnu set up in it, the crowd of
the curious and the devotees is enormous, and no doubt
many accidents have happened. It may be, because
some from a distance are ignorant of the danger, or that
enthusiastic devotees put themselves unintentionally in
danger by going too near the image they believe
holiest on earth, or try to draw the car with hundreds
of others when they are too weak or aged to do so.
But there are no intentional sacrifices under the car of
Jugernath, nor could there ever have been at any period.
For Jugernath, or rather Jaganatb, means simply
“ the Lord of Life •” it is a title of Vishnu, and the
temple is purely sacred to Vishnu. Nothing is more
rigidly forbidden than to slay anything that has life in
�35
the neighbourhood of the Lord of Life. The Hindoos
declare that the holy pages of the Vedas themselves
sprang from drops of blood lost by their Saviour while
protecting Agni in form of a dove from Indra in form
of a hawk; and to Vishnu they offer only things that
are fresh and beautiful, like flowers, and even the
. flowers must not be in the least faded. So it is
impossible that there could have been human sacrifices
to Jugernath except by accident. The accidents were
probably very frequent at one time,—at least it is
•charitable to missionary reporters to think so,—the vast
increase of popularity in the festivals having made the
crowd unwieldy. But in recent years British authority
has insisted upon carefulness—threatened to stop the
car if men and women were injured—and there is now
far less destruction of life by the car of Jugernath than
by the London cab.
Happy Hindoos ' who have at hand an enlightened
authority willing to respect their religious customs so
long as they are harmless, but ready to put Vishnu
himself under arrest if he injures humanity. I would
match an Englishman against any man living for good
sound sense in dealing with such superstitions, pro
vided they are not his own. But when that clear
headed English authority which has put out the fires
that burned widows in India comes to deal with laws
that torture women here, it gets confused among
�36
Scripture texts and precedents. When it is needed
to curb a fanaticism here which deliberately sacrificeshuman life—that, for instance, of the Peculiar People,
who, because of a text in the New Testament, refuse
to call medical aid for their sick, letting them die in
numbers every year, even helpless children—why then
all that common sense seems to vanish. When it is
called upon to regulate our Sabbath-Jugernath, beside
which the car at Puri is an innocent toy, beneath
whose wheels millions of hearts and brains are crushed
in this kingdom, why then the intelligence of the nation
grows timid, and its arm is paralysed.
The celebrations of Jugernath, the Lord of Life,
bring to the poor twelve festivals in the year, The
celebrations of the Sabbath, Lord of Lifelessness, bringto our poor fifty-two funereal vacancies in their exist
ence. They ought to be fifty-two festivals of Reason, of
Beauty, of Happiness, but to the poor they are days of
unreason, of ugliness, of torpor and drunkenness ; days
hateful to children and hurtful to all. Now it is not
merely fanciful to bring together the Jugernath and the
Sabbath superstitions. Even in origin their consecra
tion came from the same source. Our theology has
arbitrarily transferred the sanctity of the Jewish Sab
bath, the Seventh Day of the week, to the Sun-day, the
day consecrated to sun-worship, our first day of the
week. I say arbitrarily, for' there is not a word in the
�New Testament consecrating Sunday, but there are
•strong sentences declaring one day as holy as another.
The early Christians when they went among so-called
pagan ” races met for worship on the first day of
■the week because it was a holiday, and they could only
then get at the people. For the same reason we meet
to-day, because it is the day when people are liberated
from business. But the Primitive Christians had as
•little thought of consecrating the “pagan” Sun’s day
as the Jewish Sabbath, just as most of us would abhor
•the notion that any day is less sacred than another.
But Vishnu also was to his provincial worshippers the
-quickening sun, and his chariot is the car of Jugernath.
So the two institutions are linked together archeeologi•cally. But in a more important sense they are related
by the fact that they are both idolatries. lhe Sab
bath is one of the only two visible idols which pro
nounced Protestantism has left standing for a race of
kindred origin to the Hindoos, and like them
naturally loving outward symbols and images. We
•all belong to the Great Aryan race, from which pro
ceeded all the bright gods and goddesses of Greece
and Rome, and Germany, and all their variegated
symbolism.
Through certain historic combina
tions our Aryan race as it migrated westwaid, became
invested with a Shemitic religion, one which had no
arts and pictures itself, and regarded them as impious
�38
in others. In obedience to this alien religion, our
race now wrote on its temples, “Thou shalt not make
to thyself any graven images, or pictures of anything
in heaven, earth or sea.” But it was one thing to say
this, another to practise. The Eastern Church evaded
the law by putting up certain holy pictures with
frames in relief, which are something like sculpture.
The Roman Church boldly disregarded the law in its
lordly way of requiring the Bible to accommodate itself
to the Pope. In this country all the sacred visible
images were swept away by Puritanism from its own and .
many other churches—leaving all the more graven
images in the mind ; but that race-instinct, that love
of outward symbols and objects of worship with which
the Eastern Church compromised, and to which the
Romish Church succumbed—that instinct and senti
ment remained in our people, and in the empty niche
of the Madonna, on the altar from which god and
goddess and crucifix had been successively swept,
there were now set up the only two visible images of
determined Protestantism—the Bible and the Sabbath.
There are some branches of the Church of England
which approximate to the Catholic Church enough to
preserve other symbols—exalting the sacrament, mag
nifying the cross, or the liturgy—and such care less tomake overmuch of the Sabbath, and respect saintly
tradition as much as the Bible. But when you find
�an out-and-out Evangelical, or a Calvinist, or a member
of a sect which has nothing symbolical about it, you
find one who will fight for the literal Bible and the
literal Sabbath, exactly as a barbarian fights for his
idol. They are his idols. They are to him precisely
what the Jugernath is to the devotee in India. The
Bible and the Sabbath are all he has left; and if you
were to really take from the average sectarian his
idolatry of those two visible objects, he would feel as
if he had nothing to lean upon at all. For this aver
age religionist has not a vivid interior life, he has not
the mystical sense cognisant of pure ideals, most
visible when the outward eye is closed. He needs to
have something he can see and handle, and feel
physically, or realise by physical effects.
There is not the least use in trying to argue with an
idolator. Nothing can be influenced by reasoning
which was not reached by any effort of reason. Real
thinkers, even in the sects themselves, have tried their
strength against this miserable Sabbath superstition,
Luther and Calvin, and George Fox, as well as the
most learned men of the English Church. But the
Sabbath stands like the Hindoo Temple described in
the curse of Kehdma :—
“ And on the sandy shore, beside the verge
Of ocean, here and there a rock-cut fane
Resisted in its strength the surf and surge
That on their deep foundation beat in vain.”
�40
Even so, deep-cut in the plutonic rock of human
ignorance, is this idol shrine, against which all our
protests, appeals, facts, and arguments will beat in
vain, until the ignorance itself shall be undermined and
crumble away.
There is no advantage, therefore, in pleading with
Sabbatarians. The more we groan the better they
feel, for it shows them that Jehovah is having his will
by crushing ours. But there is great reason that we
should appeal to the constituted rulers of England, in
the name of our religious liberty, against the claim of
Sabbatarians to oppress consciences that are not
Sabbatarian. The right of any individual to be him
self a simpleton seems inalienable. We do not deny,
though we may deplore, the claim of Sabbatarians to
pass their “ holy time ” in any depth of sanctimonious
stupor they like.
But they have no right to bind on
the altar of their ugly idol the life of other people.
That they are still able to do so is not due to any
Sabbatarianism in those who make our laws. There
is not one member of our Government or Parliament
who does not violate the Judaic Sabbath law every
week of his life. Nearly fifty years ago, William Lovett,
and several thousand working men with him, drew up a
petition to Parliament, declaring their conviction that
much of the drunkenness and crime in London is due
to the absence of proper resources for instruction and
�amusement on Sunday. Honest Joseph Hume pre
sented their petition and appealed to Parliament for
the opening of such resources. Since then the appeal
has been repeated by Sir Joshua Walmsley, Peter
Taylor and others, but steadily refused, even while
the principle has been conceded by the opening of
museums in Ireland, where Puritanism is not strong.
The last-named valiant member of Parliament has
now for some years moved that body to admit the
poor drudges of this metropolis to gain some know
ledge, to catch some gleam of light and beauty, on the
one day when they are released from toil, in our grand
national collections which they help to support but
never see—institutions which represent the secrets of
nature and ideality of poets and artists, the history of
man in his steady mastery of the earth by skill and
genius, the sacred story of heroes, saints, saviours of
humanity. But at last that member has declined to
renew his appeal, because, as he has stated to me, he
has ample evidence that while the majority of the
House are quite convinced that his motion is right,
and have no respect for Sabbatarianism, they yet vote
for it. The Puritan Sabbath can always roll up a
majority even in a House that applauds arguments
against it. The member referred to is naturally not
willing to go on convincing men already convinced.
But why then do these politicians vote against the
�42
relief of suffering non-Sabbatarians ? Why, because
they do not wish to be also victims of the Sabbath.
To the average Member of Parliament his seat there
is the immediate jewel of his soul. He would, no
doubt, like to have right on his side, but he must have
his borough. He knows perfectly well that if he
votes for opening museums and picture galleries to the
people, on the very next Sunday his constituency
will be listening to awful burdens against him from
all the reverend Chadbands and Stigginses and
Mawworms and Cantwells and Pecksniffs, whose com
bined power can defeat any man in England, as their
like defeated the great man in Jerusalem who broke
the Sabbath, and declared it subject to man, not man
to it. Nevertheless, we must not proceed upon the
opinion that the average Member of Parliament is so
much afraid of this power behind him, or so tenacious
of his seat, that he will carry it to the extent of sup
porting what he felt to be a very serious oppression.
All the honour and courage have not entirely gone
out of this nationality. Men will be found ready to
risk their seats when they have fully apprehended
the nature and extent of the wrong that is
suffered. Parliament consists mainly of wealthy
gentlemen, whose every earthly need is so com
pletely answered that they can only with difficulty
realise the wants of the poor. On Sunday they have
�their carriages to drive in, their right to visit botanical
and zoological gardens, their libraries, pictures, clubsand billiard-rooms. Their Sunday is free enough.
They turn it to repose or recreation as they may need,
In all their lives they have never had one day of
serious want, not one day of confinement in a miserable
lodging with no alternatives but the chill street or thegin-shop. In some way it must be brought before
these gentlemen, and kept before them— like the
widow’s plea in the parable before the judge, who waswearied out at last—that the lot of the masses whose
labour makes so much of their comfort is a mean and
miserable lot. They must be made to know that
there are millions who from the cradle to the grave,
toil—and toil—and toil, year in and year out, and
whose life is one long want. It must be impressed
upon them that a large part of the sorrow and heavi
ness of the poor man’s and poor woman’s fate is the
presence in them of mental and moral faculties and
possibilities which are a perpetual hunger without any
supply, which never rise to be real intellects and tastes
because they are kept by drudgery as seeds under the
sod, unquickened by any beam of light shining from
all the knowledge around them, unsunned by any ray
of beauty. Then they will comprehend that a fearful
system of human sacrifice is going on around them,
and they will not find their parliamentary seats easy
�44
if retained by any connivance with those sacrifices.
There is an Eastern fable of a throne luxuriously soft
to any monarch who sat upon it, until a wrong had
risen somewhere in his realm; then the throne became
so hard that no sovereign could sit upon it, until the
wrong was sought out and redressed; and there is
•conscience enough among our commoners to change
many a legislative seat to flint, when its holder shall
know that he maintains it only as a coward, through
the servility that dare not grapple with serious in
justice because it is in the majority.
Those are the men who must ultimately listen to
our cause and decide it rightfully. And our cause is
that the brain and heart, and even the work of the
poor, is suffering grievously because of the restrictions
placed by superstition upon that day of the week
which represents their all of opportunity for any high
enjoyment or improvement. The Sundays of life
represent one-seventh of every man’s time; but for
the drudges of the world it represents the whole of
their time. All the rest of life is not their time; it
belongs to their employer; it is mortgaged by physical
toil. What life is at their own disposal is counted by
.Sundays. If those free days are unimproved or
unhappy the whole life goes sunless to the grave.
What provision does this nation make, and wnat
■does it permit to be made, for the elevation, instruc
�tion, and happiness of those whose other days, asGeorge Herbert said, “trail on the ground,” on the
one day susceptible to nobler impressions ?
First it provides sermons.
Twenty thousand
churches are open this day for the people, and in
them are places for a limited number of the poor.
Well, let us forget how many dull sermons are
preached, how many gloomy, false, repulsive dogmas,,
how many threadbare superstitions, and how few work
ing people have any disposition to enter these assem
blies, or such dress as would let them feel comfortable
when there. Let us pass over all that. Admitting
that one hour and a half or two hours of the poor
man’s only leisure day may be so passed, what provision
is made for the remainder ?
Why, there are the parks in which he may walk.
But that is a very inadequate reply. Our English
weather renders the park attractive for but a small
part of the year. Much of the labour done is too
wearisome to render mere walking on Sunday any
delight to the workers. Nor is there anything in that
merely physical exercise which answers the real
demand, a demand not of the feet but of the head.
Well, there is the great provision that comes next
to the church, the public house. This great nation
has been appealed to by some of its noblest scholars
for permission to accompany the poor on Sunday
�46
■afternoons, when churches are closed, through the
national collections of art and science, to explain to
them the objects of interest, to interpret for them the
wonders of nature and unfold the splendours of art.
But thus far our rulers have replied, “ No, we will
deliver you to the publican, but never to Dr. Carpenter;
Ruskin shall not teach you the glory of Raphael’s
•cartoons, but you may gaze at pleasure on the interior
decorations of the gin-palace; you must not see the
grandeurs of art, nor the fine traceries of skill, nor the
antiquities of humanity, nor the wondrous forms and
•crystals of Nature, but do not complain : do we not
allow you limitless supplies of whiskey and beer?”
And just here, by the way, I remark a little sign of
hope. The Sabbatarians begin to perceive the scandal
that the beer-house should be kept open while the
museum is closed, and they begin to demand the
closing of the public-house also. They have carried
a. measure of that kind for Ireland, and I sincerely
hope they will manage to carry one for England. For
the day that sees the beer-house close will see the door
•of the museum start. The great ally of the Sabbatarian
has been the publican, and when that alliance is broken
our success will draw near. The parson drugs the
people’s brains with superstition, and the publican
drugs with beer those whom the parson cannot reach;
and the streams from church and tap-room blending
�47
together reinforce the Lord’s-day people, so that they
can always outnumber us. If the Sabbath were not
an idol it would long ago have recoiled from all this
part of its work.
It would have said, “ Open a
thousand museums rather than drive the poor to find
their only Sunday amusement, and spend the means
for which their wives and children suffer, in drink !”
