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NATIONAL SEOUL/
Rome
WTOTY
Reason
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A REPLY TO
MANNING.
CARDINAL
BY
COL. R. G. INGERSOLL.
Reprinted from
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW,
October and November, 1888.
PRICE THREEPENCE.
London:
1 THE FREETHOUGHT PUBLISHING COMPANY, LTD.,
2 Newcastle Street, Farringdgn Street, E.C.
1903.
I
41
�PRINTED BY
THE FREETHOUGHT PUBLISHING COMPANY, LTD,,
2 NEWCASTLE-STREET, FARRINGDON-STREET, LONDON, E.C.
�ROME OR REASON?
A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
PART I.
Superstition “ has ears more deaf than adders to the voice oj
any true, decision."
Cardinal Manning has stated the claims of the Roman
Catholic Church with great clearness, and apparently
without reserve. The age, position, and learning of this
man give a certain weight to his words, apart from their
worth. He represents the oldest of the Christian
Churches. The questions involved are among the most
important that can engage the human mind. No one
having the slightest regard for that superb thing known
as intellectual honesty will avoid the issues tendered, or
seek in any way to gain a victory over truth.
Without candor, discussion, in the highest sense, is
impossible. All have the same interest, whether they
know it or not, in the establishment of facts. All have
the same to gain, the same to lose. He loads the dice
against himself who scores a point against the right.
Absolute honesty is to the intellectual perception what
light is to the eyes. Prejudice and passion cloud the
mind. In each disputant should be blended the advocate
and judge.
In this spirit, having in view only the ascertainment
of the truth, let us examine the arguments, or rather the
statements and conclusions, of Cardinal Manning.
The proposition is that “ The Church itself, by its
marvellous propagation, its eminent sanctity, its inex
haustible fruitfulness in all good things, its catholic
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unity and invincible stability, is a vast and perpetu?
motive of credibility, and an irrefragable witness of its
own divine legation.”
The reasons given as supporting this proposition are:-—
That the Catholic Church interpenetrates all the
nations of the civilised world; that it is extra-national
and independent in a supernational unity ; that it is the
same in every place; that it speaks all the languages in
the civilised world ; that it is obedient to one head ; that
as many as seven hundred bishops have knelt before the
Pope ; that pilgrims from all nations have brought gifts
to Rome, and that all these things set forth in the most
self-evident way the unity and universality of the Roman
Church.
It is also asserted that “ men see the Head of the
Church year by year speaking to the nations of the
world, treating with empires, republics, and govern
ments ” that “ there is no other man on earth that can
so bear himself,” and that “ neither from Canterbury nor
from Constantinople can such a voice go forth to which
rulers and people listen.”
It is also claimed that the Catholic Church has
enlightened and purified the world ; that it has given us
the peace and purity of domestic life; that it has
destroyed idolatry and demonology; that it gave us a
body of law from a higher source than man ; that it has
produced the civilisation of Christendom ; that the popes
were the greatest of statesmen and rulers; that celibacy
is better than marriage, and that the revolutions and
reformations of the last three hundred years have been
destructive and calamitous.
We will examine these assertions as well as some
others.
No one will dispute that the Catholic Church is the
best witness of its own existence. The same is true of
everything that exists ; of every Church, great and
small; of every man, and of every insect.
But it is contended that the marvellous growth or
propagation of the Church is evidence of its divine
origin. Can it be said that success is supernatural ?
All success in this world is relative. Majorities are not
�ROME OR REASON ?
5
necessarily right. If anything is known—if anything
can be known—we are sure that very large bodies of
men have frequently been wrong. We believe in what
is called the progress of mankind. Progress, for the
most part, consists in finding new truths and getting rid
of old errors—that is to say, getting nearer and nearer
in harmony with the facts of nature, seeing with greater
clearness the conditions of well-being.
There is no nation in which a majority leads the way.
In the progress of mankind, the few have been the nearest
right. There have been centuries in which the light
seemed to emanate only from a handful of men, while
the rest of the world was enveloped in darkness. Some
great man leads the way—he becomes the morning star,
the prophet of a coming day. Afterwards, many millions
accept his views. But there are still heights above and
beyond; there are other pioneers, and the old day, in
comparison with the new, becomes a night. So, we cannot
say that success demonstrates either divine origin or
supernatural aid.
We know, if we know anything, that wisdom has often
been trampled beneath the feet of the multitude. We
know that the torch of science has been blown out by
the breath of the hydra-headed. We know that the whole
intellectual heaven has been darkened again. The truth
or falsity of a proposition cannot be determined by
ascertaining the number of those who assert, or of those
who deny.
If the marvellous propagation of the Catholic Church
proves its divine origin, what shall we say of the mar
vellous propagation of Mohammedanism ?
Nothing can be clearer than that Christianity arose out
of the ruins of the Roman Empire—-that is to say, the
ruins of Paganism. And it is equally clear that Moham
medanism arose out of the wreck and ruin of Catholicism.
After Mohammed came upon the stage, “ Christianity
was for ever expelled from its most glorious seat—from
Palestine, the scene of its most sacred recollections ; from
Asia Minor, that of its first churches; from Egypt,
whence issued the great doctrine of Trinitarian Ortho
doxy, and from Carthage, who imposed her belief on
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Europe.” Before that time “the ecclesiastical chiefs of
Rome, of Constantinople, and of Alexandria were
engaged in a desperate struggle for supremacy, carrying
out their purposes by weapons and in ways revolting to
the conscience of man. Bishops were concerned in
assassinations, poisonings, adulteries, blindings, riots,
treasons, civil war. Patriarchs and primates were
excommunicating and anathematising one another in
their rivalries for earthly power ; bribing eunuchs with
gold and courtesans and royal females with concessions
of episcopal love. Among legions of monks who carried
terror into the imperial armies and riot into the great
cities arose hideous clamors for theological dogmas, but
never a voice for intellectual liberty or the outraged
rights of man.
“ Under these circumstances, amid these atrocities and
crimes, Mohammed arose, and raised his own nation from
Fetichism, the adoration of the meteoric stone, and from
the basest idol worship, and irrevocably wrenched from
Christianity more than half—and that by far the best
half—of her possessions, since it included the Holy Land,
the birth-place of the Christian faith, and Africa, which
had imparted to it its Latin form ; and now, after a lapse
of more than a thousand years, that continent, and a very
large part of Asia, remain permanently attached to the
Arabian doctrine.”
It may be interesting in this connection to say that the
Mohammedan now proves the divine mission of his
Apostle by appealing to the marvellous propagation of
the faith. If the argument is good in the mouth of a
Catholic, is it not good in the mouth of a Moslem ? Let
us see if it is not better.
According to Cardinal Manning, the Catholic Church
triumphed only over the institutions of men, triumphed
only over religions that had been established by men, by
wicked and ignorant men. But Mohammed triumphed
not only over the religions of men, but over the religion
of God. This ignorant driver of camels, this poor,
unknown, unlettered boy, unassisted by God, unen
lightened by supernatural means, drove the armies of the
true cross before him as the winter’s storm drives
�ROME OR REASON ?
7
withered leaves. At his name, priests, bishops, and
cardinals fled with white faces, popes trembled, and the
armies of God, fighting for the true faith, were conquered
on a thousand fields.
If the success of a church proves its divinity, and after
that another church arises and defeats the first, what does
that prove ?
Let us put this question in a milder form : Suppose
the second church lives and flourishes in spite of the
first, what does that prove ?
As a matter of fact, however, no Church rises with
everything against it. Something is favorable to it, or
it could not exist. If it succeeds and grows, it is abso
lutely certain that the conditions are favorable. If it
spreads rapidly, it simply shows that the conditions are
exceedingly favorable, and that the forces in opposition
are weak and easily overcome.
Here, in my own country, within a few years, has
arisen a new religion. Its foundations were laid in an
intelligent community, having had the advantages of
what is known as modern civilisation. Yet this new
faith—founded on the grossest absurdities, as gross as
we find in the Scriptures—in spite of all opposition
began to grow, and kept growing. It was subjected to
persecution, and the persecution increased its strength.
It was driven from State to State by the believers in
universal love, until it left what was called civilisation,
crossed the wide plains, and took up its abode on the
shores of the Great Salt Lake. It continued to grow.
Its founder, as he declared, had frequent conversations
with God, and received directions from that source.
Hundreds of miracles were performed, multitudes upon
the desert were miraculously fed, the sick were cured,
the dead were raised, and the Mormon Church continued
to grow, until now, less than half a century after the
death of its founder, there are several hundred thousand
believers in the new faith.
Do you think that men enough could join this Church
to prove the truth of its creed ?
Joseph Smith said that he found certain golden plates
that had been buried for many generations, and upon
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these plates, in some unknown language, had been
engraved this new revelation, and I think he insisted
that by the use of miraculous mirrors this language was
translated. If there should be Mormon bishops in the
countries of the world eighteen hundred years from now,
do you think a cardinal of that faith could prove the
truth of the golden plates simply by the fact that the
faith had spread and that seven hundred bishops had
knelt before the head of that Church ?
It seems to me that a “supernatural” religion—that
is to say, a religion that is claimed to have been divinely
founded and to be authenticated by miracle—is much
easier to establish among an ignorant people than any
other, and the more ignorant the people, the easier such
a religion could be established. The reason for this is
plain. All ignorant tribes, all savage men, believe in
the miraculous, in the supernatural. The conception
of uniformity, of what may be called the eternal con
sistency of nature, is an idea far above their compre
hension. They are forced to think in accordance with
their minds, and as a consequence they account for all
phenomena by the acts of superior beings—that is to
say, by the supernatural. In other words, that religion
having most in common with the savage, having most
that was satisfactory to his mind, or to his lack of mind,
would stand the best chance of success.
It is probably safe to say that at one time, or during
one phase of the development of man, everything was
miraculous. After a time, the mind slowly developing,
certain phenomena, always happening under like con
ditions, were called “ natural,” and none suspected any
special interference. The domain of the miraculous
grew less and less—the domain of the natural larger ;
that is to say, the common became the natural, but the
uncommon was still regarded as the miraculous. I he
rising and setting of the sun ceased to excite the wonder
of mankind—there was no miracle about that; but an
eclipse of the sun was miraculous. Men did not then
know that eclipses are periodical, that they happen with
the same certainty as the sun rises. It took many
observations through many generations to arrive at this
�ROME OR REASON ?
(J
conclusion. Ordinary rains became “ natural,” floods
remained “ miraculous.”
But it can all be summed up in this: The average
man regards the common as natural, the uncommon as
supernatural. The educated man—and by that I mean
the developed man—is satisfied that all phenomena are
natural, and that the supernatural does not and cannot
exist.
As a rule, an individual is egotistic in the proportion
that he lacks intelligence. The same is true of nations
and races. The barbarian is egotistic enough to suppose
that an Infinite Being is constantly doing something, or
failing to do something, on his account. But as man
rises in the scale of civilisation, as he becomes really
great, he comes to the conclusion that nothing in Nature
happens on his account—that he is hardly great enough
to disturb the motions of the planets.
Let us make an application of this : To me, the success
of Mormonism is no evidence of its truth, because it has
succeeded only with the superstitious. It has been
recruited from communities brutalised by other forms of
superstition. To me, the success of Mohammed does not
tend to show that he was right—for the reason that he
triumphed only over the ignorant, over the superstitious.
The same is true of the Catholic Church. Its seeds were
planted in darkness. It was accepted by the credulous,
by men incapable of reasoning upon such questions. It
did not, it has not, it cannot, triumph over the intellectual
world. To count its many millions does not tend to
prove the truth of its creed. On the contrary, a creed
that delights the credulous gives evidence against itself.
Questions of fact or philosophy cannot be settled
simply by numbers. There was a time when the Coper
nican system of astronomy had but few supporters—the
multitude being on the other side. There was a time
when the rotation of the earth was not believed by the
majority.
Let us press this idea further. There was a time when
Christianity was not in the majority, anywhere. Let us
suppose that the first Christian missionary had met a
prelate of the Pagan faith, and suppose this prelate had
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used against the Christian missionary the Cardinal’s
argument—how could the missionary have answered if
the Cardinal’s argument is good?
But, after all, is the success of the Catholic Church a
marvel ? If this Church is of divine origin, if it has
been under the special care, protection, and guidance of
an Infinite Being, is not its failure far more wonderful
than its success ? For eighteen centuries it has perse
cuted and preached, and the salvation of the world is
still remote. This is the result, and it may be asked
whether it is worth while to try to convert the world to
Catholicism.
Are Catholics better than Protestants ? Are they nearer
honest, nearer just, more charitable ? Are Catholic
nations better than Protestant ?
Do the Catholic
nations move in the van of progress ? Within their
jurisdiction are life, liberty, and property safer than
anywhere else ? Is Spain the first nation of the world ?
Let me ask another question : Are Catholics or Pro
testants better than Freethinkers ? Has the Catholic
Church produced a greater man than Humboldt ? Has
the Protestant produced a greater than Darwin ? Was
not Emerson, so far as purity of life is concerned, the
equal to any true believer ? Was Pius IX., or any
other Vicar of Christ, superior to Abraham Lincoln ?
But it is claimed that the Catholic Church is universal,
and that its universality demonstrates its divine origin.
According to the Bible, the Apostles were ordered to
go into all the world to preach the gospel—yet not one of
them, nor one of their converts at any time, nor one of
the Vicars of God, for fifteen hundred years afterward,
knew of the existence of the Western Hemisphere.
During all that time, can it be said that the Catholic
Church was universal ? At the close of the fifteenth
century, there was one half of the world in which the
Catholic faith had never been preached, and in the other
half not one person in ten had ever heard of it, and of
those who had heard of it, not one in ten believed it.
Certainly the Catholic Church was not then universal.
Is it universal now ? What impression has Catholicism
made upon the many millions of China, of Japan, of
�ROME OR REASON ?
II
India, of Africa ? Can it truthfully be said that the
Catholic Church is now universal ? When any church
becomes universal, it will be the only church. There
cannot be two universal churches, neither can there be
one universal church and any other.
The Cardinal next tries to prove that the Catholic
Church is divine, “ by its eminent sanctity and its inex
haustible fruitfulness in all good things.”
And here let me admit that there are many millions of
good Catholics—that is, of good men and women who
are Catholics. It is unnecessary to charge universal
dishonesty or hypocrisy, for the reason that this would
be only a kind of personality. Many thousands of heroes
have died in defence of the faith, and millions of Catholics
have killed, and been killed, for the- sake of their religion.
And here it may be well enough to say that martyrdom
does not even tend to prove the truth of a religion. The
man who dies in flames, standing by what he believes to
be true, establishes, not the truth of what he believes,
but his sincerity.
Without calling in question the intentions of the
Catholic Church, we can ascertain whether it has been
“ inexhaustibly fruitful in all good things,” and whether
it has been “ eminent for its sanctity.”
In the first place, nothing can be better than goodness.
Nothing is more sacred, or can be more sacred, than the
well-being of man. All things that tend to increase or
preserve the happiness of the human race are good—
that is to say, they are sacred. All things that tend to
his unhappiness, are bad, no matter by whom they are
taught or done.
It is perfectly certain that the Catholic Church has
taught, and still teaches, that intellectual liberty is dan
gerous—that it should not be allowed. It was driven to
take this position because it had taken another. It
taught, and still teaches, that a certain belief is necessary
to salvation. It has always known that investigation
and inquiry led, or might lead, to doubt; that doubt leads,
or may lead, to heresy, and that heresy leads to hell. In
other words, the Catholic Church has something more
important than this world, more important than the well
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being of man here. It regards this life as an oppor
tunity for joining that Church, for accepting that creed,
and for the saving of your soul.
If the Catholic Church is right in its premises, it is
right in its conclusion. If it is necessary to believe the
Catholic creed in order to obtain eternal joy, then, of
course, nothing else in this world is, comparatively
speaking, of the slightest importance. Consequently,
the Catholic Church has been, and still is, the enemy of
intellectual freedom, of investigation, of inquiry—in
other words, the enemy of progress in secular things.
The result of this was an effort to compel all men to
accept the belief necessary to salvation. This effort
naturally divided itself into persuasion and persecution.
It will be admitted that the good man is kind, merciful,
charitable, forgiving, and just. A Church must be
judged by the same standard. Has the Church been
merciful ? Has it been “ fruitful in the good things ” of
justice, charity, and forgiveness ? Can a good man,
believing a good doctrine, persecute for opinion’s sake ?
If the Church imprisons a man for the expression of an
honest opinion, is it not certain, either that the doctrine
of the Church is wrong or that the Church is bad ?
Both cannot be good. “ Sanctity ” without goodness is
impossible. Thousands of “ saints ” have been the most
malicious of the human race. If the history of the world
proves anything, it proves that the Catholic Church was
for many centuries the most merciless institution that
ever existed among men. I cannot believe that the
instruments of persecution were made and used by the
eminently good ; neither can I believe that honest people
were imprisoned, tortured, and burned at the stake by a
Church that was “ inexhaustibly fruitful in all good
things.”
And let me say here that I have no Protestant pre
judices against Catholicism, and have no Catholic
prejudices against Protestantism. I regard all religions
either without prejudice or with the same prejudice.
They were all, according to my belief, devised by men,
and all have for a foundation ignorance of this world
and fear of the next. All the gods have been made by
�ROME OR REASON ?
*3
men. They are all equally powerless and equally use
less. I like some of them better than I do others, for
the same reason that I admire some characters in fiction
more than I do others. I prefer Miranda to Caliban,
but have not the slightest idea that either of them existed.
So I prefer Jupiter to Jehovah, although perfectly satisfied
that both are myths. I believe myself to be in a frame
of mind to justly and fairly consider the claims of
different religions, believing as I do that all are wrong,
and admitting as I do that there is some good in all.
When one speaks of the “ inexhaustible fruitfulness in
all good things ” of the Catholic Church we remember
the horrors and atrocities of the Inquisition—the rewards
offered by the Roman Church for the capture and murder
of honest men. We remember the Dominican Order,
the members of which, upheld by the Vicar of Christ,
pursued the heretics like sleuth-hounds, through many
centuries.
The Church, “ inexhaustible in fruitfulness in all good
things,” not only imprisoned and branded and burned
the living, but violated the dead. It robbed graves, to
the end that it might convict corpses of heresy—to the
end that it might take from widows their portions and
from orphans their patrimony.
We remember the millions in the darkness of dungeons
-—the millions who perished by the sword-—the vast
multitudes destroyed in flames—those who were flayed
alive—those who were blinded—those whose tongues
were cut out—those into whose ears were poured molten
lead—those whose eyes were deprived of their lids—
those who were tortured and tormented in every way by
which pain could be inflicted and human nature over
come.
And we remember, too, the exultant cry of the Church
over the bodies of her victims : “ Their bodies were
burned here, but their souls are now tortured in hell.”
We remember that the Church, by treachery, bribery,
perjury, and the commission of every possible crime, got
possession and control of Christendom, and we know the
use that was made of this power—that it was used to
brutalise, degrade, stupefy, and “ sanctify ” the children
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of men. We know also that the Vicars of Christ were
persecutors for opinion’s sake—that they sought to
destroy the liberty of thought through fear—that they
endeavored to make every brain a Bastille in which the
mind should be a convict—that they endeavored to make
every tongue a prisoner, watched by a familiar of the
Inquisition—and that they threatened punishment here,
imprisonment here, burnings here, and, in the name of
their God, eternal imprisonment and eternal burnings
hereafter.
We know, too, that the Catholic Church was, during
all the years of its power, the enemy of every science. It
preferred magic to medicine, relics to remedies, priests to
physicians. It thought more of astrologers than of
astronomers. It hated geologists, it persecuted the
chemist, and imprisoned the naturalist, and opposed
every discovery calculated to improve the condition of
mankind.
It is impossible to forget the persecutions of the Cathari,
the Albigenses, the Waldenses, the Hussites, the Hugue
nots, and of every sect that had the courage to think just
a little for itself. Think of a woman—the mother of a
family—taken from her children and burned, on account
of her view as to the three natures of Jesus Christ. Think
of the Catholic Church—an institution with a Divine
Founder, presided over by the agent of God—punishing
a woman for giving a cup of cold water to a fellow being
who had been anathematised. Think of this Church,
“ fruitful in all good things,” launching its curse at an
honest man—not only cursing him from the crown of
his head to the soles of his feet with a fiendish
particularity, but having at the same time the impudence
to call on God, and the Holy Ghost, and Jesus Christ,
and the. Virgin Mary, to join in the curse ; and to curse
him not only here, but for ever hereafter; calling upon
all the saints and upon all the redeemed to join in a
hallelujah of curses, so that earth and heaven should
reverberate with countless curses launched at a human
being simply for having expressed an honest thought.
This Church, so “fruitful in all good things,” invented
crimes that it might punish. This Church tried men for
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15
a “ suspicion of heresy ”—imprisoned them for the vice
of being suspected—stripped them of all they had on
earth and allowed them to rot in dungeons, because they
were guilty of the crime of having been suspected.
This was a part of the Canon Law.
It is too late to talk about the “ invincible stability ”
of the Catholic Church.
It was not invincible in the seventh, in the eighth, or
in the ninth centuries. It was not invincible in Germany
in Luther’s day. It was not invincible in the Low
Countries. It was not invincible in Scotland, or in
England. It was not invincible in France. It is not
invincible in Italy. It is not supreme in any intellectual
centre of the world. It does not triumph in Paris, or
Berlin ; it is not dominant in London, in England;
neither is it triumphant in the United States. It
has not within its fold the philosophers, the statesmen,
and the thinkers, who are the leaders of the human
race.
It is claimed that Catholicism “ interpenetrates all the
nations of the civilised world,” and that “ in some it
holds- the whole nation in its unity.”
I suppose the Catholic Church is more powerful in
Spain than in any other nation.
The history of this
nation demonstrates the result of Catholic supremacy,
the result of an acknowledgment by a people that a
religion is too sacred to be examined.
Without attempting in an article of this character to
point out the many causes that contributed to the adop
tion of Catholicism by the Spanish people, it is enough
to say that Spain, of all nations, has been and is the
most thoroughly Catholic, and the most thoroughly inter
penetrated and dominated by the spirit of the Church of
Rome.
Spain used the sword of the Church. In the name of
religion it endeavoured to conquer the infidel world. It
drove from its territory the Moors, not because they
were bad, not because they were idle and dishonest, but
because they were infidels. It expelled the Jews, not
because they were ignorant or vicious, but because they
were unbelievers. It drove out the Moriscoes, and
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deliberately made outcasts of the intelligent, the industri
ous, the honest and the useful, because they were not
Catholics. It leaped like a wfild beast upon the Low
Countries, for the destruction of Protestantism.
It
covered the seas with its fleets, to destroy the intellec
tual liberty of man. And not only so—it established
the Inquisition within its borders. It imprisoned the
honest, it burned the noble, and succeeded after many
years of devotion to the true faith, in destroying the
industry, the intelligence, the usefulness, the genius, the
nobility and the wealth of a nation. It became a wreck,
a jest of the conquered, and excited the pity of its former
victims.
In this period of degradation, the Catholic Church
held “ the whole nation in its unity.”
At last Spain began to deviate from the path of the
Church. It made a treaty with an infidel power. In
1782 it became humble enough, and wise enough, to be
friends with Turkey. It made treaties with Tripoli and
Algiers and the Barbary States. It had become too
poor to ransom the prisoners taken by these powers. It
began to appreciate the fact that it could neither conquer
nor convert the world by the sword.
Spain has progressed in the arts and sciences, in all
that tends to enrich and ennoble a nation, in the pre
cise proportion that she has lost faith in the Catholic
Church. This may be said of every other nation in
Christendom. Torquemada is dead ; Castelar is alive.
The dungeons of the Inquisition are empty, and a little
light has penetrated the clouds and mists—not much,
but a little. Spain is not yet clothed and in her right
mind. A few years ago the cholera visited Madrid and
other cities. Physicians were mobbed. Processions of
saints carried the host through the streets for the pur
pose of staying the plague.
The streets were not
cleaned ; the sewers were filled. Filth and faith, old
partners, reigned supreme. The Church, “ eminent for
its sanctity,” stood in the light and cast its shadow on
the ignorant and the prostrate. The Church, in its
“ inexhaustible fruitfulness in all good things,” allowed
its children to perish through ignorance, and used the
�ROME OR REASON ?
I?
diseases it had produced as an instrument to further
enslave its votaries and its victims.
No one will deny that many of its priests exhibited
heroism of the highest order in visiting the sick and
administering what are called the consolations of religion
to the dying, and in burying the dead. It is necessary
neither to deny nor disparage the self-denial and good
ness of these men. But their religion did more than all
other causes to produce the very evils that called for the
exhibition of self-denial and heroism. One scientist in
control of Madrid could have prevented the plague. In
such cases, cleanliness is far better than “ godliness ” ;
science is superior to superstition ; drainage much better
than divinity; therapeutics more excellent than theology.
Goodness is not enough—intelligence is necessary. Faith
is not sufficient, creeds are helpless, and prayers fruitless.
It is admitted that the Catholic Church exists in many
nations ; that it is dominated, at least in a great degree,
by the Bishop of Rome—that it is international in that
sense, and that in that sense it has what may be called
a “ supernational unity.” The same, however, is true of
the Masonic fraternity. It exists in many nations, but
it is not a national body. It is in the same sense extra
national, in the same sense international, and has in the
same sense a supernational unity. So the same may be
said of other societies. This, however, does not tend to
prove that anything supernational is supernatural.
It is also admitted that in faith, worship, ceremonial,
discipline and government, the Catholic’ Church is
substantially the same wherever it exists. This estab
lishes the unity, but not the divinity of the institution.
The church that does not allow investigation, that
teaches that all doubts are wicked, attains unity through
tyranny—that is, monotony by repression. Wherever
man has had something like freedom, differences have
appeared, heresies have taken root, and the divisions
have become permanent. New sects have been born,
and the Catholic Church has been weakened. The
boast of unity is the confession of tyranny.
It is insisted that the unity of the Church substantiates
its claim to divine origin, This is asserted over and over
�i8
ROMS OR REASON ?
again, in many ways ; and yet in the Cardinal’s article is
found this strange mingling of boast and confession:
“ Was it only by the human power of man that the
unity, external and internal, which for fourteen hundred
years had been supreme, was once more restored in the
Council of Constance, never to be broken again ?”
By this it is admitted that the internal and external
unity of the Catholic Church has been broken, and that
it required more than human power to restore it. Then
the boast is made that it will never be broken again.
Yet it is asserted that the internal and external unity of
the Catholic Church is the great fact that demonstrates
its divine origin.
Now if this internal and external unity was broken,
and remained broken for years, there was an interval
during which the Church had no internal or external
unity, and during which the evidence of divine origin
failed. The unity was broken in spite of the Divine
Founder. This is admitted by the use of the word
“ again.” The unbroken unity of the Church is asserted,
and upon this assertion is based the claim of divine
origin ; it is then admitted that the unity was broken.
The argument is then shifted, and the claim is made that
it required more than human power to restore the internal
and external unity of the Church, and that the restora
tion, not the unity, is proof of the divine origin. Is there
any contradiction beyond this ?
Let us state the case in another way. Let us suppose
that a man has a sword which he claims was made by
God, stating that the reason he knows that God made
the sword is that it never had been, and never could be,
broken. Now if it was afterwards ascertained that it had
been broken, and the owner admitted that it had been,
what would be thought of him if he then took the ground
that it had been welded, and that the welding was the
evidence that it was of divine origin?
A prophecy is then indulged in, to the effect that the
internal and external unity of the Church can never be
broken again. It is admitted that it was broken, it is
asserted that it was divinely restored,? and^ then it. is
declared that it is never to be broken again. No reason
�ROME OR REASON ?
19
is given for this prophecy ; it must be born of the facts
already stated, Put in a form to be easily understood, it
is this :—
We know that the unity of the Church can never be
broken, because the Church is of divine origin.
We know that it was broken ; but this does not weaken
the argument, because it was restored by God, and it has
not been broken since.
Therefore, it never can be broken again.
It is stated that the Catholic Church is immutable, and
that its immutability establishes its claim to divine origin,
Was it immutable when its unity, internal and external,
was broken ? Was it precisely the same after its unity
was broken that it was before ? Was it precisely the same
after its unity was divinely restored that it was while
broken ? Was it universal while it was without unity ?
Which of the fragments was universal—which was im
mutable ?
The fact that the Catholic Church is obedient to the
Pope, establishes, not the supernatural origin of the
Church, but the mental slavery of its members. It estab
lishes the fact that it is a successful organisation ; that it
is cunningly devised; that it destroys the mental inde
pendence, and that whoever absolutely submits to its
authority loses the jewel of his soul.
The fact that Catholics are, to a great extent, obedient
to the Pope, establishes nothing except the thoroughness
of the organisation.
How was the Roman Empire formed ? By what means
did that great Power hold in bondage the then known
world ? How is it that a despotism is established ? How
is it that the few enslave the many ? How is it that the
nobility live on the labor of the peasants ? The answer
is in one word—Organisation. The organised few
triumph over the unorganised many. The few hold the
sword and the purse. The unorganised are overcome in
detail—terrorised, brutalised, robbed, conquered.
We must remember that when Christianity was estab
lished the world was ignorant, credulous, and cruel.
The Gospel, with its idea of forgiveness, with its heaven
and hell, was suited to the barbarians among whom it
�ao
ROME OR REASON ?
was preached. Let it be understood, once for all, that
Christ had but little to do with Christianity. The people
became convinced—being ignorant, stupid, and credulous
—that the Church held the keys of heaven and hell.
■ The foundation for the most terrible mental tyranny that
has existed among men was in this way laid. The
Catholic Church enslaved to the extent of its power. It
resorted to every possible form of fraud ; it perverted
every good instinct of the human heart; it rewarded
every vice; it resorted to every artifice that ingenuity
could devise, to reach the highest round of power. It
tortured the accused to make them confess ; it tortured
witnesses to compel the commission of perjury; it tor
tured children for the purpose of making them convict
their parents; it compelled men to establish their own
innocence; it imprisoned without limit; it had the
malicious patience to wait; it left the accused without
trial, and left them in dungeons until released by death.
There is no crime that the Catholic Church did not
commit, no cruelty that it did not practise, no form of
treachery that it did not reward, and no virtue that it did
not persecute. It was the greatest and most powerful
enemy of human rights. It did all that organisation,
cunning, piety, self-denial, heroism, treachery, zeal, and
brute force could do to enslave the children of men. It
was the enemy of intelligence, the assassin of liberty, and
the destroyer of progress. It loaded the noble with
chains and the infamous with honors. In one hand it
carried the alms-dish, in the other a dagger. It argued
with the sword, persuaded with poison, and convinced
with the faggot.
It is impossible to see how the divine origin of a
Church can be established by showing that hundreds of
bishops have visited the Pope.
Does the fact that millions of faithful visit Mecca
establish the truth of the Koran? Is it a scene for
congratulation when the bishops of thirty nations kneel
before a man ? Is it not humiliating to know that man
is willing to kneel at the feet of man ? Could a noble
man demand, or. joyfully receive, the humiliation of his
fellows?
�ROME OR REASON '?
21
As a rule, arrogance and humility go together. .He
who in power compels his fellow-man to kneel, .will him
self kneel when weak. The tyrant is a cringer in power ,
a cringer is a tyrant out of power. Great men stand
face to face. They meet on equal terms. The cardinal
who kneels in the presence of the Pope, wants the bishop
to kneel in his presence; and the bishop who kneels
demands that the priest shall kneel to. him; and the
priest who kneels demands that they in lower orders
shall kneel; and all, from Pope to the lowest—that is to
say, from Pope to exorcist, from Pope to the one in
charge of the bones of saints all demand that the
people, the laymen, those upon whom they live, shall
kneel to them.
The man of free and noble spirit will not kneel.
Courage has no knees. Fear kneels, or falls upon its
ctsh-di
The Cardinal insists that the Pope is the Vicar of
Christ, and that all Popes have been. What is a Vicar
of Jesus Christ ? He is a substitute, in office. He
stands in the place, or occupies the position in relation
to the Church, in relation to the world, that Jesus Christ
would occupy were he the Pope at Rome. In other
words, he takes Christ’s place; so that, according to the
doctrine of the Catholic Church, Jesus Christ himself is
present in the person of the Pope.
We all know that a good man may employ a bad
agent. A good king might leave his realm and put in
his place a tyrant and a wretch. The good man and the
good king cannot certainly know what manner of man
the agent is-—what kind of person the vicar is; conse
quently the bad may be chosen. But if the king
appointed a bad vicar, knowing him to. be bad, knowing
that he would oppress the people, knowing that he would
imprison and burn the noble and generous, what excuse
can be imagined for such a king ?
. .
Now, if the Church is of divine origin, and if each
Pope is the Vicar of Jesus Christ, he must have been
chosen by Jesus Christ", and when he was chosen
Christ must have known exactly what his Vicar would
do. Can we believ^xthat an infinity wise and good
�22
ROME OR REASON r1
Being would choose immoral, dishonest, ignorant,
malicious, heartless, fiendish, and inhuman Vicars ?
The Cardinal admits that “ the history of Christianity
is the history of the Church, and that the history of the
Church is the history of the Pontiffs,” and he then de
clares that “ the greatest statesmen and rulers that the
world has ever seen are the Popes of Rome.”