But an idol may always be recognised by just this
fact: z? demands human sacrifices. It may not always
demand the cutting-up or burning of its victims; but,
if not that, it will demand the sacrifice of his intellect
or his affections, his happinesss or his welfare; in
some way a human body, or heart, or brain will be
found bound wherever an idol stands. And though
I cannot, in such brief space, enter into all the details
of the holocaust of human benefits offered up to the
Sabbath, I will affirm for myself that the more I have
considered the needs of this people, and the lost
opportunities of meeting them, the more have I felt
that there is now no cause worthier of a good man’s zeal
than the overthrew of this Sabbath oppression. It is
a wrong for which I have no toleration at all. I can
tolerate any man’s religious conviction about the
Sabbath or anything else ; but I cannot tolerate him
when he insists on binding his dogma upon others.
I will not tolerate his intolerance. This is no issue of
abstract opinion for theological fencing. It is no
�48
sentimental grievance.
The hunger of a million
famished souls is in it. It is a great heart-breaking
wrong, crushing lower and lower one class of society
at a time when other classes are rising higher daily.
And that the poor do not feel it to be so, are in boozy
contentment with their beer or their prayers and
demand nothing better, is only a proof of how fully
the oppression has done its miserable work.
Yet they use this as an argument against us ! They
cry, “The workmen do not want it; behold our
majority.” I answer, the majority is always wrong.
The majority crucified' Christ and poisoned Socrates.
Part of the masses you have deceived by the con
temptible fiction that their day of release from toil will
be endangered by that which would make it more
attractive and therefore more precious; and a larger
part you have so besotted with beer and ignorance
that they are pauperised in soul as well as body, and
hug their own chains. Theirs is not the real voice of
the people.
A true statesman will take the only
suffrage they are competent to cast from their degraded
foreheads and their brutalised forms and faces. The
gardener will not follow the will of the weeds, though
they report the soil he works in. At any rate a rational
man’s duty is clear. The authority of the Sabbath
rests upon what every intelligent mind knows to be
fiction; upon a deity who is said to have created the
�49
universe in six days and rested on the seventh, and
then ordered that anyone working on the seventh
should be stoned to death. That is a fiction. There
is no deity who did anything of that kind. We are told
this is the Lord’s day. We know that if that Lord be
other than a phantom every day is his day. J esus
said, 11 My Father works on the Sabbath and so will
I.” Rest is not stupor. It is well to change our
occupation occasionally, but never well to be idle.
There is no ground whatever for this superstition.
The day of rest originated no doubt in a human want,
afterwards invested with sanctity: but the sanctity
must be entirely removed if the day is to be changed
from a curse to a human benefit.
4
��51
THE MARTYRDOM OF REASON.
Reason is that supreme faculty of man by which he
is cognisant of principles apart from their applica
tions, of laws as distinct from particulars, of ideas as
separate from relations. It differs from the under
standing, which is concerned with those special appli
cations and relations, as a code of laws differs from
the various decisions of courts and judgments made
under that code. A man may reason rightly when his
understanding is in error. A Hindoo walking out saw
a large and dangerous cobra, as he supposed, across
his path, preparing to dart upon him ; it so overcame
his nerves that he fainted; the object proved to be a
piece of rope. The man had reasoned correctly; he
knew the nature of the cobra, and rightly inferred the
danger, but his judgment was in error. Now judg
ment is at the point of distinction between reason
and understanding. By origin it is an organ of rea
son, by result it is the agent of the understanding.
�52
When we consider our human faculties in this
abstract way, we find them perfectly harmonious.
They move in their appointed orbits, in constant rela
tion and interaction, but without collision or jar, their
very differences completing the harmony. Abstractedly
no mortal can conceive of a special judgment with no
general principles to guide it, and none can think of
ideas and laws as things inapplicable to the particulars
of nature and life.
And yet we find in all races and ages a wide-spread
suspicion of reason. Even at this day, and in nations
which are daily reaping and enjoying the fruits of
reason, we find vast numbers of people who have an
impression like that which Shakspere puts into the
mouth of Caesar, “ He thinks too much ; such men
are dangerous.” Still more general is the notion that
the man of ideas must be unpractical. It is easy to
perceive the origin of that notion; it is suggested in
the common saying, “That is well enough in theory,
but it won’t do in practice.” Of course the phrase is
a mistake ; it should be, “ That is wrong in theory, for
it won’t do in practicebut it discloses the fact that
there has been so much false reasoning in the world
that many have come to distrust reason itself.
And just here arises a misunderstanding and a
quarrel between the theorist and the practical man.
One says the error is in the theory, the other that it is
�53
in the application of it. Among educated people the
matter would be tested by experiment. Science, for
instance, has long affirmed that when salt water freezes
it loses its saltness; but the Arctic explorers melting
the sea-ice found it so briny that they could not drink
it. The result is, of course, a revision of theory by
experiments which will probably show that the salt
does not remain strictly in the ice, but between its
crystals, that the theory is not wrong but requires more
careful statemeht to include the practical fact. In this
way the old feud between theory and practice has
entirely ceased from the domain of science.
• But it is in religion that we find the distrust of rea
son most intense and familiar.
On that distrust
Christianity is founded. Christ appealed to reason;
but Christianity has very little to do with him ; it re
lapses into barbaric ages and finds its corner-stone in
a fable that the first effort of intellect led to the cor
ruption of the whole human race. It said that when
God made man and woman he put them into a para
dise for enjoyments sensual and sensuous. The one
thing he was opposed to was knowledge. So resolute
was the Creator on that point, that he did not hesitate
to accompany his prohibition of that one fruit with a
deception. He told them that on the very day they
should eat of the tree of Knowledge they would die.
The serpent persuaded the woman that this was a
�54
fiction, as it proved to be. The truthful serpent also
said, “ Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,”
and no sooner was the fruit eaten than Jehovah,
making no mention of what he had said about their
dying, acknowledged the veracity of the serpent.
“ Behold,” he said, “ the man is become as one of us
(gods) to know good and evil.” Then, lest the gods
should have no advantage at all, and man should eat
of another fruit and become immortal, the first pair
were expelled from Paradise. This fable, which re
presents the first priestly scream against education,
shows us a deity cursing knowledge and a demon en
couraging it; it shows a deity trying to delude man to
remain in ignorance, while the demon speaks the
truth, and secures the birth of intelligence for man and
woman, where Jehovah meant them to live only the
life of the senses. On that fable the whole Plan of
Salvation is founded. The knowledge gained that day
brought on mankind the curse of total depravity, and
doom of eternal torture. To avert that the Son of
God became incarnate on earth and suffered in a few
years all the agonies which the whole human race
would have suffered if every man, -woman and child
that ever lived were damned to all eternity. All of
this is meaningless, and the whole theology of Chris
tendom mere chaff, except to avert the wrath and undo
the curse which fell from a deity jealous of the attain
�55
ments of his own creature, upon man, because of his
first endeavour to gain knowledge.
Fortunately, while that is the theology it is not the
religion, and still less the morality of this country. It
is a sublime example of the kind of theory which does
not do in practice. Nevertheless we must not under
rate the results of the long pressure of instructions like
these upon every human being through a period of
sixteen hundred years. Even now, in the most en
lightened nations, the money devoted to teach that
theology is counted by millions where the money
devoted to pure knowledge is counted by tens. And
we need not wonder that the spirit of that old curse
on knowledge still survives to haunt every seeker of it
for its own sake. It is still strong enough to cast a
certain odium on the tasks of reason. To the popular
mind there is something uncanny about the rationalist,
which means a reasoner, and the sceptic—literally, he
who considers a thing—has still an evil name. Thou
sands who shout for every other kind of freedom will
cry down freethought. They will mourn over an en
slaved African thousands of miles away, but have no
tears to shed for fettered minds at their own door.
Nay, even among those liberated from the old
theology, how much suspicion of reason do we en
counter ! How often do we hear such speak of science
as cold, and of the intellect as inferior to something
�56
they call faith or intuition ! They who have no doubts
about reason are still comparatively few. And yet our
age is full of the grandest facts and illustrations, proving
that it is among the devotees of reason and science
that the divinest life and fire of our age is manifest. I
have just been reading a history, written by the leading
rationalist minister in America, of what is called “ the
transcendental movement” in that country.
*
And it
is well called a “movement ;” for the chief impres
siveness of it lies in the fact that what had been mainly
a speculative philosophy in Europe, there, among one
of the most shrewd and practical nations of the world,
blazed out into a movement, a noble enthusiasm for
humanity, a passionate religion which kindled the hearts
of young men and women, and made them Reformers,
Apostles, Martyrs, who gave up all their goods for the
poor, who brought glad tidings to woman and lifted the
heaviest burthens of her life, and who broke off the
bonds of the slave. There was not an orthodox man
or woman among them. They were rationalists. The
Bible they studied was Kant’s “ Critique of Pure
Reason,” Goethe’s Works, Carlyle’s Essays, Cousin’s
Philosophy: the ideas of Europe became ideals in
America, rose up like pillars of flame; they became a
* Transcendentalism in New England. A History. By Octavius
Brooks Frothingham. New York : E. P. Putman & Sons, 1876.
�57
gospel in the genius of Emerson, the mind of Parker,
and the heart of Margaret Fuller, and under its charm
humble people formed themselves in communities,
ceasing to care for worldly wealth and honours. There
is no type of character that is beautiful in the past
which did not reappear. St. Francis d’ Assisi, Fenelon,
Madame Guion, Berkeley, Sydney, they all had true
counterparts in the piety, devotion, virtue, and genius,
which characterised that movement. This is the
hundredth birth-year of America as a nation; they
who established its independence in the name of
humanity were free-thinkers—Washington, Jefferson,
Adams, Franklin, Thomas Paine—and they broke for
ever the power of a priesthood in the State. And now
remark, in that country where conscience is free, a
hundred years has witnessed but one great religious
movement—but one which corresponds with the
movements under George Fox, and Wesley and Whit
field in this country—but one which exhibited power
to command the passions, conquer selfishness, and
trace itself in practical reforms and a new Church
and that one was a movement born of pure reason.
Such has ever been the work of reason where it has
been set free. And yet there are eloquent men, like
Pere Hyacinthe, who are going about imploring the
priests and prelates of Europe to make a holy alliance
of Anglican, Greek, and Gallican Churches against
�58
this terrible monster—Rationalism. I rejoice to hear
they think there is need of a new league. It is a valu
able testimony to the stream of tendency that makes
for truth. But we must not allow the good father’s
confession, that many people are not only, like him
self, denying that two and two make five, but even
running into the excess of denying that two and two
make three—a radicalism he so much deplores—we
must not allow that to make us over-confident. We
must still face the fact that Reason is a sacrifice and a
martyr amid the great institutions around us.
What is the history of nearly every child born
in this country? The few who are brought up by
rational methods, and taught to cultivate and obey
reason as their highest guide, are hardly notice
able as to numbers.
A large proportion are
neglected, so far as Christian fables are concerned,
but they are victims of popular superstitions, believe
in ghosts and goblins, fortune-telling and the evil eye,
their minds overgrown with rank weeds. The ave
rage Christian child is taught superstition above every
thing else ! Other and true things may be taught, but
they spring up only amid those briars which choke
each other growth before it can bear its fruit. Car
dinal, and bishop, and cabinet, alike agree that no
seed of wheat shall be sown in any mind without a
tare of fable or dogma beside it. Of what use is
�59
geology if one believes that Jehovah created the
universe in six days ? What is the use of any science
to a mind which believes that the laws of nature are
arbitrary, have often been suspended, and may be
changed and altered by the breath of a mortal’s peti
tion ? There can be no reason cultivated where the
law of cause and effect is disregarded. To believe in
the connection of things that have no connection—for
instance, that a man’s word can raise the dead to
life—is to strangle reason. To believe in an effect
without adequate cause—for instance, that the
world stopped revolving that a captain might have
more daylight to fight by—vastates the mind. To
believe in anything whatever for which there is no
evidence, or insufficient evidence, is superstition; and
the essence of superstition is that reason is dethroned
and a mere compulsion of habit, fear, or self-interest
set up in its place to direct the life.
Well, the ordinary studies of the average Christian
child having thus been prevented from developing his
reasoning powers in the direction of religion, he is
completely subjected to the powerful stimulants of
those preternatural fears and hopes which make the
ordinary sanctions of what is called religion, but
really is selfishness. He is warned to avoid certain
things, and do others, because he will go to hell if
he doesn't comply, but will enjoy eternal bliss if he
�6o
does,—motives of calculating self-interest, which it is
the very mission of Reason to restrain and to remand
for the work of mere physical self-preservation.
While we despise the man who loves and serves a
wife or a friend from such base calculations of interest,
children are taught to love God and serve him for
fear of punishment and hope of reward.
But let us follow the growth of the child thus in
structed. The time comes when he must enter into
life. Physical cares, business, the healthy work of
the world claim him. Amid them he is pretty sure to
discover that the theology he has been taught is not
confirmed by experience. Then, haply, he may be
able to assert the rights of his own reason. But, sup
posing he does not, one of several other results will
follow, i. He may believe that the doctrines he has
been taught must have a formal homage as divine
mysteries which he is not expected to understand, but
only blindly to obey. 2. He may become a hypocrite.
3. He may become utterly indifferent to the whole
thing, and utterly reckless. In either case his sacred
reason has been sacrificed.
But do we fully appreciate the tragedy which has
thus happened ? Do we fully realise that even when
men and women do not become either hypocrites or
reckless, they are almost certain, as things now stand,
to reach some day the appalling discovery that they
�6i
have wasted the best years of their life on a sham and
a fraud ?
In the twenty-five years during which I have been
in a position to receive the confidences of those who
were struggling amid doubts, and in the pangs of
transition, the chief agonies I have witnessed have
been those whose awakening came too late for oppor
tunities to be recovered. Youth is gone, enthusiasm
has gone, the time for study and devotion for ever
passed away, and the collective force of all the light
around them enters at last only to bring the bitter
consciousness that the glory of life has been cast away
upon the barren deserts of delusion.
These are the martyrs whom every devotee of
reason should see around him. There is no sorrow
equal to theirs. No doubt rationalism may bring
with it many trials so far as the world is concerned.
There may be separations, friendships clouded, affec
tions wounded ; for superstition can turn hearts to
stone even against their own blood where its autho
rity is denied. There may be intellectual doubts,
too, not to be satisfied, some loved legends vanish
ing, and some pretty dreams made dim along with the
nightmares escaped. But amid all these there is
nothing half so terrible as the fate of those who have
no alternatives but either to slay their reason
.altogether, or to admit its testimony only to find
that the whole life has been a gigantic mistake.