Let me call attention to a few passages in Draper’s
History of the Intellectual Development of Europe,
“ Constantine was one of the Vicars of Christ. After
wards, Stephen IV. was chosen. The eyes of Constan
tine were then put out by Stephen, acting in Christ’s
place. 1 he tongue of the Bishop Theodorus was
•
amputated by the man who had been substituted for
God. This bishop was left in a dungeon to perish of
thirst. Pope Leo III. was seized in the street and
forced into a church, where the nephew's of Pope Adrian
attempted to put out his eyes and cut off his tongue.
His successor, Stephen V., was driven ignominiously
from Rome. His successor, Paschal I., was accused of
blinding and murdering twro ecclesiastics in the Lateran
Palace. John VIII.,unable to resist the Mohammedans,
was compelled to pay them tribute.
“At this time, the Bishop of Naples was in secret
alliance with the Mohammedans, and they divided with
this Catholic bishop the plunder they collected from
other Catholics. This bishop was excommunicated by
the Pope; afterwards he gave him absolution because
he betrayed the chief Mohammedans, and assassinated
others. There was an ecclesiastical conspiracy to mur
der the Pope, and some of the treasures of the Church
were seized, and the gate of St. Pancrazia was opened
with false keys to admit the Saracens. Formosus, who
had been engaged in these transactions, who had been
excommunicated as a conspirator for the murder of Pope
John, was himself elected Pope in 891. Boniface VI.
was his successor. He had been deposed from the
diaconate and from the priesthood for his immoral and
lewd life. Stephen VII. was the next Pope, and he had
the dead body of Formosus taken from the grave,
clothed in papal habiliments, propped up in a chair and
tried before a Council. The corpse w'as found guilty,
three fingers were cut off, and the body cast into the
Tiber. Afterwards Stephen VII.. this Vicar of Christ,
was thrown into prison and strangled.
�ROME OR REASON ?
23
“ From 896 to 900, five popes were consecrated.
Leo V., in less than two months after he became Pope,
was cast into prison by Christopher, one of his chaplains.
This Christopher usurped his place, and in a little while
was expelled from Rome by Sergius III., who became
Pope in 905. This Pope lived in criminal intercourse
with the celebrated Theodora, who with her daughters
Marozia and Theodora, both prostitutes, exercised an
extraordinary control over him. The love of Theodora
was also shared by John X. She gave him the Arch
bishopric of Ravenna, and made him Pope in 915. The
daughter of Theodora overthrew this Pope. She sur
prised him in the Lateran Palace. His brother, Peter,
was killed; the Pope was thrown into prison, where he
was afterwards murdered. Afterward, this Marozia,
daughter of Theodora, made her own son Pope, John XI.
Many affirmed that Pope Sergius was his father, but his
mother inclined to attribute him to her husband Alberic,
whose brother Guido she afterwards married. Another
of her sons, Alberic, jealous of his brother, John the
Pope, cast him and their mother into prison. Alberic s
son was then elected Pope as John XII.
“John was nineteen years old when he became the
Vicar of Christ. His reign was characterised by the
most shocking immoralities, so that the Emperor Otho I.
was compelled by the German clergy to inteifere. He
was tried. It appeared that John had received bribes
for the consecration of bishops; that he had ordained
one who was only ten years old; that he was charged
with incest, and with so many adulteries that the Lateran
Palace had become a brothel. He put out the eyes of
* one ecclesiastic; he maimed another—both dying in
consequence of their injuries. He was given to drunken
ness and to gambling. He was deposed at last, and
Leo VII. elected in his stead. Subsequently he got the
upper hand. He seized his antagonists ; he cut off the
hand of one, the nose, the finger, and the tongue of
others. His life was eventually brought to an end by
the vengeance of a man whose wife he had seduced.”
And yet,I admit that the most infamous Popes, the
most heartless and fiendish bishops, friars, and priests
were models of mercy, charity, and justice when com
pared with the orthodox God—with the God they wor
shipped. These popes, these bishops, these priests could
persecute only for a few years—they could burn only for
�24
kOME OR REASON ?
a few moments—but their God threatened to imprison
and burn for ever; and their God is as much worse than
they were, as hell is worse than the Inquisition.
“John XIII, was strangled in prison. Boniface VII.
imprisoned Benedict VII., and starved him to death.
John XIV. was secretly put to death in the dungeons of
the castle of St. Angelo. The corpse of Boniface was
dragged by the populace through the streets.”
It must be remembered that the popes were assassin
ated by Catholics—murdered by the faithful; that one
Vicar of Christ strangled another Vicar of Christ, and
that these men were “ the greatest rulers and the
greatest statesmen of the earth.”
“ Pope John XVI. was seized, his eyes put out, his
nose cut off, his tongue torn from his mouth, and he was
sent through the streets mounted on an ass, with his
face to the tail. Benedict IX., a boy of less than
twelye years of age, was raised to the apostolic throne.
One of his successors, Victor III., declared that the life
of Benedict was so shameful, so foul, so execrable, that
he shuddered to describe it. He ruled like a captain of
banditti. The people, unable to bear longer his
adulteries, his homicides and his abominations, rose
against him, and in despair of maintaining his position,
he put up his papacy to auction, and it was bought by a
Presbyter named John, who became Gregory VI., in the
year of grace 1045. Well may we ask, Were these the
Vicegerents of God upon earth—these, who had truly
reached that goal beyond which the last effort of human
wickedness cannot pass?”
It may be sufficient to say that there is no crime that
man can commit that has not been committed by the
Vicars of Christ. They have inflicted every possible
torture, violated every natural right. Greater monsters
the human race has not produced.
Among the “some two hundred and fifty-eight”
Vicars of Christ there were probably some good men.
This would have happened even if the intention had
been to get all bad men, for the reason that man reaches
perfection neither in good nor in evil; but if they were
selected by Christ himself, if they were selected by a
Church with a divine origin and under divine guidance,
then there is no way to account for the selection of a
�roMe or
Reason?
25
bad one. If one hypocrite was duly elected Pope—one
murderer, one strangler, one starver—this demonstrates
that all the Popes were selected by men, and by men
only, that the claim of divine guidance is born of zeal
and uttered without knowledge.
But who were the Vicars of Christ ? How many
have there been ? Cardinal Manning himself does not
know. He is not sure. He says : “ Starting from St.
Peter to Leo. XIII., there have been some two hundred
and fifty-eight Pontiffs claiming to be recognised by the
whole Catholic unity as successors of St. Peter and
Vicars of Jesus Christ.” Why did he use the word
“some”? Why “claiming”? Does he positively
know ? Is it possible that the present Vicar of Christ is
not certain as to the number of his predecessors ? Is
he infallible in faith and fallible in fact ?
PART II.
“ If we live thus tamely—
To be thus jaded by a piece of scarlet—
Farewell nobility.”
No one will deny that “ the Pope speaks to many people
in many nations; that he treats with empires and
governments,” and that “neither from Canterbury nor
from Constantinople such a voice goes forth.”
How does the Pope speak ? What does he say ?
He speaks against the liberty of man—against the
progress of the human race. He speaks to calumniate
thinkers, and to warn the faithful against the discoveries
of science. He speaks for the destruction of civilisa
tion.
Who listens ? Do astronomers, geologists, and
scientists put the hand to the ear, fearing that an accent
�26
Rome or reason ?
may be lost ? Does France listen ? Does Italy hear ?
Is not the Church weakest at its centre ? Do those
who have raised Italy from the dead, and placed her
again among the great nations, pay attention ? Does
Great Britain care for this voice—this moan, this groan
—of the Middle Ages? Do the words of Leo XIII.
impress the intelligence of the Great Republic ? Can
anything be more absurd than for the Vicar of Christ to
attack a demonstration of science with a passage of
Scripture, or a quotation from one of the “ Fathers ” ?
Compare the popes with the kings and queens of
England. Infinite wisdom had but little to do with the
selection of these monarchs, and yet they were far better
than any equal number of consecutive popes. This is
faint praise, even for kings and queens ; but it shows
that chance succeeded in getting better rulers for England
than “ Infinite Wisdom ” did for the Church of Rome.
Compare the popes with the presidents of the Republic
elected by the people. If Adams had murdered
Washington, and Jefferson had imprisoned Adams, and
if Madison had cut out Jefferson’s tongue, and Monroe
had assassinated Madison, and John Quincey Adams had
poisoned Monroe, and General Jackson had hung Adams
and his Cabinet, we might say that presidents had been
as virtuous as popes. But if this had happened the
verdict of the world would be that the people are not
capable of selecting their presidents.
But this voice from Rome is growing feeble day by
day ; so feeble that the Cardinal admits that the Vicar
of God and the supernatural Church “are being tor
mented by Falck laws, by Mancini laws, and by Crispi
laws.” In other words, this representative of God, this
substitute of Christ, this Church of divine origin, this
supernatural institution—pervaded by the Holy Ghost—
are being “ tormented ” by three politicians. Is it pos
sible that this patriotic trinity is more powerful than the
other ?
It is claimed that if the Catholic Church “ be only a
human system, built up by the intellect, will, and energy
of men, the adversaries must prove it—that the burden
is upon them.”
�ROME OR REASON ?
As a general thing, institutions are natural. If this
Church is supernatural, it is the one exception. The
affirmative is with those who claim that it is of divine
origin. So far as we know, all governments and all
creeds are the work of man. No one believes that Rome
was a supernatural production, and yet its beginnings
were as small as those of the Catholic Church. Com
mencing in weakness, Rome grew, and fought, and con
quered, until it was believed that the sky bent above a
subjugated world. And yet all was natural. For every
effect there was an efficient cause.
The Catholic asserts that all other religions have been
produced by man—that Brahminism and Buddhism, the
religion of Isis and Osiris, the marvellous mythologies
of Greece and Rome, were the work of the human mind.
From these religions Catholicism has borrowed. Long
before Catholicism was born it w’as believed that women
had borne children whose fathers were gods. The Trinity
was promulgated in Egypt centuries before the birth of
Moses. Celibacy was taught by the ancient Nazarenes
and Essenes, by the priests of Egypt and India, by
mendicant monks, and by the piously insane of many
countries long before the Apostles lived. The Chinese
tell us that “ when there were but one man and one
woman upon the earth, the woman refused to sacrifice
her virginity even to people the globe ; and the gods,
honoring her purity, granted that she should conceive
beneath the gaze of her lover’s eyes, and a virgin mother
became the parent of humanity.”
The founders of many religions have insisted that it
was the duty of man to renounce the pleasures of sense,
and millions before our era took the vows of chastity,
poverty, and obedience, and most cheerfully lived upon
the labor of others.
The sacraments of baptism and confirmation are far
older than the Church of Rome. The Eucharist is
Pagan. Long before Popes began to murder each
other, Pagans ate cakes—the flesh of Ceres, and drank
wine—the blood of Bacchus. Holy water flowed in the
Ganges and Nile, priests interceded for the people, and
anointed the dying.
It will not do to say that every successful religion that
�28
ROME OR REASON ?
has taught unnatural doctrines, unnatural practices, must
of necessity have been of divine origin. In most reli
gions there has been a strange mingling of the good and
bad, of the merciful and cruel, of the loving and
malicious. Buddhism taught the universal brotherhood
of man, insisted on the development of the mind ; and
this religion was propagated, not by the sword, but by
preaching, by persuasion, and kindness ; yet in many
things it was contrary to the human will, contrary to the
human passions, and contrary to good sense. Buddhism
succeeded. Can we, for this reason, say that it is a super
natural religion ? Is the. unnatural the supernatural ?
It is insisted that, while other Churches have changed,
the Catholic Church alone has remained the same, and
that this fact demonstrates its divine origin.
Has the creed of Buddhism changed in three thousand
years ? Is intellectual stagnation a demonstration of
divine origin ? When anything refuses to grow, are we
certain that the seed was planted by God ? If the
Catholic Church is the same to-day that it has been for
many centuries, this proves that there has been no intel
lectual development. If men do not differ Upon religious
subjects, it is because they do not think.
Differentiation is the law of growth, of progress.
Every Church must gain or lose ; it cannot remain the
same ; it must decay or grow. The fact that the Catholic
Church has not grown—that it has been petrified from
the first—does not establish divine origin ; it simply
establishes the fact that it retards the progress of man.
Everything in nature changes ; every atom is in motion;
every star moves. Nations, institutions, and individuals
have youth, manhood, old age, death. This is, and will
be, true of the Catholic Church. It was once weak; it
grew stronger ; it reached its climax of power ; it began
to decay ; it can never rise again. It is confronted by
the dawn of Science. In the presence of the nineteenth
century it cowers.
It is not true that “ All natural causes run to disinte
gration.”
Natural causes run to integration as well as to dis
integration. All growth is integration, and all growth is
natural.
All decay is disintegration, and all decay is
�ROME OR REASON ?
29
natural. Nature builds and nature destroys. When
the acorn grows—when the sunlight and rain fall upon
it, and the oak rises—so far as the oak is concerned “all
natural causes” do not “run to disintegration.” But
there comes a time when the oak has reached its limit,
and then the forces of nature run towards disintegration,
and finally the. old oak falls. But if the Cardinal is
right, if “ all natural causes run to disintegration,” then
every success must have been of divine origin, and
nothing is natural but destruction. This, is Catholic
science: “All natural causes run to disintegration.’
What do these causes find to disintegrate? Nothing
that is natural. -The fact that the thing is not disinte
grated shows that it was, and is, of supernatural origin.
According to the Cardinal, the only business of nature
is to disintegrate the supernatural. To prevent this, the
supernatural needs the protection of the Infinite. Accord
ing to this doctrine, if anything lives and grows, it does
so in spite of nature. Growth, then, is not in accord
ance with, but in opposition to, nature. Every plant is
supernatural—it defeats the disintegrating influences of
rain and light. The generalisation of the Cardinal is
half the truth. It would be. equally true to say : All
natural causes run to integration.” But the whole truth
is that growth and decay are equal.
The Cardinal asserts that “ Christendom was created
by the world-wide Church as we see it before our eyes
at this day. Philosophers and statesmen believe it to
be the work of their own hands; they did not make it,
but they have for three hundred years been unmaking it
by reformations and revolutions.”
The meaning of this is that Christendom was far better
three hundred years ago than now ; that during these
three centuries Christendom has been going towards
barbarism. It means that the supernatural Church of
God has been a failure for three hundred years; that it
has been unable to withstand the attacks of philosophers
and statesmen, and that it has been helpless in the midst
of “ reformations and revolutions.”
What was the condition of the world three hundred
years ago, the period, according to the Cardinal, in which
the Church reached the height of its influence and since
�3°
ROME OR REASON ?
which it has been unable to withstand the rising tide of
reformation and the whirlwind of revolution ?
In that blessed time Phillip II. was King of Spain—he
with the cramped head and the monstrous jaw. Heretics
were hunted like wild and poisonous beasts ; the Inquisi
tion was firmly established, and priests were busy with
rack and fire. With a zeal born of the hatred of man
and the love of God, the Church with every instrument
of torture, touched every nerve in the human body.
In those happy days the Duke of Alva was devasta
ting the homes of Holland ; heretics were buried alive;
their tongues were torn from their mouths, their lids
from their eyes; the Armada was on the sea for the
destruction of the heretics of England, and the
Moriscoes, a million and a half of industrious people,
were being driven by sword and flame from their homes.
The Jews had been expelled from Spain. This Catholic
country had succeeded in driving intelligence and industry
from its territory; and this had been done with a cruelty,
with a ferocity, unequalled in the annals of crime.
Nothing was left but ignorance, bigotry, intolerance,
credulity, the Inquisition, the seven sacraments and the
seven deadly sins. And yet a Cardinal of the nine
teenth century, living in the land of Shakespeare, regrets
the change that has been wrought by the intellectual
efforts, by the discoveries, by the inventions and heroism
of three hundred years.
Three hundred years ago, under Charles IX., in France,
son of Catherine de Medici, in the year of grace 1572—
after nearly sixteen centuries of Catholic Christianity—
after hundreds of vicars of Christ had sat in St. Peter’s
chair—after the natural passions of man had been
“softened” by the creed of Rome—came the Massacre of
St. Bartholomew, the result of a conspiracy between the
Vicar of Christ, Philip II., Charles IX., and his fiendish
mother. Let the Cardinal read the account of this massacre
once more, and after reading it, imagine that he sees the
gashed and mutilated bodies of thousands of men and
women, and then let him say that he regrets the revolu
tions and reformations of three hundred years.
About three hundred years ago Clement VIII., Vicar
of Christ, acting in God’s place, substitute of the
�ROME OR REASON ?
31
Infinite, persecuted Giordano Bruno even unto death,
This great, this sublime man, was tried for heresy. He
had ventured to assert the rotary motion of the earth ;
he had hazarded the conjecture that there were in the
fields of infinite space worlds larger and more glorious
than ours. For these low and groveling thoughts, for
this contradiction of the word and Vicar of God, this
man was imprisoned for many years. But his noble
spirit was not broken, and finally in the year 1600, by
the orders of the infamous Vicar, he was chained to the
stake. Priests believing in the doctrine of universal
forgiveness; priests who when smitten upon one cheek
turned the other ; carried with a kind of ferocious joy
faggots to the feet of this incomparable man. These
disciples of “ Our Lord ” were made joyous as the
flames, like serpents, climbed around the body of Bruno.
In a few moments the brave thinker was dead, and the
priests who had burned him fell upon their knees and
asked the infinite God to continue the blessed work for
ever in hell.
There are two things that cannot exist in the same
universe—an infinite God and a martyr.
Does the Cardinal regret that kings and emperors are
not now engaged in the extermination of Protestants ?
Does he regret that dungeons of the Inquistion are no
longer crowded with the best and bravest ? Does he
long for the fires of the auto da fe ?
In coming to a conclusion as to the origin of the
Catholic Church ; in determining the truth of the claim
of infallibility, we are not restricted to the physical
achievements of that Church, or to the history of its
propagation, or to the rapidity of its growth.
This Church has a creed ; and if this Church is of
divine origin ; if its head is the Vicar of Christ, and, as
such, infallible in matters of faith and morals, this creed
must be true. Let us start with the supposition that
God exists, and that he is infinitely wise, powerful and
good—-and this is only a supposition. Now, if the creed
is foolish, absurd and cruel, it cannot be of divine origin.
We find in this creed, the following:
“ Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is
necessary that he hold the Catholic faith,”
�32
ROME OR REASON ?
It is not necessary, before all things, that he be good,
honest, merciful, charitable and just. Creed is more
important than conduct. The most important of all
things is, that he hold the Catholic faith. There were
thousands of years during which it was not necessary to
hold that faith, because that faith did not exist; and yet
during that time the virtues were just as important as
now, just as important as they ever can be. Millions of
the noblest of the human race never heard of this
creed. Millions of the bravest and best have heard of
it, examined, and rejected it. Millions of the most
infamous have believed it, and because of their belief, or
notwithstanding their belief, have murdered millions of
their fellows. We know that men can be, have been,
and are just as wicked with it as without it. We know
that it is not necessary to believe it to be good, loving,
tender, noble, and self-denying.
We admit that
millions who have believed it have also been self
denying and heroic, and that millions, by such belief,
were not prevented from torturing and destroying the
helpless.
Now if all who believed it were good, and all who
rejected it were bad, then there might be some propriety
in saying that “whosoever will be saved,before all things
it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith.” But as
the experience of mankind is otherwise, the declaration
becomes absurd, ignorant and cruel.
There is still another clause :
“ Which faith, except everyone do keep entire and
inviolate, without doubt he shall everlastingly perish.”
We now have both sides of this wonderful truth:
The believer will be saved, the unbeliever will be lost.
We know that faith is not the child or servant of the
will. We know that belief is a conclusion based upon
what the mind supposes to be true. We know that it is
not an act of the will. Nothing can be more absurd
than to save a man because he is not intelligent enough
to accept the truth, and nothing can be more infamous
than to damn a man because he is intelligent enough to
reject the false. It resolves itself into a question of
intelligence. If the creed is true, then a man rejects it
because he lacks intelligence. Is this a crime for which
�ROME
or reason
?
33
a man should everlastingly perish ? If the creed is
false, then a man accepts it because he lacks intelligence.
In. both cases the crime is exactly the same. If a man
is to be damned for rejecting the truth, certainly he
should not be saved for accepting the false. _ This one
clause demonstrates that a being of infinite wisdom and
goodness did not write it. It also demonstrates that it
was the work of men who had neither wisdom nor a
sense of justice.
.
What is this Catholic faith that must be held ? It is
this:
’
...
„ . .
u That we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity m
Unity, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the
substance.”
Why should an Infinite Being demand worship ?
Why should one God wish to be worshipped as three ?
Why should three Gods wish to be worshipped as
one ? Why should we pray to one God and think of
three, or pray to three Gods and think of one ? Can
this increase the happiness of the one or of the three ?
Is it possible to think of one as three, or of three as one ?
If you think of three as one, can you think of one as
none, or of none as one ? When you think of three as
one, what do you do with the other two? You must not
“ confound the persons ”—they must be kept separate.
When you think of one as three, how do you get the
other two ? You must not “ divide the substance.
Is
it possible to write greater contradictions than these ?
This creed demonstrates the human origin of the
Catholic Church. Nothing could be more unjust than to
punish man for unbelief—for the expression of honest
thought—for having been guided by his reason for
having acted in accordance with his best judgment.
Another claim is made, to the effect “ that the Catholic
Church has filled the world with the true knowledge of
the one true God, and that it has destroyed all idols by
light instead of by fire.”
The Catholic Church described the true God as a being
who would inflict eternal pain on his weak and erring
children ; described him as a fickle, quick-tempered, un
reasonable deity, whom honesty enraged, and whom
flattery governed; one who loved to see fear upon its
�34
Rome or reason ?
knees, ignorance with closed eyes and open mouth ; one
who delighted in useless self-denial, who loved to’hear
the sighs and sobs of suffering nuns, as they lay prostrate
on dungeon floors; one who was delighted when the
husband deserted his family and lived alone in some cave
in the far wilderness, tormented by dreams and driven
to insanity by prayer and penance, by fasting and faith.
According to the Catholic Church, the true God enjoyed
the agonies of heretics. He loved the smell of their
burning flesh, he applauded with wide palms when
philosophers were flayed alive, and to him the auto da fc
was a divine comedy. The shrieks of wives, the cries
of babes, when fathers were being burned, gave contrast,
heightened the effect, and filled his cup with joy. This
true God did not know the shape of the earth he had
made, and had forgotten the orbits of the stars. “ The
stream of light which descended from the beginning ”
was propagated by faggot to faggot, until Christendom
was filled with the devouring fires of faith.
It may also be said that the Catholic Church filled the
world with the true knowledge of the one true Devil. It
filled the air with malicious phantoms, crowded innocent
sleep with leering fiends, and gave the world to the
domination of witches and wizards, spirits and spooks,
goblins and ghosts, and butchered and burned thousands
for the commission of impossible crimes.
It is contended that: “ In this true knowledge of the
Divine Nature was revealed to men their own relation
to a Creator as sons to a Father.”
This tender relation was revealed by the Catholics to
the Pagans, the Arians, the Cathari, the Waldenses, the
Albigenses, the heretics, the Jews, the Moriscoes, the
Protestants—to the natives of the West Indies, of
Mexico, of Peru—to philosophers, patriots, and thinkers.
All these victims were taught to regard the true God as
a loving Father, and this lesson was taught with every
instrument of torture—with branding and burnings,
with flayings and flames. The world was filled with
cruelty and credulity, ignorance and intolerance, and the
soil in which all these horrors grew was the true know
ledge of the one true God, and the true knowledge of
the one true Devil. And yet we are compelled to say
�ROME OR REASON ?
35
that the one true Devil described by the Catholic Church
was not as malevolent as the one true God.
Is it true that the Catholic Church overthrew idolatry ?
What is idolatry ? What shall we say of the worship
of popes, of the doctrine of the Real Presence, of divine
honors paid to saints, of sacred vestments, of holy water,
of consecrated cups and plates, of images and relics, of
amulets and charms ?
.
The Catholic Church filled the world with the spirit of
idolatry. It abandoned the idea of continuity in nature,
it denied the integrity of cause and effect. The govern
ment of the world was the composite result of the caprice
of God, the malice of Satan, the prayers of the faithful—
softened, it may be, by the charity of Chance. Yet the
Cardinal asserts, without the preface of a smile, that
“ Demonology was overthrown by the Church, with the
assistance of forces that were above nature
and in the
same breath gives birth to this enlightened statement:
“ Beelzebub is not divided against himself.” Is a belief
in Beelzebub a belief in demonology ? Has the Cardinal
forgotten the Council of Nice, held in the year of grace
787, that declared the worship of images to be lawful ?
Did that infallible Council, under the guidance of the
Holy Ghost, destroy idolatry ?
The Cardinal takes the ground that marriage is a
sacrament, and therefore indissoluble, and he also insists
that celibacy is far better than marriage—holier than a
sacrament—that marriage is not the highest state, but
that “the state of virginity unto death is the highest
condition of man and woman.”
The highest ideal of a family is where all are equal—
where love has superseded authority—where each seeks
the good of all, and where none obey—where no religion
can sunder hearts, and with which no church can
interfere.
The real marriage is based on mutual affection—the
ceremony is but the outward evidence of the inward
flame. To this contract there are but two parties. The
Church is an impudent intruder. Marriage is made
public to the end that the real contract may be known,
so that the world can see that the parties have been
actuated by the highest and holiest motives that find
�36
ROME OR REASON?
expression in the acts of human beings. The man and
woman are not joined together by God, or by the
Church, or by the State. The Church and State may
prescribe certain ceremonies, certain formalities; but all
these are only evidence of the existence of a sacred fact
in the hearts of the wedded. The indissolubility of
marriage is a dogma that has filled the lives of millions
with agony and tears. It has given a perpetual excuse
for vice and immorality. Fear has borne children
begotten by brutality. Countless women have endured
the insults, indignities and cruelties of fiendish husbands,
because they thought that it was the will of God. The
contract of marriage is the most important that human
beings can make ; but no contract can be so important
as to release one of the parties from the obligation of
performance; and no contract, whether made between
man and woman, or between them and God, after a
failure of consideration caused by the wilful act of the man
or woman, can hold and bind the innocent and honest.
Do the believers in indissoluble marriage treat their
wives better than others ? A little while ago a woman
said to a man who had raised his hand to strike her,
“ Do not touch me; you have no right to beat me ; I
am not your wife.”
About a year ago a husband, whom God in his infinite
wisdom had joined to a loving and patient woman in
the indissoluble sacrament of marriage, becoming en
raged, seized the helpless wife and tore out one of her
eyes. She forgave him. A few weeks ago he deliber
ately repeated this frightful crime, leaving his victim
totally blind. Would it not have been better if man,
before the poor woman was blinded, had put asunder
whom God had joined together ?
Thousands of
husbands, who insist that marriage is indissoluble, are
beaters of wives.
The law of the Church has created neither the purity
nor the peace of domestic life. Back of all Churches is
human affection. Back of all theologies is the love of
the human heart. Back of all your priests and creeds is
the adoration of the one woman by the one man, and of
the one man by the one woman. Back of your faith is
the fireside, back of your folly is the family ; and
�ROME OR REASON ?
37
back of all your holy mistakes and your sacred ab
surdities is the love of husband and wife, and of parent
and child.
It is not true that neither the Greek nor the Roman
world had any true conception of a home. The splendid
story of Ulysses and Penelope, the parting of Hector and
Andromache, demonstrate that a true conception, of
home existed among the Greeks. Before the establish
ment of Christianity the Roman matron commanded the
admiration of the then known world. She was free and
noble. The Church degraded woman, made her the
property of the husband, and trampled her beneath its
brutal feet. The “fathers” denounced woman as a
perpetual temptation, as the cause of all evil. The
Church worshipped a God who had upheld polygamy,
and had pronounced his curse on woman, and had
declared that she should be the serf of the husband.
This Church followed the teachings of St. Paul. It
taught the uncleanliness of marriage, and insisted that
all children were conceived in sin. This Church pre
tended to have been founded by one who offered a
reward in this world, and eternal joy in the next, to
husbands who would forsake their wives and children
and follow him. Did this tend to the elevation of
woman ? Did this detestable doctrine “ create the purity
and peace of domestic life ? ” Is it true that a monk is
purer than a good and noble father ? that a nun is holier
than a loving mother ?
Is there anything deeper and stronger than a mother s
love ? Is there anything purer, holier than a mother
holding her dimpled babe against her billowed breast ?
The good man is useful, the best man is the most
useful. Those who fill the nights with barren prayers
and holy hunger, torture themselves for their own good
and not for the benefit of others. They are earning
eternal glory for themselves ; they do not fast for their
fellow-men, their selfishness is only equalled by their
foolishness. Compare the monk in his selfish cell,
counting beads and saying prayers for the purpose, of
saving his barren soul, with a husband and father sitting
by his fireside with wife and children. Compare the
nun with the mother and her babe.
�38
ROME OR REASON ?
Celibacy is the essence of vulgarity. It tries to put a
stain upon motherhood, upon marriage, upon love_ that
is to say, upon all that is holiest in the human heart.
Take love from the world, and there is nothing left
worth living for. The Church. has treated this great,
this sublime, this unspeakably holy passion, as though it
polluted the heart. They have placed the love of God
above the love of woman, above the love of man.
Human love is generous and noble. The love of God is
selfish, because man does not love God for God’s sake
but for his own.
Yet the Cardinal asserts “ that the change wrought
by Christianity in the social, political, and international
relations of the world the root of this ethical change,
private and public, is the Christian home.” A moment
afterwards, this prelate insists that celibacy is far
better than marriage. If the world could be induced
to live, in accordance with the “highest state,” this
generation would be the last. Why were men and
women created ? Why did not the Catholic God com
mence with the sinless and sexless ? The Cardinal
ought to take the ground that to talk well is good, but
that to be dumb is the highest condition ; that hearing
is a pleasure, but that deafness is ecstasy ; and that to
think, to reason, is very well, but that to be a Catholic
is far better.
Why should we desire the destruction of human
passions ? Take passions from human beings, and
what is left? The great object should be, not to
destroy passions, but to make them obedient to the
intellect. To indulge passion to the utmost is one form
of intemperance, to destroy passion is another. The
reasonable gratification of passion under the domination
of the intellect is true wisdom and perfect virtue.
The goodness, the sympathy, the self-denial of the
nun, of the monk, all come from the mother instinct, the
father instinct; all were produced by human affection—
by the love of man for woman, of woman for man. Love
is a transfiguration. It ennobles, purifies, and glorifies.
In true marriage two hearts burst into flower. Two
lives unite. They melt in music. Every moment is a
�KOi\iE OR REASON '?
39
melody. Love is a revelation, a creation. From love
the world borrows its beauty and the heavens their glory.
Justice, self-denial, charity, and pity are the children of
love. Lover, wife, mother, husband, father, child, home
—these words shed light; they are the gems of human
speech. Without love all glory fades, the noble falls
from life, art dies, music loses meaning and becomes
mere motions of the air, and virtue ceases to exist.
It is asserted that this life of celibacy is above and
against the tendencies of human nature; and the Car
dinal then asks: “ Who will ascribe this to natural
causes, and, if so, why did it not appear in the first four
thousand years ?”
If there is in a system of religion"a doctrine, a dogma,
or a practice against the tendencies of human nature
if this religion succeeds, then it is claimed by the
Cardinal that such religion must be of divine origin. Is
it 11 against the tendencies of human nature for a
mother to throw her child into the Ganges to please a
supposed god ? Yet a religion that insisted on that
sacrifice succeeded, and has, to-day, more believers than
the Catholic Church can boast.
Religions, like nations and individuals, have always
gone along the line of least resistance. Nothing has
“ ascended the stream of human license by a power
mightier than nature.” There is no such power. There
never was, there never can be, a miracle. We know
that man is a conditioned being. We know that he is
affected by a change of conditions. If he is ignorant he
is superstitious—that is natural. If his brain is developed,
if he perceives clearly that all things are naturally pro
duced, he ceases to be superstitious and becomes scien
tific. He is not a saint, but a savant—not a priest, but
a philosopher. He does not worship, he works; he inves
tigates ; he thinks; he takes advantage, through
intelligence, of the forces of nature. He is no longer
the victim of appearances, the dupe of his own ignorance,
and the persecutor of his fellow-men.
He then knows that it is far better to love his wife
and children than to love God. He then knows that the
love of man for woman, of woman for man, of parent
for child, of child for parent, is far better, far holier, than
�4°
fear10^
ROME OR REASON ?
phantom born of ignorance and
It is illogical to take the ground that the world was
cruel and ignorant and idolatrous when the Catholic
Church was established, and that because the world is
better now than then, the Church is of divine origin.
.What was the world when science came ? What was
it in the days of Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler ? What
was it when printing was invented ? What was it when
the Western World was found ? Would it not be much
easier to prove that science is of divine origin ?
. Science does not persecute. It does not shed blood—
it fills the world with light. It cares nothing for heresy;
it develops the mind, and enables man to answer his
own prayers.
Cardinal Manning takes the ground that Jehovah
practically abandoned the children of men for four
thousand years, and gave them over to every -abomina
tion. He claims that Christianity came “ in the fulness
of time,” and it is then admitted that “ what the fulness
of time may mean is one of the mysteries of times and
seasons that it is not for us to know.” Having declared
that it is a mystery, and one that we are not to know,
the Cardinal explains it: “One motive for the long
delay of four thousand years is not far to seek—it gave
time, full and ample, for the utmost development and
consolidation of all the falsehood and evil of which the
intellect and will of man is capable.”
Is it possible to imagine why an infinitely good and
wise being “ gave time full and ample for the utmost
development and consolidation of falsehood and evil ”?
Why should an infinitely wise God desire this develop
ment and consolidation ? What would be thought of a
father who should refuse to teach his son and deliberately
allow him to go into every possible excess, to the end
that he might “ develop all the falsehood and evil of
which his intellect and will were capable ”? If a super
natural religion is a necessity, and if without it all men
simply develop and consolidate falsehood and evil, why
was not a supernatural religion given to the first man ?
The Catholic Church, if this be true, should have been
founded in the garden of Eden. Was it not cruel to
�ROME OR REASON ?
4*
drown a world just for the want of a supernatural
religion ; a religion that man, by no possibility, could
furnish ? Was there “ husbandry in heaven ?
But the Cardinal contradicts himself by not only
admitting, but declaring, that the world had never seen
a legislation so just, so equitable, as that of Rome. Is
it possible that a nation in which falsehood and evil had
reached their highest development was, after all, so wise,
so just, and so equitable ? Was not the civil law far
better than the Mosaic—more philosophical, nearer just?
The civil law was produced without the assistance of God.
According to the Cardinal, it was produced by men in
whom all the falsehood and evil of which they were
capable had been developed and consolidated, while the
cruel and ignorant Mosaic code came from the lips of
infinite wisdom and compassion.
It is declared that the history of Rome shows what
man can do without God, and I assert that the history
of the Inquisition shows what man can do when assisted
by a church of divine origin, presided over by the
infallible vicars of God.
The fact that the early Christians not only believed
incredible things, but persuaded others of their truth, is
regarded by the Cardinal as a miracle. This is only
another phase of the old argument that success is the
test of divine origin. All supernatural religions have
been founded in precisely the same way. The credulity
of eighteen hundred years ago believed everything
except the truth.
A religion is a growth, and is of necessity adapted in
some degree to the people among whom it grows. It is
shaped and moulded by the general ignorance, the
superstition and credulity of the age in which it lives.
The key is fashioned by the lock. Every religion that
has succeeded has in some way supplied the wants of its
votaries, and has to a certain extent harmonised with
their hopes, their fears, their vices, and their virtues.
If, as the Cardinal says, the religion of .Christ is in
absolute harmony with nature, how can it be super
natural ? The Cardinal also declares that “ the religion
of Christ is in harmony with the reason and moral
nature in all nations and all ages to this day.” What
�42
Rome
or reason
?
becomes of the argument that Catholicism must be of
divine origin because “ it has ascended the stream of
human license, contra ictum fluminis, by a power mightier
than nature ? If “ it is in harmony with the reason and
moral nature of all nations and ages to this day,” it
has gone with the stream, and not against it. If “ the
religion of Christ is in harmony with the reason and
moral nature of all nations,” then the men who have
rejected it are unnatural, and these men have gone
against the stream. How then can it be said that
Christianity has been in changeless opposition to nature
as man has marred it? To what extent has man
marred it ? In spite of the marring by man, we are
told that the reason and moral nature of all nations in all
aqres to this day is ip harmony with, the religion of Jesus
Christ.
J
Are we justified in saying that the Catholic Church is
of divine origin because the Pagans failed to destroy it
by persecution ?
We will put the Cardinal’s statement in form :
Paganism failed to destroy Catholicism by persecution,
therefore Catholicism is of divine origin.
Let us make an application of this logic:
Paganism failed to destroy Catholicism by persecution;
therefore, Catholicism is of divine origin.
Catholicism failed to destroy Protestantism by per
secution ; therefore, Protestantism is of divine origin.
Catholicism and Protestantism combined failed to
destroy Infidelity ; therefore, Infidelity is of divine
origin.
Let us make another application :
Paganism did not succeed in destroying Catholicism ;
therefore, Paganism was a false religion.
Catholicism did not succeed in destroying Protestant
ism ; therefore, Catholicism is a false religton.
Catholicism and Protestantism combined failed to
destroy Infidelity ; therefore, both Catholicism and Pro
testantism are false religions.
The Cardinal has another reason for believing the
Catholic Church of divine origin. He declares that the
“ Canon Law is a creation of wisdom and justice to
which no statutes at large or imperial pandects can
�ROME OR REASON ?
43
bear comparison ” ; that “ the world-wide and secular
legislation of the -Church was of a higher character, and
that as water cannot rise above its source, the Church
could not, by mere human wisdom, have corrected and
perfected the imperial law, and therefore its source must
have been higher than the sources of the world.”
When Europe was the most ignorant, the Canon Law
was supreme. As a matter of fact, the good in the
Canon Law was borrowed—the bad was, for the most
part, original. In my judgment, the legislation of the
Republic of the United States is in many respects
superior to that of Rome, and yet we are greatly indebted
to the Common Law; but it never occurred to me that
our Statutes at Large are divinely inspired.
If the Canon Law is, in fact, the legislation of infinite
wisdom, then it should be a perfect code. Yet the
Canon Law made it a crime next to robbery and theft
to take interest for money. Without the right to take
interest the business of the world would, to a large
extent, cease and the prosperity of mankind end. There
are railways enough in the United States to make six
tracks around the globe, and every mile was built with
borrowed money on which interest was paid or promised.
In no other way could the savings of many thousands
have been brought together and a capital great enough
formed to construct works of such vast and continental
importance.
It was provided in this same wonderful Canon Law
that a heretic could not be a witness against a Catholic.
The Catholic was at liberty to rob and wrong his fellow
man, provided the fellow man was not a fellow Catholic,
and in a court established by the Vicar of Christ, the
man who had been robbed was not allowed to open his
mouth. A Catholic could enter the house of an un
believer, of a Jew, of a heretic, of a Moor, and before
the eyes of the husband and father murder his wife and
children and the father could not pronounce in the hear
ing of a judge the name of the murderer. The world is
wiser now, and the Canon Law, given to us by infinite
wisdom, has been repealed by the common sense of man.
In this divine code it was provided that to convict a
�44
ROME OR REASON ?
cardinal bishop, seventy-two witnesses were required ; a
cardinal presbyter, forty-four; a cardinal deacon, twentyfour . a sub-deacon, acolyth, exorcist, reader, ostiarus,
seven ; and in the purgation of a bishop, twelve wit
nesses were invariably required; of a presbyter, seven ;
of a deacon, three. These laws, in my judgment, were
made, not by God, but by the clergy.
So, too, in this cruel code it was provided that those
who gave aid, favor, or counsel to excommunicated
persons should be anathema, and that those who talked
with, consulted, or sat at the same table with, or gave
anything in charity to the excommunicated, should be
anathema.
Is it possible that a being of infinite wisdom made
hospitality a crime ? Did he say: “Whoso giveth a cup
of cold water to the excommunicated shall wear forever
a garment of fire ? ” Were not the laws of the Romans
much better ? Besides all this, under the Canon Law
the dead could be tried for heresy, and their estates con
fiscated that is to say, their widowsand orphans robbed.
The most brutal part of the common law of England is
that in relation to the right of woman—all of which was
taken from the Corpus Juris Canonici, “ the law that
came from a higher source than man.”
The only cause of absolute divorce as laid down by
the pious canonists was propter infidelitatem, which was
when one of the parties became Catholic, and would
not live with the other who continued still an unbe
liever. Under this divine statute, a pagan wishing to be
rid of his wife had only to join the Catholic Church,
provided she remained faithful to the religion of her
fathers. Under this divine law, a man marrying a
widow was declared to be a bigamist.
It would require volumes to point out the cruelties,
absurdities, and inconsistencies of the Canon Law. It
has. been thrown away by the world. Every civilised
nation has a code of its own, and the Canon Law is of
interest only to the historian, the antiquary, and the
enemy of theological government.
Under the Canon Law, people were convicted of
being witches and wizards, of holding intercourse with
�ROME OR REASON ?
45
devils. Thousands perished at the stake, having been
convicted of these impossible crimes. Under the Canon
Law, there was such a crime as the suspicion of heresy.
A man or woman could be arrested, charged with being
suspected, and under this Canon Law, flowing from the
intellect of infinite wisdom, the presumption was in favor
of guilt. The suspected had to prove themselves inno
cent. In all civilised courts, the presumption of inno
cence is the shield of the indicted ; but the Canon Law
took away this shield, and put in the hand of the priest
the sword of presumptive guilt.
If the real Pope is the Vicar of Christ, the true
shepherd of the sheep, this fact should be known not
only to the vicar, but to the sheep. A divinely-founded
and guarded church ought to know its own shepherd,
and yet the Catholic sheep have not always been certain
who the shepherd was.
The Council of Pisa, held in 1409, deposed two popes
—rivals—Gregory and Benedict—that is to say, deposed
the actual Vicar of Christ and the pretended. This
action was taken because a council, enlightened by the
Holy Ghost, could not tell the genuine from the counter
feit. The council then elected another Vicar, whose
authority was afterwards denied. Alexander V. died,
and John XXIII. took his place; Gregory XII. insisted
that he was the lawful pope ; John resigned, then he
was deposed, and afterwards imprisoned ; then Gregory
XII. resigned, and Martin V. was elected. The whole
thing reads like the annals of a South American Revo
lution.
The Council of Constance restored, as the Cardinal
declares, the unity of the Church, and brought back the
consolation of the Holy Ghost. Before this great
council John Huss appeared and maintained his own
tenets. The council declared that the Church was not
bound to keep its promise with a heretic. Huss was
condemned and executed on the 6th of July, 1415. His
disciple, Jerome of Prague, recanted; but, having
relapsed, was put to death, May 30, 1416. This cursed
council shed the blood of Huss and Jerome.
The Cardinal appeals to the author of Eccc Homo for
�46
ROME OR REASON ?
the purpose of showing that Christianity is above nature,
and the following passages, among others, are quoted
“ Who can describe that which unites men ? Who
has entered into the formation of speech, which is the
symbol of their union ? Who can describe exhaustively
the origin of civil society ? He who can do these things
can explain the origin of the Christian Church.”
These passages should not have been quoted by the
Cardinal. The author of these passages simply says
that the origin of the Christian Church is no harder to
find and describe than that which unites men ; than
that which has entered into the formation of speech, the
symbol of their union ; no harder to describe than the
origin of civil society, because he says that one who can
describe these can describe the other.
Certainly none of these things are above nature. We
do not need the assistance of the Holy Ghost in these
.matters. We know that men are united by common
interests, common purposes, common dangers—by race,
climate, and education. It is no more wonderful that
people live in families, tribes, communities, and nations,
than that birds, ants, and bees live in flocks and swarms.
If we know anything, we know that language is
natural-—that it is a physical science. But if we take
the ground occupied by the Cardinal, then we insist that
everything that cannot be accounted for by man is
supernatural. Let me ask, by what man ? What
man must we take as the standard ?
Cosmos or
Humboldt, St. Irenaeus or Darwin ? If everything that
we cannot account for is above nature, then ignorance is
the test of the supernatural. The man who is mentally
honest stops where his knowledge stops. At that point
he says that he does not know. Such a man is a philo
sopher. Then the theologian steps forward, denounces
the modesty of the philosopher as blasphemy, and pro
ceeds to tell what is beyond the horizon of the human
intellect.
Could a savage account for the telegraph or the tele
phone by natural causes ? How would he account for
these wonders ? He would account for them precisely
as the Cardinal accounts for the Catholic Church.
�ROME OR REASON ?
47
Bek nping to no rival Church, I have not the slightest
interest in the primacy of Leo XIII., and yet it is to be
regretted that this primacy rests upon such a narrow
■and insecure foundation.
The Cardinal says that “ it will appear almost certain
that the original Greek of St. Irenaeus, which is unfortu
nately lost, contained either rd —pun-eca, or some inflection
of 7rpwT€t'w, which signifies primacy.”
From this it appears that the primacy of the Bishop
of Rome rests on some “inflection” of a Greek word,
and that this supposed inflection was in a letter supposed
to have been written by St. Irenaeus, which has certainly
been lost. Is it possible that the vast fabric of papal
power has this, and only this, for its foundation ? To
this “ inflection ” has it come at last ?
The Cardinal’s case depends upon the intelligence and
veracity of his witnesses. The Fathers of the Church
were utterly incapable of examining a question of fact.
They were all believers in the miraculous. The same is
true of the apostles. If St. John was the author of the
Apocalypse, he was undoubtedly insane. If Polycarp
said the things attributed to him by Catholic writers, he
was certainly in the condition of his master. What is
the testimony of St. John worth in the light of the fol
lowing ? “ Cerinthus, the heretic, was in a bath-house.
St. John and another Christian were about to enter. St.
John cried out : ‘ Let us run away, lest the house fall
upon us while the enemy of truth is in it.’ ” Is it pos
sible that St. John thought that God would kill two
eminent Christians for the purpose of getting even with
one heretic ?
Let us see who Polycarp was. He seems to have
been a prototype of the Catholic Church, as will be seen
from the following statement concerning this Father :
“When any heretical doctrine was spoken in his
presence he would stop his ears.” After this, there can
be no question of his orthodoxy. It is claimed that
Polycarp was a martyr—that a spear was run through
his body, and that from the wound his soul, in the shape
of a bird, flew away. The history of his death is just
as true as the history of his life.
Irenaeus, another witness, took the ground that there
�48
ROME OR REASON’ ?
was to be a millennium, a thousand years of enjoyment
in which celibacy would not be the highest form of
virtue. If he is called as a witness for the purpose of
establishing the divine origin of the Church, and if one
of his “ inflections ” is the basis of papal supremacy, is
the Cardinal also willing to take his testimony as to the
nature of the millennium ?
All the Fathers were infinitely credulous. Every one
of them believed, not only in the miracles said to have
been wrought by Christ, by the apostles, and by other
Christians, but every one of them believed in the Pagan
miracles. All of these Fathers were familiar with
wonders and impossibilities. N othing was so common
with them as to work miracles-, and on many occasions
they not only cured diseases, not only reversed the order
of nature, but succeeded in raising the dead.
It is very hard, indeed, to prove what the apostles
said, or what the Fathers of the Church wrote. There
were many centuries filled with forgeries, many genera
tions in which the cunning hands of ecclesiastics erased,
obliterated, and interpolated the records of the past,
during which they invented books, invented authors, and
quoted from works that never existed.
The testimony of the “Fathers” is without the
slightest value. They believed everything, they examined
nothing. They received as a waste-basket receives.
Whoever accepts their testimony will exclaim with the
Cardinal: “ Happily, men are not saved by logic.”
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Rome or reason? : a reply to Cardinal Manning
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Ingersoll, Robert Green [1833-1899]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 48 p. ; 19 p.
Notes: Reprinted from the North American Review, Oct. and Nov. 1888. First published: London: Progressive Publishing Company, 1888. No. 65b in Stein checklist. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Catholic Church
Rationalism
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Catholic Church-Controversial Literature
Henry Edward Manning
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NATIONAL SECU'
" "''CIETY
ROME OR REASON?
A
REPLY
TO
Cardinal Manning
BY
COLONEL R. G. INGERSOLL.
REPRINTED EROM
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW,
■ October and November, 1888.
^onirou:
PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY,
28 Stonecutter Street, E.C.
1888.
�J ONDON :
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY G. W. FOOTE,
AT 28 STONECUTTER STREET, E.C.,
�ROME, OR REASON?
CARDINAL MANNING.
PART I.
Superstition Nias ears more deaf than adders to the voice
of any true decision.”
A REPLY TO
Cardinal Manning has stated the claims of the Roman
Catholic Church with great clearness, and apparently
without reserve. The age, position and learning of this
man give a certain weight to his words, apart from their
worth. He represents the oldest of the Christian churches
The questions involved are among the most important
that can engage the human mind. No one having the
slightest regard for that superb thing known as intel
lectual honesty, will avoid the issues tendered, or seek in
any way to gain a victory over truth.
. Without candor, discussion, in the highest sense, is
impossible. All have the same interest, whether they
know it or not in the establishment of facts. All have
the same to gain, the same to lose. He loads the dice
against himself who scores a point against the right.
Absolute honesty is to the intellectual perception what
hght is to the eyes. Prejudice and passion cloud the
mind. In each disputant should be blended the advocate
and judge. In this spirit, having in view only the ascertainment
or the truth, let us examine the arguments, or rather the
statements and conclusions, of Cardinal Manning.
The proposition is that “ The Church itself, by its mar
vellous propagation, its eminent sanctity, its inexhaustible
fruitfulness m all good things, its catholic unity and
lnVinC\^e lability, is a vast and perpetual motive of
legationaU irrefragable witness of its own divine
�4
ROME OR REASON.
The reasons given as supporting this proposition are :
That the Catholic Church interpenetrates all the nations
of the civilised world; that it is extra-national and inde
pendent in a supernational unitv ; that it is the same in
every place ; that jt speaks all the languages in the civi
lised world; that it is obedient to one head; that as many
as seven hundred bishops have knelt before the pope ;
that pilgrims from all nations have brought gifts to Rome,
and that all these things set forth in the most self-evident
way the unity and universality of the Roman Church.
It is also asserted that “ men see the Head of the
Church year by year speaking to the nations of the world,
treating with empires, republics and governments ; ” that
“ there is no other man on earth that can so bear him
self,” and that “ neither from Canterbury nor from Con
stantinople can such a voice go forth to which rulers and
people listen.”
It is also claimed that the Catholic Church has enlight
ened and purified the world ; that it has given us the
peace and purity of domestic life ; that it has destroyed
idolatry and demonology ; that it gave us a body of law
from a higher source than man ; that it has produced
the civilisation of Christendom ; that the popes were the
greatest of statesmen and rulers ; that celibacy is better
than marriage, and that the revolutions and reformations
of the last three hundred years have been destructive
and calamitous.
We will examine these assertions as well as some
others.
No one will dispute that the Catholic Church is the
best witness of its own existence. The same is true of
every thing that exists; of every church, great and small,
of every man, and of every insect.
But it is contended that the marvellous growth or
propagation of the Church is evidence of its divine
origin. Can it be said that success is supernatural ? All
success in this world is relative. Majorities are not
necessarily right. If anything is known—if anything
can be known—we are sure that very large bodies of men
have frequently been wrong. We believe in what is
called the progress of mankind. Progress, for the most
part, consists in finding new truths and getting rid of old
errors—that is to say, getting nearer and nearer in har
�ROME OR REASON.
5
mony with the facts of nature, seeing with greater clear
ness the conditions of well-being.
There is no nation in which a majority leads the way.
In the progress of mankind, the few have been the nearest
right. There have been centuries in which the light
seemed to emanate only from a handful of men, while
the rest of the world was enveloped in darkness. Some,
great man leads the way—he becomes the morning star,
the prophet of a coming day. Afterwards, many millions
accept his views. But there are still heights above and
beyond ; there are other pioneers, and the old day, in
comparison with the new, becomes a night. So, we can
not say that success demonstrates either divine origin or
supernatural aid.
~
We know, if we know anything, that wisdom has often
been trampled beneath the feet of the multitude. We
know that the torch of science has been blown out by
the breath of the hydra-headed. We know that the
whole intellectual heaven has been darkened again. The
truth or falsity of a proposition cannot be determined by
ascertaining the number of those who assert, or of those
who deny.
If the marvellous propagation of the Catholic Church
proves its divine origin, What shall we say of the mar
vellous propagation of Mohammedanism ?
Nothing can be clearer than that Christianity arose
out of the ruins of the Roman Empire—that is to say,
the rums of Paganism. And it is equally clear that
Mohammedanism arose out of the wreck and ruin of
Catholicism.
- After Mohammed came upon the stage, “ Christianity
was forever expelled from its most glorious seat—from
Palestine, the scene of its most sacred recollections ; from
Asia Minor, that of its first churches; from Egypt
whence issued the great doctrine of Trinitarian Ortho
doxy, and from Carthage, who imposed her belief on
Europe.” Before that time “the ecclesiastical chiefs of
Rome,, of Constantinople, and of Alexandria were en
gaged in a desperate struggle for supremacy, carrying out
their purposes by weapons and in ways revolting to the
Conscience of .man. Bishops were concerned in assassina10ns, poisonings, adulteries, blindings, riots, treasons,
civil war. Patriarchs and primates were excommuni
�6
ROME OR REASON.
eating and anathematizing one another in their rivalries
for earthly power ; bribing eunuchs with gold and
courtesans and royal females with concessions of epis
copal love. Among legions of monks who carried terror
into the imperial armies and riot into the great cities
arose hideous clamors for theological dogmas, but never a
voice for intellectual liberty or the outraged rights of man.
“ Under these circumstances, amid these atrocities and
crimes, Mohammed arose, and raised his own nation from
Fetichism, the adoration of the meteoric stone, and from
the basest idol worship, and irrevocably wrenched from
Christianity more than half—and that by far the best
half—of her possessions, since it included, the Holy Land,
the birth-place of the Christian faith, and Africa, which
had imparted to it its Latin form ; and now, after a lapse
of more than a thousand years, that continent, and a very
large part of Asia, remain permanently attached to the
Arabian doctrine.”
It may be interesting in this connection to say that the
Mohammedan now proves the divine mission of his
Apostle by appealing to the marvellous propagation of
the faith. If the argument is good in the mouth of a
Catholic, is it not good in the mouth of a Moslem ? Let
us see if it is not better.
According to Cardinal Manning, the Catholic Church
triumphed only over the institutions of men, triumphed
only over religions that had been established by men, by
wicked and ignorant men. But Mohammed triumphed
not only over the religions of men, but over the religion
of God. This ignorant driver of camels, this poor,
unknown, unlettered boy, unassisted by God, unen
lightened by supernatural means, drove the armies of the
true cross before him as the winter’s storm drives withered
leaves. At his name, priests, bishops and cardinals fled
with white faces, popes trembled, and the armies of God,
fighting for the true faith, were conquered on a thousand
fields.
If the success of a church proves its divinity, and after
that anothei’ church arises and defeats the first, what does
that prove ?
Let us put this question in a milder form : Suppose the
second church lives and flourishes in spite of the first,
what does that prove ?
�ROME OR REASON.
7
As a matter of fact, however, no church rises with
everything against it. Something is favorable to it, or it
could not exist. If it succeeds and grows, it is absolutely
certain that the conditions are favorable. If it spreads
rapidly, it simply shows that the conditions are exceed
ingly favorable, and that the forces in opposition are weak
and easily overcome.
Here, in my own country, within a few years, has
arisen a new religion. Its foundations were laid in an
intelligent community, having had the advantages of
what is known as modern civilisation. Yet this new
faith—founded on the grossest absurdities, as gross as we
find in the Scriptures—in spite of all opposition began to
grow, and kept growing. It was subjected to persecution,
and the persecution increased its strength. It was driven
from State to State by the believers in universal love,
until it left what was called civilisation, crossed the wide
plains, and took up its abode on the shores of the Great
Salt Lake. It continued to grow. Its founder, as he
declared, had frequent conversations with God, and
received directions from that source.
Hundreds of
miracles were performed, multitudes upon the desert
were miraculously fed, the sick were cured—the dead
were raised, and the Mormon Church continued to grow,
until now, less than half a century after the death of its
founder, there are several hundred thousand believers in
the new faith.
Do you think that men enough could join this church
to prove the truth of its creed ?
Joseph Smith said that he found certain golden plates
that had been buried for many generations, and upon
these plates, in some unknown language, had been
engraved this new revelation, and I think he insisted
that by the use of miraculous mirrors this language was
translated. If there should be Mormon bishops in the
countries of the world, eighteen hundred years from now,
do you think a cardinal of that faith could prove the
truth of the golden plates simply by the fact that the
faith had spread and that seven hundred bishops had
knelt before the head of that church ?
It seems to me that a “ supernatural ” religion—that it
to say, a religion that is claimed to have been divinely
founded and to be authenticated by miracle, is much
�8
ROME OR REASON.
easier to establish among an ignorant people than any
other, and the more ignorant the people, the easier such
a religion could be established. The reason for this is
plain. All ignorant tribes, all savage men, believe in the
miraculous, in the supernatural.
The conception of
uniformity, of what may be called the eternal consistency
of nature, is an idea far above their comprehension.
They are forced to think in accordance with their minds,
and as a consequence they account for all phenomena by
the acts of superior beings—that is to say, by the super
natural. In other words, that religion having most in
common with the savage, having most that was satis
factory to his mind, or to his lack of mind, would stand
the best chance of success.
It is probably safe to say that at one time, or during
one phase of the development of man, everything was
miraculous. After a time, the mind slowly developing,
certain phenomena, always happening under like con
ditions, were called “natural,” and none suspected any
special interference. The domain of the miraculous grew
less and less—the domain of the natural larger ; that is
to say, the common became the natural, but the uncom
mon was still regarded as the miraculous. The rising
and setting of the sun ceased to excite the wonder of
mankind—there was no miracle about that ; but an
eclipse of the sun was miraculous. Men did not then
know that eclipses are periodical, that they happen with
the same certainty that the sun rises. It took many
observations through many generations to arrive at this
conclusion. Ordinary rains became “ natural,” floods
remained “ miraculous.”
But it can all be summed up in this : The average man
regards the common as natural, the uncommon as super
natural. The educated man—and by that I mean the
developed man—is satisfied that all phenomena are
natural, and that the supernatural does not and can not
exist.
As a rule, an individual is egotistic in the proportion
that he lacks intelligence. The same is true of nations
and races. The barbarian is egotistic enough to suppose
that an Infinite Being is constantly doing something, or
failing to do something, on his account. But as man
rises in the scale of civilisation, as he becomes really
�BOMB OR BEASON.
9
great, he comes to the conclusion that nothing in Nature
happens on his account—that he is hardly great enough
to disturb the motions of the planets.
Let us make an application of this : To me, the success
of Mormonism is no evidence of its truth, because it has
succeeded only with the superstitious. It has been
recruited from communities brutalised by other forms of
superstition. To me, the success of Mohammed does not
tend to show that he was right—for the reason that he
triumphed only over the ignorant, over the superstitious.
The same is true of the Catholic Church. Its seeds were
planted in darkness. It was accepted by the credulous,
by men incapable of reasoning upon such questions. It
did not, it has not, it cannot triumph over the intellectual
world. To count its many millions does not tend to
prove the truth of its creed. On the contrary, a creed
that delights the credulous gives evidence against itself.
Questions of fact or philosophy cannot be settled
simply by numbers. There was a time when the Coper
nican system of astronomy had but few supporters—the
multitude being on. the other side. There was a time
when the rotation of the earth was not believed by the
majority.
Let us press this idea further. There was a time when
Christianity was not in the majority, anywhere. Let us
suppose that the first Christian missionary had met a pre
late of the Pagan faith, and suppose this prelate had
used against the Christian missionary the Cardinal’s
argument—how could the missionary have answered if
the Cardinal’s argument is good ?
But, after all, is the success of the Catholic Church a
marvel ? If this Church is of divine origin, if it has
been under the especial care, protection, and guidance
of an Infinite Being, is not its failure far more wonderful
than its success ? For eighteen centuries it has persecuted
and preached, and the salvation of the world is still
remote.
This is the result, and it may be asked
whether it is worth while to try to convert the word to
Catholicism.
Are Catholics better than Protestants ? Are they nearer
honest, nearer just, more charitable ? Are Catholic
nations better than Protestant ? Do the Catholic nations
move in the van of progress? Withintheir jurisdiction
�10
ROME OR REASON.
are life, liberty and property safer than anywhere else ?
Is Spain the first nation of the world ?
Let me ask another question : Are Catholics or Pro
testants better than Freethinkers ? Has the Catholic
Church produced a greater man than Humboldt ? Has
the Protestant produced a greater than Darwin ? Was
not Emerson, so far as purity of life is concerned, the
equal to any true believer? Was Pius IX., or any other
Vicar of Christ, superior to Abraham Lincoln ?
But it is claimed that the Catholic Church is universal,
and that its universality demonstrates its divine origin.
According to the Bible, the Apostles were ordered to go
into all the world to preach the gospel—yet not one of
them, nor one of their con verts at any time, nor one of the
Vicars of God, for fifteen hundred years afterward, knew
of the existence of the Western Hemisphere. During all
that time, can it be said that the Catholic Church was
universal ? At the close of the fifteenth century, there
was one-half of the world in which the Catholic faith had
never been preached, and in the other half not one person
in ten had ever heard of it, and of those who had heard
of it, not one in ten believed it. Certainly the Catholic
Church was not then universal.
Is it universal now ? What impression has Catholicism
made upon the many millions of China, of Japan, of
India, of Africa ? Can it truthfully be said that the
Catholic Church is now universal ? When any church
becomes universal, it will be the only church. There
cannot be two universal churches, neither can there be
one universal church and any other.
The Cardinal next tries to prove that the Catholic
Church is divine, “ by its eminent sanctity and its inex
haustible fruitfulness in all good things.”
And here let me admit that there are many millions of
good Catholics—that is, of good men and women who
are Catholics. It is unnecessary to charge universal
dishonesty or hypocrisy, for the reason that this would
be only a kind of personalitv. Many thousands of heroes
have died in defence of the faith, and millions of Catholics
have killed and been killed for the sake of their religion.
And here it may be well enough to say that martyrdom
does not even tend to prove the truth of a religion. The
man who dies in flames, standing by what he believes to
�ROME OR REASON.
11
be true, establishes, not the truth of what he believes, but
his sincerity.
Without calling in question the intentions of the
Catholic Church, we can ascertain whether it has been
“ inexhaustibly fruitful in all good things,” and whether
it has been “ eminent for its sanctity.”
In the first place, nothing can be better than goodness.
Nothing is more sacred, or can be more sacred, than the
well-being of man. All things that tend to increase or
preserve the happiness of the human race are good—that
is to say, they are sacred. All things that tend to the
destruction of man’s well-being, that tend to his unhappi
ness, are bad, no matter by whom they are taught or
done.
It is perfectly certain that the Catholic Church has
taught, and still teaches, that intellectual liberty is dan
gerous—that it should not be allowed. It was driven to
take this position because it had taken another. It
taught, and still teaches, that a certain belief is necessary
to salvation. It has always known that investigation and
inquiry led, oi’ might lead, to doubt ; that doubt leads, or
may lead, to heresy, and that heresy leads to hell. In
other words, the Catholic Church has something more
important than this world, more important than the well
being of man here. It regards this life as an opportunity
for joining that Church, for accepting that creed, and for
the saving of your soul.
If the Catholic Church is right in its premises, it is
right in its conclusion. If it is necessary to believe the
Catholic creed in ordei’ to obtain eternal joy, then, of
course nothing else in this world is, comparatively
speaking, of the slightest importance. Consequently, the
Catholic Church has been, and still is, the enemy of
intellectual freedom, of investigation, of inquiry—in
other words, the enemy of progress in secular things.
The result of this was an effort to compel all men to
accept the belief necessary to salvation. This effort
naturally divided itself into persuasion and persecution.
It will be admitted that the good man is kind, merciful,
charitable, forgiving and just. A church must be judged
by the same standard. Has the Church been merciful ?
Has it been “ fruitful in the good things ” of justice,
charity, and forgiveness ? Can a good man, believing a
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ROME OR REASON.
good doctrine, persecute for opinion’s sake ? If the
Church imprisons a man for the expression of an honest
opinion, is it not certain, either that the doctrine of the
Church is wrong, or that the Church is bad ? Both can
not be good. “ Sanctity ” without goodness is impossible.
Thousands of “ saints ” have been the most malicious of
the human race. If the history of the world proves
anything, it proves that the Catholic Church was for many
centuries the most merciless institution that ever existed
among men. I cannot believe that the instruments of
persecution were made and used by the eminently good ;
neither can I believe that honest people were imprisoned,
tortured, and burned at the stake by a Church that was
“ inexhaustibly fruitful in all good things.”
And let me say here that I have no Protestant prejudices
against Catholicism, and have no Catholic prejudices
against.Protestantism. I regard all religions either with
out prejudice or with the same prejudice. They were all,
according to my belief, devised by men, and all have for
a foundation ignorance of this world and fear of the next.
All the gods have been made by men. They are all
equally powerful and equally useless. I like some of
them better than I do others, for the same reason that I
admire some characters in fiction more than I do others.
I prefer Miranda to Caliban, but have not the slightest
idea that either of them existed. So I prefer Jupiter to
Jehovah, although perfectly satisfied that both are myths.
I believe myself to be in a frame of mind to justly and
fairly consider the claims of different religions, believing
as I do that all are wrong, and admitting as I do that there
is some good in all.
When one speaks of the “ inexhaustible fruitfulness in
all good things ” of the Catholic Church, we remember
the horrors and atrocities of the Inquisition—the rewards
offered by the Roman Church for the capture and murder
of honest men. We remember the Dominican Order, the
members of which, upheld by the Vicar of Christ,
pursued the heretics like sleuth hounds, through many
centuries.
The Church, “ inexhaustible in fruitfulness in all good
things,” not only imprisoned and branded and burned the
living, but violated the dead. It robbed graves, to the
-end that it might convict corpses of heresy—to the end
�ROME OR REASON.
13
that it might take from widows their portions and from
orphans their patrimony.
We remember the millions in the darkness of dungeons
—the millions who perished by the sword—the vast
multitudes destroyed in flames—those who were flayed
alive—those who were blinded—those whose tongues
were cut out—those into whose ears were poured molten
lead—those whose eyes were deprived of their lids—
those who were tortured and tormented in every way by
which pain could be inflicted and human nature over
come.
And we remember, too, the exultant cry of the Church
over the bodies of her victims : “Their bodies were
burned here, but their souls are now tortured in hell.”