�62
Therefore it is the high duty of every human being
to maintain openly and valiantly the verdict of his
own faculties. Unfortunately the guardians of the
young are so eager to teach them how to say
prayers, and keep sanctimonious on Sunday, and to
refrain from kneeling down to graven images, that few
have ears to hear the great decalogue announced in
their own time. The first of the new commandments
is this,—Seek truth ! and the second is like unto it,
Live the Truth in thought, word, and deed 1 So little
has the virtue of self-truthfulness been taught, that we
often meet people who actually make a merit of con
cealing their convictions, especially if they think they
are thereby saving somebody’s feelings. There is a
great deal of selfishness, as well as sentiment, sheltered
under Paul’s dangerous maxim about being all things
to all men, and a great deal of Jesuitism hides itself
under Christ’s admonition against casting pearls before
swine, which is true only if read by the light of his
own martyrdom for speaking the truth. As a rule the
men and women you meet are not swine, and you
need not fear to offer them—it is cruel to refuse them
—your pearls of truth and sincerity. Many of them,
indeed, are going about silently seeking those very
pearls. No doubt there are times for reserve, no doubt
there are rocks of prejudice and ignorance which have
to be slowly pulverised into a soil before any seed can
�63
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be sown in them. But no one will ever lack wisdom
for all occasions who is animated purely by that love
which is not seeking his own, nor vaunting himself,
but seeking only to advance Truth. Reason supplies
an instinct adequate to all emergencies. Remember
again what reason is, and the ground of its supremacy I
Remember now and always, that its very soul is dis
interestedness. It is the clear vision of the mind as
it rises above all the considerations of self-interest, pre
judice, conventionality, passion, which would lower and
discolour its pure light. Reason is to see things as
they are, and not as majorities or institutions say they
are, or wish them to be. And it is just as much as a
mind can do to keep that holy lamp burning steadily
through life in a world where the most powerful threats
and bribes are continually used to sway and pervert
the judgment. In legal affairs no judge is allowed to
decide a case involving his own interest; a heavy
punishment follows any attempt to bribe judge or jury
man. So we can get just verdicts. But how are
we to get just verdicts on religious questions,
when untold millions and all social advantages
are set apart by Church and State to influence every
mind in favour of creeds and dogmas, as against pure
reason? We can hope for a true verdict only from
those who have ascended above such considerations,
and surrender themselves wholly to the guidance of
reason and right.
�64
When the poet Heine was in Paris, poor, sick,
wretched, he renounced his rationalism. His friends
in Germany heaped scorn upon him. Heine then
wrote :—“ They say Heine has changed and become
a reactionist. Ah, well, lately I went to the Louvre,
and knelt before our lady of Milo. Many tears did I
shed as I gazed upon her beautiful form and face, but
I rose and left her, for she had no arms. She had no
arms, and I was poor and needy.” So he turned to
our lady of the Church, for she had arms and hands,
all full of rich gifts to reward any poet for singing her
praises.
We cannot help feeling compassion for those who
yield to rich and powerful superstition the homage
which is due to reason alone: but the standard cannot
be lowered, whoever may go away sorrowful. He
alone is a true man who stands firm to the mandate of
the Sinai within him, and sees that whatever may
bend or break, it shall not be his fidelity to truth.
��
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Human sacrifices in England : four discourses
Creator
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Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907 [1832-1907]
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 64 p. ; 16 cm.
Notes: Contents: I. Human sacrifices -- 2. The daughters of Jephthah -- 3. Children and their Moloch -- 4. The Sabbath-Jugernath -- 5. The martyrdom of reason. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Trübner and Co.
Date
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1876
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N178
G3343
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Religion
Rationalism
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Human sacrifices in England : four discourses), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Child Rearing-Moral and Ethical Aspects
Children
Children's Rights
Education
Morris Tracts
NSS
Rationalism
Reason
Religion and Civil Society
Sabbath
Social Justice
Women-Religious Aspects-Christianity
Women's Rights
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Text
^*7 3/^
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
Ingersoll’s Advice to Parents.
keep children out of church
AND SUNDAY SCHOOL.
Nothing is More Outrageous than to Take Advantage
of the Helplessness of Childhood to Sow
in the Brain the Seeds of Error.
By
,
ROBERT
G. INGERSOLL.
Should parents who are Infidels, unbelievers, or Atheists
send their children to Sunday schools and churches to give
them the benefit of Christian education ?
Parents who do not believe the Bible to be an inspired
book should not teach their children that it is. They should
be absolutely honest. Hypocrisy is not a virtue, and, as a
rule, lies are less valuable than facts.
An unbeliever should not allow the mind of his child to
be deformed, stunted, and shrivelled by superstition. He
should not allow the child’s imagination to be polluted.
Nothing is more outrageous than to take advantage of the
helplessness of childhood to sow in the brain the seeds of
falsehood, to imprison the soul in the dungeon of fear, to
teach dimpled infancy the infamous dogma of eternal pain
—filling life with the glow and glare of hell.
No unbeliever should allow his child to be tortured in the
orthodox inquisitions. He should defend the mind from
attack as he would the body. He should recognise the
rights of the soul. In the orthodox Sunday schools children
are taught that it is a duty to believe, that evidence is not
�( 2 )
essential, that faith is independent of facts, and that religion
is superior to reason. They are taught not to use their
natural sense, not to tell what they really think, not to
entertain a doubt, not to ask wicked questions, but to accept
and believe what their teachers say. In this way the minds
of the children are invaded, corrupted, and conquered.
Would an educated man send his child to a school in which
Newton’s statement in regard to the attraction of gravitation
was denied; in which the law of falling bodies, as given by
Galileo, was ridiculed; Kepler’s three laws declared to be
idiotic, and the rotary motion of the earth held to be utterly
absurd ?
Why, then, should an intelligent man allow his child to be
taught the geology and astronomy of the Bible ? Children
should be taught to seek for the truth—to be honest, kind,
generous, merciful, and just. They should be taught to love
liberty and to live to the ideal.
Why, then, should an unbeliever, an Infidel, send his child
to an orthodox Sunday school, where he is taught that he
has no right to seek for the truth, no right to be mentally
honest, and that he will be damned for an honest doubt;
where he is taught that God was ferocious, revengeful,
heartless as a wild beast; that he drowned millions of his
children; that he ordered wars of extermination, and told
his soldiers to kill gray-haired and trembling age, mothers
and children, and to assassinate with the sword of war the
babes unborn ?
Why should an unbeliever in the Bible send his child to
an orthodox Sunday school, where he is taught that God
was in favor of slavery, and told the Jews to buy of the
heathen, and that they should be their bondmen and bond
women for ever—when he is taught that God upheld
polygamy and the degradation of women ?
Why should an “ unbeliever,” who believes in the uni
formity of nature—in the unbroken and unbreakable chain
of cause and effect—allow his child to be taught that
miracles have been performed ; that men have gone bodily
to heaven; that millions have been miraculously fed with
manna and quails ; that fire has refused to burn the clothes
�( 3 )
,
f
and flesh of men; that iron has been made to float; that
the earth and moon have been stopped, and that the earth
has not only been stopped, but made to turn the other way;
that devils inhabit the bodies of men and women; that
diseases have been cured with words; and that the dead,
with a touch, have been made to live again ?
The thoughtful man knows that there is not the slightest
evidence that these miracles ever were performed. Why
should he allow his children to be stuffed with these foolish
and impossible falsehoods ? Why should he give his lambs
to the care and keeping of the wolves and hyenas of super. stition ?
Children should be taught only what somebody knows.
Guesses should not be palmed off on them as demonstrated
facts. If a Christian lived in Constantinople he would not
send his children to the mosque to be taught that Mohammed
was a prophet of God and that the Koran is an inspired
book. Why ? Because he does not believe in Mohammed
or the Koran. That is reason enough. So an Agnostic,
living in New York, should not allow his children to be
taught that the Bible is an inspired book. I use the word
“ Agnostic ” because I prefer it to the word “ Atheist.” As
a matter of fact no one knows that God exists, and no one
knows that God does not exist. To my mind there is no
evidence that God exists—that this world is governed by a
being of infinite goodness, wisdom, and power—but I do
not pretend to know. What I do insist upon is that children
should not be poisoned, should not be taken advantage of
'
that they should be treated fairly, honestly ; that they should
be allowed to develop from the inside instead of being
crammed from the outside; that they should be taught to
reason, not to believe ; to think, to investigate, and to use
their senses, their minds.
Would a Catholic send his children to school to be taught
that Catholicism is superstition and that science is the onl
savior of mankind ?
Why, then, should a free and sensible believer in science
in the naturalness of the universe, send his child to a
Catholic school ?
�.
( 4 )
Nothing could be more irrational, foolish, and absurd.
My advice to all Agnostics is to keep their children from
the orthodox Sunday schools, from the orthodox churches,
from the poison of the pulpits.
Teach your children the facts you know. If you do not
know, say so. Be as honest as you are ignorant. Do all
you can to develop their minds to the end that they may
live useful and happy lives.
Strangle the serpent of superstition that crawls and hisses
about the cradle. Keep your children from the augurs, the
soothsayers, the medicine-men, the priests of the super- «
natural. Tell them that all religions have been made by I
folks and that all the “ sacred books ” were written by
ignorant men.
Teach them that the world is natural. Teach them to
be absolutely honest. Do not send them where they will
contract diseases of the mind—the leprosy of the soul. Let
us do all we can to make them intelligent.
The Pioneer Press, 2 Newcastle-street, Farringdon-street,
London, E.C.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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Ingersoll's advice to parents : keep children out of church and Sunday School
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Ingersoll, Robert Green [1833-1899]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 4 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Not in Stein checklist but cf his No. 67. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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The Pioneer Press
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[189-?]
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Child rearing
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Sunday Observance
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& 2-37 2-
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
PRICE TWOPENCE
THE
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
OF CHILDREN
BY THE LATE
Rev. JAMES CRANBROOK
(EDINBURGH)
[issued for the rationalist press association, ltd.]
London :
WATTS & CO.,
17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1908
��THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF
CHILDREN
Religion is only a form of feeling. This needs to be dis
tinctly understood, or else we shall blunder at every step we
take. But I feel I have no occasion to go into any very
elaborate proof of it, as most rational thinkers have become
familiar with the arguments on which it rests. They know
that religion is not the observance of forms and ceremonies,
inasmuch as men may observe all these most punctiliously
and yet be mere hypocrites and pretenders to the religious
life. Nor is religion the belief of certain creeds, inasmuch
as men have held parts of every kind of orthodoxy, and yet
been most atrociously impious. But, as it is generally
expressed, it is a state of the heart, of the feelings, a state
of faith, reverence, awe, love, dependence, or fear, according
to the character of the divine object presented to the mind.
No distinction can be more important than that of this
modern one between theology and religion. It is necessary
to the interpretation of all the religious history of the past,
and to all intelligent religious action in the present. Religion
is the feeling which arises when a divine object is presented
to the mind ; theology is the explanation the intellect gives
of that object, its nature, character, and relations, the analysis
of the feeling itself, and the exposition of the forms of expres
sion or worship to which the feeling gives rise. So that it is
quite clear that religion must precede theology in the order of
time; the thing analysed and explained, ?>., must come
before the analysis and explanation. And it is further clear
that religion and theology may exist quite independently of
3
�4
THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
each other—i.e., the intellectual process which explains is
quite a different thing from the emotional state which seeks
for the explanation. A man may feel deeply, and yet, through
defect of intellect, be entirely without the theological know
ledge ; or he may through his power of intellect understand
the whole question of the theology, and yet seldom or never
in the faintest degree be the subject of the religious feeling.
Bearing in mind, then, these distinctions, what is it we are
inquiring into when we propose to ourselves the subject of
a child’s religious education ?
By religious education do we mean the education of that
feeling which arises upon the perception of a divine object?
or do we mean the analysis and ascertaining of the truths or
facts respecting the divine object of the feeling—z.e., theo
logy? or do we mean both the education of the feeling and
of the intellectual process of its interpretation ? Now, if I
mistake not, the popular idea of religious education is wholly
limited to the second meaning—z.e., the learning of theology.
Hence, e.g\, you will see in the prospectuses of various
schools a long rigmarole about the great importance they
attach to religious education, and the pains they give to it ;
and then, when you come to look into the processes by which
they carry on this important work, you will find that it often
happens that the sole effort they make in this direction with
one class for a whole year is to instruct their pupils in the
question of the Christian evidences 1 Now, I admit to the
fullest extent the great importance of this question. It is
one of the great questions of the day. In matters of theo
logy, it is the great question. But it is not a question of
religion. It is a question of historical criticism. And
historical criticism is a science of recent times, and requires
more learning, hard and dry study, power of acute and
accurate reasoning, and maturity of judgment than any other
science of the same class. To set children, therefore, to the
study of the Christian evidences, and then to call this
�THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
5
proceeding their religious education, seems to me as egregious
a piece of blundering as ever was perpetrated, and at the
same time proves what I said—that in popular estimation
religious education means, for the most part, education in
theology.
I do not mean to say, however, that there is no religious
education. On the contrary, there is a great deal of it,
Sometimes too much, and out of all proportion. But it is
carried on, and especially by pious mothers, without any
idea that it is education, and, consequently, without any
thought or system. The only thing called and attended to
as education consists of theological doctrines. But, in the
sense in which I speak of religious education, it is the first
of those I named—z’.e., the education of that feeling or those
feelings which arise upon the presentation to the mind of a
divine object, or, in other words, on the contemplation of the
mystery of the universe—the education of the feelings of
wonder, awe, reverence, love, and dependence. It is not
forming our minds to the study of theological truth. That
may be used as a means of religious education indirectly ;
and we may see thereafter that it is a means. But the
religious education itself is the development, direction, and
promotion of the growth of the religious feeling, the
purifying it from gross superstitions and sensual elements,
and rendering it elevated and elevating, pure and purifying,
noble and ennobling. Now, by what process is this to be
effected ? I have already alluded to the means generally
employed. Pious parents feel it their duty at the very
earliest period to begin with teaching their children theology—
notions respecting God, the soul, eternity—and in instructing
them in the feelings they ought to cherish with regard to
these objects. As soon as they can lisp, they teach them to
say prayers ; as soon as they can repeat sentences like a
parrot, they teach them a catechism. Now, not only is this
most destructive to the intellect, by teaching the child to use
�6
THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
words without a meaning, but it is creating in the child, so
far as it awakens religious feeling at all, a merely super
stitious religion founded on a false theology, which it will
afterwards have to correct. It is sad to reflect that in most
schools children receive to-day the same ideas in regard to
the universe and the destiny of man which their ancestors
entertained, and which are in direct contradiction to con
temporary knowledge.
Let us take as an illustration of what I mean the first two
questions of the simplest and the most generally used cate
chism for little children I know—Dr. Watts’s. I have known
it taught to children three years old, and, of course, before
they could read ; and have constantly heard it referred to as
the very model of a manual for the purpose. And most
certainly it represents the spirit—and very much of the letter
—of teaching children yet in their early years. It begins
with asking: “Can you tell me, child, who made you?”
The answer is: “The Great God who made heaven and
earth.” Now, here at the very outset are two notions
involving the most recondite and difficult ideas, which lie
utterly beyond a child’s comprehension. What idea can a
child have of God which is not utterly false ? Whatnotion
can the words convey but what is grossly superstitious? To
give the word “ God ” to a young child without explanation
is to teach him to use words without meaning—the greatest
curse of most people’s lives. To attempt to give him an
explanation is simply to call his creative fancy into play, by
means of which he will form for himself a most ridiculous
idol. If you awaken religion at all—i.e., feeling towards this
misconceived object, this idol—it will be a religion as super
stitious as ever was that of pagan nations. But then, in this
answer there is another notion besides that of God, and as
utterly incomprehensible to a child—that of a cosmogony—
the generation of a world, of the universe. What are you
going to say to a young child about God’s making the
�THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
7
heavens and the earth? Will you explain, supposing you
are able to do so? He could not comprehend. Would you
leave it unexplained, and let him form his own notions?