We remember that the Church, by treachery, bribery,
perjury, and the commission of every possible crime, got
possession and control of Christendom, and we know the
use that was made of this power—that it was used to
brutalise, degrade, stupefy, and “ sanctify ” the children
of men. We know also that the Vicars of Christ were
persecutors for opinion’s sake—that they sought to
destroy the liberty of thought through fear—that they
endeavored to make every brain a Bastille in which the
mind should be a convict—that they endeavored to make
every tongue a prisoner, watched by a familiar of the
Inquisition—and that they threatened punishment here,
imprisonment here, burnings here, and, in the name of
their God, eternal imprisonment and eternal burnings
hereafter.
We know, too, that the Catholic Church was, during all
the years of its power, the enemy of every science. It
preferred magic to medicine, relics to remedies, priests to
physicians. It thought more of astrologers than of
astronomers.
It hated geologists—it persecuted the
chemist, and imprisoned the naturalist, and opposed
every discovery calculated to improve the condition of
mankind.
It is impossible to foi-get the persecutions of the Cathari,
the Albigenses, the Waldenses, the Hussites, the Hugue
nots, and of every sect that had the courage to think just
a little for itself. Think of a woman—the mother of a
family—taken from her children and burned, on account
of her view as to the three natures of Jesus Christ. Think
�HOME OR REASON.
14
of the Catholic Church—an institution with a Divine
FonX presided over by the agent of God-punisbmg
a woman for giving a cup of cold water to a
who had been anathematised. Think of this Church,
“ fruitful in all good things,” launching its curse at an
honest man—not only cursing him from the crown of his
head to the soles of his feet with a fiendish
but having at the same time the impudence to call on
God, and the Holy Ghost, and Jesus Christ, and the Virgin
Marv to join in the curse ; and to curse him no _ y
herey’but forever hereafter—calling upon all the saints
and’upon all the redeemed to join in a hallelujah of
cursesP so that earth and heaven should reverbrate with
countless curses launched at a human being simply or
having expressed an honest thought.
,
This Church, so “fruitful in all good things " invented
crimes that it might punish, This Church tried men or
a “suspicion of heresy’’—imprisoned themfoi ^e vice
of being suspected—stripped them of all they bad_ on
earth and allowed them to rot in dungeons, because they
were guilty of the crime of having been suspected. This
W It Vtoo late^to talk about the “invincible stability ” of
the Seventh, in the Eighth, or
in the Ninth centuries. It was not invincible m Germany
in T other’s day. It was not invincible m the Low
Countries. It was not invincible in Scotland, or in
England It was not invincible in France. It is not
invincible in Italy. It is not supreme m any intellectual
centre of the world. It does not .triumph m Paris, or
Berlin • it is not dominant m London, m England ,
neither’ is it triumphant in the United States. It has not
within its fold the philosophers, the statesmen, and the
thinkers who are the leaders of the human race.
It is claimed that Catholicism “ interpenetrates all the
nations of the civilised world,” and that m some it holds
the whole nation in its unity.
.
in
I suppose the Catholic Church is more powerful 1
Spain than in any other nation. The history of this
nation demonstrates the result of Catholic supremacy, the
result of an acknowledgment by a people that a certain
religion is too sacred to be examined.
�ROME OR REASOK.
15
Without attempting in an article of this character to
point out the many causes that contributed to the adoption
of Catholicism by the Spanish people, it is enough to say
that Spain, of all nations, has been and is the most
thoroughly Catholic, and the most thoroughly inter
penetrated and dominated by the spirit of the Church of
Rome.
Spain used the sword of the Church. In the name of
religion it endeavored to conquer the infidel world. It
drove from its territory the Moors, not because they were
bad, not because they were idle and dishonest, but because
they were infidels. It expelled the Jews, not because
they were ignorant or vicious, but because they were
unbelievers. It drove out the Moriscoes, and deliberately
made outcasts of the intelligent, the industrious, the
honest and the useful, because they were not Catholics.
It leaped like a wild beast upon the Low Countries, for
the destruction of Protestantism. It covered the seas
with its fleets, to destroy the intellectual liberty of man.
And not only so—it established the Inquisition within its
borders. It imprisoned the honest, it burned the noble,
and succeeded after many years of devotion to the true
faith, in destroying the industry, the intelligence, the
usefulness, the genius, the nobility and the wealth of a
nation. It became a wreck, a jest of the conquered, and
excited the pity of its former victims.
In this period of degradation, the Catholic Church held
“ the whole nation in its unity.”
At last Spain began to deviate from the path of the
Church. It made a treaty with an infidel power. In 1782
it became humble enough, and wise enough, to be friends
with Turkey. It made treaties with Tripoli and Algiers
and the Barbary States.
It had become too poor to
ransom the prisoners taken by these powers. It began to
appreciate the fact that it could neither conquer nor
convert the world by the sword.
Spain has progressed in the arts and sciences, in all
that tends to enrich and ennoble a nation, in the precise
proportion that she has lost faith in the Catholic Church.
This may be said of every other nation in Christendom'
Torquemada is dead; Castelar is alive. The dungeons of
the Inquisition are empty, and a little light has penetrated
the clouds and mists—not much, but a little. Spain is
�16
ROME OR REASON.
not yet clothed and in her right mind. A few years ago
the cholera visited Madrid and other cities.. Physicians
were mobbed. Processions of saints carried the host
through the streets for the purpose of staying the plague.
The streets were not cleaned ; the sewers were filled.
Filth and faith, old partners, reigned supreme. The
Church, “eminent for its sanctity,” stood in the light and
cast its shadow on the ignorant and the prostrate. The
Church, in its “inexhaustible fruitfulness in all good
things,” allowed its children to perish through ignorance,
and used the diseases it had produced as an instrument
ality to further enslave its votaries and its victims.
No one will deny that many of its priests exhibited
heroism of the highest order in visiting the sick and
administering what are called the consolations of religion
to the dying, and in burying the dead. It i§ necessary
neither to deny nor disparage the self-denial and goodness
of these men. But their religion did more than all other
causes to produce the very evils that called. for the
exhibition of self-denial and heroism. One scientist in
control of Madrid could have prevented the plague. In
such cases, cleanliness is far better than “godliness”;
science is superior to superstition ; drainage much better
than divinity ; therapeutics more excellent than theology.
Goodness is not enough—intelligence is necessary.
Faith is not sufficient, creeds are helpless, and prayers
fmitloss*
It is admitted that the Catholic Church exists in many
nations; that it is dominated, at least in a great degree, by
the Bishop of Rome—that it is international in that sense,
and that in that sense it has what may be. called a
supernationai
xiw same,
“ supernational unity.” The muj-c, however, is true of
the Masonic fraternity. It exists in many nations, but it
is not a national body. It is in the same sense extra
national, in the same sense international, and has in t e
same sense a supernational unity. So the same may be
said of other societies. This, however, does not tend to
prove that anything supernational is supernatural.
It is also admitted that in. faith, worship, ceremonial,
discipline and government, that the Catholic Church is
substantially the same wherever it exists. . This estab
lishes the unity, but not the divinity of the institution.
The church that does not allow investigation, that
�ROME OR REASON.
17
teaches that all doubts are wicked, attains unity through
tyranny—that is, monotony by repression. Wherever
man has had something like freedom differences have
appeared, heresies have taken root, and the divisions have
become permanent. New sects have been born and the
Catholic Church has been weakened. The boast of unity
is the confession of tyranny.
It is insisted that the unity of the Church substantiates
its claim to divine origin. This is asserted over and over
again, in many ways ; and yet in the Cardinal’s article is
found this strange mingling of boast and confession :
Was it only by the human power of man that the unity,
external and internal, which for fourteen hundred years
had been supreme, was once more restored in the Council
of Constance, never to be broken again ? ”
By this it is admitted that the internal and external
unity of the Catholic Church has been broken, and that
it required more than human power to restore it. Then
the boast is made that it will never be broken again. Yet
it is asserted that the internal and external unity of the
Catholic Church is the great fact that demonstrates its
divine origin.
Now if this internal and external unity was broken,
and remained broken for years, there was an interval
during which the Church had no internal or external
unity, and during which the evidence of divine origin
failed. The unity was broken in spite of the Divine
Founder. This is admitted by the use of the word
“ again.” The unbroken unity of the Church is asserted,
and upon this assertion is based the claim of divine
origin ; it is then admitted that the unity was broken.
The argument is then shifted, and the claim is made that
it required more than human power to restore the internal
and external unity of the Church, and that the restora
tion, not the unity, is proof of the divine origin. Is there
any contradiction beyond this ?
Let us state the case in another way. Let us suppose
that a man has a sword which he claims was made by
God, stating that the reason he knows that God made the
sword is that it never had been and never could be
broken. Now if it was afterwards ascertained that it had
been broken, and the owner admitted that it had been,
what would be thought of him if he then took the ground
B
�18
ROME OR REASON.
that it had been welded, and that the welding was the
evidence that it was of divine origin ?
A prophecy is then indulged in, to the effect that the
internal and external unity of the Church can never be
broken again. It is admitted that it was broken, it is
asserted that it was divinely restored, and then’ it is
declared that it is never to be broken again. No reason
is given for this prophecy ; it must be born of the facts
already stated. Put in a form to be easily understood it
is this :
’
We know that the unity of the Church can never be
broken, because the Church is of divine origin.
We know that it was broken; but this does not weaken
the argument, because it was restored by God, and it has
not been broken since.
Therefore, it never can be broken again.
It is stated that the Catholic Church is immutable, and
that its immutability establishes its claim to divine origin.
Was it immutable when its unity, internal and external,
was broken ? Was it precisely the same after its unity
was broken that it was before ? Was it precisely the same
after its unity was divinely restored that it was while
broken? Was it universal while it was without unity?
Which of the fragments was universal—which was
immutable ?
The fact that the Catholic Church is obedient to the
pope, establishes, not the supernatural origin of the
Church, but the mental slavery of its members. It estab
lishes the fact that it is a successful organisation ; that it
is cunningly devised ; that it destroys the mental inde
pendence, and that whoever absolutely submits to its
authority loses the jewel of his soul.
The fact that Catholics are to a great extent obedient to
the pope, establishes nothing except the thoroughness of
the organisation.
.. How was the Roman empire formed ? By what means
did that Great Power hold in bondage the then known
world ? How is it that a despotism is established? How
is it that the few enslave the many ? How is it that the
nobility live on the labor of the peasants ? The answer
is in one word, Organisation. The organised few
triumph over the unorganised many. The few hold the
�ROME OR REASON,
19
sword and the purse. The unorganised are overcome in
detail—terrorised, brutalised, robbed, conquered.
We must remember that when Christianity was estab
lished the world was ignorant, credulous and cruel. The
gospel with its idea of forgiveness, with its heaven and
hell, was suited to the barbarians among whom it was
preached. Let it be understood, once for all, that Christ
had but little to do with Christianity. The people
became convinced—being ignorant, stupid and credulous
—that the Church held the keys of heaven and hell..
The foundation for the most terrible mental tyranny that
has existed among men was in this way laid. The
Catholic Church enslaved to the extent of its power. It
resorted to every possible form of fraud ; it perverted
every good instinct of the human heart ; it rewarded
every vice ; it resorted to every artifice that ingenuity
could devise, to reach the highest round of power. It
tortured the accused to make them confess; it tortured wit
nesses to compel the commission of perjury ; it tortured
children for the purpose of making them convict their
parents; it compelled men to establish their own innocence;
it imprisoned without limit; it had the malicious patience
to wait; it left the accused without trial, and left them
in dungeons until released by death. There is no crime
that the Catholic Church did not commit, no cruelty that
it did not practice, no form of treachery that it did not
reward, and no virtue that it did not persecute. It was
the greatest and most powerful enemy of human rights.
It did all that organisation, cunning, piety, self-denial,
heroism, treachery, zeal and brute force could do to
enslave the children of men. It was the enemy of
intelligence, the assassin of liberty, and the destroyer of
progress. It loaded the noble with chains and-th©
infamous with honors. In one hand it carried the alms
dish, in the other a dagger. It argued with the sword,
persuaded with poison, and convinced with the faggot.
It is impossible to see how the divine origin of a Church
can be established by showing that hundreds of bishops
have visited the pope.
Does the fact that millions of the faithful visit Mecca
establish the truth of the Koran ? Is it a scene for
congratulation when the bishops of thirty nations kneel
before a man ? Is it not humiliating to know that man
�20
ROME OR REASON.
is willing to kneel at the feet of man ? Could a noble
man demand, or joyfully receive, the humiliation of his
fellows ?
As a rule, arrogance and humility go together. He
who in power compels his fellow man to kneel, wili him
self kneel when weak. The tyrant is a cringer in power;
■a cringer is a tyrant out of power. Great men stand face
to face. They meet on equal terms. The cardinal who
kneels in the presence of the pope, wants the bishop to
kneel in his presence ; and the bishop who kneels
■demands that the priest shall kneel to him ; and the priest
who kneels demands that they in lower orders shall
kneel ; and all, from pope to the lowest—that is to say,
from pope to exorcist, from pope to the one in charge of
the bones of saints—all demand that the people, the lay
men, those upon whom they live, shall kneel to them.
The man of free and noble spirit will not kneel.
'Courage has no knees. Fear kneels, or falls upon its
•ashen face.
The cardinal insists that the pope is the Vicar of
Christ, and that all popes have been. What is a Vicar
of Jesus Christ ? He is a substitute in office. He stands
in the place, or occupies the position in relation to the
Church, in relation to the world, that Jesus Christ would
occupy were he the pope at Rome. In other words, he
takes Christ’s place ; so that, according to the doctrine of
the Catholic Church, Jesus Christ himself is present in
the person of the pope.
We all know that a good man may employ a bad agent.
A good king might leave his realm and put in his place a
tyrant and a wretch. The good man, and the good king,
■cannot certainly know what manner of man the agent is
—what kind of person the vicar is—consequently the bad
may be chosen. But if the king appointed a bad vicar,
knowing him to be bad, knowing that he would oppress
the people, knowing that he would imprison and burn
the noble and generous, what excuse can be imagined for
such a king ?
Now if the Church is of divine origin, and if each pope
is the Vicar of Jesus Christ, he must have been chosen
by Jesus Christ ; and when he was chosen, Christ must
have known exactly what* his Vicar would do. Can we
believe that an infinitely wise and good Being would
�ROME OR REASON.
21
choose immoral, dishonest, ignorant, malicious, heartless,
fiendish and inhuman vicars ?
The Cardinal admits that “ the history of Christianity
is the history of the Church, and that the history of the
Church is the history of the Pontiffs,” and he then de
clares that “the greatest statesmen and rulers that the
world has ever seen are the Popes of Rome.”
Let me call attention to a few passages in Draper’s
History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.
“ Constantine was one of the Vicars of Christ. After
wards, Stephen IV. was chosen. The eyes of Constantine
were then put out by Stephen, acting in Christ’s place.
The tongue of the Bishop Theodoras was amputated by
the man who had been substituted for God. This bishop
was left in a dungeon to perish of thirst. Pope Leo III.
was seized in the street and forced into a church, where
the nephews of Pope Adrian attempted to put out his
eyes and cut off his tongue. His successor, Stephen V
was driven ignominiously from Rome. His successor,
Paschal I., was accused of blinding and murdering two
ecclesiastics in the Lateran Palace. John VIII., unable
to resist the Mohammedans, was compelled to pay them
tribute.
“At this time, the Bishop of Naples was in secret
alliance with the Mohammedans, and they divided with
this Catholic bishop the plunder they collected from other
Catholics. This bishop was excommunicated by the
pope ; afterwards he gave him absolution because he be
trayed the chief Mohammedans, and assassinated others.
There was an ecclesiastical conspiracy to murder the pope,
and some of the treasures of the Church were seized, and
the gate of St. Pancrazia was opened with false keys to
admit the Saracens. Pormosus, who had been engaged
in these transactions, who had been excommunicated as
a conspirator for the murder of Pope John, was himself
elected pope in 891. Boniface VI. was his successor.
He had been deposed from the diaconate and from the
priesthood for his immoral and lewd life. Stephen VII.
was the next pope, and he had the dead body of Formosus
taken from the grave, clothed in papal habiliments,
propped up in a chair and tried before a Council. The
corpse was found guilty, three fingers were cut off
and the body cast into the Tiber. Afterwards Stephen
�'22
ROME OR REASON.
VII., this Vicar of Christ, was thrown into prison and
strangled.
“ From 896 to 900, five popes were consecrated. Leo V.,
in less than two months after he became pope, was cast
into prison by Christopher, one of his chaplains. This
Christopher usurped his place, and in a little while was
expelled from Rome by Sergius III., who became pope
in 905. This pope lived in criminal intercourse with the
celebrated Theodora, who with her daughters Marozia
and Theodora, both prostitutes, exercised an extraordi
nary control over him. The love of Theodora was also
shared by John X. She gave him the Archbishopric of
Ravenna, and made him pope in 915. The daughter
of Theodora overthrew this pope. She surprised him
in the Lateran Palace. His brother, Peter, was killed;
the pope was thrown into prison, where he was afterwards
murdered. Afterward, this Marozia, daughter of Theo
dora, made her own son pope, John XI. Many affirmed
that Pope Sergius was his father, but his mother inclined
to attribute him to her husband Alberic, whose brother
Guido she afterwards married. Another of her sons,
Alberic, jealous of his brother, John the Pope, cast him
and their mother into prison. Alberic’s son was then
elected pope as John XII.
“ John was nineteen years old when he became the
Vicar of Christ. His reign was characterised by the most
shocking immoralities, so that the Emperor Otho I. was
compelled by the German clergy to interfere. He was
tried. It appeared that John had received bribes for the
consecration of bishops ; that he had ordained one who
was only ten years old ; that he was charged
with incest, and with so many adulteries that the
Lateran Palace had become a brothel.
He put out
the eyes of one ecclesiastic; he maimed another
—both dying in consequence of their injuries. He was
given to drunkeness and to gambling.
He*was de
posed at last, and Leo VII. elected in his stead. Subse
quently he got the upper hand. He seized his an
tagonists ; he cut off the hand of one, the nose, the finger,
and the tongue of others. His life was eventually
brought to an end by the vengeance of a man whose wife
he had seduced.”
And yet, I admit that the most infamous popes, the
�ROME OR REASON.
S3
most heartless and fiendish bishops, friars, and priests
were models of mercy, charity, and justice when compared
with the orthodox God—with the God they worshipped.
These popes, these bishops, these priests could persecute
only for a few years—they could burn only for a few
moments—but their God threatened to imprison and burn
forever ; and their God is as much worse than they were,
as hell is worse than the Inquisition.
“ John XIII. was strangled in prison. Boniface VII.
imprisoned Benedict VII., and starved him to death.
John XIV. was secretly put to death in the dungeons of
the castle of St. Angelo. The corpse of Boniface was
dragged by the populace through the streets.”
It must be remembered that the popes were assassinated
by Catholics—murdered by the faithful—that one Vicar
of Christ strangled another Vicar of Christ, and that these
men were “ the greatest rulers and the greatest statesmen
of the earth.”
“ Pope John XVI. was seized, his eyes put out, his nose
cut off, his tongue torn from his mouth, and he was sent
through the streets mounted on an ass, with his face to
the tail. Benedict IX., a boy of less than twelve years of
age, was raised to the apostolic throne. One of his suc
cessors, Victor III., declared that the life of Benedict was
so shameful, so foul, so execrable, that he shuddered to
describe it. He ruled like a captain of banditti. The
people, unable to bear longer his adulteries, his homicides
and his abominations, rose against him, and in despair of
maintaining his position, he put up his papacy to auction,
and it was bought by a Presbyter named John, who
became Gregory VI., in the year of grace 1045. Well
may we ask, Were these the Vicegerents of God upon
earth—these, who had truly reached that goal beyond
which the last effort of human wickedness cannot pass ?”
It may be sufficient to say that there is no crime that
man can commit that has not been committed by the
Vicars of Christ. They have inflicted every possible
torture, violated every natural right. Greater monsters
the human race has not produced.
Among the “ some two hundred and fifty-eight ” Vicars
of Christ there were probably some good men. This
would have happened even if the intention had been to
get all bad men, for the reason that man reaches perfec
�24
ROME OR REASON.
tion neither in good nor in evil; but if they were selected
by Christ himself, if they were selected by a Church with
a divine origin and under divine guidance, then there is
no way to account for the selection of a bad one. If one
hypocrite was duly elected pope—one murderer, one
strangler, one starver—this demonstrates that all the popes
were selected by men, and by men only, that the claim
of divine guidance is born of zeal and uttered without
knowledge.
But who were the Vicars of Christ ? How many have
there been ? Cardinal Manning himself does not know.
He is not sure. He says : “ Starting from St. Peter to
Leo XIII., there have been some two hundred and fifty
eight Pontiffs claiming to be recognised by the whole
Catholic unity as successors of St. Peter and Vicars of
Jesus Christ.” Why did he use the word “some"?
Why “ claiming ” ? Does he positively know ? Is it
possible that the present Vicar of Christ is not certain as
to the number of his predecessors ? Is he infallible in
faith and fallible in fact ?
PART II.
“ If we live thus tamely,—
To be thus jaded by a piece of scarlet,—
Farewell nobility.”
No one will deny that “the pope speaks to many people
in many nations : that he treats with empires and govern
ments,” and that “ neither from Canterbury nor from
Constantinople such a voice goes forth.”
How does the pope speak ? What does he say ?
He speaks against the liberty of man—against the
progress of the human race. He speaks to calumniate
thinkers, and to warn the faithful against the discoveries
of science. He speaks for the destruction of civilisation.
Who listens ? Do astronomers, geologists and scientists
put the hand to the ear fearing that an accent may be
lost ? Does France listen ? Does Italy hear ? Is not the
Church weakest at its centre ? Do those who have raised
�ROME OR REASON.
25
Italy from the dead, and placed her again among the
great nations, pay attention ? Does Great Britain care for
this voice—this moan, this groan—of the Middle Ages ?
Do the words of Leo XIII. impress the intelligence of the
Great Republic ? Can anything be more absurd than for
the vicar of Christ to attack a demonstration of science
with a passage of Scripture, or a quotation from one of
the “ Fathers ” ?
Compare the popes with the kings and queens of
England. Infinite wisdom had but little to do with the
selection of these monarchs, and yet they were far better
than any equal number of consecutive popes. This is
faint praise, even for kings and queens, but it shows that
chance succeeded in getting better rulers for England
than “ Infinite Wisdom ” did for the Church of Rome.
Compare the popes with the presidents of the Republic
elected by the people.
If Adams had murdered
Washington, and Jefferson had imprisoned Adams, and if
Madison had cut out Jefferson’s tongue, and Monroe had
assassinated Madison, and John Quincy Adams had
poisoned Monroe, and General Jackson had hung Adams
and his Cabinet, we might say that presidents had been as
virtuous as popes. But if this had happened, the verdict
of the world would be that the people are not capable of
selecting their presidents.
But this voice from Rome is growing feebler day by
day ; so feeble that the Cardinal admits that the vicar of
God, and the supernatural Church, “ are being tormented
by Falck laws, by Mancini laws and by Crispi laws.” In
other words, this representative of God, this substitute of
Christ, this Church of divine origin, this supernatural
institution—pervaded by the Holy Ghost—are being
“ tormented ” by three politicians. Is it possible that
this patriotic trinity is more powerful than the other ?*
It is claimed that if the Catholic Church “ be only a
human system, built up by the intellect, will and energy
of men, the adversaries must prove it—that the burden is
upon them.”
As a general thing, institutions are natural. If this
Church is supernatural, it is the one exception. The
affirmative is with those who claim that it is of divine
origin. So far as we know, all governments and all
creeds are the work of man. No one believes that Rome
�26
ROME OR REASON.
was a supernatural production, and yet its beginnings
were as small as those of the Catholic Church. Commenc
ing in weakness, Rome grew, and fought, and conquered,
until it was believed that the sky bent above a subjugated
world. And yet all was natural. For every effect there
was an efficient cause.
The Catholic asserts that all other religions have been
produced by man—that Brahminism and Buddhism, the
religion of Isis and Osiris, the marvellous mythologies of
Greece and Rome, were the work of the human mind.
From these religions Catholicism has borrowed. Long
before Catholicism was born, it was believed that women
had borne children whose fathers were gods. The Trinity
was promulgated in Egypt centuries before the birth of
Moses. Celibacy was taught by the ancient Nazarenes
and Essenes, by the priests of Egypt and India, by
mendicant monks, and by the piously insane of many
countries long before the Apostles lived. The Chinese
tell us that “ when there were but one man and one
woman upon the earth, the woman refused to sacrifice
her virginity even to people the globe ; and the gods,
honoring her purity, granted that she should conceive
beneath the gaze of her lover’s eyes, and a virgin mother
became the parent of humanity.
The founders of many religions have insisted that it
was the duty of man to renounce the pleasures of sense,
and millions before our era took the vows of chastity,
poverty and obedience, and most cheerfully lived upon
the labor of others.
The sacraments of baptism and confirmation are far
(older than the Church of Rome. The Eucharist is pagan.
Long before popes began to murder each other, pagans ate
cakes—the flesh of Ceres, and drank wine—the blood of
Bacchus. Holy water flowed in the Ganges and Nile,
priests interceded for the people, and anointed the dying.
It will not do to say that every successful religion that
has taught unnatural doctrines, unnatural practices, must
of necessity have been of divine origin. In most religions
there has been a strange mingling of the good and bad,
of the merciful and cruel, of the loving and malicious.
Buddhism taught the universal brotherhood of man,
insisted on the development of the mind, and this religion
was propagated not by the sword, but by preaching, by
�ROME OR REASON.
27
persuasion and by kindness—yet in many things it wag
contrary to the human will, contrary to the human pas
sions, and contrary to good sense. Buddhism succeeded.
Can we, for this reason, say that it is a supernatural
religion ? Is the unnatural the supernatural ?
It is insisted that, while other churches have changed,
the Catholic Church alone has remained the same, and
that this fact demonstrates its divine origin.
Has the creed of Buddhism changed in three thousand
years ? Is intellectual stagnation a demonstration of
divine origin ? When anything refuses to grow, are we
certain that the seed was planted by God ? If the
Catholic Church is the same to-day that it has been for
many centuries, this proves that there has been no intel
lectual development. If men do not differ upon religious
subjects, it is because they do not think.
Differentiation is the law of growth, of progress. Every
Church must gain or lose ; it cannot remain the same ; it
must decay or grow. The fact that the Catholic Church
has not grown—that it has been petrified from the first—
does not establish divine origin ; itsimply establishes the
fact that it retards the progress of man. Everything in
nature changes—every atom is in motion—every star
moves. Nations, institutions and individuals have youth,
manhood, old age, death. This is and will be true of the
Catholic Church. It was once weak—it grew stronger—
it reached its climax of power—it began to decay—it
never can rise again. It is confronted by the dawn of
Science. In the presence of the nineteenth century it
cowers.
It is not true that “ All natural causes run to disinte
gration.”
Natural causes run to integration as well as to disinte
gration. All growth is integration, and all growth is
natural. All decay is disintegration, and all decay is
natural. Nature builds and nature destroys. When the
acorn grows—when the sunlight and rain fall upon it and
the oak rises—so far as the oak is concerned “ all natural
causes ” do not “ run to disintegration.” But there comes
a time when the oak has reached its limit, and then the
forces of nature run towards disintegration, and finally
the old oak falls. But if the Cardinal is right—if “ all
natural causes run to disintegration,” then every success
�28
ROME OR REASON.
must have been of divine origin, and nothing is natural
but destruction. This is Catholic science : “ All natural
causes run to disintegration.” What do these causes find
to disintegrate ? Nothing that is natural. The fact that
the thing is not disintegrated shows that it was and is of
supernatural origin. According to the Cardinal, the only
business of nature is to disintegrate the supernatural.
To prevent this, the supernatural needs the protection of
the Infinite. According to this doctrine, if anything
lives and grows, it does so in spite of nature. Growth,
then, is not in accordance with, but in opposition to
nature. Every plant is supernatural—it defeats the dis
integrating influences of rain and light. The generalisa
tion of the Cardinal is half the truth. It would be
equally true to say : All natural causes run to integration.
But the whole truth is that growth and decay are equal.
The Cardinal asserts that “ Christendom was created by
the world-wide Church as we see it before our eyes at
this day. Philosophers and statesmen believe it to be the
work of their own hands ; they did not make it, but they
have for three hundred years been unmaking it by refor
mations and revolutions.”
The meaning of this is that Christendom was far better
three hundred years ago than now ; that during these
three centuries Christendom has been going towards
barbarism. It means that the supernatural Church of
God has been a failure for three hundred years ; that it
has been unable to withstand the attacks of philosophers
and statesmen, and that it has been helpless in the midst
of “ reformations and revolutions.”
What was the condition of the world three hundred
years ago, the period, according to the Cardinal, in which
the Church reached the height of its influence and since
which it has been unable to withstand the rising tide of
reformation and the whirlwind of revolution ?
In that blessed time, Phillip II. was king of Spain—he
with the cramped head and the monstrous jaw. Heretics
were hunted like wild and poisonous beasts ; the in?
quisition was firmly established, and priests were busy
with rack and fire. With a zeal born of the hatred of
man and the love of God, the Church with every
instrument of torture, touched every nerve in the human
body.
�ROME OR REASON.
29
In those happy clays the Duke qf Alva was devastating
the homes of Holland ; heretics were buried alive—their
tongues were torn from their mouths, their lids from
their eyes; the Armada was on the sea for the destruction
of the heretics of England, and the Moriscoes—a million
and a half of industrious people—were being driven by
Sword and flame from their homes. The dews had been
expelled from Spain. This Catholic country had suc
ceeded in driving intelligence and industry from its
territory ; and this had been done with cruelty, with a
ferocity, unequalled in the*annals of crime. Nothing
was left but ignorance, bigotry, intolerance, credulity, the
Inquisition, the seven sacraments and the seven deadly
Sins. And yet a Cardinal of the nineteenth century,
living in the land of Shakespeare, regrets the change that
has been wrought by the intellectual efforts, by the dis
coveries, by the inventions and heroism of three hundred
years.
Three hundred years ago, Charles IX., in France, son
of Catherine de Medici, in the year of grace 1572—after
nearly sixteen centuries of Catholic Christianity—after
hundreds of vicars of ^Christ had sat in St. Peter’s chair—
after the’natural passions of man had been “ softened ” by
the creed of Rome—came the Massacre of St. Bartholo
mew, the result of a conspiracy between the Vicar of
Christ, Philip II., Charles IX., and his fiendish mother.
Let the Cardinal read the account of this massacre once
more, and after reading it, imagine that he sees the
gashed and mutilated bodies of thousands of men and
women, and then let him say that he regrets the revolu
tions and reformations of three hundred years.
About three hundred years ago Clement VIII., Vicar of
Christ, acting in God’s place, substitute of the Infinite,
persecuted Giordano Bruno even unto death. This great’
this sublime man, was tried for heresy. He had ventured
to assert the rotary motion of the earth ; he had hazarded
the conjecture that there were in the fields of infinite
space worlds larger and more glorious than ours. For
these low and groveling thoughts, for this contradiction
of the word and vicar of God, this man was imprisoned
for many years. But his noble spirit was not broken,
and finally in the year 1600, by the orders of the infam
ous Vicar, he was chained to the stake. Priests believing
�30
ROME OR REASON.
in the doctrine of universal forgiveness—priests who
when smitten upon one cheek turned the other—carried
with a kind of ferocious joy faggots to the feet of this
incomparable man. These disciples of “Our Lord” were
made joyous as the flames, like serpents, climbed around
the body of Bruno. In a few moments the brave thinker
was dead, and the priests who had burned him fell upon
their knees and asked the infinite God to continue the
blessed work for ever in hell.
There are two things that cannot exist in the same
universe—an infinite God and a martyr.
Does the Cardinal regret that kings and emperors are
not now engaged in the extermination of Protestants ?
Does he regret that dungeons of the Inquisition are no
longer crowded with the best and bravest? Does he
long for the fires of the auto da fe1
?
In coming to a conclusion as to the origin of the
Catholic Church—in determining the truth of the claim
of infallibility—we are not restricted to the physical
achievements of that Church, or to the history of its
propagation, or to the rapidity of its growth.
This Church has a creed ; and if this Church is of
divine origin—if its head is the Vicar of Christ, and, as
such, infallible in matters of faith and morals, this creed
must be true. Let us start with the supposition that God
exists, and that he is infinitely wise, powerful and good—
and this is only a supposition. Now, if the creed is
foolish, absurd and cruel, it cannot be of divine origin.
We find in this creed the following :
“Whosoever will be saved, before all things it isnecessary that he hold the Catholic faith.”
It is not necessary, before all things, that he be good,,
honest, merciful, charitable and just. Creed is more im
portant than conduct. The most important of all things
is, that he hold the Catholic faith. There were thousands
of years during which it was not necessary to hold that
faith, because that faith did not exist; and yet during
that time the virtues were just as important as now, just
as important as they ever can be. Millions of the noblest
of the human race never heard of this creed. Millions
of the bravest and best have heard of it, examined, and
rejected it. Millions of the most infamous have believed
it, and because of their belief, or notwithstanding their
�ROME OR REASON.
31
belief^ have murdered millions of their fellows. We
know that men can be, have been, and are just as wicked
with it as without it. We know that it is not necessary
to believe it to be good, loving, tender, noble and self
denying. We admit that millions who have believed it
have also been self-denying and heroic, and that millions,
by such belief, were not prevented from torturing and
destroying the helpless.
Now if all who believed it were good, and all who
rejected it were bad, then there might be some propriety
in saying that “ whoever will be saved, before all things
it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith.” But as
the experience of mankind is otherwise, the declaration
becomes absurd, ignorant and cruel.
There is still another clause :
u Which faith, except every one do keep entire and
inviolate, without doubt he shall everlastingly perish.”
We now have both sides of this wonderful truth : The
believer will be saved, the unbeliever will be lost. We
know that faith is not the child or servant of the will.
We know that belief is a conclusion based upon what the
mind supposes to be true. We know that it is not an act
of the will. Nothing can be more absurd than to save a
man because he is not intelligent enough to accept the
truth, and nothing can be more infamous than to damn
a man because he is intelligent enough to reject the false.
It resolves itself into a question of intelligence. If the
creed is true, then a man rejects it because he lacks
intelligence. Is this a crime for which a man should
everlastingly perish ? If the creed is false, then a man
accepts it because he lacks intelligence. In both cases
the crime is exactly the same. If a man is to be damned
for rejecting the truth, certainly he should not be saved
for accepting the false. This one clause demonstrates
that a being of infinite wisdom and goodness did not
write it. It also demonstrates that it was the work of
men who had neither wisdom nor a sense of justice.
What is this Catholic faith that must be held ? It is
this :
■“ That we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in
Unity, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the
substance.”
Why should an Infinite Being demand worship ? Why
�32
ROME OR REASON.
should one God wish to be worshipped as three ? Why
should three Gods wish to be worshipped as one ? Why
should we pray to one God and think of three, or pray to
three Gods and think of one ? Can this increase the
happiness of the one or of the three ? Is it possible to
think of one as three, or of three as one ? If you think
of three as one, can you think of one as none, or of none
as one ? When you think of three as one, what do you
do with the other two ? You must not “ confound the
persons ”—they must be kept separate. When you think
of one as three, how do you get the other two ? You
must not “divide the substance.” Is it possible to write
greater contradictions than these ?
This creed demonstrates the human origin of the
Catholic Church. Nothing could be more unjust than to
punish man for unbelief—for the expression of honest
thought—for having been guided by his reason—for
having acted in accordance with his best judgment.
Another claim is made, to the effect “ that the Catholic
Church has filled the world with the true knowledge of
the one true God, and that it has destroyed all idols by
light instead of by fire.”
The Catholic Church described the true God as a being
who would inflict eternal pain on his weak and erring
children ; described him as a fickle, quick-tempered,
unreasonable deity, whom honesty enraged, and whom
flattery governed ; one who loved to see fear upon its
knees, ignorance with closed eyes and open mouth ; one
who delighted in useless self-denial, who loved to hear
the sighs and sobs of suffering nuns, as they lay prostrate
on dungeon floors ; one who was delighted when the
husband deserted his family and lived alone in some cave
in the far wilderness, tormented by dreams and driven
to insanity by prayer and penance, by fasting and faith.
According the Catholic Church, the true God enjoyed
the agonies of heretics. He loved the smell of their
burning flesh ; he applauded with wide palms when
philosophers were flayed alive, and to him the auto da fe
was a divine comedy.
The shrieks of wives, the
cries of babes when fathers were being burned,
gave contrast, heightened the effect and filled his cup
with joy. This true God did not know the shape of the
earth he had made, and had forgotten the orbits of the
�BOMB OR REASON.
33
stars. > “ The stream of light which descended from the
beginning” was propagated by faggot to faggot, until
Christendom was filled with the devouring fires of
faith.
It may also be said that the Catholic Church filled the
world with the true knowledge of the one true Devil. It
filled the air with malicious phantoms, crowded innocent
Sleep with leering fiends, and gave the world to the
domination of witches and wizards, spirits and spooks,
goblins and ghosts, and butchered and burned thousandsfor the commission of impossible crimes.
It is contended that: “ In this true knowledge of the
Divine Nature was revealed to man their own relation toa Creator as sons to a Father.”
This tender relation was revealed by the Catholics tothe Pagans, the Arians, the Cathari, the Waldenses, the
Albigenses, the heretics, the Jews, the Moriscoes, the
Protestants—to the natives of the West Indies, of Mexico,
of Peru—to philosophers, patriots and thinkers. All these
victims were taught to regard the true God as a loving
Father, and this lesson was taught with every instrument
of torture—with brandings and burnings, with Sayings and
flames. The world was filled with cruelty and credulity,
ignorance and intolerance and the soil in which all these
horrors grew was the true knowledge of the one true God,,
and the true knowledge of the one true Devil. And yet,
we are compelled to say, that the one true Devil described
by the Catholic Church was not as malevolent as the one
true God.
Is it true that the Catholic Church overthrew idolatry ?
What is idolatry ? What shall we say of the worship of
popes—of the doctrine of the Real presence, of divine
honors paid to saints, of sacred vestments, of holy water,
of consecrated cups and plates, of images and relics, of
amulets and charms ?
The Catholic Church filled the world with the spirit of
idolatry. It abandoned the idea of continuit5r in nature,
it denied the integrity of cause and effect. The govern
ment of the world was the composite result of the caprice
of God, the malice of Satan, the prayers of the faithfulsoftened, it may be, by the charity of Chance. Yet the
Cardinal asserts, without the preface of a smile, that
“ Demonology was overthrown by the Church, with the
•
c
�34
ROME OR REASON,
assistance of forces that were above nature; ” and in the
same breath gives birth to this enlightened statement :
“Beelzebub is not divided against himself.” Is a belief
in Beelzebub a belief in demonology ? Has the Cardinal
forgotten the Council of Nice, held in the year of grace
787, that declared the worship of images to be lawful ?
Did that infallible Council, under the guidance of the
Holy Ghost, destroy idolatry ?
The Cardinal takes the ground that marriage is a sacra
ment, and therefore indissoluble, and he also insists that
celibacy is far better than marriage—holier than a sacra
ment—that marriage is not the highest state, but that
« the state of virginity unto death is thejhighest condition
of man and woman.”
The highest ideal of a family is where all are equal—
where love has superseded authority—where each seeks
the good of all, and where none obey—where no religion
can sunder hearts, and with which no church can in
terfere.
The real marriage is based on mutual affection—the
ceremony is but the outward evidence of the inward
flame. To this contract there are but two parties. The
Church is an impudent intruder. Marriage is made public
to the end that the real contract may be known, so that
the world can see that the parties have been actuated by
the highest and holiest motives that find expression in
the acts of human beings. The man and woman are not
joined together by God, or by the Church, or by the
State. The Church and State may prescribe certain
•ceremonies, certain formalities—but all these are only
•evidence of the existence of a sacred fact in the heaits of
the wedded. The indissolubility of marriage is a dogma
that has filled the lives of millions with agony and tears.
It has given a perpetual excuse for vice and immorality.
Fear has borne children begotten by brutality. ^Countless
women have endured the insults, indignities and cruelties
■of fiendish husbands, because they thought that it was
the will of God. The contract of marriage is the most
important that human beings can make ; but no contract
can be so important as to release one of the parties from
the obligation of performance ; and no contract, whether
made between man and woman, or between them and
God, after a failure of consideration caused by the wilful
�HOME OR REASON.
35
act of the man or woman, can hold and bind the innocent
and honest.
Do the believers in indissoluble marriage treat their
wives better than others ? A little while ago, a woman
said to a man who had raised his hand to strike her :
“ Do not touch me ; you have no right to beat me ; I am
not your wife.”
About a year ago, a husband, whom God in his infinite
wisdom had joined to a loving and patient woman in the
indissoluble sacrament of marriage, becoming enraged,
seized the helpless wife and tore out one of her eyes.
She forgave him. A few weeks ago he deliberately
repeated this frightful crime, leaving his victim totally
blind. Would it not have been better if man, before
the poor woman was blinded, had put asunder whom
God had joined together? Thousands of husbands,
who insist that marriage is indissoluble, are the b eaters
of wives.
The Law of the Church has created neither the purity
nor the peace of domestic life. Back of all churches is
human affection. Back of all theologies is the love of
the human heart. Back of all your priests and creeds is
the adoration of the one woman by the one man, and of
the one man by the one wom'an. Back of your faith is
the fireside, back of your folly is the family • and back
of all your holy mistakes and your sacred absurdities is
the love of husband and wife, of parent and child.
It is not true that neither the Greek nor the Roman
world had any true conception of a home. The splendid
story of Ulysses and Penelope, the parting of Hector and
Andromache, demonstrate that a true conception of
home existed among the Greeks. Before the establish
ment of. Christianity, the Roman matron commanded the
admiration of the then known world. She was free and
noble. The Church degraded woman ; made her the
property of the husband, and trampled her beneath its
brutal feet. The “ fathers ” denounced woman as a perpetual temptation, as the cause of all evil. The Church
worshipped a God who had upheld polygamy, and had
pronounced his curse on woman, and had declared
that she should be the serf of the husband. This Church
followed the teachings of St. Paul. It taught the un
cleanness of marriage, and insisted that all children were
�36
' ROME OR REASON.
conceived in sin. This Church pretended to have been
founded by one who offered a reward in this world, and
eternal joy in the next, to husbands who would forsake
their wives and children and follow him. Did this tend
to the elevation of woman ? Did this detestable doctrine
“create the purity and peace of domestic life’ ? Is it
true that a monk is purer than a good and noble father .
that a nun is holier than a loving mother ?
?
Is there anything deeper and stronger than a mother 8
love ? Is there anything purer, holier than a mother
holding her dimpled babe against her billowed breast ?
The good man is useful, the best man is the most use
ful. Those who fill the nights with barren prayers and
holy hunger, torture themselves for their own good and
not for the benefit of others. They are earning eternal
glory for themselves ; they do not fast for their fellow
men, their selfishness is only equalled by their foolish
ness. Compare the monk in his selfish cell, counting
beads and saying prayers for the purpose of saving his
barren soul, with a husband and father sitting by his
fireside with wife and children. Compare the nun with
the mother and her babe.
Celibacy is the essence of vulgarity. It tries to put a
stain upon motherhood, upon marriage, upon love—that
is to say, upon all that is holiest in the human heart
Take love from the world, and there is nothing left worth
livino- for. The Church has treated this great, this
sublime, this unspeakably holy passion, as though it
polluted the heart. They have placed the love of God
above the love of woman, above the love of man. Human
love is generous and noble. The love of God is selfish,
because man does not love God for God’s sake but for
his own. •
,
i 4.
Yet the Cardinal asserts “ that the change wrought by
Christianity in the social, political and international
relations of the world’’-“that the root of this ethical,
change, private and public, is the Christian home.
A
moment afterwards, this prelate insists that celibacy is
far better than marriage. If the world could be induced
to live in accordance with the “ highest state, this gene
ration would be the last. Why were men and women
created ? Why did not the Catholic God commence with
the sinless and sexless ? The Cardinal ought to take the
�ROME OR REASON.
37
ground that to talk well is good, but that to be dumb is
the highest condition; that hearing is a pleasure, but that
deafness is ecstasy ; and that to think, to reason, is very
well, but that to be a Catholic is far better.
Why should we desire the destruction of human
passions ? Take passions from human beings and what
is left ? The great object should be not to destroy
passions, but to make them obedient to the intellect. To
indulge passion to the utmost is one form of intemper
ance, to destroy passion is another. The reasonable
gratification of passion under the domination of the
intellect is true wisdom and perfect virtue.
The goodness, the sympathy, the self-denial of the nun,
of the monk, all come from the mother instinct, the
father instinct—all were produced by human affection,
by the love of man for woman, of woman for man. Love
is a transfiguration. It ennobles, purifies and glorifies.
In true marriage two hearts burst into flower. Two lives
unite. They melt in music. Every moment is a melody.
Love is a revelation, a creation. From love the world
borrows its beauty and the heavens their glory. Justice,
self-denial, charity and pity are the children of love.
Jjover, wife, mother, husband, father, child, home—these
words shed light—they are the gems of human speech.
Without love all glory fades, the noble falls from life, art
dies, music loses meaning and becomes mere motions of
the air, and virtue ceases to exist.
It is asserted that this life of celibacy is above and
against the tendencies of human nature; and the Cardinal
then asks : “ Who will ascribe this to natural causes,
and, if so, why did it not appear in the first four thousand
years ? ”
If there is in a system of religion a doctrine, a dogma,
or a practice against the tendencies of human nature—if
this religion succeeds, then it is claimed by the Cardinal
that such religion must be of divine origin. Is it “against
the tendencies of human nature ” for a mother to throw
her child into the Ganges to please a supposed God? Yet
a religion that insisted on that sacrifice succeeded, and
has, to-day, more believers than the Catholic Church can
boast.
Religions, like nations and individuals, have always
.gone along the line of least resistance. Nothing has
�38
ROME OR REASON.
“ascended the stream of human license by a power
mightier than nature.” There is no such power. There
never was, there never can be, a miracle. We know that
man is a conditioned being. We know that he is affected
by a change of conditions. If he is ignorant he is super
stitious—that is natural. If his brain is developed, if
he perceives clearly that all things are naturally produced,
he ceases to be superstitious and becomes scientific. He
is not a saint, but a savant—not a priest, but a philo
sopher. He does not worship, he works; he investigates ;
he thinks ; he takes advantage, through intelligence, of
the forces of nature. He is no longer the victim of
appearances, the dupe of his own ignorance, and the
persecutor of his fellow men.
He then knows that it is far better to love his wife
and children than to love God. He then knows that the
love of man for woman, of woman for man, of parent
for child, of child for parent, is far better, far holier
than the love of man for any phantom born of ignorance
and fear.
It is illogical to take the ground that the world was
cruel and ignorant and idolatrous when the Catholic
Church was established, and that because the world is
better now than then, the Church is of divine origin.
What was the world when science came ?
What
was it in the days of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler ?
What was it when printing was invented ? What was it
when the Western World was found ? Would it not be
much easier to prove that science is of divine origin ?
Science does not persecute. It does not shed blood—
it fills the world with light. It cares nothing for heresy;
it developes the mind, and enables man to answer his
own prayers.
Cardinal Manning takes the ground that Jehovah prac
tically abandoned the children of men for four thousand
years, and gave them over to every abomination. He
claims that Christianity came “ in the fulness of time,
and it is then admitted that “ what the fulness of time
may mean is one of the mysteries of times and seasons,
that it is not for us to know.” Having declared that it is
a mystery, and one that we are not to know, the Cardinal
explains it : “ One motive for the long delay of four
thousand years is not far to seek—it gave time, full and
�ROME OR REASON.
39
ample, for the utmost development and consolidation of
all the falsehood and evil of which the intellect and will
of man is capable.”
Is it possible to imagine why an infinitely good and
wise being “ gave time full and ample for the utmost
development and consolidation of falsehood and evil ” ?
Why should an infinitely wise God desire this development
and consolidation ? What would be thought of a father
who should refuse to teach his son and deliberately
allow him to go into every possible excess, to the end
that he might “ develop all the falsehood and evil of
which his intellect and will were capable ”? If a super
natural religion is a necessity, and if without it all men
simply develop and consolidate falsehood and evil, why
was not a supernatural religion given to the first man ?
The Catholic Church, if this be true, should have been
founded in the garden of Eden. Was it not cruel to drown
a world just for the want of a supernatural religion—a
religion that man, by no possibility, could furnish ? Was
there “ husbandry in heaven ” ?
But the Cardinal contradicts himself by not only
admitting, but declaring, that the world had never seen
a legislation so just, so equitable, as that of Rome. Is it
possible that a nation in which falsehood and evil had
reached their highest development was, after all, so wise,
so just, and so equitable ? Was not the civil law far
better than the Mosaic—more philosophical, nearer just?
The civil law was produced without the assistance of God.
According to the Cardinal, it was produced by men in
whom all the falsehood and evil of which they were
capable had been developed and consolidated, while the
cruel and ignorant Mosaic code came from the lips of
infinite wisdom and compassion.
It is declared that the history of Rome shows what man
can do without God, and I assert that the history of the
Inquisition shows what man can do when assisted by a
church of divine origin, presided over by the infallible
vicars of God.
The fact that the early Christians not only believed
incredible things, but persuaded others of their truth, is
regarded by the Cardinal as a miracle. This is only
another phase of the old argument that success is the test
of divine origin. All supernatural religions have been
�40
ROME OR REASON.
founded in precisely the same way. The credulity of
eighteen hundred years ago believed everything except
the truth.
A religion is a growth, and is of necessity adapted in
some degree to the people among whom it grows. It is
shaped and moulded by the general ignorance, the
superstition and credulity of the age in which it lives.
The key is fashioned by the lock. Every religion that
has succeeded has in some way supplied the wants of its
votaries, and has to a certain extent harmonised with
their hopes, their fears, their vices, and their virtues.
If, as the Cardinal says, the religion of Christ is in
absolute harmony with nature, how can it be super
natural ? The Cardinal also declares that. “ the religion
of Christ is in harmony with the reason and moral nature
in all nations and all ages to this day.” What becomes of
the argument that Catholicism must be of divine origin
because “ it has ascended the stream of human licence,
contra ictum fluminis, by a power mightier than
nature ” ? If “ it is in harmony with the reason and
moral nature of all nations and all ages to this day,” it
has gone with the stream, and not against it. If “ the
religion of Christ is in harmony with the reason and
moral nature of all nations,” then the men who have
rejected it are unnatural, and these men have gone against
the stream. How then can it be said that Christianity
has been in changeless opposition to nature as man has
marred it ? To what extent has man marred it ? In spite
of the marring by man, we are told that the reason and
moral nature of all nations in all ages to this day is in
harmony with the religion of Jesus Christ.
Are we justified in saying that the' Catholic Church is
of divine origin because the Pagans failed to destroy it
by persecution ?
We will put the Cardinal’s statement in form :
Paganism failed to destroy.Catholicism by persecutions
therefore Catholicism is of divine origin.
Let us make an application of this logic :
Paganism failed to destroy Catholicism by persecution ;
therefore, Catholicism is of divine origin.
Catholicism failed to destroy Protestantism by persecu
tion ; therefore, Protestantism is of divine origin.
�ROME OR REASON.
41
Catholicism and Protestantism combined failed to
destroy Infidelity; therefore, Infidelity is of divine
origin.
Let us make another application :
Paganism did not succeed in destroying Catholicism ;
therefore, Paganism was a false religion.
Catholicism did not succeed in destroying Protestant
ism ; therefore, Catholicism is a false religion.
Catholicism and Protestantism combined failed to
destroy Infidelity ; therefore, both Catholicism and
Protestantism are false religions.
The Cardinal has another reason for believing the
Catholic Church of divine origin. He declares that the
Canon Law is a creation of wisdom and justice to which
no statutes at large or imperial pandects can bear com
parison “ that the world-wide and secular legislation of
the Church was of a higher character, and that as water
cannot rise above its source, the Church could not, by
mere human wisdom, have corrected and perfected the
imperial law, and therefore its source must have been
higher than the sources of the world.”
When Europe was the most ignorant, the Canon Law
was supreme. As a matter of fact, the good in the Canon
Law was borrowed—the bad was, for the most part,
original. In my judgment, the legislation of the Repub
lic of the United States is in many respects superior to
that of Rome, and yet we are greatly indebted to the
Common Law ; but it never occurred to me that our
Statutes at Large are divinely inspired.
If the Canon Law is, in fact, the legislation of infinite
wisdom, then it should be a perfect code. Yet, the Canon
Law made it a crime next to robbery and theft to take
interest for money. Without the right to take interest
the business of the world would, to a large extent, cease
and the prosperity of mankind end. There are railways
enough in the United States to make six tracks around
the globe, and every mile was built with borrowed money
on which interest was paid or promised. In no other
way could the savings of many thousands have been
brought together and a capital great enough formed to
construct works of such vast and continental import
ance.
�42
ROME OR REASON.
It was provided in this same wonderful Canon Law
that a heretic could not be a witness against a Catholic.
The Catholic was at liberty to rob and wrong his fellow
man, provided the fellow man was not a fellow Catholic,
and in a court established by the Vicar of Christ, the man
who had been robbed was not allowed to open his mouth.
A Catholic could enter the house of an unbeliever, of a
Jew, of a heretic, of a Moor, and before the eyes of the
husband and father murder his wife and children, and
the father could not pronounce in the hearing of a judge
the name of the murderer. The world is wiser now, and
the Canon Law, given to us by infinite wisdom, has been
repealed by the common sense of man.
In this divine code it was provided that to convict a
cardinal bishop, seventy-two witnesses were required ; a
cardinal presbyter, forty-four ; a cardinal deacon, twentyfour ;' a sub-deacon, acolyth, exorcist, reader, ostiarus,
seven ; and in the purgation of a bishop, twelve witnesses
were invariably required; of a presbyter, seven ; of a
deacon, three. These laws, in my judgment, were made,
not by God, but by the clergy.
So, too, in this cruel code it was provided that those
who gave aid, favor, or counsel, to excommunicated per
sons should be anathema, and that those who talked
with, consulted, or sat at the same table with, or gave
anything in charity to the excommunicated, should be
anathema.
Is it possible that a being of infinite wisdom made
hospitality a crime ? Did he say : “ Whoso giveth a cup
of cold water to the excommunicated shall wear forever a
garment of fire”? Were not the laws of the Romans
much better ? Besides all this, under the Canon Law the
dead could be tried for heresy, and their estates confiscated
—that is to say, their widows and orphans robbed. The
most brutal part of the common law of England is that in
relation to the right of women—all of which was taken
from the Corpus Juris Canonist, “ the law that came
from a higher source than man.”
The only cause of absolute divorce as laid down by the
pious canonists was propter infidelitatem, which was
when one of the parties became Catholic, and would not
live with the other who continued still an unbeliever.
Under this divine statute, a pagan wishing to be rid of
�ROME OR REASON.
43:
his wife had only to join the Catholic Church, provided
she remained faithful to the religion of her fathers.
Under this divine law, a man marrying a widow was
declared to be a bigamist.
It would require volumes to point out the cruelties,
absurdities and inconsistencies of the Canon Law. It'
has been thrown away by the world. Every civilised
nation has a code of its own, and the Canon Law is of
interest only to the historian, the antiquarian, and the
enemy of theological government.
Under the Canon Law, people were convicted of being
witches and wizards, of holding intercourse with devils.
Thousands perished at the stake, having been convicted
of these impossible crimes. Under the Canon Law, there
was such a crime as the suspicion of heresy. A man or
woman could be arrested, charged with being suspected,,
and under this Canon Law, flowing from the intellect of
infinite wisdom, the presumption was in favor of guilt.
The suspected had to prove themselves innocent. In all
civilised courts, the presumption of innocence is theshield of the indicted, but the Canon Law took away this
shield, and put in the hand of the priest the sword of
presumptive guilt.
If the real pope is the vicar of Christ, the true shepherd
of the sheep, this fact should be known not only to the
vicar, but to the sheep. A divinely founded and guarded
church ought to know its own shepherd, and yet the
Catholic sheep have not always been certain who theshepherd was.
The Council of Pisa, held in 1409, deposed two popes—
rivals—Gregory and Benedict—that is to say, deposed
the actual vicar of Christ and the pretended. This action
was taken because a council, enlightened by the Holy
Ghost, could not tell the genuine from the counterfeit.
The council then elected another vicar, whose authority
was afterwards denied. Alexander V. died, and John
XXIII. took his place ; Gregory XII. insisted that he
was the lawful pope ; John resigned, then he was de
posed, and afterwards imprisoned; then Gregory XII.
resigned, and Martin V. was elected. The whole thing
reads like the annals of a South American Revolution.
The Council of Constance restored, as the Cardinal
declares, the unity of the Church, and brought back the
�44
ROME OR REASON.
consolation of the Holy Ghost. Before this great council
John Huss appeared and maintained his own tenets.
The council declared that the Church was not bound to
keep its promise with a heretic. Huss was condemned
and executed on the 6th of July, 1415. His disciple,
Jerome of Prague, recanted, but having relapsed, was put
to death, May 30th, 1416. This cursed council shed the
blood of Huss and Jerome.
The Cardinal appeals to the author of Ecce Homo for
the purpose of showing that Christianity is above nature,
and the following passages, among others, are quoted :
“ Who can describe that which unites men ? Who has
entered into the formation of speech, which is the symbol
of their union ? Who can describe exhaustively the
origin of civil society ? He who can do these things can
explain the origin of the Christian Church.”
These passages should not have been quoted by the
Cardinal. The author of these passages simply says that
the origin of the Christian Church is no harder to find
and describe than that which unites men—than that
which has entered into the formation of speech, the
symbol of their union—no harder to describe than th®
origin of civil society—because he says that one who can
describe these can describe the other.
Certainly none of these things are above nature. We
do not need the assistance of the Holy Ghost in these
matters. We know that men are united by common
interests, common purposes, common dangers—by race,
■climate, and education. It is no more wonderful that
people live in families, tribes, communities and nations,
than that birds, ants, and bees live in flocks and
swarms.
If we know anything we know that language is natural
—that it is a physical science. But if we take the ground
occupied by the Cardinal, then we insist that everything
that cannot be accounted for by man, is supernatural.
Let me ask, by what man ? What man must we take as
the standard ? Cosmas or Humboldt, St. Irenaeus or
Darwin ? If everything that we cannot account for is
above nature, then ignorance is the test of the super
natural. The man who is mentally honest, stops where
his knowledge stops. At that point he says that he does
not know. JSuch a man is a philosopher. Then the
�ROME OR REASON.
45
theologian steps forward, denounces the modesty of the
philosopher as blasphemy, and proceeds to tell what is
beyond the horizon of the human intellect.
■ Could a savage account for the telegraph, or the tele
phone by natural causes? How would he account for
these wonders ? He would account for them precisely
as the Cardinal accounts for the Catholic Church.
Belonging to no rival church, I have not the slightest
interest "in the primacy of Leo XIII., and yet it is to be
regretted that this primacy rests upon such a narrow and
insecure foundation.
The Cardinal says that “ it will appear almost certain
that the original Greek of St. Irenaeus, which is un
fortunately lost, contained either to. 7rpcoTeia, or some
inflection of 7rp<DTeva>, which signifies primacy.”
From this it appears that the primacy of the Bishop of
Rome rests on some “ inflection ” of a Greek word—and
that this supposed inflection was in a letter supposed to
have been written by St. Irenaeus, which has certainly
been lost. Is it possible that the vast fabric of papal
power has this, and only this, for its foundation ? To
this “ inflection ” has it come at last ?
The Cardinal’s case depends upon the intelligence and
veracity of his witnesses. The Fathers of the Church
were utterly incapable of examining a question of fact.
They were all believers in the miraculous. The same is
true of the apostles. If St. John was the author of the
Apocalypse, he was undoubtedly insane. If Polycarp
said the things attributed to him by Catholic writers, he
was certainly in the condition of his master. What is
the testimony of St. John worth in the light of the
following ? “ Cerinthus, the heretic, was in a bath-house.
St. John and another Christian were about to enter. St.
John cried out: ‘ Let us run away, lest the house fall
upon us while the enemy of truth is in it.’ ”
Is it
possible that St. John thought that God would kill two
eminent Christians for the purpose of getting even with
one heretic ?
Let us see who Polycarp was. He seems to have been
a prototype of the Catholic Church, as will be seen from
the following statement concerning this Father: “When
any heretical doctrine was spoken in his presence he
would stop his ears.” After this, there can be no question
�46
ROME OR,REASON.
of his orthodoxy. It is claimed that Polycarp was a
martyr—that a spear was run through his body and
that from the wound his soul, in the shape of a bird, flew
away. The history of his death is just as true as the
history of his life.
Irenaeus, another witness, took the ground that there
was to be a millennium, a thousand years of enjoyment
in which celibacy would not be the highest form of
virtue. If he is called as a witness for the purpose of
establishing the divine origin of the Church, and if oneof his inflections ” is the basis of papal supremacy, is
the Cardinal also willing to take his testimony as to the
nature of the millennium ?
All the Fathers were infinitely credulous. Every one
of them believed, not only in the miracles said to have
been wrought by Christ, by the apostles, and by other
Christians, but every one of them believed in the Pagan
miracles. . All of these Fathers were familiar with won
ders and impossibilities. Nothing was so common with
them as to work miracles, and on many occasions they
not only cured diseases, not only reversed the order of
nature, but succeeded in raising the dead.
It is very hard, indeed, to prove what the apostles said,
or what the Fathers of the Church wrote. There were
many centuries filled with forgeries, many generations in
which the cunning hands of ecclesiastics erased, oblite
rated and interpolated the records of the past, during
which they invented books, invented authors, and quoted
from works that never existed.
The testimony of the “Fathers” is without the slightest
value. They believed everything, they examined nothing.
They received as a waste-basket receives.
Whoever
accepts their testimony will exclaim with the Cardinal :
“ Happily, men are not saved by logic.”
���
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Rome or reason? : a reply to Cardinal Manning
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Ingersoll, Robert Green [1833-1899]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 46 p. ; 18 p.
Notes: Reprinted from the North American Review, Oct. and Nov. 1888. No. 65a in Stein checklist. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Catholic Church
Rationalism
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Catholic Church
Catholic Church-Controversial Literature
Henry Edward Manning
Marriage
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Text
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
THE DIVINE
INTERPRETATION OF
SCRIPTURE:
A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
BY
SALADIN.
Being a Paper read at the Cassadaga Conference, Neu< York,
by S. P. Putnam, Secretary, American Liberal League.
[reprinted
from
“the secular review.”]
London:
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
��NS£3
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF
SCRIPTURE.
Where the currents of human thought and destiny are now
drifting to the wisest of us cannot determine with any degree
of precision. We search in vain for a precedent in the form
and pressure of the present age over all the past annals of
the world. It may be that history repeats itself; but wre
have now reached a juncture of social, political, moral, and
intellectual forces which we look for in vain back through
the dim corridors of time; and how history is to repeat itself
speculation is overwhelmed in the attempt to decide, and
vaticination is dumb.
Never in that tract of the world nominally Christian did
aggressive and defiant “ Infidelity ” close and grapple with
the legions of the Cross as she does to-day; and never
since the Reformation era did the Scarlet Woman flaunt her
skirts so proudly in the great cities of both the Eastern and
Western Hemisphere. Protestantism has no geographical
area that she did not win by the zealous fanaticism of her
first rush. The Protestant countries of the sixteenth cen
tury are the Protestant countries of to-day, and no new ones
have been added thereto. Nay, and the old ones are rent
and riven; and the seed sown by Luther and Spalatin, by
Huss and Calvin, by Wycliffe and Sawtre, by Knox and
Melville, has grown up almost choked with Romish weeds
�4
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE :
and Rational tares. The mentation and the aspiration of
the fifteenth century were not identical with those that
actuate the nineteenth. The floods of human folly have
worn other channels, the currents of human tendency have
torn their way through other rocks and over other shoals.
The old battle-fields are deserted, and only through the
mists of departed time can we descry them, with their rank
grasses, broken and shapeless weapons, half-obliterated
trenches, and dull mounds marking more or less dishonoured
graves. The battalions have reeled and surged into other
fields, and there, with other weapons and other battle-cries,
the often-changing but never-ending tide of human conflict
ebbs and flows. Guns are yet planted on the roof, and there
is a rattle and blaze of musketry from the windows, of the
old half-way house between Rome and Rationalism; but
the shot and shell fall wide of the mark. Formerly, the old
house was in the centre of operations ; now it is on the
extreme left flank, and miles away the real conflict rages.
The half-way house is tottering to its fall. The emergency
to meet which it was built has passed away. Its giants are
dead, its heroes are no more ; its prestige is over, and
Ichabod is inscribed over its gateway. A shabby despotism,
three centuries ago, it modified a terrible despotism, and
thereby justified its existence; but now, Why cumbereth it
the ground ? Hardly taking it into account in military
strategy, up on the side of the windy hill the banners wave
and the troops are ranking, the forces of Rationalism and
Rome, and with them and no other rests the balance
between victory and defeat in the Armageddon of these
latter ages.
Everywhere now Ecclesiasticism howls against “the spread
of Infidelity,” and everywhere Romanism is active, frcm
�A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
5
New York to Birmingham. In the latter town, the other
day, a church dedicated to St. Anne was opened by his
Eminence, Cardinal Manning, with all the august ceremonial
of pontifical High Mass. In his subtle and able dedicatory
address, his Eminence is reported to have said : “ They
believed all that God had revealed, unwritten and written,
the old Divine traditions of the Church from the beginning
—every jot and every tittle. But why did they believe this?
The ‘ Word ’ in the text did not mean the Book, and they
who would draw their Christianity out of the written Scrip
ture had proved for centuries the inefficiency of that rule of
faith by the multitudinous contradictions and ever-increasing
diversity of the interpretation that had been put upon that
Word. Without Divine certainty they could not have Divine
faith, and, therefore, the wisest human critic could give him
no definite certainty of the meaning of the Holy Scripture;
the most learned scientific historian could not fix for him the
meaning of the Word of God. No one, however pious
or good; no minister of religion or priest of the Church,
apart from the Divine authority of the Church itself, could
venture to interpret that written word by his own light or
his own discernment.”