“ Oh,” you say ; “ who would think to teach a child your fine
scientific ideas ? I would leave him to the plain common
sense meaning of the words; every child knows what to make
means.” To be sure ! You are quite right. A child knows
what to make means, for he has seen your cook make pastry,
or he has made mud houses in the streets ; so he takes the
meaning of to make as thus learned—the only thing he can
do, according to the laws of thought—and applies the notion
to God’s making the heavens and the earth ! Is that, how
ever, the meaning you would have him take the words in ?
Do you think such a notion will produce in him any deep
religion—that is, reverence, wonder, love, dependence upon
him who has done for the heavens and the earth what the
child knows he has done for the mud house made in the
streets? It is all an absurdity together. If the child think
and feel about it at all, it will be false thought and feeling.
If he do not think and feel, he has learned to use words
without attending to the ideas they represent.
Let us now go on to the second question in the cate
chism, recollecting we quote it, not merely because it is very
generally used, but because it exactly expresses the spirit of
what is called “ religious ” education where it is not used.
That question is : “ What does this Great God do for you?”
“He keeps me from harm by night and by day, and is always
doing me good.” Now, the criticism upon this is very short
and very sharp. In the only sense in which a young child
could understand it, it is absolutely untrue. In the only
sense in which anybody could understand it, it is partially
untrue. God does not keep us from harm by night and by
day, and is not always doing us good. He sometimes lets
us get into a very great deal of harm, and sometimes does us
a great deal of evil. “Oh, but that is all for wise and
�8
THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
gracious purposes.” But the catechism does not say so ;
and besides, whatever the purpose, harm is harm, evil is
evil ; and, in the sense of the catechism, God does not keep
us from the one and does inflict the other. What of truth
would there have been in the answer if those children who
lost their lives in the fire last week had repeated it before they
went to bed? “ He keeps me from harm by night and by day,
and is always doing me good ’’—and yet to wake up in the
agony of suffocation and a horrible death by fire ! “ Oh,
yes,” you say ; “ but those poor children may have been saved
from worse calamities by this premature death, agonising
and dreadful as it was.”
Ay ! but to die and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible, warm motion to become
A kneaded clod........... ’tis too horrible !
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
But, indeed, all the poets might be quoted in the same strain,
showing that our human nature shrinks from death as the
greatest of earthly evils ; nor could any sophistry persuade
one that it were better to die the agonising death of those
children than to live on in poverty. What I say, therefore,
is that that catechism does not teach truth when it teaches
“God keeps us,” etc. He may have higher and wiser pur
poses to serve than we could comprehend; but in our mortal
state harm is constantly happening to us, and we constantly
suffer evil. If, therefore, the child’s religion be founded upon
such teaching, it will be an erring, blind, superstitious reli
gion. It will trust God for what it will not get, depend upon
him for what he will not do ; and the consequence will be, if
the child ever become thoughtful, he will have to abandon,
and perhaps with agonising conflicts and doubts, all you
have ever taught.
�THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
9
Having thus prepared the way, the next step generally
taken in the child’s religious education is to introduce a
catechism of a more theologically recondite character. It
may be taught at school or at home. But, with any notion
of religion, the idea of training a child in it at school,
surrounded by a large and restless class, and all the want of
seriousness which belongs to children’s nature, is simply
preposterous. It is the work of home ; of solitude, if pos
sible ; of quiet, if not sombre ; but certainly serious
circumstances. However, that is of no consequence now.
Let the education be conducted at home or at school, it is
generally most pernicious. The catechism most commonly
used in this country (Scotland) is, as everyone knows, the
Assembly’s. Now, I do not speak yet of the truth or untruth
of what it teaches—I speak of the capacity of the child to
comprehend. And I know of no thoughtful person who
would pretend that a boy or girl between eight and sixteen
could comprehend the doctrines, philosophical, metaphysical,
and theological, it contains. Again, I will pass over the
intellectual injury done by teaching a child to handle words
which convey to him no distinct or clear idea ; and I simply
ask, What is the result? It is obvious throughout society.
Children so taught are not even grounded in theology—they
are simply furnished with theological words ; they, therefore,
MS they advance in life, easily become indoctrinated with that
weak, watery, and illogical form of evangelicalism which has
become popular in our pulpits during recent years, and which
is infinitely more detestable than the stern, consistent, daring
Calvinism of the catechism. The last is the system of men
of strong, trained, logical minds ; the first is pure fanaticism.
But, even supposing a child could understand, what would
you have gained in the way of religious education? What
could the knowledge of some 500 (as I have heard say there
are) difficult questions of metaphysics, physics, philosophy,
and theology do towards developing in his nature the feelings
�IO
THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
of reverence, wonder, love, and dependence? Does feeling
spring forth from metaphysics ; emotion from philosophy ;
love from theology? Divine humanity, how thy history
shudders at the thought I No, it is other things than dry,
intellectual propositions which inspire feeling, and so long
as you are occupying the mind with the propositions of the
catechism you are necessarily keeping the attention from
those other things. And then, when you add to these
considerations the utter falsehood of the theology of the
catechism, the gross and wicked representations it contains
of the character and government of God, and the pernicious
effect this, so far as it is understood and heartily believed,
must have upon the whole character, one is forced to conclude
that the so-called “ religious ” education of the masses of
children in this country is altogether irreligious, and one
continued misnomer and mistake.
There is one other catechism used, upon which I need
here only make but a passing remark. I refer to the
catechism of the Church of England, used in this country
also, I believe, by the Episcopalians. As an epitome of
theology, it is altogether deficient. It has the advantage,
however, of being entirely practical in the body of it, and,
therefore, immeasurably superior to the Assembly’s as a
manual for a child. But then, on the other hand, it begins
and ends with the monstrous notions about the sacraments
which place the system bound up with them on a level with
the magic of the rain-makers of South Africa. I would
rather, however, that children were taught this than to think
of God under the awfully malignant aspects in which he is
represented in the Assembly’s catechism. I have already
referred to the additions which are made to the religious (!)
education of children in some schools by instruction in the
evidences of Christianity, and in the same connection may
be mentioned what is called Bible history. I have shown
you that teaching the evidences is not teaching religion, but
�THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
ii
the application of the science of historical criticism, and that,
if it be done thoroughly, it requires a knowledge and a
development of faculties no child can possess. And how
Bible history could be thought specially connected with
religion one would be at a loss to imagine, if it were not
for that doctrine of inspiration which is now becoming
rejected by all the more advanced of even the orthodox
school. It is true that Bible history refers all events to the
immediate and direct management of God ; but so do all the
histories of people in their ancient, barbarous state. In the
early histories of Greece and Rome, e.g., the gods were
always interfering as much as in the early history of the
Hebrews, and if this fact constitutes the Bible history
religious, all ancient histories are religious. And then,
while I grant that certain forms of religious feeling may be
excited by some of the facts and events of Bible history, I
must add, they are superstitious and erroneous forms, mostly
connected with that doctrine of a special providence against
which the whole experience of mankind protests. I do not say
anything now about the intellectual mischief done by teaching
Bible history as it stands ; because it is not greater than that
done by teaching the events of the siege of Troy, the
wanderings of Ulysses, and the stories of Romulus and
Remus as true history, excepting, indeed, that the sacred
element mingled with the Bible history renders it more
difficult to discern the purely mythical character of the
narrative.
Well, then, when I consider what religion is, and what is
the formal and systematic education given to a child to culti
vate the religion, I am forced to conclude there is little of a
directly systematic religious character in it; and that what
little there is is of an erroneous character, only leading to
mischief. Parents and teachers substitute theology for reli
gion, and indoctrinate with a theology which I deem utterly
false. But I do not mean that children therefore get no
�12
THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
religious education. Nature has been to them too bountiful
for that, and begins their education in religion almost as soon
as it is begun in knowledge. She surrounds the child from
its earliest days with objects calling forth its reverence,
wonder, love, dependence, worship, and thus gradually
prepares it for the devout recognition of God. Spontane
ously, Nature furnishes the child with all that is necessary
for the culture of its religious life for many years. First of
all, just as in the Book of Exodus Jehovah is represented as
saying to Moses, “ Lo! I have made thee God unto Pharaoh ”
—z.e., by the miracles he enabled him to work—so Nature
makes the parent God to the child through the miracles of
power, wisdom, and goodness which the parent seems to the
child to display. The parent, if of ordinary attainments and
character, stands up before the child as a mysterious source
of knowledge, wisdom, supply, protection, and happiness—
incomprehensible to it, and calling forth all its wonder and
faith, all its devotion and love, all its reverence and depen
dence. The word of the parent is infallible ; the action of
the parent is necessarily right. He has a seeming omni
potence about him, an irresistible will. What is there a little
child thinks his father cannot do? What is there his mother
does not know? For what of love will he not trust her
wholly? Yes, a little child has nothing greater he could
imagine to make a God out of than the parent. Nothing he
could imagine (seeing it would be but an imagination) could
by any means call forth half the depth and intensity of reli
gious feeling the parent calls forth. Practically the parent is
the young child’s God ; he knows no other, can know no
other; and no other, simply by the knowing, could do him
any good. And when the mother, in her ignorance, takes
him upon her knee and strives to make him understand
about the God she imagines, and is ready, perhaps, to burst
into tears because her efforts are so much in vain, all the
while great Nature is developing the child’s deepest and
�1
THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
13
truest religious life through the trust and love awakened in
his heart by the light and love which pour into his soul from
her eyes. By and by, however, as the child’s intellectual
nature is developed, the perception dawns upon him that the
parent is not quite so powerful and wise as he had thought.
There are things he cannot do, things he does not know ;
trust gets disappointed, dependence is shaken. Then a
higher object becomes necessary to call forth the perfect
reverence and trust the parent can no longer do ; and,
generally, that object is found in the teacher. I would not
speak with the same certainty with respect to the teachers of
large schools as with regard to those in smaller ones, where
the connection between master and pupil is more intimate.
But in a well-ordered school a boy looks up with profound
reverence and trust to his master, and regards him for long
years as the very embodiment of wisdom and knowledge.
Here again, then, is the provision made in nature for the
direct culture of the religious nature of the child—not by
means of a dogma, but by bringing the mind into contact
with real objects, which necessarily excite those feelings in
the exercise of which religion consists. After a while, how
ever, even the teacher’s wisdom is found sometimes to fail,
and his knowledge to have its soundings. Then the sceptical
period in the child’s mind is renewed. There are, however,
other provisions as useful as these, which, at this later
period, come into more active operation — I refer to the
grander object of Nature herself, ever appearing more grand
and glorious as our knowledge extends. From early years
such objects make some impression on the child, and they
would do more if he had judicious parents to guide his eye
sight. But it is in after years, when science has interpreted
the laws, the order, the forces of these objects to him, that
they make the deepest impression and excite the deepest
reverence, adoration, wonder, and dependence. It is then
that inquiry leads to the perception of the grand and awful
�i4
THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN .
mystery which surrounds the whole universe ; and the mind
takes refuge from its exhausting, fruitless questionings in the
conception of an infinite, efficient, conscious force working in
all and by all. It is at this point religion and theology
mingle, and the latter becomes of any practical service to
the former. For when the active intellect has begun seriously
to inquire into the nature and origin of those deep feelings
which the great objects of the universe, its order, its mystery,
excite, its answers react upon these feelings according to the
attributes with which the answers clothe its conception of that
infinite, efficient Force into which it resolves the whole. If
that force be dealt with subjectively, and so have ascribed to it
human qualities and affections, there results an imagined
object which excites many other feelings besides those of
reverence, wonder, love, and dependence, and which may
degenerate into the lowest forms of superstition to which man
is liable. But if it be dealt with objectively, then it remains
the sublimely generalised conception of all the forces in the
universe, and is known, worshipped, and adored only as it
manifests itself in man and the outer world.
Now, this being the only form in which I can think of
God, the course of the child’s religious education seems to
me very simple. It merely consists in leading him face to
face with those objects which excite religious feeling. First,
as parents, by the development of his own nature to the
highest, preserving his reverence, wonder, love, and depen
dence until the last moment—which is natural ; then, as
teachers, securing his devotion by the real resources of
wisdom and knowledge we have treasured up in ourselves ;
and then, finally, when both these fail—and even concur
rently with them—ever lead him forth to gaze upon those
wondrous objects of which physical nature is full, and those
not less wondrous characters and events of which the history
of humanity is full. And as he gazes and marvels, the
deepest feelings of his being will be stirred, and he will
�THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
i5
begin to wonder and adore. But wonder and adore what?
At first blindly, and simply instinctively. But if this happen
before his knowledge is matured, he will soon construct for
himself a fetish. It is yours to stand by, and, by means of
clear, intellectual light, beat down the fetish. And so, in the
whole course of his progress, you must help him to destroy
all the false gods he will create for himself whilst attempting
to solve that mystery of Nature which makes him feel so
deeply, until, at last, he come to rest on the only thought
which remains for this and the coming age—a God who is
the all-in-all, ever immanent in all that is, the one absolute
force ; unknown in himself and unknowable, but recognised
and felt in the forces and order of universal Nature. To sum
up, then, I say : Never attempt to give a God to a child until
the child’s nature asks for one. And then your work will be
more destructive than positive—-the destruction of his idols as
he forms them. Leave theology as much as possible alone
until he learns it in history. If, in the meanwhile, you would
have his religious life be growing, reverence, adoration,
wonder, love, and dependence becoming deeper and more
habitual, you must not create for him imaginary beings by
the play of the metaphysical fancy, but you must lead him
to whatever is great, sublime, glorious, and divine in this
universe. To that direct his eye steadily, and by the act you
will place him under the influence of all that has power to
‘ inspire a pure, religious life.
WATTS AND CO., PRINTERS, 17, JOHNSON*S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
��
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The religious education of children
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Cranbrook, James
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 15 p. ; 22 cm.
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Watts & Co.
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1908
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N181
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Education
Religion
Child rearing
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Text
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English
Children
Education
NSS
Religious Education
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Text
SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS
S!MPLY_ DEFINED
(FOR THE USE OF CHILDREN)
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BY
■jfelF E. L. MARSDEN
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[issued for the rationalist press association, limited]
•a-$/Uc Bjr ' .
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London:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E,C.
Price Threepence
�Note.—Books preceded by an X are copyright in America,
and cannot be supplied to customers in that country.
“ These splendid handbooks belong to an age of wonders.”
f
—Birmingham Gazette.
HISTORY OF SCIENCE SERIES.
Each about 160 pages, with Illustrations ; cloth, Is. net, by post Is. 3d.
The 13 vols. post free 14s.
XAstronomy (History of). By Prof. XPsyehology (History of). Vol. I:
From the Earliest times to John
George Forbes, M.A., F.R.S.
Locke. Vol. II: From John Locke
JfChemistry (History of). Vol. I: 2000
to the Present Time. By Prof J.<
B. c. to 1850 A.D. Vol. II : 1850 A.D.
Mark Baldwin.
to Date. By Sir Edward Thorpe,
C. B., LL.D., D.Sc., F.R.S.
XOld Testament Criticism (History
of), By Prof. A. Duff.
^Geography (History of). By J.
Scott Keltie, LL.D., and O. J. R. XNew Testament Criticism (History
of). By F. C. Conybeare, M.A.
Howarth, M.A.
XGeolOgy (History of). By H. B. XAneient Philosophy (History of),
Woodward, F.R.S., F.G.S.
By A. W. Benn, author of The
History of English Rationalism in
XBiolOgy (History of). By Prof. L. C.
the Nineteenth Century, etc.
MiAll, F.R.S.
XAnthropolOgy (History of). By XModern Philosophy (History of).
By A. W. Benn,
A. C. Haddon, M.A., D.Sc., F.R.S.
PAMPHLETS for the MILLION.
Eaeh with Coloured Cover and Portrait
1. Why I Left the Chureh. By 7. The Age of Reason. (Parts I and
II only.) By Thomas Paine. 124
Joseph McCabe. 48 pp.; id.
pp.; 2d.
2. XWhy am I an Agnostic ? By
8. Last Words on Evolution. By
R. G. Ingersoll. 24 pp.; J^d.
Professor Ernst Haeckel. 64 pp.;
3. Christianity’s Debt to Earlier
id.
Religions. By P. Vivian. 64
9. Science and the Purpose of
pp.; id.
Life. By Fridtjof Nansen, (the
4. XHow to Reform Mankind. By
well-known explorer). 16 pp.;
R. G. Ingersoll.
24 pp.; J^d.
5. Myth or History in the Old Tes 10. XThe Ghosts. By R. G. Inger32 pp.; id.
tament? By S. Laing. 48 pp.; id.
6. XLiberty of Man, Woman, and 11. The Passing of Historical
Christianity. By the Rev. R.
Child. By R. G. Ingersoll, 48
Roberts. 16pp.; J£d.
pp.; id.
The Set of eleven Pamphlets post paid for Is. 2d. Special terms
for quantities. (100 of any one pamphlet at half-price, plus
carriage and small charge for packing.)
THE INQUIRER S LIBRARY.
1, The Existence of God.
By 3. The Old Testament.
Joseph McCabe. 160 pp.; cloth,
9d. net, by post is.
V'Z
1
By ChilEdwards. 160 pp.; cloth,
9d. net, by post is.
peric
2. XThe Belief in Personal Im 4. Christianity and Civilization.
By Charles T., Gorham. 160 pp.;
mortality. By E. S. P. Haynes.
164 pp.; cloth, 9d. net, by post is.
gd. het, by post is.
WATTS AND CO., 17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
/
,
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,71
�NEVE
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS
SIMPLY DEFINED
FOR THE USE OF CHILDREN)
BY
E. L. MARSDEN
( ISSUED FOB THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED )
London:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1914
��FOREWORD
The result of “pious” parents beginning to teach children
at an early age theology, prayers, catechisms, etc., is that
many children learn to use words icithout having any
definite conception of their meaning.
This is intellectually
injurious, and as a rule azoakens a mere superstition founded
to a large degree on false history.
1 have here attempted to
explain in a rational manner and as simplzj as possible the
meaning of a feio of those expressions zvhich children are
constantly zcsizzg and hearing zcsed, words of whose meaning
they have but the vaguest idea.
This pamphlet is zvritten in the hope that a simple explana
tion of some of the more comznon zoords zcsed daily izi religious
instruction znay be of beziefit to the youzig, and possibly to
a few of their teachers.
E. L. M.
May, 1914.
��SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS SIMPLY
DEFINED
BIBLE TEACHING
RELIGION appears to be the only subject in which teachers make
no use of the most recent authorities and the latest discoveries.
The practice of most Christian ministers, and of many 1 other
teachers of religion, of ignoring modern Biblical criticism amounts
to a scandal. Children are given the impression that the Bible is
for us what it was for our ancestors. Congregations are kept in
ignorance of what has taken place in historical research, textual
criticism, and comparative mythology; they are not informed that,
however useful and edifying as parables the old tales of the Bible
may be, those tales have no claim to be treated as historically true.
Knowledge and research have shown that the traditional theories
about the Bible are no longer tenable ; but many children from their
earliest years are given utterly false impressions on the subject. It
is not honest to preach as if the Bible consists of absolutely trust
worthy documents when scholarship, both Christian and secular,
knows them to be otherwise. The old matter-of-course assumption
of the divinely guaranteed accuracy of the Old Testament has dis
appeared from the minds of the well-educated, and no well-informed
person treats the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch as anything
but unsupported tradition.
Some few years ago the Encyclopedia Biblica was issued, the
purpose of which work was to ascertain the real facts and to state
them. This book is the work of some of the greatest of the world’s
Biblical students, and it sums up, supported by a mass of learning,
the conclusions of modern criticism. A glance at the list of con
tributors will show the large number of scholarly Churchmen who
have abandoned the theory of the literal truth of the Bible. We
5
�6
SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS SIMPLY DEFINED
learn from these volumes that the creation story originated in a
stock of primitive myths common to the Semitic races, and is almost
identical with the Babylonian myth ; that the very existence of the
Old Testament patriarchs is uncertain; that the whole book of
Genesis is not history, but a narrative based on older records, long
since lost; that the story of Joseph was, compiled in the seventh
century B.C.; that the book of Exodus is a legend; that it is
doubtful whether Moses is the name of an individual or of a clan•
that the alleged origin of the Ten Commandments is purely tradi
tional ; that it is very doubtful whether David wrote any of the
Psalms ; that everything in the Gospels is uncertain ; that we do
not know when Jesus was born, when he died, or who was his
father ; that the supposed virgin birth has no evidence in its favour;
that it is impossible to separate the truth from doubtful legend and
symbolical embroidery in any of the Gospels; that the accounts of
the Resurrection. exhibit contradictions of the most glaring kind;
that the view that the four gospels bearing the names of Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John were written by them and appeared thirty
or forty years- after the death of Jesus can no longer be maintained,
nor can they be regarded as credible narratives ; that the genuineness
of the Pauline Epistles is far from clear. These and a hundred
other conclusions can be found in the Encyclopedia Btblica, wherein
eminent Christian scholars proclaim results quite contrary to the
usual orthodox teachings.
Nevertheless, dogmas discarded by enlightened Christian ministers
continue to be taught to our children, whereas real religion, the
development and direction of the moral and spiritual feelings, is
neglected to a great extent. Highly as we may prize the Bible,
a system of instruction which makes it a fetish tends to degrade it,
and it is much to be regretted that it should be so much misused in
religious education. To treat as solemn fact every Hebrew legend
and impossible miracle, to try to harmonize Old Testament fables
of lust, slaughter, and deceit approved by Jehovah with the spirit
of the Sermon on the Mount, can do nothing but harm ; to teach
a child the story of the Fall as historically true when he will soon
know that man has not fallen, but gradually risen, can only unsettle
his mind.
If we were to exclude the idea of absolute historical accuracy in
teaching the Bible, we should eliminate much unreality and insincerity
from the moral atmosphere. It is not the book, but the conventional
superstition with which it is treated, that is at fault. Treated with
�RELIGION AND THEOLOGY
7
intelligent discrimination, it will always have its educational value,
but it cannot supply the place of instruction in real religion, in the
morals of daily life. Scripture is one thing, morality another.
Now that many ministers of all sects admit that nearly every
book in the Old Testament is of unknown authorship, and much of
it is mythical and fabulous, it is time that we should protest against
our children being taught that the: Fall, the Deluge, the plagues of
Egypt, the massacres in Canaan, etc., are part of an infallible and
divine revelation; that view is gone except for the grossly ignorant,
and to cause children to regard these stories as authentic history is
demoralizing both to teachers and taught.
RELIGION AND THEOLOGY
RELIGION is not the observance of forms and ceremonies, for men
may observe these and be wholly wanting in religious life ; nor is it
the belief in some particular creed, for men have held every kind of
orthodox creed and yet been quite impious. Religion is a state of
the heart and feelings, a state of reverence, awe, love, or dependence,
according to the character of the divine object presented to the
mind. Religion is the feeling, theology is the attempted explanation
of that feeling; hence religion must precede theology, and they may
exist independently of each other.
Questions of theology, <l historical criticism ” of Scripture, and
such subjects, are of undoubted importance, but are not matters of
religion. The end of religious education should be the development
and direction of the moral and spiritual feelings, and instruction in
the morals of daily life, leading to the victory over Self. Theology
is the supposed knowledge as to God and the unknown, and what
man believes about supernatural beings and about those things at
present inexplicable by any known laws of nature. Such beliefs
should be freely discussed, but not made the subject of ridiculous
quarrels, as no human being knows the truth about these matters ;
and it should be remembered that man’s early theological beliefs,
which we are asked to accept, were due to • thA limitations of his
knowledge and experience.'
"■"■L
�8
SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS SIMPLY DEFINED
TRUTH AND LAWS OF NATURE
Truth is the most perfect knowledge attainable concerning any
given .question, and such knowledge is what we depend upon for the
highest ends of life. Truth is acquired by experience and study, and
the only permanent truths are those of observation and inference.Formerly they were few ; but with modern scientific development
they are increasing rapidly, and they stand apart from truths derived
from supposed revelations. The latter’s durability is comparatively
short; there are everywhere traces of extinct religions once devoutly
believed. Real truths are always in harmony, not so theological
truths ; time strengthens the one and weakens the other. When we
seek truth, we are seeking a knowledge of that which is capable of
verification and proof. In science, the truth is a statement giving a
correct representation of facts; in theology, the truth is a statement
supposed to be in accordance with the particular revelation which is
accepted. Science appeals to facts ; theology appeals to supposed
miracles, and asks us to believe in a number of events contrary to
all experience, on the authority of unknown writers. “ Laws of
nature” means the invariable order in which facts occur, all facts
.being links in an endless chain of cause and effect; one single
exception to this invariable order, and it cannot be a law of nature.
Truth is founded upon laws of nature.
REVELATION AND REASON
In the history of the human race there have been many so-called
revelations ” claiming to teach us things we should not otherwise
know. Such are the Zoroastrian,. Brahman, Buddhist, Jewish,
Christian, Mohammedan; they all claim divine origin, and each
condemns the others as unreliable and incomplete. In separating
.what is true from what is false in these various revelations, or in
.accepting one of them as the only true one, we must use our
■judgment. It follows, therefore, that our reason is a higher
authority than revelation, for we cannot believe anything without
�GOD
9
the approval of our reason. (What people say they believe is a
different matter.)
In all the revelations and bibles there are many mistakes in
history and science, and numerous contradictions. Such mistakes
are natural, as all these bibles are the work of man. All we can do
is to follow the best light we have—our reason ; for even if it
sometimes leads us into error, we have nothing better to follow.
In the name of Revelation or the “ Word of God ” many of the
worst crimes have been committed, and some of the world’s noblest
men have either known nothing of it or disbelieved in it.
Many people in this country believe that the ancient Jews were
Specially favoured with a revelation ; while the Greeks, the most
advanced people of antiquity, had none. If this were true, it would
show that morality and intelligence are possible without revelation,
and are in no way dependent upon it. Those who believe in
revelation think that it makes truth known to us by “ inspiration.”
If so, these questions arise: What is inspiration ? How are inspired
thoughts distinguished from uninspired ? and, How did the selectors
choose between genuine and spurious ? These questions have never
been answered.
GOD
By the word “God” is meant the power which exists behind
the facts of the universe. If such a power exists, its nature is
unknown and unknowable. The popular idea of God is that he is
a Person who created the universe, that he knows and sees every
thing and is everywhere; also that he is just and holy. Man has
made God in his own image, consequently God has grown better as
man has improved in intelligence and character. The God of the
savage was a savage; the God of the ancient Jews, as represented
in the Old Testament, was bloodthirsty, vindictive, jealous, and
petty; the God of the Christians was a being who punished the
errors of this brief life with eternal torments. This is still the
opinion of many Christians, but it is difficult to understand how
anyone can believe this horrible doctrine. God has been known by
different names in different countries—Zeus, Jove, Ormuzd, Brahm,
Jehovah, Allah, among others ; he is also called the Supreme Being,
�10
SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS SIMPLY DEFINED
tli© Infinite, the First Cause, Nature, etc. Some people when they
say God mean a person, others an idea. Belief in several Gods was
the earliest belief of all nations. It is quite clear from the Old
Testament that the ancient Jews believed in other Gods, of whom
their God was jealous.
The sun, moon, mountains, rivers, animals, almost everything,
have been regarded as Gods, and men have prayed to them and
sacrificed to them. As mankind advanced in knowledge the belief
in Gods decreased, and now nearly all educated people believe either
in one God or in none. The old argument that, as every effect must
have a cause, the universe must have a cause which is God, is met
by the obvious rejoinder that, if every effect must have a cause, God
must also have a cause. It is just as easy or difficult to imagine
a universe without a cause as a God without a cause. The existence
of God cannot be demonstrated, but is a very general belief. Each
man makes his own God, which word represents the highest ideal
of the individual. Hence one man’s God may be better and nobler
than that of another, as each man is the measure of his own ideal
or God. Theologians who profess belief in an all-wise, all-powerful,
and all-good God have never been able to give a rational explanation
of all the pain, misery, and evil which exists in the world, and some
have believed that God allows an evil spirit, Satan, to tempt every
body. If God had wished sin to abound, what more could he have
done than to appoint a being to the office of tempting mankind at
all times and places ? Any parent who allowed his children tli
associate with bad characters would deserve censure.
PRAYER
Prayer is a supplication to God, or a desire for communion with
him. No one prays to laws of nature or to great ideals ; prayers
are always addressed to a personal God. But the idea of a God and
a person is incongruous. To be a God is to be infinite ; to be a
person is to be finite. Prayer originated in a desire to appease the
anger or secure the favour of invisible beings. When after a long
period of drought a minister prays for rain, it is in the belief that
God caused the drought, and can be persuaded to discontinue it.
As a drought does not last for ever, such prayers are apparently
�CHRISTIANITY
11
answered. It may happen that some people are praying God
to do what other people are just as earnestly praying him not
to do, and such prayers imply that God is an individual ready to
adapt himself to the convenience of everybody. There is no reason
to believe that God has any less control over the law of gravity than
over the weather, but people never pray to have the law of gravity
suspended for their benefit; they know such law is inviolable, and
they will stop praying about the weather when they learn that the
laws governing it are equally inviolable.