I am a soldier in the ranks of those who would face un
told fatigue and peril to flesh their blades in the heart of
Rome; but I heartily endorse the utterance of his Eminence
in regard to the “wisest human critic” being unable to
express any “ definite certainty of the meaning of the Holy
Scripture.” So far, I, a Rationalist, am in exact accord with
a Romish Cardinal. But when the learned Cardinal pro
ceeds to say that, although the esoterics of Holy Writ are
too deep for human learning, too mystical for human wisdom,
they can be infallibly interpreted by “ the Divine authority
�6
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE :
of the Church itself,” I join issue with him, and oppose him
foot to foot and hilt to hilt. I positively and emphatically
deny that the Church has, in the past, shown that it could
interpret Scripture more successfully than the mere “human
critic” could. Nay, my Lord Cardinal, I will refer you to
only one example—e.g., of how your Church interpreted a
certain Scripture passage; but the example I will give is
such a striking, picturesque, and conclusive one as should
be able to explode forever your Church’s monstrous preten
sions to divinely-inspired hermeneutics. It is unfortunate,
your Eminence, for you and yours that our more modern
times have laid the intellectual wealth of the world’s yester
day at the feet of men who have neither post nor pension
from your Church. It is unfortunate for you and yours that
there are men of my type, who will read and study for many
years in obscurity, anxious only to find out what is true, and
never once asking what is profitable; studying for no pro
fession, hoping for no preferment; poor, but aspiring to no
gain, no crozier, no cardinal’s hat; but freely giving learning
and time and life to the most thankless of all causes—to a
cause that for independence gives you poverty, for celebrity
gives you infamy. What a pity you have not still your Index
Expurgatorius to prevent such as I from misusing the best
years of their life in toiling over volumes the perusal of
which can only be inimical to your hierarchy! How lament
able that you cannot now arrest pens like mine by giving
those who wield them a twinge of the thumbscrew, or make
the blazing fagots at the stake reduce the hand of the writer
to ashes ! Like its God, your Church is the same yesterday,
to day, and forever. Among the calcined bones of the
mighty you would honour me by mingling those of thi
humble Scottish heretic and rebel, but that Protestantism
�A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
7
held you at bay till the party that I in some imperfect way
represent grew strong; and now an enemy infinitely more
terrible than Protestantism confronts you.
Your Church, my Lord Cardinal, has alone the true in
terpretation of Holy Scripture, has it? We shall see. You
should have ceased to make such assertions when it became
possible for men like me to unearth and decipher the works
of such writers as Glaber, Abbo of Fleury, Gennadius, and
Corodi. You will, no doubt, my Lord Cardinal, have heard
of the Millenarian insanity of the tenth century, although
you would undoubtedly rather that such as I had never
heard of it. How excellently the “ Divine authority of the
Church ” interpreted Revelation xx. 2-3 ! The binding of
Satan for a thousand years your Church alleged began at
the birth of Christ; so, of course, at the expiry of a thousand
years from that date, Satan was to be let loose, and unutter
able calamity, if not absolute annihilation, be visited upon
the world. In the tenth century your Church was in full
swing, with its Divine interpretations and all the rest of its
monstrous jugglery; and not even one solitary bark of a
heretic dog resounded through the caverns of your ecclesias
tical Avernus. You had, or your annalists belie you, a
perfect plethora of dirt and piety and plague and pestilenceLike rotten sheep, your ignorant and filthy dupes died off
in tens of thousands ; while the half-naked, vermin-eaten,
and nasty—but ignorant and holy—survivors crowded into
your abbeys and churches and implored God to have mercy
upon them; but he would not. You showed them relics,
and they wanted a bath ; you treated them to the Mass, and
they wanted soap ; you incited them to godliness, and they
wanted cleanliness. So much attention was given to dying
and to seeking the kingdom of God that the wheat and com
�8
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE :
and barley remained unsown, or were allowed to be destroyed
by blight and mildew; and the survivors of the plague, for
wild roots, had to burrow in the ground like pigs, eat rats
and other vermin, and regale themselves upon diseased
human flesh from the corpses of their plague-stricken dead.
In this state of affairs what did your Divine and Scripture
interpreting Church do ? What wine and oil and bread and
consolation did it give to the scared and famished remnant
plague and pestilence had left ? Your holy Bernhardt of
Thuringia turned to the twentieth chapter of Revelation and
preached the immediate end of the world. As the clock
struck midnight on December 31st, 1000, the Devil would
break his chains, and, with blood and fire and misery, make
a prelude to the Day of Judgment. The clergy of your
Church took up the cry of Bernhardt. It was howled from
every abbey; it was thundered from every cathedral; and
frantic monks, with cope and stole and cord, appealed in
town and village and hamlet to a still more frantic populace.
Portent and miracle, wraith and apparition, dark shadows
on earth and blood-red signs in heaven, bore evidence to the
near advent of the Day of Doom. Europe was all but
ruined, but what mattered that ?—your “ divine Church ” was
enriched. Kings and nobles rushed to the sanctuary to
endow it with lands and wealth which they had won by
carnage and fire. With the sword they had gained place
and power by doing the work of the Devil, and now they
devoted all to the service of God, since they should have
to part with everything, anyhow, by the time the clock
struck twelve, ringing in the awful millennium and usher
ing in the end of the world. Kings and nobles, whose
pastime was slaughter, as regarded men, and lust as regarded
women, in spite of the dominance of the Church, grew
�A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
suddenly penitent, and flung away the sword for the missal
and abandoned the couch of the voluptuary for the monk’sshirt of hair. William of the Long Sword, Duke of Nor
mandy, was fain to abandon his ducal rank and take shelter
in the monkish cell. Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, was anxious
to throw up all to find shelter in the monastery against the
terrors of the Day of Doom; and Hugh, Count of Arles,
was like-minded. The Emperor, Henry II., crownless and
unkinged, presented himself at the abbey gate of St. Vanne,
howling piously from the psalms : “ This shall be my rest
forever; here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein.”’
Numbers of nobles left lands and castles and all to the
Church and hastened to the Holy Land, bare-footed, ragged,
and penniless, in the cunningly Church-inspired hope that
those who, at the crack of doom, were found in the sainted
clime in which the Redeemer had died would have certain
immunities from the horrors and terrors about to be wrecked
upon the rest of the human race. Others stubbornly and
desperately remained in their doomed castles and on their
estates, left to barrenness and weeds, and did not impiously
attempt to propitiate the vengeance of God. But the altars
were loaded with, and the church floors strewn with, legal
instruments, venerable parchment, and dusty vellum, repre
senting gifts to the Church of some of the noblest estates in
Europe, and thousands upon thousands of serfs and vassals.
The Church took them all, just as if the Day of Judgment had
not been so close at hand. The monks, Cardinal Manning,
were themselves the conveyancers, and the deeds of convey
ance began with the stereotyped words : “ Seeing that the
end of the world is now approaching, and that every day accu
mulates fresh miseries, I, Baron--------- , for the good of my
soul, give to the monastery of--------- ,” etc. The last day of
�IO
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE:
the world was the harvest-day of the Church, and the twen
tieth chapter of Revelation was, for the time being, worth
more than all the remainder of the Book of God. And
gloriously your Church interpreted it, my Lord Cardinal, in
the interests of your order. The nobles you had under
your thumb by this divine gift the Church has for putting
the correct meaning upon Scripture texts; and, as for the
common people, they forgot all the instincts of human
nature in their abject terror. They wallowed in ignorance,
filth, and vermin. An eclipse of the sun became visible to
the Emperor Otho’s army on their march. They at once
recognised in it one of the apocalyptic “ signs in the sun.”
They were paralysed with fear. They dropped their
weapons, broke their ranks, and such of the screaming and
disorganised rabble as terror did not render motionless fled
to the mountains, literally calling to the rocks to hide them
and the hills to fall upon them.
On dragged the awful weeks—coming nearer and still
nearer to the instant when heaven and earth should pass
away. At length, at the end of the most terrible December
the world has ever seen, came the last week of the year
1000 a.d. Then there were such agonising suspense, such
paralysing fear, and such abandoned phrenzy as never
before or since have cursed such masses of the race of
man. Your Church, my Lord Cardinal, had indeed vindi
cated its claim to be “ the divine interpreter of Scripture.”
You took up the twentieth chapter of Revelation, and, by
your interpretation thereof, exalted the hierarchy and well
nigh ruined the world. During this terrible week the work
of the world was utterly suspended. For the ring of the
anvil there was the yell of the maniac; for the whirr of the
shuttle there was the shriek of the madman. Drearily rose
�A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
11
the sun, and drearily set in the last few wintry days before
his light was to be extinguished forever. Men held their
very breath in terror. Blanched white were the dark-brown
locks that so lately shaded the smooth and open brow of
youth. In the halls of luxury, where the arras was of the
richest, where the patines were of gold, and where the air
was heavy with odours, now lay the dead and dying com
mingled, no sexton to bury, and no thief to steal the
vessels of gold, and where the air had been heavy with
odours were now the filth of the living and the putrescence
of the dead. Beauty was beautiful no longer, heroism was
extinct, and valour was no more. The deer and the boar
roamed in the greenwood unscathed. No household fires
were lighted to shed a warmth through the wintry air. The
wine cask wTas unbroached and meals were no longer pre
pared. Men, women, and children, of all ranks and classes,
lay huddled together, clutching each other convulsively in
imminent expectation of the crashing of chains that would
herald the release of Satan and of the trumpet blast that
should signal the end of the world. Love was banished,
hate was forgotten, and terror was master of all. The
thread upon the distiff remained unwound, and the sword
lay rustling on the floor. Revelation xx. 3-4 had con
quered. Your divine-interpreting Church, Cardinal Man
ning, had driven Europe frantic that her riches might be
purloined as she lay in delirium.
All vocations were dead, save that of the priest. With
husky voice, haggard mien, and supernatural wildness of
gesticulation, the monk harangued in the market-place, and
around him surged all that Terror and Death had spared.
Nearer, nearer, and nearer came the end of the year, till
only a few hours intervened between mankind and the Day
�I2
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE :
of Judgment. Then the remnant of human beings crushed
into the churches till they were filled to suffocation. Thou
sands clamoured in vain for admission at the gate of convent,
cathedral, and abbey. Resolved that it would be better for
their souls should they perish among the ruins of the house
of God, they who could not obtain admission scrambled up
to the roof, and mingled their chants and wails with the roll
of the organ which ascended from within. Midnight on the
31st of December was the utmost limit given for the release
of Satan ; but it was held that the release might take place
an hour or two before night’s solemn noon. The great
candles of the cathedral shone under groined arch and by
fluted column over the pale and upturned faces of a con
vulsed and motley multitude. There were no clocks; but,,
at regular intervals, on the great candles metal balls were
fixed by inflammable strings, and as, hour after hour, the
flame reached each string in succession, the ball fell into a
basin-shaped gong below, with a clang that, in the breath
less suspense which waited upon the burning of each string,
resounded to the loftiest turret, and reverberated among the
graves under the flag-stones in the aisle. One by one, an
eternity of suspense between them, fell the balls into the
gong, and yet the end of the world did not come, and the
winter morning dawned of the 1st of January, in the year
1001. The Holy Catholic Church had indeed interpreted
the Scripture—interpreted it to replenish her own coffers
and augment her own power. The world slowly slunk back
into its old work-a-day ways, but without taking pains to
resent its having been duped and hoaxed by the unscru
pulous cunning of Rome. Shame, my Lord Cardinal 1
Remember, you are not addressing the illiterate vassalageof the Dark Ages. Your words reach those who can criti-
�A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
13
rise them without favour and reject them without fear.
When you would speak of your Church being the only
divine interpreter of Scripture, remember the twentieth
chapter of Revelation and the year 1000 a.d., and be forever
dumb.
Nay, my Lord Cardinal; the pretensions of your Church
are going the way of all the earth. You yet manage to
hobble along on two crutches—the mental apathy and
moral credulity of mankind. But the earth swings round,
and the gnome casts another shadow upon the dial of Time.
A race arises that cares neither for your book nor your
infallible interpretation thereof. Address, if you will, the
present-day spawn of the bats and owls of medievalism ;
but the beams of the true sun of righteousness have now
broken through the gloom of your censor smoke and your
windows, dim with the effigies of saints. The perdition
which has overtaken Zeus and Isis is overtaking you.
Untold opulence, the romance of history, the wealth of
erudition, and the subtlety of intellect are yet on your side;
and I admit that even I, the “ Infidel,” immeasurably more
pronounced than ten thousand “ Infidels ” you have tortured
and burnt, have some feeling of sympathy with you as, girt
with the cestus of the mighty memories of two thousand
years of the irrevocable Past, you stand confronting your
inevitable doom from the fiat of the merciless Future.
Hater as I am of tyrants and tyranny, the tears have coursed
down my face as I have figured my fathers at Culloden
amid ruin and rout, riven tartan and shivered claymore,
perishing in the whirlwind that swept away the “divine
right of kings.” Like sympathy I extend to you and your
Church, Cardinal Manning, standing between the sunset of
the world’s yesterday and the dawn of the world’s to-morrow,
�14
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE.
defending the divine right of priests. But, like a spectre of
the Brocken, your towers and citadels melt away into the
viewless air. You have made a darkly-interesting chapter
in anthropology; but the race rises to the level of new
developments and new seons, and, ere a long time pass,
your censor will smoke no more, your Jesus will have taken
his place with the obsolete gods, and the candles upon your
altar shall burn no more forever. The same sun in the
heavens that has looked down upon the waning altar-fires
of the faiths of the world’s hoary yesterday shall yet look
down upon your altars, cold, deserted, and desolate. The
altar of the future will be the concave of the sky overarching
in glory the everlasting hills. The -worship of the future,
irrespective of teleological dogma, will be the reaching
forward to stronger brain, purer morals, and a happier world.
To further the advent, my Lord Cardinal, of that nobler
altar and grander worship, the Freethinkers of America are
met to-day on the Cassadaga heights, and they permit me
thus to shake hands with them over the “ misty and mourn
ful Atlantic,” and add my feeble spark to the splendour of
the coming day in a land where Romanism never had the
mastery—on a continent of which your Jesus never heard.
�Post Free Three-Halfpence.
JE rice One Fenny.
FROM THE VALLEY
OF
THE SHADOW OF DEATH.
By SALADIN.
IN
BRUNO
MEMORIAL
STEWART
ROSS,
Died igth November, 1882, aged two years and five weeks.
London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C
Recently Published.
Post free Twopence-halfpenny.
WITCHCRAFT
IN CHRISTIAN COUNTRIES.
By SALADIN.
Being an Address delivered at the Inauguration of the Secular
Society at Stockport, November 19th, 1882—the Marquis of
Queensberry in the Chair.
London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
Price 2s. post free.
Elegantly printed in colours.
SONGS BY THE WAYSIDE
OP AN AGNOSTICS LIFE.
By Himself.
“It is not an irreverent Agnosticism that is uttered in these pages,
although, without doubt, it is terribly heterodox ; but the author evidently
feels and think, which is more than can be said of some of our versifiers.’
—Scotsman, July 21st, 1883.
London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�Every Thursday.
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THE SECULAR REVIEW:
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London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C. ’
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By WILLIAM BELL McTAGGART.
London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
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The divine interpretation of scripture : a reply to Cardinal Manning
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Bible
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Bible-Criticism
Henry Edward Manning
Interpretation
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THE DIVINE
INTERPRETATION OF
I
SCRIPTURE:
A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
BY
Being a Paper read at the Cassadaga Conference, New York,
by S. P. Putnam, Secretary, American Liberal League.
SECOND EDITION.
London :
W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�4
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE :
and Rational tares. The mentation and the aspiration of
the fifteenth century were not identical with those that
actuate the nineteenth. The floods of human folly have
worn other channels, the currents of human tendency have
torn their way through other rocks and over other shoals.
The old battle-fields are deserted, and only through the
mists of departed time can we descry them, with their
rank grasses, broken and shapeless weapons, half-obliterated
trenches, and dull mounds marking more or less dishonoured
graves. The battalions have reeled and surged into other
fields, and there, with other weapons and other battle-cries,,
the often-changing but never-ending tide of human conflict
ebbs and flows. Guns are yet planted on the roof, and
there is a rattle and blaze of musketry from the windows
of the old half-way house between Rome and Rationalism
but the shot and shell fall wide of the mark. Formerly, the
old house was in the centre of operations ; now it is on the
extreme left flank, and miles away the real conflict rages.
The half-way house is tottering to its fall. The emergency
to meet which it was built has passed away. Its giants are
dead, its heroes are no more; its prestige is over, and
Ichabod is inscribed over its gateway. A shabby despotism,
three centuries ago, it modified a terrible despotism, and
thereby justified its existence ; but now, Why cumbereth it
the ground? Hardly taking it into account in military
strategy, up on the side of the windy hill the banners wave
and the troops are ranking, the forces of Rationalism and
Rome, and with them and no other rests the balance
between victory and defeat in the Armageddon of these
latter ages.
Everywhere now Ecclesiasticism howls against “the spread
of Infidelity,” and everywhere Romanism is active, from
�A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
5
New York to Birmingham. In the latter town, the other
day, a church dedicated to St. Anne was opened by his
Eminence, Cardinal Manning, with all the august ceremonial
of pontifical High Mass. In his subtle and able dedicatory
address, his Eminence is reported to have said: “ They
believed all that God had revealed, unwritten and written,
the old Divine traditions of the Church from the beginning
—every jot and every tittle. But why did they believe this ?
The ‘Word’ in the text did not mean the Book, and they
who would draw their Christianity out of the written Scrip
ture had proved for centuries the inefficiency of that rule of
faith by the multitudinous contradictions and ever-increasing
■diversity of the interpretation that had been put upon that
Word. Without Divine certainty they could not have Divine
faith, and, therefore, the wisest human critic could give him
no definite certainty of the meaning of the Holy Scripture;
the most learned scientific historian could not fix for him
the meaning of the Word of God. No one, however pious
■or good ; no minister of religion or priest of the Church,
apart from the Divine authority of the Church itself, could
venture to interpret that written word by his own light or
his own discernment.”
I am a soldier in the ranks of those who would face un
told fatigue and peril to flesh their blades in the heart of
Rome ; but I heartily endorse the utterance of his Eminence
in regard to the “wisest human critic” being unable to
express any “definite certainty of the meaning of the Holy
Scripture.” So far, I, a Rationalist, am in exact accord with
.a Romish Cardinal. But when the learned Cardinal pro
ceeds to say that, although the esoterics of Holy Writ are
.too deep for human learning, too mystical for human wisdom,
they can be infallibly interpreted by “ the Divine authority
�6
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE :
of the Church itself,” I join issue with him, and oppose himfoot to foot and hilt to hilt. I positively and emphatically
deny that the Church has, in the past, shown that it could'
interpret Scripture more successfully than the mere “ human
critic ” could. Nay, my Lord Cardinal, I will refer you toonly one example—e.g., of how your Church interpreted a
certain Scripture passage ; but the example I will give is
such a striking, picturesque, and conclusive one as should
be able to explode forever your Church’s monstrous preten
sions to divinely-inspired hermeneutics. It is unfortunate,
your Eminence, for you and yours that our more modern
times have laid the intellectual wealth of the world’s yester
day at the feet of men who have neither post nor pension
from your Church. It is unfortunate for you and yours that
there are men of my type, who will read and study for many
years in obscurity, anxious only to find out what is true, and.
never once asking what is profitable; studying for no pro
fession, hoping for no preferment; poor, but aspiring to no
gain, no crozier, no cardinal’s hat ; but freely giving learning
and time and life to the most thankless of all causes—to a
cause that for independence gives you poverty, for celebrity
gives you infamy. What a pity you have not still your Index
Expurgatorius to prevent such as I from misusing the best
years of their life in toiling over volumes the perusal of
which can only be inimical to your hierarchy ! How lament
able that you cannot now arrest pens like mine by giving
those who wield them a twinge of the thumbscrew, or make
the blazing fagots at the stake reduce the hand of the writer
to ashes I Like its God, your Church is the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever. Among the calcined bones of the
mighty you would honour me by mingling those of this
humble Scottish heretic and rebel, but that Protestantism
�A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
7
held you at bay till the party that I in some imperfect way
represent grew strong ; and now an enemy infinitely more
terrible than Protestantism confronts you.
Your Church, my Lord Cardinal, has alone the true in
terpretation of Holy Scripture, has it ? We shall see. You
should have ceased to make such assertions when it became
possible for men like me to unearth and decipher the works
of such writers as Glaber, Abbo of Fleury, Gennadius, and
Corodi. You will, no doubt, my Lord Cardinal, have heard
of the Millenarian insanity of the tenth century, although
you would undoubtedly rather that such as I had never
heard of it. How excellently the “ Divine authority of the
Church ” interpreted Revelation xx. 2-3 ! The binding of
Satan for a thousand years your Church alleged began at
the birth of Christ ; so, of course, at the expiry of a thousand
years from that date, Satan was to be let loose, and unutter
able calamity, if not absolute annihilation, be visited upon
the world. In the tenth century your Church was in full
swing, with its Divine interpretations and all the rest of its
monstrous jugglery ; and not even one solitary bark of a
heretic dog resounded through the caverns of your ecclesias
tical Avernus. You had, or your annalists belie you, a
perfect plethora of dirt and piety and plague and pestilence.
Like rotten sheep, your ignorant and filthy dupes died off
in tens of thousands ; while the half-naked, vermin-eaten,
and nasty—but ignorant and holy—survivors crowded into
your abbeys and churches and implored God to have mercy
upon them ; but he would not. You showed them relics,
and they wanted a bath; you treated them to the Mass, and
they wanted soap ; you incited them to godliness, and they
wanted cleanliness. So much attention was given to dying
and to seeking the kingdom of God that the wheat and corn
�8
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE :
and barley remained unsown, or were allowed to be destroyed
by blight and mildew; and the survivors of the plague, for
wild roots, had to burrow in the ground like pigs, eat rats
and other vermin, and regale themselves upon diseased
human flesh from the corpses of their plague-stricken dead.
In this state of affairs what did your Divine and Scripture
interpreting Church do ? What wine and oil and bread and
consolation did it give to the scared and famished remnant
plague and pestilence had left ? Your holy Bernhardt of
Thuringia turned to the twentieth chapter of Revelation and
preached the immediate end of the world. As the clock
struck midnight on December 31st, 1000, the Devil would
break his chains, and, with blood and fire and misery, make
a prelude to the Day of Judgment. The clergy of your
Church took up the cry of Bernhardt. It was howled from
every abbey : it was thundered from every cathedral; and
frantic monks, with cope and stole and cord, appealed in
town and village and hamlet to a still more frantic populace.
Portent and miracle, wraith and apparition, dark shadows
on earth and blood-red signs in heaven, bore evidence to
the near advent of the Day of Doom. Europe was all but
ruined ; but what mattered that ?—your “divine Church” was
enriched.
Kings and nobles rushed to the sanctuary to
endow it with lands and wealth which they had won by
carnage and fire. With the sword they had gained place
and power by doing the work of the Devil, and now they
devoted all to the service of God, since they should have
to part with everything, anyhow, by the time the clock
struck twelve, ringing in the awful millennium and usher
ing in the end of the world. Kings and nobles, whose
pastime was slaughter as regarded men and lust as regarded
women, in spite of the dominance of the Church, grew
�A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
9
suddenly penitent, and flung away the sword for the missal
and abandoned the couch of the voluptuary for the monk s
shirt of air. William of the Long Sword, Duke of Nor
mandy, was fain to abandon his ducal rank and take shelter
in the monkish cell. Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, was anxious
to throw up all to find shelter in the monastery against the
terrors of the Day of Doom ; and Hugh, Count of Arles,
was like-minded. The Emperor, Henry II., crownless and
unkinged, presented himself at the abbey gate of St. Vanne,
howling piously from the psalms: “ This shall be my rest
forever; here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein.”
Numbers of nobles left lands and castles and all to the
Church and hastened to the Holy Land, barefooted, ragged,
and penniless, in the cunningly Church-inspired hope that
those who, at the crack of doom, were found in the sainted
clime in which the Redeemer had died would have certain
immunities from the horrors and terrors about to be wrecked
upon the rest of the human race. Others stubbornly and
desperately remained in their doomed castles and on their
estates, left to barrenness and weeds, and did not impiously
attempt to propitiate the vengeance of God. But the altars
were loaded with, and the church floors strewn with, legal
instruments, venerable parchment, and dusty vellum, repre
senting gifts to the Church of some of the noblest estates in
Europe, and thousands upon thousands of serfs and vassals.
The Church took them all, just as if the Day of Judgment had
not been so close at hand. The monks, Cardinal Manning,
•were themselves the conveyancers, and the deeds of convey
ance began with the stereotyped words : “ Seeing that the
end of the world is now approaching, and that every day accu
mulates fresh miseries, I, Baron--------- , for the good of my
soul, give to the monastery of---------,” etc. 1 he last day of
�IO
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE:
the world was the harvest-day of the Church, and the twen
tieth chapter of Revelation was, for the time being, worth
more than all the remainder of the Book of God. And
gloriously your Church interpreted it, my Lord Cardinal, in
the interests of your order. The nobles you had under
your thumb by this divine gift the Church has for putting
the correct meaning upon Scripture texts; and, as for the
common people, they forgot all the instincts of human
nature in their abject terror. They wallowed in ignorance,
filth, and vermin. An eclipse of the sun became visible to
the Emperor Otho’s army on their march. They at once
recognised in it one of the apocalyptic “ signs in the sun.”
T hey were paralysed with fear. They dropped their
weapons, broke their ranks, and such of the screaming and
disorganised rabble as terror did not render motionless fled
to the mountains, literally calling to the rocks to hide them
and the hills to fall upon them.
On dragged the awful weeks—coming nearer and still
nearer to the instant when heaven and earth should pass
away. At length, at the end of the most terrible December
the world has ever seen, came the last week of the year
ioco a.d. Then there were such agonising suspense, such
paralysing fear, and such abandoned phrenzy as never
before or since have cursed such masses of the race of
man. Your Church, my Lord Cardinal, had indeed vindi
cated its claim to be “the divine interpreter of Scripture.”
You took up the twentieth chapter of Revelation, and, by
your interpretation thereof, exalted the hierarchy and well
nigh ruined the world. During this terrible week the work
of the world was utterly suspended. For the ring of the
anvil there was the yell of the maniac; for the whirr of the
shuttle there was the shriek of the madman. Drearily rose
�A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
II
the sun, and drearily set in the last few wintry days before
his light was to be extinguished forever. Men held their
very breath in terror. Blanched white were the dark-brown
locks that so lately shaded the smooth and open brow of
youth. In the halls of luxury, where the arras was of the
richest, where the patines were of gold, and where the air
was heavy with odours, now lay the dead and dying com
mingled, no sexton to bury, and no thief to steal the
vessels of gold, and where the air had been heavy with
odours were now the filth of the living and the putrescence
of the dead. Beauty was beautiful no longer, heroism was
extinct, and valour was no more. The deer and the boar
roamed in the greenwood unscathed. No household fires
were lighted to shed a warmth through the wintry air. The
wine cask was unbroached and meals were no longer pre
pared. Men, women, and children, of all ranks and classes,
lay huddled together, clutching each other convulsively in
imminent expectation of the crashing of chains that would
herald the release of Satan and of the trumpet blast that
should signal the end of the world. Love was banished,
hate was forgotten, and terror was master of all. The
thread upon the distiff remained unwound, and the sword
lay rustling on the floor. Revelation xx. 3-4 had con
quered. Your divine-interpreting Church, Cardinal Man
ning, had driven Europe frantic that her riches might be
purloined as she lay in delirium.
All vocations were dead, save that of the priest. With
husky voice, haggard mien, and supernatural wildness of
gesticulation, the monk harangued in the market place, and
around him surged all that Terror and Death had spared.
Nearer, nearer, and nearer came the end of the year, till
only a few hours intervened between mankind and the Day
�12
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE:
Judgment. Then the remnant of human beings crushed
into the churches till they were filled to suffocation. Thou
sands clamoured in vain for admission at the gate of convent,
cathedral, and abbey. Resolved that it would be better for
their souls should they perish among the ruins of the house
of God, they who could not obtain admission scrambled up
to the roof, and mingled their chants and wails with the roll
of the organ which ascended from within. Midnight on the
31st of December was the utmost limit given for the release
of Satan; but it was held that the release might take place
an hour or two before night’s solemn noon. The great
candles of the cathedral shone under groined arch and by
fluted column over the pale and upturned faces of a con
vulsed and motley multitude. There were no clocks; but,
at regular intervals, on the great candles metal balls were
fixed by inflammable strings, and as, hour after hour, the
flame reached each string in succession, the ball fell into a
basin-shaped gong below, with a clang that, in the breath
less suspense which waited upon the burning of each string,
resounded to the loftiest turret, and reverberated among the
graves under the flag-stones in the aisle. One by one, an
eternity of suspense between them, fell the balls into the
gong, and yet the end of the world did not come, and the
winter morning dawned of the 1st of January, in the year
ioci.
The Holy Catholic Church had indeed interpreted
the Scripture—interpreted it to replenish her own coffers
and augment her own power. The world slowly slunk back
into its old work-a-day ways, but without taking pains to
resent its having been duped and hoaxed by the unscru
pulous cunning of Rome. Shame, my Lord Cardinal !
Remember, you are not addressing the illiterate vassalage
of the Dark Ages. Your words reach those who can criti
�A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
13.
cise them without favour and reject them without fear.
When you would speak of your Church being the only
divine interpreter of Scripture, remember the twentieth
chapter of Revelation and the year 1000 a.d., and be
forever dumb.
Nay, my Lord Cardinal; the pretensions of your Churchare going the way of all the earth. You yet manage to
hobble along on two crutches—the mental apathy and
moral credulity of mankind. But the earth swings round,
and the gnome casts another shadow upon the dial of Time.
A race arises that cares neither for your book nor your
infallible interpretation thereof. Address, if you will, the
present-day spawn of the bats and owls of mediaevalism ;
but the beams of the true sun of righteousness have now
broken through the gloom of your censor smoke and your
windows, dim with the effigies of saints. The perdition
which has overtaken Zeus and Isis is overtaking you.
Untold opulence, the romance of history, the wealth of
erudition, and the subtlety of intellect are yet on your side ;
and I admit that even I, the “ Infidel,” immeasurably more
pronounced than ten thousand “ Infidels” you have tortured
and burnt, have some feeling of sympathy with you as, girt
with the cestus of the mighty memories of two thousand
years of the irrevocable Past, you stand confronting your
inevitable doom from the fiat of the merciless Future.
Hater as I am of tyrants and tyranny, the tears have coursed
down my face as I have figured my fathers at Culloden,
amid ruin and rout, riven tartan and shivered claymore,
perishing in the whirlwind that swept away the “ divine
right of kings.” Like sympathy I extend to you and your
Church, Cardinal Manning, standing between the sunset of
the world’s yesterday and the dawn of the world’s to-morrow,.
�14
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE.
defending the divine right of priests. But, like a spectre of
the Brocken, your towers and citadels melt away into the
viewless air. You have made a darkly-interesting chapter
in anthropology ; but the race rises to the level of new
developments and new aeons, and, ere a long time pass,
your censor will smoke no more, your Jesus will have taken
his place with the obsolete gods, and the candles upon your
altar shall burn no more forever. The same sun in the
heavens that has looked down upon the waning altar-fires
of the faiths of the world’s hoary yesterday shall yet look
down upon your altars, cold, deserted, and desolate. The
altar of the future will be the concave of the sky overarch
ing in glory the everlasting hills. The worship of the future,
irrespective of teleological dogma, will be the reaching
forward to stronger brain, purer morals, and a happier world.
To further the advent, my Lord Cardinal, of that nobler
.altar and grander worship, the Freethinkers of America are
■met to-day on the Cassadaga heights, and they permit me
■thus to shake hands with them over the “ misty and mourn
ful Atlantic,” and add my feeble spark to the splendour of
the coming day in a land where Romanism never had the
.mastery—on a continent of which your Jesus never heard.
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Being an Examination of the Origin and History of
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Protestantism—Appendix.
London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
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The divine interpretation of scripture : a reply to Cardinal Manning
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Edition: 2nd ed.
Place of publication: London
Collation: 14, [2] p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: "Being a paper read at the Cassadaga Conference, New York, by S.P. Putnam, Secretary, American Liberal League." Publisher's advertisements on unnumbered page at the end. Other works by Saladin published by W. Stewart on back page. "By Saladin" [title page], the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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[188?]
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Bible-Criticism
Henry Edward Manning
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Text
“Religious Education.”
A LETTER TO
CARDINAL MANNING.
PART I.
BY
London :
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
��6 JO 7/
KT555
“Religious Education.”
May it Please Your Eminence,—I have read in the
Newcastle Daily Chronicle the report of your sermon,
delivered at St. Mary’s Cathedral, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
on Saturday, September 26th, 1885. From your interest
ing biography, venerable age, and exalted position in the
Romish Church, your utterances challenge criticism.
Whether they challenge criticism from any intrinsic con
siderations I leave your readers and mine to decide.
Recognising that you and I respectively stand at the
very antagonising poles of modern tendency and thought,
I will make an effort to come within touch of you, in order
to, as far as possible, realise your position before I assail it.
Your attitude I recognise to be a complete anachronism:
it belongs to the time when Rufus founded a castle on
the banks of the Tyne, not to the generation in which
Stephenson spanned that river with an iron bridge.
Your Eminence lays stress upon the special solicitud(e
heaven took in children, although only the children of
Jews, before the Christian dispensation, and then you
exclaim:—
How much more, then, are yours—your children that are born
again by water and the Holy Ghost, and are made children of God
in a higher sense than the children of Israel—members of Christ,
heirs of the eternal heirship of the Son of God, of the kingdom of
heaven ?