It is said that God demands that his creatures should continually
address him in terms of glorification and endearment. Such an
idea insults God ; a really great and good being would not constantly
want our prayers and laudations. The idea, of course, came from
the East, where sultans can only be approached with presents and
salaams. Prayer makes men look for help outside themselves, and
thus weakens their self-dependence. When we offer flattery, build
churches, give money, etc., to obtain a favour it is an attempt to
corrupt God by. bribery. It makes morality and justice of less
importance than rites, prayers, and dogmas. It is inconsistent with
any high ideal of God that he will be influenced by prayers and
praise. Public prayer is less desirable than private prayer, as it is
formal and not spontaneous, professional and not personal. Even
in the New Testament Jesus is reported as saying that we should
not pray in public (Matthew vi, 5-6).
CHRISTIANITY
It may be said that the Christian revelation has exerted more
influence in the world than any other, as it has helped to shape the
history of the first-class nations. This particular revelation is found
in a book called the Holy Bible, divided into two parts—the Old
Testament and the New Testament. It consists of sixty-six books,
written by different authors at different periods in different languages
and in different countries; these books were gradually collected into
one volume by religious councils. The Old Testament relates the
history of the Jews, their laws, customs, and wars. This history is
not materially different from that of other primitive people, and
there is no reason why it should be regarded as the “ Word of God.”
�12
SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS SIMPLY DEFINED
The New Testament consists of a number of writings collected about
one hundred-and-fifty years after the death of Jesus Christ, and of
these writings we have no knowledge of the authorship, with the
possible exception of four letters of Paul and one of James. The
titles, The Gospel according to Matthew,” etc., represent the
opinion of the editors or translators ; and probably the name of an
apostle was used to give the work greater authority. The apostles,
expecting the world would end in their lifetime, did not write their
own messages.
There were many other gospels besides those in the New
Testament; but they have been excluded as being doubtful—that
is, they did not receive the necessary number of votes in ecclesiastical
councils to be considered inspired. The books of the Bible were
written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic; and as the original
manuscripts from which our English Bible is said to have been
translated are not in existence, we do not know that the translation
is accurate. Our translation is from the supposed copies of the lost
originals, which copies were produced possibly hundreds of years
after the originals had been lost, so that we cannot know that the
copies are reliable.
The Christian revelation teaches that humanity was originally
perfect, that it fell into sin, and that a select few may escape
through faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ. We now know
that the human race has been ascending slowly, and that incarna
tion and atonement are world-wide myths. We also realize that the
idea of a guilty person pardoned through the atoning death of an
innocent victim has no moral value. Christianity, in the light of
modern knowledge of comparative mythology, is one member of
a large family of religions (Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Mohammedan,
etc.) which in one form or another are co-extensive with the history
of humanity. Christianity might have led on to true religion, but
has taken its place; in its petrified form it holds prisoner the forces
of real religion.
THE CANON OF THE BIBLE
The “ canon ” of the Bible consists of those books which
ecclesiastical councils have declared of divine authority; this
canon has not always been the same. The earliest Christians
�JESUS AND HIS TEACHINGS
13
regarded only the Old Testament as the word of God, and the
Apostolic Fathers apparently did not look upon the New Testament
as of equal authority with the Old. Schisms between early Chris
tians gave rise to the idea of a canon; a generally accepted word of
God was necessary, and the demand created the supply.
The first reference to a canon was in the latter half of the second
century. In 352 A.D. the canon of the Emperor Constantine was
produced, and contained the present number of books except the
book of Revelation. Many books in the Bible have been questioned
at various times. Luther did not regard the book of Revelation and
the Epistle of James as part of God’s word. The Roman Catholic
Bible contains seventy-two books, as it includes as inspired some
books that Protestants reject. Roman Catholics hold that it is the
Church that gives the Bible its authority, and do not allow private
interpretation of it; while Protestants look upon it as infallible, but
each individual must read and interpret it for himself. The Holy
Spirit does not, apparently, reveal the same meaning of the Scrip
tures to all readers ; for, in spite of the assumed infallible revelation,
all Protestants are not agreed on such important questions as
Baptism, Predestination, Eternal Punishment, Atonement, and the
Divinity of Jesus.
Apart from the fact that the meaning of the Bible is not clear to
everybody, the objection to an inspired book is that it limits the
possession of truth to one people or race, and makes it a thing of the
long past; it makes research needless, and gives the Church power
to suppress new truth. Fortunately, the Bible’s power for harm is
-decreasing now that we are beginning to regard it as the literature
■of a primitive and uninformed people. It is only worshipped as
infallible by the least educated of mankind.
JESUS AND HIS TEACHINGS
The prevailing belief about Jesus is that he was both God and
man, that he was begotten by the Holy Ghost, that he was without
■sin, that he worked miracles, and was equal to God. We have only
the word of man on the subject, and, as all religions have claimed
power to work miracles, there is no reason for treating the
miraculous element in the life of Jesus in any other wTay than
�14
SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS SIMPLY DEFINED
we treat the same in the life of Buddha, Moses, or Mohammed.
All our knowledge of Jesus is contained in broken records of a few
months in the last year of his life.
“ Towards the middle of the second century A.D. certain
documents are found to be in circulation professing to describe
the life of a religious teacher who had lived in a remote part of
the Empire more than a hundred years before. These documents
or gospels are many in number, and all of unknown authorship;
they are in the possession of an obscure and fanatical sect, and many
of them contain obvious absurdities. Gradually the more absurd are
denounced as apocryphal, and four are retained, which, together
with some letters of one of the early Christians, form the New
Testament’ of future ages.” (Joseph McCabe.)
With regard to these documents or records next to nothing is
known. Their authors, place of origin, the motives that caused
their compilation, are all matters of guesswork. The charm of the
narratives, viewed as literature, is greatly due to our magnificent
“ Authorized ” version. As contemporary writers are entirely silent
on the subject of Jesus ; as Apostolic literature knows nothing of the
Jesus of the Gospels, of his virgin birth, of his alleged miracles; as
our only knowledge of him is contained in the New Testament, the
utmost we are justified in thinking of Jesus is that he was a man of
noble life, with a remarkable influence over his fellow-men. His
undoubted sincerity in believing that he was divinely chosen to
teach the people is no proof of the truth of his belief. He believed
that the earth belonged to the devil, but that some day he (Jesus)
would be recognized as the king of kings. “ Verily, I say unto you,
this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.” That
prophecy, uttered by Jesus himself, has not been fulfilled; it was
uttered about 1,900 years ago. He recognized Caesar’s authority,
and advised others to do the same. He did not denounce war or
slavery; but he said to his disciples : “ My peace I give unto you.”
Those who called themselves Christians, however, have not lived in
peace with one another, but have repeatedly waged war with one
another and persecuted one another ; the worst persecutors in the
world have been Christians. The teaching of Jesus is partly
responsible for this, inasmuch as he said that they who did not
believe on him would be damned ; and his followers, to save people
from damnation, tried to compel them to become Christians. This
persecution, this attempt to maintain an opinion by violence, to
conquer the reason without enlightening it, has characterized the
�THE CHURCH, CREEDS, AND CLERGY
15
larger part of Christian propaganda. The teachings of Jesus about
love, charity, brotherhood, justice, and forgiveness, although not
entirely original, embody the finest ethical code ever presented to
mankind; but an attempt to make them a universal rule of conduct
would in our present state of society be impracticable; no Christian
shapes his life on the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. He
taught that this world was of no importance, and, instead of trying
to right wrong conditions here and now, he advised non-resistance to
evil. He told those who wept and suffered to rejoice, for they would
have their reward in another world. This teaching has consoled
some people, but has prevented many from trying to right their
present wrongs. It has encouraged the rich and powerful to answer
the cry for justice by suggesting to the oppressed that they ought to
be satisfied with the reward promised in the next world. Those in
power have always encouraged religion among the poor; orthodoxy
is generally on the side of the oppressors. In spite of the fact that
the words of love and goodness spoken by Jesus have been an
immense influence for good, his theological doctrines have caused
much hatred, bloodshed, and misery.
THE CHURCH, CREEDS, AND CLERGY
The word “ church” originally meant an assembly or congrega
tion, and was at first merely an organization of fellow-believers, out
■of which has gradually arisen the distinction between clergy and
laymen. There are many Churches in Christendom, of which the
most important is the Roman Catholic. It was organized about the
time that the Roman Empire became converted to Christianity, and
the Emperor Constantine, one of the worst criminals in history, was
its first imperial head and protector. It soon became covetous,
ambitious, partisan, and intolerant, and its domination over the
■conscience and its punishment of heretics has caused an immense
amount of useless suffering.
In the sixteenth century the Church was split up chiefly through
Martin Luther, the principal author of the Reformation movement.
The seceders from the Church of Rome were called Protestants.
The Church of England dates from the time of Henry VIII, who,
■quarrelling with the Pope over a matter of divorcing his wife, founded
�16
SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS SIMPLY DEFINED
a new Church, of which he became master. In the past the
Protestant Churches have persecuted almost as much as the Roman
Church in their desire to exterminate what they looked upon as
heresy. In these days, when blind belief and superstition are not
regarded as a virtue, the Churches have not the power to persecute
except quite indirectly. Liberal and Broad Churches exist which
make little of theology and much of character, and the number of
people who look upon religion as something apart from formal ritual
is gradually increasing.
Disagreements among believers necessitated an authoritative
expression of Church doctrine; this was the origin of “ creeds,” the
object of which was to enforce uniformity of belief and prevent
independent thinking. The oldest Christian creed is supposed to be
the Apostles’ Creed, which we know was not written by the apostles.
The fundamental beliefs of this creed are those in the Trinity, the
Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection of the Flesh. No proofs are
given; they are assumed to be true. The Nicene Creed, the
Athanasian Creed, the creed of the Greek Church, the Church of
England Creed (the Thirty-nine Articles), the Westminster Creed—
all contain statements of belief narrow and intolerant. They tend
to prevent the pursuit of truth and confine it to one sect. Our
creed should be one in accord with facts, and one which keeps
abreast of our growing knowledge. To subscribe to a creed thatforbids freedom of thought lowers the dignity of man, whose reason
is his greatest possession. A clergyman is a man who has received
Holy Orders ” from the Church. A man can become a clergyman
by passing an examination and asserting his belief in the creed of
the particular Church to which he applies for admission.
THE EARTH AND MAN
The Bible states that some six thousand years ago God created
heaven and earth and all that they contain. Science teaches us
that the earth is many millions of years old, and that there has been
for countless ages a slow growth and gradual ascent. The origin of
matter remains a mystery.
Science teaches us that man is hundreds of thousands of years
old, and is descended from the lower animals. In the structure and
�DEATH AND IMMORTALITY
17
functions of his organs he is exactly like an animal; every bone,
muscle, and organ can be paralleled in the animals ; he is composed of
the same materials, and is subject to the same laws of life and death.
The human embryo, before birth, passes through stages of develop
ment when it has gills like a fish, a tail, a body covered with hair,
and a brain like a monkey’s ; thus showing that man, in his long
existence, has climbed through all these forms to his present state.
He was not specially created, but grew slowly upwards, and his mind
or reason was evolved in the same manner as his body, the struggle
for existence having been the chief contributor to his development.
Some people still believe that he was created “ perfect.” What
they mean by “ perfect ” is probably “ as perfect as a man can be.”
Had he been perfect, he could not have fallen. It is said that God
permitted him to fall, and encouraged Satan to tempt him, the con
sequence being sin, suffering, and death for all mankind. People
believed these stories because their fathers and mothers believed
them ; but hardly any enlightened people now hold these unreasonablebeliefs.
DEATH AND IMMORTALITY
Many people fear death because they think that it is the
beginning of an irrevocable doom ; but the rational view is that it
either secures happiness or ends suffering. We can conquer death
by serving some noble cause in which we may live after we have
passed away. When we are dead we shall not miss life, and to
lose what we cannot miss is not an evil.
It is popularly believed that there is a soul or spirit temporarily
inhabiting the body, which soul continues to live after death; that
men, but not animals, have souls ; that the body cannot live without
the soul, but that the soul can live without the body. It is impos
sible for the finite human mind to form a conception of this soul,,
this spirit without form or extension. Theology teaches that at
death the soul leaves the body and goes to some other world, each
sect having its own view of what sort of place this other world is.
The view of the Christian creeds is that only those who have thetrue faith will be happy; others will go to eternal misery. Even
great and good men and women not holding the true faith will go to>
�18
SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS SIMPLY DEFINED
hell, according to this view. The desire for immortality, a conscious
personal immortality, is almost universal ; it is an extension of the
instinct of self-preservation.
We know nothing of any future life, and, although the belief in
it is very general throughout humanity, many general beliefs have
turned out to be illusions. All we can say is that we do not know.
But we can safely affirm that all that we say and do will contribute
to build the world of the future, in which we shall live again as
influences and examples, as moral and intellectual forces. In this
sense we are certainly immortal, and the knowledge should inspire
us to cultivate only what is true and noble. A future life for each
personal individual is an enormous assumption to be made without
proof, and yet all the alleged consolations of orthodox religion hang
on this. Many people believe enough to be full of anxiety and fear,
and never have complete peace ; belief to them is a source of inward
unrest and alarm. For one death-bed smoothed by orthodox beliefs
it is probable that hundreds have been turned into beds of torture.
GOOD AND BAD
ANYTHING adjusted for some purpose and efficiently accomplish
ing that purpose is “ good when it fails in that purpose it is “ bad.”
For example, a knife is good when it cuts well; a road is good when
it makes travelling easy and comfortable ; a watch is good when it
keeps time correctly. When a knife is blunt, a road uneven, or a
watch incorrect, in each case it is “bad.” Thus efficiency is good
ness, inefficiency badness ; and to know whether conduct is good or
bad the first question to be asked is what purpose social conduct is
intended to serve. Social conduct is conduct adjusted for the benefit
of society, or co-operation. Conduct which tends to draw individuals
closer together is good ; conduct which repels them from one another
is bad. To the conduct of a single individual on a desert island,
where no act of his could affect anyone but himself, the terms “ good ”
and “ bad” in a moral sense would have no meaning. Man is dependent
■on the co-operation of society, and the aim of the moral code is to
discourage actions injurious to social co-operation and to encourage
•conduct which promotes it; therefore good and bad actions may be
�THE CHIEF OBJECT OF LIFE
19
roughly defined as those which benefit or injure somebody else or
society as a whole.
Theologically, “ good ” and “ bad ” mean obedience or disobedience
to the supposed will of some God, apart from any ethical or social
value in the action itself. Adam’s crime was disobedience ; the
command not to eat of the tree of knowledge was quite a capricious
and arbitrary one ; no reason was given why he should not eat of
it, and it was a natural thing for him to think that a knowledge of
good and evil was an excellent thing to acquire. But eating the
fruit, simply because it was an act of disobedience, was so great
a crime that the whole human race was damned for it. Abraham
agreed to commit the crime of burning his son; but because this
was an act of obedience theologians hold him up as a model of
virtue.
We now realize that a “ good ” man is one who promotes the
happiness and well-being of his fellow-creatures, and that morality
does not consist in blind obedience at the expense of our conscience
and reason, especially as, even assuming the existence of a God
whom we ought to obey, we have no means of knowing his will.
THE CHIEF OBJECT OF LIFE AND THE
RELIGION OF THE FUTURE
OUR duty is to seek those things that increase and elevate life;
to learn by experience (the accumulated experience of humanity as
well as our own) what is right and what is wrong, good and bad.
We need no revelation to tell us what is right and what is wrong;
we must discover it for ourselves. Nature is the sum of all the
forces which keep the world in movement; she is our first and
oldest teacher. We obey her because we must. She has joined
cause and consequence in such a way that every act and word bears
seed. If we sow evil, we reap pain; if we sow good, we reap
happiness. The reward of goodness is to be good. If we will not
be good without future rewards and punishments, others will; and,
by the law of the survival of the fittest, theirs will be the power of
the future. What is needed is knowledge ; we must know what is
for our highest good. Knowledge will give us sympathy instead of
�20
SOME RELIGIOUS TERMS SIMPLY DEFINED
prejudice, justice and humanity instead of oppression and greed.
Knowledge will help us to make the highest use of this life, without
reference to imaginary heavens and hells of which we can know
nothing.
In accordance with the law of evolution, we progress very slowly ;
but truth will ultimately prevail, and, even if its results cause pain
to some people, they must be accepted without hesitation. Man, as
a rational being, will no longer accept his religious opinions without
a mental conviction of their truth—a conviction demanded in every
other province of knowledge. Reason and experience will replace
theology, and, free from the difficulties and mysteries generated by
dogmas, we shall no longer try to force our conscience and intel
ligence to accept ancient revelations.
But, although theology will die, religion will remain; not the
religion which consists in singing hymns and reading bibles, in
pious talk and unctuous prayers, but the religion of acting rightly
and kindly. Real religion—the sense of duty arising from our
relationship to some superior Power, even though the nature of
that Power is unknown to us—will grow stronger. Our object in
life will be to promote the well-being and happiness of our fellow
creatures, and every new truth we learn will fit us better for this
task. Sympathy will replace selfishness ; those tendencies injurious
to social life will become weaker, those which facilitate social
co-operation will become stronger. We know that all faculties and
organs are strengthened by exercise and weakened by disuse. Our
duty, then, is to cultivate the faculties that are social and sym
pathetic, and to neglect those that are not. Every good act benefits
not only others, but self ; for it strengthens the faculties by which it
is performed. Conversely, every bad act not only injures others,
but also the actor ; for it strengthens faculties which should be
unexercised and allowed to die out from disuse.
No churches for propitiating imaginary deities will be built, but
we shall propitiate our conscience by the fulfilment of duty. No
imaginary heaven will arouse hope, and no hideous phantoms of
eternal hell will terrify the mind ; but we shall face the unknowable
with calmness and without fear.
PRINTED BY WATTS AND CO., JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Some religious terms simply defined, for the use of children
Creator
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Marsden, E. L.
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 20 p. ; 22 cm.
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Watts & Co.
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1914
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N474
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Religion
Education
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Children
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Religious Education
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Text
THE
RELIGION OF CHILDREN
A DISCOURSE, WITH READINGS AND MEDITATION,
given at
SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL,
OCTOBER
2i, 1877,
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
frige twopence.
�ORDER
1. Hymn 132—
“ Smiles on past misfortune’s brow.”—Gray.
2. Readings, pages 3 to 7.
3. Hymn 180—
“I think if thou could’st know.”—Adelaide Procter.
4. Meditation, p. 8.
5. Anthem 22—
“Gently fall the dews of eveP—Saralt P. Adams.
6. Discourse, p. 9.
7. Hymn, 191 —
“ Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill. ”—Tennyson.
8.
Dismissal.
�HYMN 132.
READINGS.
HEBREW PROVERBS.
My son, if base men entice thee,
■Consent thou not.
Walk not in the way with them :
Keep back thy foot from their paths :
Tor their feet run to evil.
.'Surely in vain the net is spread,
In the sight of any bird ;
But these lay snares for their own lives.
.Such are the ways of everyone greedy of gain;
The life of those addicted to it, it taketh away.
Because they hated knowledge,
Therefore they shall eat of the fruit of their own way,
And from their own counsel they shall be filled.
T’or the turning away of the simple shall slay them,
And the carelessness*of fools shall destroy them.
�4
ORIENTAL FABLE.
The learned Saib, who was entrusted with the education of the
son of the Sultan Carizama, related to him each day a story.
One day he told him this from the annals of Persia
“A magi
cian presented himself before King Zohak, and breathing on his
breast, caused two serpents to come forth from the region of the
king’s heart. The king in wrath was about to slay him, but the
magician said, ‘ These two serpents are tokens of the glory
of your reign. They must be fed, and with human blood. Thisvon may obtain by sacrificing to them the lowest of your people ;
but they will bring you happiness, and whatever pleases you isjust.’ Zohak was at first shocked ; but gradually he accustomed
himself to the counsel, and his subjects were sacrificed to the
serpents. But the people only saw in Zohak a monster bent on
their destruction. They revolted, and shut him up in a cavern
of the mountain Damarend, where he became a prey to the two
serpents whose voracity he could no longer appease.
“ What a horrible history ! ” exclaimed the young prince, when
his preceptor had ended it. “ Pray tell me another that I can
hear without shuddering.” “ Willingly, my lord,” replied Saib.
“ Here is a very simple one :—-A young sultan placed his confi
dence in an artful courtier, who filled his mind with false ideas of
glory and happiness, and introduced into his heart pride and volup
tuousness. Absorbed by these two passions, the young monarch
sacrificed his people to them, insomuch that in their wretchedness
they tore him from the throne. He lost his crown and his
treasures, but his pride and voluptuousness remained, and being
now unable to satisfy them, he died of rage and despair.” The
young prince of Carizama said, “ I like this story better than theother.” “ Alas, prince,” replied his preceptor, “itis neverthelessthe same.”
�5
FROM “THE SPIRIT’S TRIALS.”
By J. A. Froude.
A TALENT, of itself unhealthily precocious, was most unwisely
pushed forward and encouraged out by everybody—by teachers
Ld schoolmasters, from the vanity of having a little monster to
display as their workmanship; by his father, because he vms
anxious for the success of his children in life, and the quicker
they <mt on the better : they would the sooner assume a position
It had struck no one there might be a mistake about it. Tw one
could have ever cared to see even if it were possible they migat,
or five minutes’ serious talk with the boy, or to have listened to
his laurh, would have shown the simplest of them that t rey we. e
but developing a trifling quickness of faculty ; that the powe
which should have gone for the growth of the entire rec
bein-directed off into a single branch, which was su ed g
disproportioned magnitude, while the stem was quietly decaying.
L to the character, of the entire boy-his temper, dispos tion, health of tone in heart and mind, all that was presumem
It made no show at school exhibitions, and at east due dy
assumed no form of positive importance as regarded after
So this was all left to itself. Of course, if a boy knew half the
Iliad by heart at ten, and had construed the Odyssey through a
eleven, all other excellences were a matter of course. . .
was naturally timid, and shrunk from all the amusements and
Xes of other boys. So much the better : he would keep to his
books
He was under-grown for ms age, infirm, an un
healthy'"and a disposition might have been observed in him
even then in all his dealings with other boys and with Ins master
X evade difficulties instead of meeting them-a feature whi
should have called for the most delicate handling, anc uou
have far better repaid the time and attention which were w
�6
in forcing him beyond his years, in a few miserable attainments,
. . In a scene so crowded as this world is, or as the little world
of a public school is, with any existing machinery it is impossible
to attend to minute shades of character. There is a sufficient
likeness among boys to justify the use of general, very general
laws indeed. They are dealt with in the mass. An average
treatment is arrived at. If an exception does rise, and it happens
to disagree, it is a pity, but it cannot be helped. “Punish,” not
“prevent,” is the old-fashioned principle. If a boy goes wrong,
whip him. Teach him to be afraid of going wrong by the pains
and penalties to ensue—just the principle on which gamekeepers
used to try to break dogs. But men learned to use gentler
methods soonest with the lower animals. As to the effects of the
treatment, results seem to show pretty much alike in both cases ;
but with the human animal an unhappy notion clung on to it,
and still clings, and will perpetuate the principle and its disas
trous consequences, that men and boys deserve their whipping,
as if they could have helped doing what they did in a way dogs
cannot. . . It would be well if people would so far take
example from what they find succeed with their dogs, as to learn
there are other ways at least as efficacious, and that the desired
conduct is better if produced in any other way than in that. . .
On the whole, general rules should have no place in family
education. It is just there, and there perhaps alone, that there
are opportunities of studying shades of difference, and it should
be the business of affection to attend to them. When affection
i s really strong, it will be an equal security against indulgence
and over-hasty severity. . . .
I take it to be a matter of the most certain experience in
dealing with boys of an amiable, infirm disposition, that exactly
the treatment they receive from you they will deserve. In a
general way it is true of all persons of unformed character who.
�7
Come in contact with you as your inferiors, although with men it
cannot be relied on with the same certainty, because their feel
ings are less powerful, and their habit of moving this way or that
wZy under particular circumstances more determinate. But with
the very large class of boys of a yielding nature who have very
little self-confidence, are very little governed by a determined
will or judgment, but sway up and down under the impulses of
the moment, if they are treated generously and trustingly, it
may be taken for an axiom that their feelings will be always
strong enough to make them ashamed not to deserve it. Treat
them as if they deserved suspicion, and as infallibly they soon
actually will deserve it. People seem to assume that to be
governed by impulse means, only “ bad impulse,” and they
endeavour to counteract it by trying to work upon the judg
ment, a faculty which these boys have not got, and so cannot
possibly be influenced by it. There never was a weak boy yet
that was deterred from doing wrong by ultimate distant con
sequences he was to learn from thinking about them. It is idle
to attempt to manage him otherwise than by creating and foster
ing generous impulses to keep in check the baser ones. And
the greatest delicacy is required in effecting this. It is not
enough to do a substantial good. Substantial good is Oiten diy
or repulsive on the surface, and must be understood to be
valued ; just, again, what boys are unable to do. . . Strong
natures may understand and value the reality. Women, and
such children as these, will not be affected by it, unless it shows
on the surface what is in the heart. Provided you will do it in
a kind, sympathising manner, you may do what you please with
them ; otherwise nothing you do will affect them at all.
HYMN iSo.
�8
MEDITATION.
As we gather to-day, apart from the conventional world of
worshippers, we are still between those vast realms of moral
good and evil which are reflected in all human consciousness.
Beneath, stretches that abyss which human imagination has
peopled with demons and devils, and the manifold tortures of
souls in eternal pain and despair ; above, the fair realms of joy
with its spirits of light, angels, cherubim and seraphim. But
these are all within each of us. All those demons mean only
hearts sunk low in selfishness ; all those angels mean hearts
raised high in burning love. Not mean or poor is any lot which
gives room to deny self, to put all self-seeking passions under
foot, to ascend by the ardour and spirit of love. There is the
grand conflict between angel and demon waged, the struggle
between light and darkness, and there the victory is being won.
Great is love 1 Whether it sends its sweet influence through a
community or a home, whether it is saving a world or a heart,
great and divine is love! For it closes over and hides
the dark region of guilt and baseness within us, it quickens the
mind and expands the heart to their fulness of life. In each
heart are the two doors—one opening downward to the pit of
selfishness in all its forms, one opening upwards to the purest
joys ; and it is when we give all to the spirit of Love that the
hell is for ever conquered, and we build around us henceforth our
eternal heaven.
ANTHEM 22.
�THE RELIGION OF CHILDREN.
In some respects the child living in the present age
finds its lines fallen in pleasant places. It is not, like
its ancestors, tortured with nauseous drugs, nor so
much with the rod. The clergyman no longer pro
nounces over the babe at baptism, as he once did,
“ I command thee, unclean spirit, that thou come out
of this infantnor delivers it up to be dealt with as
if its natural temper and will were efforts of the unclean
spirit to get back again. In Iceland the old people
account for elves by saying that once when the Al
mighty visited Eve after the fall, she kept most of her
children out of the way because they were not washed;
on which these were sentenced to be always invisible,
were turned into elves, and became the progenitors of
such. But we are beginning to be more merciful than
that even for the unwashed, and have gone a consider
able way towards humanising them and making them
presentable.
�Id
As to their literary culture and entertainment, there
were probably more good and attractive books for
children published in the last ten years than in the
whole of the last century. Many of the finest writers
of our generation—Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne,
Kingsley—the list would be long—have rightly thought
it a high task of genius to write books for children.
But in religious matters the children can hardly be
congratulated on the age upon which they have fallen.
The child is a piece of nature—physical, mental, moral
nature. Heaven and earth meet in it; the laws of
reason are in its instincts as well as zoologic laws;
and these harmonise in it. The child is a unit. Con
science is for a time external; it knows good and evil
in the parental conscience, not in itself. There is no
divorce between the two kinds of goodness—what
is good for eye and mouth, and what is good, for the
soul. There is no fruit inwardly forbidden. Confucius
said 11 Heaven and earth are without doubleness,’’ but
Hebrew Scriptures say God has made all things double
—one is set against the other. Our theology has been
largely evolved out of this Hebraism, but our children
live morally in that primitive age which cannot realise
profoundly any dualism. The child, therefore, lives in
a heaven and earth without doubleness; if its parent
only consents to a thing, it feels no misgiving; but it
is early introduced to a religion full, not only of double-
�II
ness, but of duplicity. It is the gangrene of our
age that it says one thing and means another; professes one thing and believes another; and nearly
.
every child, taught any religion at all, is taug t mgs
incongruous. I used, in childhood, to wonder about
the meaning of that prayer in the Zh Dam,
e
us never be confounded;” but as time went on,
whatever else was obscure, the confusion grew clear.
Not only that old sense of a word which reqmres
philology to explain ; but the sense of every chapter
•n the Bible, every sentence in the Catechism,
requires the interpretation of knowledge and. expe
rience; whilst the sentences being m Eng ,
apparently, the young mind is compelled
p
some meaning into them-a meaning pretty certain
to be wrong—or else be put to confusion It is not,
however, the double tongue of formal teaching wh 1
is worst; the mental confusion is not so bad as the
moral; and there it is impossible to conceive anything
more anomalous than most of the rehg.ous induct o
—so-called—around us. It is the necessity of the
home, the nursery, and of the school, that the c>
should be taught to be forgiving, gentle knd and
never angry or hateful. It is instructed that all
X be «». But just so fast, and so far as
dogmas can be crammed into the child, it is1 asyste
which begins with God’s wrath against the whole
�12
world, and ends with Christ’s damnation of vast
multitudes. A little boy in an American family with
which I am acquainted, being in a passion with his
playmate, declared that he hated him, and never
would see him again. His sister rebuked him, told
him that was very wrong, and not like Christ. “ Christ
never hated and abused others, not even his enemies.”
“No,” said the boy, “but he’s going to.”