Am I to infer from the hackneyed and half-meaningless
pulpit jargon of this passage that God likes Jew children
well, but Christian children better ? I have been told
by God, on the authority of his own book, that he is
“ no respecter of personsbut you apparently know
better. Has the unchangeable God changed his mind
and given your Eminence the advantage of a private
revelation, prefaced by : “ Don’t mind my old book : I
�4
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. ’
am a much older and wiser God than I was when I wrote
that”? My children, your Eminence, are neither Jewish
nor Christian : perhaps you would be courteous enough
to say how he regards them. If there be a God who,
on account of the faith of its parents, would even com
paratively disfavour (as you allege he does) an innocent
child, I am glad I am only an Agnostic, and cannot,
by searching, find out such a God ; for, were I a Theist,
and could find him out, I should denounce him as a
malignant fiend and curse him to his face. Thrust aside
your theological tantrums for a moment, Cardinal Man
ning, and tell me if you are not ashamed of this mean
little godling you worship, who, before'he determines to
what degree he will love an innocent baby, takes into
consideration whether its parents are Jewish or Christian.
One of the reasons you allege why God loves the
Christian baby more than the Jewish one is, that the
former is “ born again by water and the Holy Ghost.”
Pray be good enough to step down for a moment from
your ranting theological perch to the firm ground of
common sense, and tell me, in the name of all that is
explicable, what this means. “ Born again by water and
the Holy Ghost” ! You know as well as I do that this
expression is as utterly nonsensical as if your Eminence
had said : “ Born again of a paving-stone and of the
fire-shovel.” Your dupes ask you for bread, and you
give them a stone; they ask for an idea, and you give
them words. Your Church conducts much of its service
in Latin, to impose upon the ignorant and keep them
ignorant; and your priesthood take care that their English
is as unintelligible as their Latin, the threadbare and labo
riously nonsensical platitudes of pontifical jargon. The
“fools and blind ” are awed by the presentiment that some
fearfully significant and mysterious meaning underlies
your priestly babblement. “Born again by water”!
Such jargon, instead of exciting reverent piety with those
with whom you have to cope now-a-days, evokes only
the irreverent contempt which asks : Do you refer to
parturition in a punt on the river, or to an accouchement
down in a diving-bell ? And as for your exceedingly
phantasmal Holy Ghost, will you tell me anything he
ever did, except his being mixed up with an affiliation
�“ RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
5
case under remarkably shady circumstances, appearing
once in the guise of a dove or fantail pigeon, and once
again in the shape of “ cloven tongues as of firewhile
appearing as Paysandu tongues, at 9d. a lb., would have
been more to the purpose ? Is this scurrilous blasphemy?
So be it. It is our contemptuous reply to divine thimble
rigging. Give us arguments to deal with, and wre will
deal with them ; but insult our reason with the hackneyed
and vapid platitudes of professional priestcraft, and our
sneer and our sarcasm will give you to understand what
we think of them and you.
Your Eminence assures us that, as regards children—
They have an invisible guardian—an angel ever watching over
them.
Here, your Eminence, you have effectively curbed my
irreverent levity. To talk, as you do, of an “invisible
guardian ” watching over every child is too sinister and
solemn a mockery for flippant refutation. You are
double my age, Lord Cardinal. Have you not seen
children as I have seen them ? Do you speak in igno
rance, or do you speak in truculent and terrible jest ?
Have you seen the child, partially born, have its skull
crushed in in splinters upon its brain by iron forceps,
as the solution of the desperate alternative whether the
life of the mother or that of the child should be saved?
Where was the “invisible guardian’? Have you seen
the child born mutilated and covered with ulcers, fearful
heirloom from the sins and sorrows of its progenitors ?
Where was the “ invisible guardian ” ? Have you seen
the babe, with sunken eyes and ravenous lip, and the
haggard look that babyhood should never know, tug at
the milkless nipples of a-starving mother ? Where is the
“invisible guardian?” Have you seen that haggard
baby dead and shrouded in a newspaper, as I have seen
it, and smuggled surreptitiously into the coffin of an
adult pauper, and buried with him to save expense ?
Where was the “ invisible guardian ” ? That baby was
so buried in its newspaper cerements because its mother,
who followed it to the grave, through want, would not
stoop to prostitution, even to save its life and her own.
Where was the “ invisible guardian ” ? Have you seen,
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RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
as I have seen, the child born in “ holy wedlock,” but with
the prostitution of its mother resorted to in order to save
its life and hers ; and have you seen that babe, as I have
seen it, drain from its mother’s breast the syphilitic virus
till the cartilege of the baby nose and the scalp on the
baby skull rotted away, and the innocent infant was
putrescent before it reached the tomb ? Where was the
“ invisible guardian ” ? Have you seen the prepossessing
female child fed and nurtured by its own parents, to be
sold to the lecher—incipient human flesh exposed on the
shambles of lust, and knocked down to the highest
bidder? Where was the “ invisible guardian ” ?
I could go on with interrogations like these, your
Eminence, mounting step after step in the terrible climax;
for I, who write to you, am a man who have turned from
the study of Greek to study the fearful moods and tenses
of the streets ; and I have left Hebrew that I might
study the square characters of the alleys and the Massorah of the slums. The hand that holds the pen that
now writes to you has lain upon the pulse of the world,
and felt all the irregular throbbings of the heart of
Humanity.
The eye that glances upon the paper
upon which this missive is written has, for God, gazed
through the clouds of the esoteric till it has been com
pelled to look down in Agnosticism, dimmed and blinded,
outside the unopening gates of Mystery. I have seen
falsehood on the throne, and truth on the scaffold; but
I have never traced, and neither have you, the action of
the “invisible guardian.”
In pleading for the support of schools in which the
Romish faith may continue to be inculcated, your
Eminence remarks:—
And, lastly, some of you, perhaps, may remember the schools of
this parish when you make your last will and testament, and your
Lord’s name will be found among the names of your heirs.
Did your Eminence so far master your risible tendencies
as to look sufficiently solemn for your sacred calling when
you uttered these words ? Cicero opines that two augurs
could not meet without laughing in each other’s faces,
in tacit recognition of how they managed to gull the
populace. When you spoke of Catholics executing their
�RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. »
7
wills, and making Jesus Christ one of their heirs, did
you, internally, put your divine thumb to your sacred
nose and extend your holy fingers? You well know
that Jesus Christ—whether that half-mythical character
ever really existed or not—wants none of your filthy lucre.
You use his name as the shears with which to shear the
sheep, that the fleece may come to the priests. This
lending money to the Lord in celestial debentures is a
very old confidence trick and financial swindle, Cardinal
Manning. The swindle has never been a farthing in the
pocket of “ the Lord,” whatever and whoever he may
be ; but it has, for centuries, swelled the coffers of a fat,
lazy, and licentious priesthood. For how many dreary
and black ages the priest of your baleful creed has
attended at the bedside of the dying man and indemni
fied the expiring wretch against the red fire of hell in
consideration of the Church receiving the red sheen of
his gold ! Is the palpable imposition not yet played
out ? How long, O Lord, how long, will the mothers of
our race only bear and suckle fools ?
Your Eminence goes on to say :—
I would fain much rather speak upon the Sermon on the Mount,
or upon the useful history of the gospel we have read to-day, than
upon the matter on which I may say necessity compels us at this
time to think with all the energy of our hearts—I mean the state
and condition of the education of this country, the peril that is
before us, the unconsciousness of that peril; and that peril multi
plied by the fact that men are not roused up or awakened to see
what is certain and inevitable in the future. Let us, then, con
sider this. From the seventh century down to the present the
education of the people of this land was a Christian education.
The Christianity of England was perpetuated by that which made
England in the beginning. At this moment we have come to what
I may call a deviation from that sacred tradition, which, until now,
has sustained the Christianity of the people of this land. Some
men will call it a new departure. It is the language of the day ;
and it is a useful phrase for us for it is a departure—a striking off
from the tradition, the broad highway of the people, of Christian
England. And we are threatened at this time with a system of
education neither Christian nor English, but borrowed from the
vain and shallow theories of the first French Revolution—that is to
say, a State education without definite teaching, and, therefore—I
will say it boldly—Christianity. Down to fifteen years ago the
education of this land was in the hands of the parents of children
and those whom they spontaneously and voluntarily chose. For
the last fifteen years the State has claimed the children as its own,
�RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
and the State has claimed to be the educator of the children born
within its boundaries. These two principles are the principles of
the old Greek philosophy of the Platonic Republic, revived at the
end of the last century, as I have said, by the vainglorious and
superficial minds who wrecked the noble and Christian people of
France. And these two principles are establishing themselves in
the minds of the people of this country.
I quite credit your Eminence when you allege that you
would much rather dilate upon the “ Sermon on the
Mount ” than comment upon the, to you, extremely
painful fact of the education of the children of this
generation passing out of the hands of your Church, and,
indeed, out of the hands of Christianity. The “ Sermon
on the Mount,” with its cruel mockery and fiendish
sarcasm of '‘'■Blessed be ye poor,” is, possibly, the source
from which you have drawn your terrible trope anent the
“ invisible guardian ” which stands in watch and ward
over every child. But be assured, my Lord Cardinal,
that men are “ roused up or awakened to see what is
certain and inevitable in the future.” They see as clearly
as you do that the “ inevitable ” is that your Church is
doomed ; but they anticipate its dissolution and ruin with
equanimity, where they do not contemplate it with satis
faction. You, most reverend father, and your caste, have
lived upon the base craft of the priest and ascended on
the wings of sacerdotalism to the high places of the
earth; but those who do not belong to your craft have
had to maintain you, and they begin to find out that they
have been gulled too long by your wheedling them to
endure a hell upon earth on the promise that they will
have wings and glory in the skies. They are beginning
to discover that they know as much about the wings and
glory as you do, and find that they are so extremely
problematical that they have resolved to make the best
and the happiest of Here and Now, leaving the wings and
the glory to take care of themselves. They have resolved
that their children shall be taught Reading and Writing
and Arithmetic, and, where practicable, the “ Extra
Subjects and they have freely permitted themselves to
be rated for this purpose, and have practically told you
and yours to stand aside with your Gospels and your
“ Sermon on the Mount,” and let them have a little more
bread and intelligence here, and not stultify them any
�“religious education.”
9
longer with your child-bearing Virgin, your crucified
joiner, and your other monstrous, but to you profitable,
“ teachings ” upon which your poor dupes are to depend
for their wings and their glory.
The very France upon which your Eminence lays
such great stress is drifting away with England from
the rusty and obsolete moorings of your Church.
In France the item for education has just been con
sidered in the Budget; and, when Bishop Freppel
objected to secular schools, M. Debost replied that
they were gaining in popularity, having had since
last year 65,000 more attendants, while the scholars in
the Catholic schools have in the same time decreased
by 13,000. The establishment of professorship of the
History of Religions, to be filled with men who count
the Christian religion as but one among many, was also
very naturally objected to by the Bishop, as virtually
teaching a State irreligion. But to all this it was con
sidered sufficient to reply that these posts would be
filled by men like Ernest Havet and Renan, who would
discuss texts, and not dogmas.
What does your Eminence think of men of the type
of Ernest Renan and Ernest Havet? They are not
exactly the kind of persons upon whom your Church has
pronounced panegyrics. Your Almighty God and your
infallible Church are behind you. Strike and spare not.
Scatter the charred dust of the heretics on the wings of
the wind, as you were wont. You w’ould do so without
invocation from me; but your God has become decrepit
and your Church has become imbecile. There are, alas
for you, no lightning at Sinai to vindicate, no Holy
Inquisition at Rome to avenge. We “Infidels” have
emerged from the Stygian gloom. Our eyes have caught
from the far horizon the sunrise of the world’s morning;
and, long before the sun has climbed to the zenith, we
will stand with our heel upon the neck of your God and
your Church, proclaiming that heaven is annihilated and
hell extinguished, that the Demon of the Seven Hills is
dead, and that man, at last, is free.
Renan and Havet! Alas ! poor Cardinal. Your lines
have not fallen in pleasant places. Simeon Styletes,
standing uselessly on the top of his pillar praying, while
�IO
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
worms and vermin were eating holes through his shrunken
flesh into his sapless bones, was the type of manhood
your papist cultus produced. Marie Angelique, praying
forever, except when she stood on her head before the
Lord, and pointed up to his throne with her unwashed
heels ; or when she sucked, in his holy name, rags that
had bandaged and were saturated with the pus from sores,
was the model type of womanhood your Church pro
duced when she alone was the educator, and none
durst say unto her, What doest thou ?
Your Church, when all the power was hers, my Lord
Cardinal, inculcated a coarse, but devout, blasphemy far
beneath the mental and moral status of the School
Board system which you abhor. For instance, in
several churches of France, remarks Russell, in his
“ Modern Europe,” a festival was celebrated in com
memoration of the Virgin Mary’s flight into Egypt. It
was called the “ Feast of the Ass.” A young girl, richly
dressed, with a child in her arms, was placed upon an
ass superbly caparisoned. The ass was led to the altar
in solemn procession. High mass was said with great
pomp. The ass was taught to kneel at proper places ;
a hymn, no less childish than impious, was sung in his
praise; and, when the ceremony was ended, the priest,
instead of the usual words with which he dismissed the
people, brayed three times like an ass ! and the people,
instead of the usual response, brayed three times in
return!
Your Eminence objects to the School Board and to
secular education generally : no wonder, it is so exceed
ingly different from the “ religious education ” which
held sway when all the power was yours, and when Pro
testants and “ Infidels ” were unknown. A “ religious
education ” embraced profound speculations as to
whether Adam, not having a mother, was “created”
with a navel, and as to whether Christ could have taken
any other form but that of man—as, for instance, that of
a woman, of the devil, of an ass, of a cucumber, or of
a flint stone. Then, supposing he had taken the form
of a cucumber, how could he have preached, worked
miracles, or been crucified ? Whether Christ could be
called a man while he was hanging on the cross;
�RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
I1
whether the Pope shared both natures with Christ;
whether God the Father could in any case hate the Son ;
whether the Pope was greater than Peter, and a thousand
other niceties far more subtle than those about
“notions,” “formalities,” “quiddities,” “ ecceities,” “in
stants,” and “essences.” This “religious education,”
whose demise you lament, disposed the mind all through
Christendom to give a ready credence to miracles worked
by bottles of Christ’s blood and bottles of Mary’s milk,
“ God’s coat,” “ our lady’s smock,” part of the last supper,
a piece of the halter with which Judas hanged himself,
a bone of Mary Magdalene, at least two different heads
of Thomas-^.-Becket, Christ’s picture on a handkerchief
which he had sent to Abgarus, Christ’s foreskin, and a
finger of the Holy Ghost. In the genuineness of these and
thousands of other sacred and miracle-working relics all
Europe believed, Cardinal Manning, when your Church
had undisputed power in education; and, in the few re
maining dark dens of ignorance where your power remains
unbroken, your dupes believe in these relics still; but,
except in her dens of ignorance, Europe will tolerate your
“ religious education ” no more forever.
Ichabod ! the glory of your house has departed ;
and it would not be without sympathy that I should
listen to your wail of desolation, your voice as of one
crying in the wilderness ; but I hear in your wail the
clarion-blast which heralds that the New World is
drawn up in battle-line against the Old. I hear in
your voice in the wilderness the clash of steel in the
Armageddon in which Truth shall conquer Error, and
from which the world shall emerge, not looking for its
salvation to your poor Jew upon Calvary, but looking to
the might that slumbers in its own heart and brain for the
working out of its own sanctification and redemption.
Your Eminence states that, “from the seventeenth
century down to the present,” the education of this
country has been a “Christian education.” Yes; but it
is just because Christianity was established in England
so early as the seventh century (it was established much
earlier than that, as your Eminence will see when you
begin to read history) that it should be continued no
longer. What suited the seventh century will not suit
�12
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
the nineteenth. Human progress is as slow as the
proverbial “ mills of Godstill, it is progress ; and
what suited lethargic Saxons or steel-shirted Danes under
Offa or Hardraga will not suit the awakening intelligence
of England in the reign of Victoria.
Could I sympathise with a terrible calamity falling
upon the defenceless head of Abaddon, I should sym
pathise with your Eminence in your cry of tribulation
thatvthe education of the children of our time is passing
—has almost passed—out of the control of the Church.
This, to your Christian Abracadabra, simply means
perdition. It was only because the Christian priesthood
got hold of plastic childhood, and maimed the intellect
and mutilated the understanding, that you got Christianity
to be accepted by any except lunatics. Try it with adults
who never heard of it till they were adults, and from
the experiment you will be able to determine whether
or not what I say is true. I make bold to allege that
there never was a really sane human being in the world
who had reached manhood before he had heard of Chris
tianity, and then adopted it from the appeal it made to
his mental and moral acceptance. You have tried the
adult Jew and the adult Hindoo for ages, and what have
you to show for your missionary zeal and vast monetary
sacrifice? Your labourers have got no souls for their
hire. The field consecrated by their devotion, and not
infrequently watered with their blood, is sterile. The
effort is stupendous, and the result is mV.
No wonder that you cry with a bitter and despairing
cry that the children are taken from you. For centuries
you have crippled and debased them to bring them down
to the low standard of your creed and render them
the half-hewn caryatides to support the superstructure of
your wealth and power and splendour. It is in youth
the Chinese must distort the feet of their ladies into the
pedal abortions upon which Chinese ladies walk. If
they tried to do so in later life, the more consolidated
tarsal and metatarsal bones would resist, and the woman
would perish before the deformity was effected. It is
only in early youth you can bend the credence into accept
ing as fact that Jonah was three days “ in the whale’s
belly,” and that the Son of Man was three days “in
�“religious
education.”
13.
the heart of the earth;” and that, at the end of three days,
Jonah got vomited out on dryland ; and that, at the end
of three days, the Son of Man got up out of his grave
and flew to heaven. Tell this to any man out of Colney
Hatch, and see whether he will believe you. Then, is
it moral to impose to such an extent upon the innocent
credulity of a child as to impress fables upon him as
facts, and burn them so deeply into his soul with the
accursed branding-irons of your priestcraft that the
intellect of his manhood is unable to deface the scars ?
You can rely upon the judgment finding for Christianity
only when that judgment is strongly warped by early
prejudice. Without the instilling of that early prejudice
you cannot make Christians, and you never will. You
use with skill all the most powerful influences of mental
distortion : you use shuddering fear ; you use the most
exalted love. You terrify the child with the fire and
brimstone of your hell, and you decoy him with the
tenderest emotions to which the human heart ever
throbbed; for the child first lisps his prayer at his
mother’s knee, and, in after years, the words have still
memories of a mother’s kiss and the halo of a vanished
face and the echo of a voice that is no more. The first
dread of hell, the first memories of a mother’s love, are
skilfully linked on to a debased and degrading supersti
tion, and they are, alas! too often strong enough to
support that superstition through a whole life. And this
deep engraining of prejudice, in favour of monstrosities
which, but for this prejudice, wrould never, on their own
merits, have had a moment’s serious consideration, is
what you and your clerical fraternity of all denomina
tions call Education ! Education, forsooth—it is the
very antithesis of it. You know that the intellect, if left
unmutilated till it matured, -would attach at most as
much credence to the Arthurian as to the Gospel legends.
Accordingly, to make sure that the intellect shall never
see above and beyond the “ truths ” which must be
believed in the interests of priestcraft, you take the
intellect in its infancy and burn out its eyes, or at least
afflict them with myopia and a malignant squint.
And this is Education ! For shame, my Lord Cardinal 1
If your Christianity be so true and reasonable, wait till
�14
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
the reason is developed before you attempt to teach.
I will then make you welcome to the half-dozen idiots in
all England who will believe your fable. But, in the
name of all that is sacred in the soul of the race, desist
from mutilating the intellect and debasing the morals
of little children in the interests of your irrational and
execrable creed. They are guilty who mutilate the feet
of Chinese girls, that when they become women they
may not wantonly walk into their neighbour’s houses;
but thrice damned is the guilt of those who mutilate the
intellects of European boys and girls, that when they
become men and women they may “ walk in the way of
the Lord.”
The section of the Christian Church of which your
Eminence is an ornament has always presumed upon the
crass ignorance of its votaries, and done its best to keep
that ignorance devotedly dense. But surely you presume
too much upon the ignorance of even the dupes of the
Church of Rome when you slanderously refer to “ the
vainglorious and superficial minds who wrecked the
noble and Christian people of France.” Surely some,
even in your ignorant auditory, must have had a surmise
that the “vainglorious and superficial minds” you referred
to were the Economists and the Encyclopaedists. Your
disparaging sneer was flung at Voltaire, D’Alembert,
Diderot, Duclos, Mably Condillac, Rousseau, Turgot,
Marmontel, Helvetius, and Raynal. Was there not,
even in the dull brains of the bigots who listened to you
at Newcastle as you sneered at “ superficial minds,” some
unbidden vision of a living pigmy kicking at a phalanx
of dead colossus ?
And, as for “the noble and Christian people of France,”
where did they exist outside of the prejudiced imagina
tion of your Eminence ? As for the people of France
before the Revolution you deplore, “ Christian ” they
may have been ; but “ noble ” they were not. The world
has never seen—and may the world never see again—a
people so utterly trampled down into the abyss of want
and misery and general degradation. Every schoolboy
knows this ; but your Eminence, apparently, does not
know it—or, rather, does not want to know it. “ Every
thing was fastened on by a few hands; everywhere the
�“ RELIGIOUS EDUCATION/’
J5
smaller number was in set opposition to the plundered
many. The nobility and clergy possessed nearly twothirds of the landed property ; the other third, possessed
by the people, paid taxes to the crown, a multitude of
feudal dues to the nobility, tithes to the clergy, and was,
moreover, subjected to the devastations of noble sports
men and the depredations of their game. The taxes
upon commodities weighed upon the great mass, and,
consequently, heaviest upon the people. The mode of
levying them was vexatious; the gentry might be in
letters with impunity; the people, on the contrary, were
ill-treated and imprisoned in default of payment. It
maintained by the sweat of its brow and defended with
its blood the higher classes, while scarcely able to subsist
itself. The inhabitants of towns, industrious, enlightened
—less miserable, certainly, than the peasantry, but en
riching the country by their industry and reflecting credit
upon it by their talents—enjoyed none of the advantages
io which they were entitled. Justice, administered in
some provinces by the gentry, in the royal jurisdictions
by magistrates who had bought their offices, was slow,
often partial, always ruinous, and especially atrocious in
criminal cases. Personal liberty was violated by lettres
de cachet, the liberty of the Press by royal censors.
Lastly, the State, ill-defended abroad, betrayed by the
mistresses of Louis XV., compromised by the ministers
of Louis XVI., had just been dishonoured in the eyes
of Europe by the shameful sacrifice of Holland and
Poland.”* So much for “the noble and Christian people
of France,” and the glorious state of affairs that the
“ superficial minds ” overthrew !
It is with diffidence I remind your Eminence of what
a “ noble and Christian people” the French were before
the “superficial minds” wrecked their nobility and
Christianity. To pay the infamous gabelle, a tax on
salt of about sevenpence in the pound, and other grievous
taxes, “ I have known poor people,” says Michelet, “sell
their beds and lie upon straw ; sell their pots, kettles,
and all their necessary household goods, to content the
unmerciful collectors of the king’s taxes.” There is a
* Thiers’ “ History of the French Revolution,” vol i., p. 9.
�“religious
16
education.”
well-known official document extant which proves that
the people were oppressed to such a degree that they,
“ could not buy wheat or barley ; they had to live on
oats, to nourish themselves on grass, and even to die of
hunger.” “ The people have not money to buy bread ;”
and Foulon, the model tax-collector, retorted : '"'■Then kt
them eat grass ”—this “ noble and Christian people of
France,” whose exalted position the “ superficial minds ”
so wickedly overthrew! No doubt your Eminence
admires the corvee with the admiration you lavish upon
the vingtieme and the gabelle. By virtue of this corvee,
on certain days in each year, the officers of the Court
went through the country, seized the peasants at will,
and marched them off in droves to make or repair the
public roads. For this the peasants received no pay;
and, if they could not, during their short respites from
labour, beg enough to keep themselves alive, they might
perish of hunger. Your Comte de Charolois amused
himself by going about with his musket in his hand,
looking out for peasants thatching their cottages, that
he might fire at and shoot them for the sport of seeing
them roll off the roof to the ground. How deplorable
it is to be sure that the “ superficial minds ” should
object to such a happy condition of affairs among “ the
noble and Christian people of France !”
Every Thzirsday.
THE
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Text
“Religious Education.”
A LETTER TO
CARDINAL MANNING.
PART II.
BY
London :
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
�.......
¿ 1i
�B3 0 7y
“Religious Education.”
And, Cardinal Manning, you will be gratified to hear
that your Church played an exceedingly prominent part
in the state of affairs the abolition of which you lament»
Great numbers of “ the noble and Christian people of
France ” were Huguenots. We will say nothing of how
your Church waded through the blood of 70,000 of these
Huguenots on a certain eve of St. Bartholomew. But
here is a record in regard to how your Christian Catholics
loved the Christian Huguenots : “ Some they stripped
naked, and, after they had offered them a thousand
indignities, they stuck them with pins from head to foot;
they cut them with pen-knives, tore them by the noses
with red-hot pincers, and dragged them about the rooms.
........... They tied fathers and husbands to the bed-posts,
and ravished their wives and daughters before their
eyes.”* No doubt, since your Eminence considers these
the amenities of a “ noble and Christian people,” you are
justified in your opposition to the un-Christian character
of School Board education. It will certainly not pro
duce the state of things you seem to admire. No set of
men brought up at a Board school will ever see any
motive to use red-hot pincers upon the flesh of those
trained at any other Board school. The teaching of
secular subjects produces no such result. To produce
adult actors in the red-hot pincers tragedy, you must train
children m the horrid dogmas and ruthless intolerance of
your Church. All the murder and martyrdom has been
over your Catechisms. I have never heard that an inch
of human flesh has been scorched, or that a drop of
human blood has been shed, over the Rule-of-Three.
Quicks “Synodicon,” vol. i., pp. 130-131.
�4
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
If you want all the old stabbing and scorching and
persecution and hatred to go on as they were wont, you
will, in early childhood, have to lay the substratum on
which they are based. The School Board will engender
only Philadelphia and cosmopolitanism; therefore, you
do well to attempt to arrest its hand, if you desire a con
tinuance of theological sectarianism and rancour. Get
hold of the children, if you can, my Lord Cardinal;
for it will take very early and unfair initiation to induce
them to tolerate, much less adore, your creed and
you. I repeat, Get hold of them early, if you can ; for
remember the truism Dryden renders so epigrammatically
in his “ The Hind and the Panther —
‘ ‘ By education most have been misled ;
So they believe because they so were bred.
The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man.”
The Due de Chartres built himself a magnificent
brothel, to which from 150 to 200 fallen women were
led each night blindfolded. A gorgeous supper, com
prising the most generous and heating wines, was what
met the eyes of the wantons when the bandages were
removed therefrom. The 150 or 200 women sat down
to the feast in a state of perfect nudity, and had. the
fiery vintages poured out to them by the assembled
*
libertines.
Modesty cries to Mercy to let the curtain
drop upon this carnival of lust participated in by “ the
noble and Christian people of France,” before the
“ superficial minds ” incited the populace to wash away
the stains of Christian lechery in the blood of a godless
revolution. Madame de Pompadour founded that “ noble
and Christian ” institution, the Parc aux Cerfs, and to
this institution were decoyed pretty maidens, no matter
how young, to minister to the pampered sensualities of
the king when Pompadour herself, in the course of years,
had lost her fascinations as a courtesan. A secret police
was instituted to entice, or kidnap, these young girls for
sensual orgies in the Parc aux Cerfs. The pious
Christian king insisted that these girl-children should tell
their beads and say their prayers, anxious that he should
* Vide “ Regede Louis XVI.;” “ Soulaire,” vol. ii., pp. 103, 104,
�RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.'
5
have their bodies and that Christ should have their souls.
Christ generously responded to this solicitude. One of
the little kidnapped ministers of the king’s licentiousness,
a girl of fourteen, had contracted small-pox. From the
girl, in whom it was as yet undeveloped, the king caught
the disease. The malady was fire to tinder in the
corrupt and poisonous blood of the royal débauchée.
His body was one mass of nauseating putrescence. The
stench from the dying lecher was so intense that no one
could go near the bed upon which he festered and died.
Before the writings of the “ superficial minds ” had had
time to take effect, your God, Cardinal Manning, took
this “ noble and Christian ” king unto himself, because
that, when debauching the bodies of little girls, he was
so solicitous that Christ should have their souls !
In 1777 the surface of their “noble and Christian”
France was crawled over by 1,200,000 diseased beggars,
all hungry, all in rags, all criminal and murderous, all
suffering from hideous diseases which want and filth had
brought on, but all “ noble and Christian.” For mercy’s
sake, your Eminence, do, when you are moved by the
Lord Jesus Christ to speak, insist that he move you to
speak a little nearer the truth ! Remember you are not
speaking amid the darkness of the seventh century, to
which you refer so fondly. Remember that I, an ir
reconcilable layman, conduct a journal which shrinks
not from the duty of speaking plainly to you, Cardinal
though you be. The only arguments you ever had to
meet such objections as I raise, such criticisms as I offer,
were of the dungeon-and-fire order ; and neither of these
you can now employ against me. The storm of public
opinion has' blown the roof off your dungeon, and Freethought stands defying you with her foot placed upon
the torch that lit your martyr-fires. Do, then, keep a
little nearer the truth ; for, if you do not, I promise you
I will strike and spare not ; and although the clientele I
appeal to may not, in your opinion, be “ noble,” and is
certainly not “ Christian,” it is neither small nor power
less ; and it prefers my history to your faith, my blasphemy
to your mass, and my sarcasm to your prayers. This
clientele can, if you persist in putting forward devout
fallacies, afford to dispise your Eminence ; but your
�6
“ RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.’
Eminence cannot afford to despise it; for, unlike you,
it raises no wail that its house is falling into decay : it
faces you, young indeed, but strong and resolute ; and,
panoplied in the armour of truth and righteousness, it
means to go forward conquering and to conquer, till
“ noble” does mean noble, and till the term “ Christian”
is first execrated and then abandoned.
Let the tree of Roman Catholic education be judged
by its fruits. Those ignorant and down-trodden thralls
of “ noble and Christian France ” are a specimen of
the fruits. Do you object: “ These are the fruits of
the laic branches of the tree”? Very well, your
*
Eminence, I am willing to stand by testing the fruit on
the cleric branches of the tree—by the very Pope
on the chair of St. Peter. Pope Sergius III., the vice
gerent of God upon earth, lived in concubinage with a
woman named Marocia. Pope John X. lived in con
cubinage with Theodora, a younger sister of Marocia.
Pope John XII. converted the papal palace into a perfect
seraglio, and lost his life by the hand of a husband whose
wife he had dishonoured. Pope John XVII. pursued
the same licentious course, and also perished under the
hand of an avenging husband. Benedict IX. led such
a scandalous life that he outraged even the too tolerant
laxity of the Roman citizens, and was expelled the city.
Clement V. lived in concubinage with his own relative,
the Countess of Perigord. Paul III. was a Sodomite.
Pope Sixtus IV., the founder of the Inquisition, and who
is reported to have died of venereal disease, opened
brothels in Rome, which produced an annual income of
20,000 ducats, which went to help to support the luxurious
lechery of your most holy Christian Church. It was the
same Pope who, in reply to the petition of Cardinals
Robere, Riario, and San Lucas, requesting that Sodomy
might be permitted in Rome during the warm months of
June, July, and August, wrote on the margin of the
petition, “ Let it be so.” And as to Alexander VI., the
Borgia, what thinks your Eminence of him as a specimen
of the fruit of your Christian teaching? He lived in
concubinage with a young girl called Catalina Vanoci: by
her he had several sons and one daughter, the infamous
Lucretia. Lucretia became the concubine of her own
�RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
7
father, the Pope of Rome and vicegerent of God, and
cohabited with her own brothers, Luigi and Caesar.
This holy father-in-God—and father and more of
Lucretia—died of poison which he had himself prepared
for three Cardinals, and which he took in mistake. We
learn from Burnet’s exposition that indulgence in un
natural lusts was so prevalent among ecclesiastics that
St. Bernard, in a sermon preached to the clergy of
“ noble and Christian France,” affirmed Sodomy to be so
common in his time that bishops Sodomised with other
bishops! What think ye of this, your Eminence? Have
I shown you sufficient specimens of the fruit of your
Roman Catholic education? If I have not, say so, and
I will show you more. Give us, who believe in secular
education, a fair chance; give our system some fifteen
centuries, as yours has had, and see whether we will not
produce better fruit. One thing is certain : we can
hardly produce worse.
Your “religious education,” my Lord Cardinal, but
for influences which were non-Christian—nay, antiChristian—would have blotted out forever all the
learning that the past centuries of the world had accu
mulated. While your Church was piously and labo
riously discussing such problems as Was Adam’s faeces
before the Fall malodorous? How many angels at a
time can stand on the point of a needle ? the learning
which dead Greece had left, the learning which mighty
Rome had bequeathed to the world as she herself
crashed and crumbled into ruin, was trodden under the
brute hoofs of your Christian Church, but taken up and
cherished as a priceless boon by the followers of the
Prophet of Islam, whom your Church despised and
hated. “ All the knowledge of mathematics, astronomy,
medicine, and philosophy, propagated in Europe from
the tenth century onward, was derived principally from
the schools and books of the Arabians in Italy and
Spain.”* “ Mere human learning,” as your Christianity
contemptuously called it, owed its salvation from extinc
tion to the persecuted and detested Saracen.
No, your Eminence; learning never did flourish
Mosheim, vol. ii., p. 194.