It may be that only one boy in many would be
clear-headed enough to say that, but many can feel
what one or none can say. It is impossible that
children can be taught in one breath a vindictive
Christianity and a gentle Christianity—dogmas of
fear and principles of trust—and not imbibe either
muddy waters of confusion or the waters of bitterness,
where they should find only fountains of light and joy.
In one respect the Reformation had an unhappy effect
upon the work of nurturing little children. It trans
ferred the care of “ saving its soul,” as it is called,
from the outside to the inside of a head too small to
manage it. In the Catholic family the drop of holy
water and sign of the cross on the child’s forehead are
alone required; and for many years it is mainly left to a
natural growth; at any rate, not encouraged to grapple
with everlasting problems.
Under the reformed
religion there grew an increasing anxiety as to how
the souls of the children were to be saved; and the
�13
way fixed on was to stimulate strongly its fears and its
hopes.
Luther brought with him a bright children s para
dise from the Church of Rome. Here is his letter to
his son, aged 4 :—•
il Grace and peace in Christ, my dearly beloved
little son. I am glad to know that you are learning
well and that you say your prayers. So do, my little
son, and persevere; and^hen I come home I will
bring home with me a present from the annual fair.
I know of a pleasant and beautiful garden into which
many children go, where they have golden little coats,
and gather pretty apples under the trees, and pears,
and cherries, and plums (pflaumen), and yellow
plums (spillen); where they sing, leap, and are
merry; where they also have beautiful little horses,
with golden bridles and silver saddles. When I
asked the man that owned the garden ‘ Whose are
these children ? ’ he said ‘ They are the children that
love to learn, and to pray, and are pious.’
“ Then I said, ‘ Dear Sir, I also have a son I he is
called Johnny Luther (Hanischen Luther). May he
not come into the garden, that he may eat such
beautiful apples and pears, and ride such a little
horse, and play with these children ? ’ Then the man
said ‘ If he loves to pray and to learn, and is pious,
he shall also come into the garden; Philip too, and
�14
little James; and if they all come together, then they
may have likewise whistles, kettle-drums, lutes and
harps; they may dance also, and shoot with little
crossbows.’
“Then he showed me a beautiful green grass
plot in the garden prepared for dancing, where hang
nothing but golden fifes, drums, and elegant silver
cross-bows. But it was now early, and the children
had not yet eaten. Thereupon I could not wait for
the dancing, and I said to the man, ‘ Ah, dear Sir,
I will instantly go away and write about all of this to
my little son John; that he may pray earnestly, and
learn well, and be pious, so that he may also come
into this garden; but he has an aunt Magdalene,
may he bring her with him ? ’ Then said the man,
(So shall it be ; go and write to him with confidence.’
Therefore, dear little John, learn and pray with de
light ; and tell Philip and James, too, that they must
learn and pray; so you shall come with one another
into the garden. With this I commend you to
Almighty God—and give my love to aunt Magdalene ;
give her a kiss for me. Your affectionate father,
Martin Luther.” (In the year 1530.)
It is plain that the man who wrote that letter was
himself a child. Thunder for the Emperor, lightning
for the Pope, but a shower of rainbows for little
Johnny. But that child’s paradise is now as obsolete
�iS
as the Elysian Fields, or the Indian’s happy hunting
ground There was already a worm amid its blossoms
while Luther described them: for Calvinism was
lurking near, with terrors to blacken not only the earth
but the blue sky. Happily for Johnny, his father was
not logical, else it might have occurred to him that if
prayer and piety were the way to reach the heavenly
garden, they would naturally be the chief occupation
there. But Calvin was logical; and there is no worse
affliction than your logical man when his premisses
are false. Calvinism made heaven into a large Presby
terian assembly, all the children turned to rigidly
righteous elders ; no children there at all. One by one
in the child’s paradise the blossoms fell blighted.
Instead of the dance, behold a Puritan Sabbath school;
instead of plums and cherries, texts and hymns ; cross
bows yield to catechisms ; and the child learned at last
that its heaven was to be a place where congrega
tions ne’er break up, and Sabbaths have no end.
Well, we have measurably recovered from that. . At
least, many well-to-do families have; the Puritan
paradise is one we are generally quite willing to give to
the poor. It is still largely the ragged-school para
dise, and I suspect that endless Sabbath fixes m many
a ragged boy the resolve never to go there. Meanwhi e,
for the children of a happier earthly lot, the fading away
of the little Luther paradise has left them almost none at
�i6
all. Protestantism, with its education, has shot out
into various theories of the future life for grown-up
people. The Reformer hopes for a scene of endless
progress. The Theologian imagines the supreme bliss
of seeing his own doctrines proved true, and his oppo
nents’ all wrong. The Baptist’s heaven shows the
sprinkling parson confounded; and the Wesleyan will
shout glory at the convicted Calvinist. “ There,” say all
of them, “ we shall see eye to eye”—that is, everybody
shall see as we always saw.
But what has all this to do with the children ? They
do not care for the theological heaven, nor the heaven
of endless progress. The learned Protestant world is
so absorbed in the controversy whether there be any
future at all, that it forgets the little ones who would
like to know whether it be a future worth having.
What is provided for them as the reward of their
prayers, piety, and self-denial ? They go to church ;
they read the Bible; they sit through the tragedy;
but when they look for the curtain to rise on beauty
and happiness, it rises on metaphysical mist, not by
any means attractive or even penetrable to a child.
Since, for us, Luther’s plum-paradise, and the
Puritan paradise, are equally gone beyond recall, we
may look at them calmly and impartially; and we
may see that both have their suggestiveness, and
point to a truth. Luther’s letter is a celebration of
�17
the child’s nature—the purity and sweetness and
even holiness of its little aims and joys. It is like
birds singing over again the old theme—“ Of such
is the kingdom of heaven.’’ But the paradise
Luther promised his child was much too definite.
He went too far into detail; and when little
Johnny grew from the age of four to ten or
twelve, and during that time had learned his lessons,
he would see his paradise losing its summer beauty.
By that time he might have outgrown the whistles, and
become careless of kettle-drums. He might prefer
gold in his pocket to a golden coat. He might find
it, as time went on, impossible to stimulate prayer by
a prospect of silver cross-bows, or even of yellow
plums. And so leaf by leaf, blossom by blossom, his
paradise would fade away; and it could never bloom
again.
On the other hand, the Puritan paradise, with all its
sombreness, did have the advantage of raising the
mind to large conceptions. It was false—cruelly false
__in crushing the innocent mirth and despising the
little aims of the child. That which Puritanism called
petty, was not petty. The boy at his sports is training
the sinews which master the world. The doll quickens
to activity maternal tenderness. It is said Zoroaster
was born laughing, and a sage prophesied he would
be greatest of men. That sage was wiser than the
�i8
Puritan. But it is not necessary to chill the mirth or
to dispel the illusions of childhood, in order to
keep it from the delusion of holding on to its small
pleasures as if the use of existence lay between a
penny trumpet on earth and a golden trumpet in
heaven.
It appears to me that the true religion of a child
is to grow ; and when it is old, its religion will
still be to grow. The child ■will turn from its toys ;
will return to them after longer and longer intervals ;
and lastly leave them, and turning say, “ Mother, what
shall I be when I grow up ? ”
If the mother only knew it, all the catechisms on
earth have no question so sacred as that! The
child that dreams of its future in the great wrorld has
already learned far enough for the time the pettiness
of life’s transient aims : it is already overarched by
an infinite heaven. In the great roaring world, seen
from afar, nothing is defined, nothing limited—it is a
boundless splendour of possibility. All that man
or woman may dream of heaven, a child may dream
of the great world of thought and action into which it
must enter at last, and find there a heaven or a helk
Religion can teach the child no higher lesson than
that, nor stimulate its good motives by any nobler
conception. As its sports train to manly strength, its
little pleasures develop the longing for intellectual
�i9
and moral joys. And if the parent’s tongue is not
equal to the high task of telling the truth about the
tragic abyss of evil to be shunned, or the beautiful
heights of excellence to be won, there are noble
books awaiting the child, the boy, the youth j ready
to meet every phase of the growth, and follow every
fading leaf with a flower more fair, more full of
promise than the cast-off toy or pastime.
What a training for the child entering upon school
life are the stories of Miss Edgeworth—a training in
manliness, independence, sincerity, and justice,
which can make the playground the arena of heroism
and duty ! And there is Scott: the horizon grows
lustrous with noble presences, as the boy reads.
Dickens will tell him the romance of humble life
how kindness and sympathy can find pearls in London
gutters, and scatter them again wherever they go.
Plutarch’s “Lives” frescoe earth and heaven with
heroic forms that remain through life as guardians of
conscience and measures of honourable conduct.
Happily the catalogue is long—too long to be now
repeated—of the good books which tell the young,
what brave and faithful men have done, and can do,
to help the weak, redress wrong, uplift truth and
justice, and make human lives melodious and beau
tiful amid the jarring discords of the world.
And the lives of noblest men and women have for
�20
their dark background the evils they conquered, the
wrongs they assailed; evils and wrongs which are the
■only real hell to be shunned. It is only the fictitious
hell that terrifies the child. The snare set on pur
pose to injure it by a “ ghostly enemy ” ; the dangers it
incurs unknowingly, from an invisible assailant it
may not avoid; these are the terrors that unnerve
and unman. The real dangers of life, when seen,
nerve the strength, man the heart, endow with resolu
tion and courage.
The old man said to a child afraid to go into the
dark—“Go on, child; you will see nothing worse
than yourself.” And that is the fundamental doctrine
for a child. All the hells—their mouths wide open
on the street—the seductive haunts of vice in all its
shapes—they are the creations of human passion and
appetite. According to what they find in us do those
fell dragons devour us, or else feel the point of our
spear in their throat.
And even so we make or mar our own heaven.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
The little boy came to his mother, angry and weep
ing, complaining that in the hills some other boy
had called him bad names. He had searched, but
could not find him. But the mother well knew that
other concealed abuser of her son. il It was,” she said,
�21
“but the echo of your own voice. Had you called
out pleasant names, pleasant names had been returned
to you; and all through life, as you give forth to the
world, so shall it be returned unto you.
Amid these ever-present hells and heavens your
child must move—onward from the cradle to the
grave : why give it dismay or hope of heavens and
hells not present ? Do not pour that living heart into
ancient moulds and examples, even the best. While
it has to thread its way through London, why give it
the map of Jerusalem? While it must live high or
low in the nineteenth century, why bid it build for a
distant age or clime? True it is, that a noble and
brave life is worthy to be studied, whether lived mthe
year One or One thousand or in r877 J but its noble
ness is in itself, not in its accidents of time and space,
not in its vesture of name and scenery. When a youth
reads of the fidelity of Phocion, is it that he may
confront Alexander, or withstand the follies oi
Athenians ? It is that he may be true and faithful m
his relations to living men and women. If he fancies
that it is like Phocion to slay the slain, and deal with
dead issues, let him repair to Don Quixote, and see
what comes of fighting phantoms and giants that do
not exist And if the life be that of Christ, the fact is
nowise changed. That life is not yet written ; we have
the figure-head of a Jewish sect, painted to suit itself, and
�22
-called Christ; the figure-head of Gentile sect, painted
to suit itself, and called Christ; and so we have a Greek,
an Alexandrian, a Roman, a Protestant Christ, each
with its sectarian colours and glosses; each an anomaly
.and an impossibility. There is no volume you can put
into the hand of a child, and honestly call the Life of
Christ. The time has not come when that great man
can be brought forth as he really was, to quicken men
instead of supporting prejudice. But where there is
no prejudice instilled, the heart may be trusted to
pick out from the New Testament the record of a
valiant soul, the deeds of a hero, thoughts of a sage,
death of a martyr; and these too will help to idealise
life for the young, and teach them its magnificent
possibilities. Let the child know well that all it reads
of Christ is true of itself. Let him know that all he
reads there or elsewhere which marks that or any
■other life off from human life, as something miracu
lous, is mere fable• and that his own daily life
is passed amid wonders equally great, and conditions
just as sacred and sublime. Ah, how sublime!
What tears are there to be wiped away ; what faces
of agony to which smiles may be called ; what wrongs
to be righted, high causes to be helped; what heights
of excellence to be won—summits all shining with the
saintly souls that have climbed them, and radiant with
the glories of which poets and prophets have dreamed I
�23
That teaching which belittles our own time, and
lowers our powers beneath those of any other, may be
called a religion, but it is a moral blight and a curse.
When we demand of our children the very highest
aims that were ever aspired to, the very truest,
noblest lives ever lived—nor let them be overshadowed
by any names, however great—then shall we see rising
our own prophets and heroes, and see our own world
redeemed by a devotion not wasted on a buried society,
by an enthusiasm no longer lavished on a world for us
unborn.
HYMN 191.
Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins-of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.
DISMISSAL.
Printed
by waterlow and sons limited,
London wall, London.
�WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY.
BY M. D. CONWAY, M.A.
The Sacred Anthology: A Book
of Ethnical Scriptures.........................
The Earthward Pilgrimage
Do.
do.
Republican Superstitions.........................
Christianity
>.....................................
Human Sacrifices in England ..
David Frederick Strauss.........................
Sterling and Maurice.........................
Intellectual Suicide .
.........................
The First Love again.........................
Our Cause and its Accusers
Alcestis in England
.........................
Unbelief: its nature, cause, and cure ..
Entering Society ..
PRICES.
8.
IO
5
2
2
1
1
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0
0
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0
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d.
0
0
6
6
6
0
3
2
2
2
1
2
2
2
NEW WORK BY M. D. CONWAY, M. A.
Idols and Ideals {including the Essay
on Christianity^ 350 pp.
7 6
Members of the Congregation can obtain this
work in the Library at 5/-.
BY A. J. ELLIS, B.A., F.R.S., &c., &c.
Salvation....................................................... 0
'
Truth
....................................................... 0
1
0
Speculation
..
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■•
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Duty
.•
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The Dyer's Hand........................................... 0
1
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2
2
2
2
BY REV. P. H. WICKSTEED, M.A.
0
1
2
The Modern Analogue of the Ancient
Prophet....................................................... 0
1
2
Going Through and Getting Over
••
BY REV. T. W. FRECKELTON.
BY W. C. COUPLAND, M.A.
The Conduct of Life
Hymns and Anthems
................................ 0
*
..
2
V-, 2Si-
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The religion of children : a discourse, with readings and meditation, given at South Place Chapel, October 21, 1877
Creator
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Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Description
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 23, [1] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Includes extract from the text of 'The spirit's trials' by J.A. Froude. Printed by Waterlow and Sons Limited, London Wall. With a list of 'works to be obtained in the Library' of South Place Chapel at the end of pamphlet. Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 1.
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[South Place Chapel]
Date
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[1877]
Identifier
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G3337
Subject
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Religion
Education
Child rearing
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (The religion of children : a discourse, with readings and meditation, given at South Place Chapel, October 21, 1877), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Child Rearing-Moral and Ethical Aspects
Children
Moral Education
Morris Tracts
Religious Education