�RELIGIOUS EDUCATION/
under Christian auspices ; and she only dares to par
tially assert herself now because Christianity is rent and
shattered and half-dead, and where she could once bury
the Albigensian heresy under a million of bloody corpses
she is now impotent to break and silence a bitter pen
like mine. Learning was never at all in the line of the
followers of your uneducated carpenter and his illiterate
fishermen. Your creed, my Lord Cardinal, was hatched
in the nest of Ignorance, and only on the dunghill of
Ignorance can it thrive. Learning, I repeat, was never
in the Christian line; but, to cheer and encourage your
Eminence, I will tell you what was in the Christian line.
From accounts of the Council of Pavia we find that
horses and hawks and gambling and harlots and drunken
ness were very much in the Christian line, and very con
spicuously distinguished the Christian priesthood. And
as for the sanctity of woman, your Church conserved it
as such a sacred trust that the same Council remarks
of your religious houses : “ They seem to be rather
brothels than monasteries.” From accounts of the
Council of Mayence—and, remember, the accounts
of these Councils were not written by wicked Infidels,
but by devout Catholics—it is candidly remarked
that “some priests, cohabiting with their own sisters,
have had children by them.” How to make convents
into brothels, and how to have children by their own
sisters, was the kind of learning your priesthood culti
vated when they were not deep in absorbing studies as to
the exact odour of prelapsarian excrementum, whether
Adam, having had no mother, had a navel, and the
precise number of angels that could stand on the point
of a needle.
One other branch of “ religious education ” was parti
cularly in the Christian line; and, in this branch, the
Christians left the Saracens and all other pagans far
behind. This branch of a “ religious education ” in
which your Church so greatly excelled was Hatred. The
Christians could hate each other more bitterly, and per
secute each other more cruelly, than any other religionists '
on the face of the earth, and their ancient excellence in
this department of polite learning is not yet entirely lost.
It was, as you are no doubt aware, the common proverb
�“ RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.”
9
of the pagans, “ No wild beasts are so hostile to men as
are Christian sects to one another.” No one save rival
Christians ever drenched the fields of the earth with
blood over a diphthong, or ever flew at each other’s
*
throats over such hair-breadth twaddle as the difference
between Filioque and no Filioqne, till the Christian
Church was permanently rent into two sections, the
Latin and the Greek. We have seen the results of
“ religious education ” when your Church had the power.
These things were done in the green tree ; we shall take
care they are not done in the dry.
Is your Eminence aware that in 1861 (before the
institution of the School Board which you deplore), of
persons sent to prison, 8^ per cent, were under 16
years of age. In 1870 7 per cent, were under 16. In
1884 only 3 per cent., and this 3 per cent, has been found
to consist almost entirely of children who have managed
to elude attendance at school. So much for the abhorred
School Board and the diminution of criminality; but,
then, criminality and devotion to your Church go
together; and thus it is that you practically lament that
crime is on the decline. Statistics show with inexorable
clearness that, out of all proportion to their numerical
efficiency outside, the inmates of our prisons are Roman
Catholics. With Superstition and Ignorance you always
must have Crime; but, then, without Superstition and
Ignorance you cannot have Christianity, and, of course,
from a priest’s point of view, better have Crime with
Catholicism than throw over Catholicism to get rid of
Crime.
Before the Education Act of 1870, which is so detest
able to your Eminence, the so-called National Schools
were, as a judicious writer remarks, only sq in name, and
they were administered by one religious denomination,
being therefore under the control of its sectarian influence,
while also supplying instruction to a comparatively small
number of children. The remainder were to be found
in the Dame Schools, British and Ragged Schools, and
the Voluntary Schools of various denominations. But
* I refer to the dispute between the Homoousians and Homoibusians.
�TO
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.'
what of the larger residue ? They were running about
the streets; they were ignorant and uncared for, except
at the hands of noble philanthropists, like the late Lord
Shaftesbury and his colleagues. Imbibing the instincts
of idleness and crime, without a counteracting check,
they sapped the healthy life of the growing generation.
Crime among the juvenile classes had grown to such an
extent that in 1870 no less than 9,998 children were
committed to prison for a variety of offences. Over all
educational facilities for their improvement the State
possessed no control, excepting where schools were
subject to Government inspection as the condition of
receiving grants of public money.
And, in the incontrovertible words of another writer,
“ the Board Schools have through good and evil report
sown the seeds of a new era. The children who go back
to the slums from the Board Schools are themselves
quietly accomplishing more than Acts of Parliament,
missions, and philanthropic crusades can ever hope to
do. Already the young race of mothers, the girls who
had the benefit for a year or two of the Education Act,
are tidy in their persons, clean in their homes, and decent
in their language. Let the reader who wishes to judge
for himself of the physical and moral results which educa
tion has already accomplished go to any Board School
recruited from the ‘ slum ’ districts, and note the differ
ence in the older and younger children ; or attend a
Board meeting, where the mothers come to plead
excuses for their little ones’ non-attendance, and mark
the difference between the old and young mothers,
between those who, before they took ‘mates’ or husbands,
had a year or two of school training, and those who had
given birth to children in the old days of widespread
ignorance.” But all this indisputable improvement of
the social, moral, and intellectual condition of the masses
is, of course, to your Eminence, only a cold and comfort
less fact, seeing that your theological absurdities are being
neglected, and stubborn knees are being trained that will
not genuflect to crosses and relics ; manly voices being
trained, but not to whine your litanies; and above all,
breeches pockets being plenished which will not disgorge
their contents for penance and purgatorial fees for vest-
�“ RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.”
11
merits and images and candle-sticks .and altars and
painted glAss and mummery.
My Lord Cardinal, it is a simulation and a mockery
for you to speak about education at all. As a Cardinal
of the Romish Church, your comments upon education
are about as valuable as would be those of Satan upon
holy water. It has ever been your aim and policy to
murder education; he who murders any person is the
last one in the world whose sincerity we should trust in,
should he evince a specially anxious affection for the
person he had murdered.
I am sorry that the limits of this letter preclude
my giving more than the very vaguest outline of the
learning (?) of your Christian priesthood and the attitude
they have from first to last taken up as regards education.
However the exigencies of the time may urge upon you
to enunciate your theory to-day, we well know what your
attitude has been through all the centuries of your domi
nation. You have ever maintained that the wisdom of
man (and, in the name of casuistry, what other wisdom is
there ?) is foolishness in the sight of God. The unalter
able attitude of your faith towards education, about
which you now orate, may be summed up in the wellknown retort of the infallible Pope, Felix V. A cardinal
one day ventured to reproach him for his ignorance,
whereupon, with pious bigotry, the pontiff replied : “ The
Holy Ghost is not an ass, is it? Well, it will inspire me.
That is its business.” You educated, and (because you
change not unless when you cannot possibly help it) you
would still educate Christendom on the old-fashioned
lines of the Holy Ghost. Now, this Holy Ghost may be
very well as “ the comforter ” to devout imbeciles who
feel the peristaltic movements of the abdominal viscera,
and mistake them for the action of the Holy Spirit. Rut
this Holy Ghost, “the comforter,” is no schoolmaster,
and this I say to his face ; and if he, she, or it have no
face, then I say it to its os coccyx, or whatever part of
it it is decorous to address.
Your infallible Felix V. sounded the keynote of the
devilward march of your hierarchy when, instead of to
study, he gave himself up to gluttony and volup
tuousness, and where anything like education was
�12
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
wanted left the matter in the hands, or feet, or
tentacula, or some such organs, of the Holy Ghost.
And this said Holy Ghost has shirked its business
deplorably. It has been as successful in standing to man
in the place of education as the other third part of a
juggle of a deity has been in redeeming the world. The
party that permits me to speak in its name, your
Eminence, has had enough of the Holy Ghost as a
schoolmaster. We mean to dismiss this ghost, and try
some mortal with a degree from an university, or a certi
ficate from a training college. Besides being a school
master, this ghost of yours has figured as a dove, or
pigeon. The world will figure better when it sees this
pigeon finally baked into a pie and its feet sticking up
through the crust. Is this offensive ? It is not our time
to apologise; it is yours. You first insult our sense and
outrage our reason with your divine twaddle and pious
balderdash, and then expect us to be deferential and
apologetic. Your absurdity and cant is as revolting to
the Agnostic as the Agnostic’s anti-Christian blasphemy
can be to you. Cease to print your inane and insane
lunacies, and, of course, we will cease to attack them.
But, in the interests of the sanity of our race, in the
interests of man’s practicable hopes and rational aspira
tions, insult us no more with the pious legerdemain and
divine conjuring tricks of your pulpits; or, with the
most savage cat-o’-nine tails that sarcasm can wield, we
will lash your rhinoceros hide, O Church, till you will be
glad to find even in the depths of hell a refuge from our
scourge.
You have heard of the lex talionis, your Eminence.
Feel it. We are not your friends. We are your enemies
to the death. We refuse in the interests of conventional
amity to forget your faith’s diabolical record of over a
thousand years. Rivers of the best blood of Europehave, O Church, been let loose by your sword. They
have flowed into a sea of vengeance over which now
gather the thunder-clouds that will burst and shatter
you. These rivers of human blood flow between us and
you ; and over them we refuse to reach you any olive
branch. The charred bones of Giordano Bruno lie
between us and you. The flame that shrivelled up his
�RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
z3
majestic brain and heroic heart yet throws its heat upon
our “ Infidel ” cheek, and over these bones—holier than
tons of your priestly relics—we swear, by our deathless
and relentless hatred of wrong and tyranny, that with
you we will hold neither truce nor parley, that our helmet
shall never leave our head, that day or night our swordbelt shall never be ungirded till your utter destruction is
accomplished and guarantee thereby given that you, O
Rome, will curse the world no more.
“ Christian education ” indeed, your Eminence !
Unless you presumed upon the impenetrable ignorance
of your dupes, you would never dare to refer to such a
sinister sham and flagitious hypocrisy. I say it delibe
rately, judicially, and ' perfectly prepared to take up the
gauntlet of any historical student who may challenge
me : Christian education has been the curse of Europe.
From the very first, Christianity “ despised all knowledge
that was not useful to salvation.”* A great majority
of Christians were anxious “ to banish all reason and
philosophy out of the confines of the Church.”f Up to
the time when Constantine, the libertine and murderer,
took Christianity by the hand, and she found she was in
a position to argue with the sword and debate with the
heading-axe, she took no further pains to discipline
herself in what she contemptuously called mere human
learning. Formerly a section of the Christian priesthood
had taken some interest in such learning, in order to be
able to argue with the Pagan; but the Christian was able
now to argue with the Pagan in a far different fashion—
with the dungeon and the stake, and accordingly “ the
liberal arts and sciences and polite literature fell into a
declining condition.’’^ This Christian bigotry and
murderous persecution asserted itself till, in the words
of Moshiem,§ “ learning was almost extinct; only a
faint shadow of it remained.” Philosophy was persistently neglected, for, writes Moshiem, “ nearly all
supposed that religious persons could do very well without
it, or, rather, ought never to meddle with it.”
I could go on interminably, your Eminence, in demon
* “ Decline and Fall,” chap. xv.
J “Jorian,” vol. ii., p. 212.
+ “ Mosheim,” vol. i., p. 148.
§ Vol. i., p. 359.
�14
“religious education.”
strating that your Church not only utterly neglected
“worldly learning,” but that it assumed to it an attitude
of actual hostility; but I presume that even you, with
your faculty for pious romancing will not pretend there is
any way of rebutting the charge in this respect; so, turn
ing from your neglect of and hostility to “ mere human
learning,” I shall briefly revert to the “ religious educa
tion ” which you have inculcated for fifteen centuries,
and which you teach to-day. You want the education of
the children of this our England to be in your hands.
You teach that these children must be baptised, or that
they will be damned. So urgently do you contend for
this barbarous hocus-pocus of baptism that, if the mother
be likely to die while she is in a state of pregnancy, she
must be cut up alive so that the foetus may be extracted
alive and baptised to obviate its spending an eternity in
fire and brimstone. The sweetness and delicacy of this
doctrine is as conspicuous as its loving kindness of
the fiery sort that demonstrates itself in never-dying
worms and inextinguishable flames. This, your Eminence,
teaches us the incalculable importance of a few drops of
water at the right time, and the ineffective impotence of
the whole Pacific at, say, five seconds subsequent to the
right time. It also teaches us how profound are the
divine mysteries of a “ religious education.”
One beauty of belonging to your Church, your
Eminence, is exceedingly solacing and comforting, and
that is, that you and your fellow Catholics will be saved,
and that all the rest of the world will be damned; for I
find, from your “ Ordo Administrandi Sacramenti,” that
outside “ the true Catholic Faith ” “ no one can be
saved.” Of course, this is quite certain. It is also very
modest; there is not a vestige of blasphemous cheek
about it. The whole world has been “ created ” for the
purpose of being roasted for ever and ever, to afford
amusement to the handful of Catholics who will sit up
aloft in heaven looking down upon the agony wriggle of
the infernal pit. The inhabitants of the globe have
been estimated at 1,000,000,000, and the Catholics amount
to only 160,000,000. Heaven will be the dress-circle,
and Hell will be the stage ; and those on the stage,
amusing those in the dress-circle, dancing an agony break-
�‘religious education.’
15
down, and footing the fiery jig of the damned, will be out
of all proportion to the mere handful of privileged Papists,
wearing crowns, waving wings, thumbing harps, and
looking on. This doctrine is as humble as it is humane,
and gives us a divine insight into the glories of a “ re
ligious education.” It must be so gratifying to a true
Catholic to see his Protestant wife in endless torment.
She was loving and true and noble. She bore him sons
and daughters. In poverty, distress, and sickness she
stood by him with that self-denying and heroic tender
ness with which woman alone is gifted. She was the wife
of his bosom; but now, in hell, she leaps into the em
brace of devils. All this because she could accept the
Tweedledum of Consubstantiation, but not the Tweedledee of Transubstantiation. For this “ thou art com
forted” and she is “tormented.” So much for the
unspeakable happiness of “religious education.” I am
only an “ Infidel,” and only imperfectly appreciate it.
In fact, honesty impels me to make the impious admis
sion that I desire to be with my wife and children
wherever they are. I wish to be with them, whether
they be in Heaven, Hell, or Annihilation.
The “religious education” of your Eminence implies
subscription to the creed that, “ in the most holy Sacra
ments of the Eucharist, there are truly, really, and sub
stantially the body and blood, together with the soul and
divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ; and that there is made
a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into
the body and of the whole substance of the wine into
the blood.”* After you have eaten a slice of this God
who made the earth and then came down to it as a
joiner and made wheelbarrows, your “religious educa
tion ” advises those who have eaten hocus-pocussed Godand-joiner to pray as follows : “ May thy body, O Lord,
which I have received, and thy blood which I have
drank, cleave to my bowels, and grant that no stain of sin
may remain in me who have been fed with this pure and
holy sacrament.”! If I could humbly 'presume to
comment on a mystery so sacred, I should reverently
* “ Ordo Ministrandi Sacramenti.”
+ “ Missal for the Use of the Laity,” p. 30.
�16
“religious education.”
observe that, after you have eaten a world-maker and
wielder of a jack-plane, there is little wonder if he should
“ cleave ” to your “ bowels,” that you should be afflicted
with divine constipation ; but I should, with therapeutic
piety, suggest that you work off the god with Glauber salts
and the joiner with jalap. Is this blasphemous, your Emi
nence ? It is infinitely less blasphemous than your missal.
Mine is a drastic attempt to make men sane; yours is an
insidious attempt, in the interests of priestcraft, to keep
men cross-signing and genuflecting idiots.
Price Twopence.
Every Thursday.
THE
SECULAR
REVIEW:
A JOURNAL OF AGNOSTICISM.
EDITED BY SALADIN.
Order of your Newsagent, or send direct to the Publishers—W.
Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, London( E.C.
HISTORICAL PAMPHLETS.
A Reply to Cardinal Manning, by Saladin ...
The Crusades, by Saladin
The Covenanters, by Saladin
Christian Persecution, by Saladin ...
The Flagellants, by Saladin
The Iconoclasts, by Saladin
The Inquisition, Part I., by Saladin
...
The Inquisition, Part II., by Saladin
The Dancers, Shakers, and Jumpers, Part I., by Saladin
The Dancers, Shakers, and Jumpers, Part II., by Saladin
The Persecution of the Jews, Part I., by Saladin
The Persecution of the Jews, Part II., by Saladin
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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCT^ty
“Religious Education.”
A LETTER. TO
CARDINAL MANNING.
FART III.
WITH
ADDENDA.
London:
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
��B 30?9
M5 <>7
“Religious Education.”
Have I recommended purgatives to work deity and
mechanic out of the enterics of saints? May I point
out, your Church, in its “ religious education,” proceeds
on somewhat similar lines ? I find, from a rubric in the
“ Roman Missal,”* what is to be done with Christ, pro
viding that the saint vomit him ! The blasphemy implied
in a “ poor worm of the dust ” retching away and
vomiting God is a hyperbole of sacrilege to which I
cannot aspire to reach, and I leave all the honour and
glory of it to the Roman Catholic Church. I find that,
according to the rubric (how unspeakable the advantages
of a “ religious education ” !), the vomit is to be kept in
“some sacred place” till it is “corrupted”—in other
words, till God is rotten. It is so considerate of your
Church to thus write down to the level of a sow—perhaps
the only creature besides a priest who could contemplate
without nausea first swallowing the Lord and then
vomiting him, and then looking for him in the vomit.
And your Eminence would like this emeticating of God,
prodding about for him in the vomit, finding him and
swallowing him over again, or not finding and, therefore
burning him and the vomit, and casting the ashes into
the sacristan to be taught at the expense of the rate
payers ! The ratepayers are mostly fools, and pay rates
and taxes with too little investigation into the why and
wherefore; and many of them are addicted to finding
Jesus. But they draw the line somewhere. They
have begun to draw the line at the priest who, in
order to “find Jesus,” prods about in a vomit with a
breakfast fork! Ugh! But no. This is nastiness to
be sure; but it is divine nastiness, and part and parcel of
* Published in Mechlin, 1840.
�4
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.'
a “ religious education.” Would it be etiquette, your
Eminence, for the person prodding about with the fork,
when he has discovered the half-digested wafer in the
vomit, to exclaim, “I have found Jesus!”
Then, your Eminence, the fine, cheerful doctrine of
Purgatory enters into the curriculum of a “ religious edu
cation.” In purgatory there is a nice, clear fire (ignis
)
*
for cooking souls. This nice, clear fire is exceedingly
useful; it enables you to rifle the pockets of a man’s
relations after he himself has been laid in his grave.
The fires in purgatory are just the sufficient heat for the
dead to enable you to extract half-crowns from the
pockets of the living.
Old Brown dies, his body is
buried, and you get certain fees over that; and his soul
canters off to purgatory. Young Brown would not mind
a cent about his dad being in purgatory, if you would
make the place at all comfortable for him ; but you
manage to make old Brown hot enough to make young
Brown pay to get him out. All this is very clever, and
very religious. St. Christina, who had been in purgatory,
and managed to come back to the earth again (possibly
for her umbrella), told your great and learned Cardinal
Bellarmine that “ the torments that I there witnessed
are so dreadful that to attempt to describe them would
be utterly in vain.” The place was found to be filled
with “ those who had repented indeed of their sins,
but had not paid the punishment due for them.’T After
this, from St. Christina to Bellarmine, who would be so
unfilial as to leave his father, or even his mother-in-law,
in purgatory ? Out they must come. The devout one
must “raise the wind ” to put out the fire. What man
who has the soul of a man would not pawn his braces;
what woman who has the heart of a woman would not
sell her garters, to get her dear dead out of such a hot
and damnable hole as the purgatory of Bellarmine? It
is set apart, it seems, for those who have repented of
their sins, but have not paid for them. Those who
have neither repented of their sins nor paid for them go
straight to hell; but that matters little : the temperature
* See Catechism on the fifth article of the Creed of Pope Pius IV,
t “ De Genitu Columbse,” bk. ii., ch. ix.
�RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
5
is only a trifle higher, and a good, round, sound specimen
of a sinner can soon get accustomed to that. The great
thing is the pay. Pay, and it hardly matters a cinder
whether you repent or not. Yours is a grand and noble
Church, Cardinal Manning. It has the knack of getting
all possible moneys out of a man when he is alive, and,
through its purgatory, it can pursue the dead through
the very bottom of the grave, as it were, and shake him,
red-hot, flaming, and shrieking, in the eyes of the friends
he has left, that they may sell their very shirts to relieve
him of his agony. The one paid for leaps out from the
flames into the midst of heaven’s wings and harps, and
the gold and silver ring and rattle into the coffers of the
priest.
The Agnostic, alas, has no such facilities for turning
an honest penny. He does not know God sufficiently
to be able to induce him to enter into the swim with
him to help him to swindle and juggle. It is no use
any one trying to swindle on any exalted and profitable
scale, unless he has got God on his side, and does his
juggling in God’s name. All history and all experience
teach us that lesson with pious emphasis. I have not
God on my side, so all that I get is a little pittance for
my honest toil. I have no way of extracting cash for
the love of harps that have never been strung, and for
the fear of fires that have never been kindled. I am at
this disadvantage for not having acted up to the precepts
of a “religious education.”
Still, O Cardinal, if God be God—if he be noble and
generous and humane—you may stride up to him with
all the wealth and grandeur your Church has acquired,
and I will walk up into his presence with only this year’s
volume of the Secular Review under my arm. And, if
he say, “ Depart from me, ye cursed 1” it will be to you,
O Cardinal, and not to me. He will say, “ Give me a
shake of your hand, Saladin. You searched earnestly
and honestly for me, and could not find me ; but you
see I am here. You often studied and read all day, and
then burned the oil till long after midnight. Without
fee or reward, amid contumely and in obscurity, you
worked out your very life to teach others what you con
ceived to be right and true. To be mistaken, Saladin, is
�6
“religious
education.”
a small thing in the eyes of a God ; but to be honest is a
great thing. Read me some passages from ‘At Random
they are flashes from the immortal soul of a man
struggling in the dark ;• and passages written in the red
blood of an earnest human life are worthy the attention of
a God.”
I am, My Lord Cardinal,
Your Eminence’s
Obedient Servant,
Saladin.
�ADDENDA.
THE CHRISTIAN HEAVEN.
Bishop Croke of Cashell recently mounted the highest
stilts of sacred oratory, and dashed along thus, with his
head in New Jerusalem and his feet in Kildare :—
When we read in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel according
to St. Luke that “there is more joy in heaven upon one sinner
that doeth penance than upon ninety-nine just who need not
penance,” we may very naturally be expected to say each one
within himself—Sin, then, must sadden God exceedingly, and cast
a gloom, so to speak, over the face of His angels ; because penance
that wipes sin away gives great gladness to God, fills with joy the
whole court of heaven, makes the loveliest seraph there smile yet
more sweetly, and Heaven itself become more heavenly still. Only
just think of it, brethren. There is the great God of the universe
sitting serenely, as we are used to picture him, on his throne of
state on high. Millions and hundreds of millions of angels
brighter far than the sun and infinitely more beautiful than the
moon stand ever-joyous sentinels around him. The ample domain
of,heaven itself, extending far and wide—yea, full many a mile
further than created eye can carry—encompasses him on every side.
It is lit up with lamps that know no dimness, and peopled with
happy spirits that are not destined to die. This earth is but an
atom in their sight. Wars, conflagrations, earthquakes, plague and
famine, and pestilence sweep over and decimate its inhabitants, and
Heaven heeds not the ruin that is tints made. Yet, strange to say,
one man, a poor weak worm of the earth, living on it, born of it,
and destined to return to it again in death, trangresses a law that
had been given to him by God for his guidance—thereby commit
ting sin—and behold the heart of the Most High is saddened, a
cloud comes across the countenance of his angels, and heaven itself
seems to be heaven no more. But, see, that same man repents;
that sinner is converted ; that rebel hand raised in pride against
the Almighty is uplifted no more, and, as the herald of God’s mercies
to man proclaims the glad tidings aloud, the music of heaven’s
choir becomes sweeter still; the light of heaven’s lamps becomes
brighter still ; the face of heaven’s angels becomes more smiling
still, for there is more joy in heaven upon one sinner that does
penance than upon ninety-nine just who need not penance.
�8
ADDENDA,
You see into that passage in Luke the Archbishop
has got his papist “penance” inserted where the
Protestant version has “repentance.” With the Pro
testant, “penance” is an heretical abomination. But
you observe the “word of God” is so explicit and simple
that it means either, or both, or neither. This vague
ambiguity is a distinguishing feature of divine writing.
If a man were to lose his reason, he could write tolerably
like God; and a man who has lost his reason, or who,
as is usually the case, had never any to lose, understands
best what God has been graciously pleased to write.
“ Sin,” according to Croke, and of course he knows
all about it, must “sadden God exceedingly.” A “sad”
deity, God-in-the-dumps, sitting on the white throne,
with all the beasts roaring “ Holy, holy, holy 1” and
glaring at him with the eyes they have in their tails and
their elbows, convinces me that Augustus Harris will
never produce a really effective pantomime at Drury
Lane till he has had the advantage of spending a week
in heaven. Would the great Croke, who seems to know
heaven and its denizens so intimately, inform me whether
the hebdomadal issue of this journal can “sadden God
exceedingly ” ? I know of no god, and I prefer to know
of none till I find one magnanimous and mighty enough
not to get “sad” at the writings of a weak mortal like
Saladin, or be pleased with the ranting but pious blarney
of a little sermon-spinner like Croke.
God used to be unchangeable. But that was in the
good old days, before Ireland and Croke were invented.
Now he gets “sad” whenever anybody sins; but grins
from ear to ear, and kicks up his holy heels with delight,
whenever anybody does penance. Pretty sudden and
fiequent transitions these for an unchangeable God.
But the authority is very high—the authority of his
friend, Croke of Cashel.
u
am „really sorry f°r
P00r dear angels with the
gloom on their faces. I once had a notion of becom
ing an angel myself by imitating, say, David, the man
“according to God’s own heart.” But now I give up
the project. There would always be somebody sinning,
and so my face would always be clouded with “gloom,”
except when somebody did penance—the only thing, by
�THE CHRISTIAN HEAVEN.
9
the-bye, that seems to throw a gleam of light into heaven.
This “ gloom ” would never do for me; I like a good
laugh now and again; and I can laugh, too, a loud hurri
cane of a laugh that shakes the rafters. So I will relin
quish my design of becoming an angel by imitating
David, and thereby some Uriah and some Joab will
escape murder and some Bathsheba dishonour.
Lord, how Croke does hit off heaven with only a few
spasms of his voice—the best voice going at wild rant
and mad tapsalteerie. Perhaps “ the loveliest seraphs
there would smile yet more sweetly” if I could get
beside them to tell them tales of heroic W allace instead
of stories about timid Jesus. By my halidome, I should
like to strut up the golden street—although I should
much rather stand up to the hurdies in Scottish heather
—and fling the strains of my mountain harp into the
ears of the belles of heaven. If they have blood in their
veins, I should send it tingling to the tips of their toes
and their wings. I should make the lyre of Caledonia
weep and moan and thunder and dirl till the harps that
hung on the willows by the streams of Babel would be
broken up and cast away.
Dr. Croke’s heaven, which is intended to be so attrac
tive to good Catholics and Land-Leaguers, does not
tempt me. I do not feel at all attracted to a great
ogre of a God, sitting on “ his throne of state on high,”
while “ millions and hundreds of millions of angels,
brighter far than the sun, and infinitely more beautiful
than the moon,” stand around him as “ sentinels.”
“ Sentinels,” indeed ! Surely these millions of angels
might be better employed. Millions of these celestial
monsters with wings, but whose tails are never men
tioned, stand “sentinel,” like the big horsemen at White
hall. Before I can be got to be really enamoured of
heaven, I should like to know how its flying monsters
get along without tails. A tail is to a bird what a rudder
is to a ship. I should like to be assured, before I consent
to go to heaven, that an angel can steer its course
accurately without a tail. I do not wish to go there and
incur the risk of some great, flying idiot coming dashing
up against me and knocking the teeth out of my head,
with a “Beg your pardon, Sir—pure accident; had
�IO
ADDENDA.
intended to fly to that there rafter 1” Besides, if these
angels are “ brighter far than the sun/’ I could not look
upon their splendour; so I should shortly be blind as
well as toothless.
In spite of the tremendous effulgence of Dr. Croke’s
angels, I observe that heaven is “lit up with lamps.”
Seeing that, in brilliance, every angel must be equal to
at least fifty sperm candles, I fail to see the use of the
lamps ; and I fear, as a canny Scot, I should demur
at the holy extravagance and the divine waste of paraffin.
At all events, fitting heaven up with lamps does not, as
far as I am concerned, add to its charms. There you
sit, pen in hand, all silent as death ■ and you in obstetric
t roes with one of your biggest thoughts, when crack
goes the glass chimney of the said lamp, and, in your
state of concentrated intensity, nearly startles your life
out. Besides, lamps are constantly getting upset, and,
if I were to upset one upon Sarah’s skirts or Rahab’s
polonaise, the effects might disconcert all heaven.
Besides, in trimming the wick, I usually burn my fingers,
and when I burn my fingers I usually swear ; and a good,
rattling malediction might tempt some outraged seraph
to throw me over heaven’s battlements into' the other
place, hurling the lamp after me.
But, O Bishop of Cashel, can all these millions
of angels find nothing better to do than to “stand
sentinel ” ? It may be all glory and brilliance with
;
but there are lanes and alleys with us where it is all
misery and gloom. The sties of Seven Dials are filled
with guilt and misery; over the fever slums of White
chapel falls the Shadow of Death.
Where are the
hundreds of millions of angels? From the dens of
Want and Stench and Disease rises the cry of Humanity;
but that cry reaches not the ears of the angels. Un
moved, they stand sentinel round their ogre God. Not
one angel breaks away from the phalanx to help the
gallant soul beaten down in life’s struggle, to drive away
want and shame from the home of the widow, to give
shelter to the destitute and bread to the fatherless.
The father which art in heaven ” cannot spare one
angel out of his hundreds of millions to visit his children
in mercy, and allay the gnawings of hunger and the pain
�THE CHRISTIAN HEAVEN.
11
of the heart that aches in misery. The music of every
harp, the sheen of every wing, is wanted “ for his own
glory.” No angel can be spared to stand between the
maiden and the deceiver. No angel can be sent for a
moment to kiss the desperately-parted lips and smooth
down the wildly-dishevelled hair of her, the lost and
ruined, as she mounts the parapet of the bridge to leap
from the street and Shame into the river and Death.
No angel comes down with the lightning in his hand to
strike the rich man dead as, by dint of his gold, from
the pale arms of Famine he forces the embraces of
Love.
A hundred thousand men, in uniform, are struggling
in yonder valley. A chorus goes to hell of the yells
of madness, the groans of anguish, and the screams of
agony. The gulf of smoke is torn by torrents and bursts
of fire, and shaken by louder than the thunders of
God. Weary with slaughter, his feet entangled in his
brother’s entrails, the powder-blackened madman falls.
He clutches at the red grass and the heaps of reeking
butchery, and gurgles and gasps and drowns in his
brother’s blood. And the horror and the agony are not
all here. Circling away into the busy towns, the quiet
villages, the corn fields, and the apple orchards of other
lands, extends the tide of misery and woe. Far away
from the field of carnage, hunger overtakes the orphan
child. The aged mother has lost her son, and the
young girl her lover. Over hundreds of leagues of the
world rises the voice of mourning and lamentation and
woe. Damn the heartless god that required all his idle
angels when his children down here went mad 1 Out of
the vast multitude, could he spare not a single one to
stand between these two hosts, and stay that hurricane
of lead; not one to stop these levelled bayonets and
that crunch of steel—that grinding of the bloody wheels
of the mills of Death ?
Is this God—this omnipotent fiend who could make
us, his poor children on earth here, holy and happy, and
will not ? Then let me, his son, flee from such a father
to the uttermost rim of the universe. Is this heaven,
where immortals stand as a retinue of sentinels, unmoved
by the tears of man’s misery and the cries of human
�12
ADDENDA.
pain ? Is this heaven—the happiest sphere we are to
enter when the gate of the grave closes behind us ? Then
proclaim it from the housetops that there is no heaven,
that all that is is a universal hell, and that man is the
plaything of an inscrutable fiend.
When will gushing gospel-mongers learn that, in spite
of its “loveliest seraphs” smiling as sweetly as they can
be made to do in Bishop Croke’s pious rhetoric, heaven
is not good enough for nineteenth-century men and
women. It did ■well enough as a more or less delirious
day-dream for centuries that are no more, for those who
have Jain in the grave so long that it would require
chemical analysis to distinguish the marrow of thefemorbone from the rust of the coffin-nail.
Shades of the dead, whose essence, in a sublime
panontism, has gone to feed the tissues of the universe,
we mean no disrespect to you when we reject your heaven.
It is upon the mountain,formed by the bonesofa departed
world, we stand, in order to see further than that departed
world ever saw. It is not the cerebration inside our indivi
dual skull, but the fact of our standing upon a more than
Tamerlane pyramid of skulls, that throws our vision
further down the vista of Mystery. The former coral
zoophytes laid their deposits on the sea-bed and under the
wave; on their deposits we place ours, thanks to them,
not in the dark like theirs, but up in the light, where the
sun shines, where the clouds roll and unroll, where the
wind blows and the billows thunder and s ing. We are
no longer away down among heavens and hells, the rocks
and algae of the ocean’s floor, but up in the light, where
the sea-birds scream, where the blue smoke from our
hearth melts away calmly over the deep green of the
trees, where the waters are wooed by olive boughs and
kissed by riparian myrtles, and flowers fling the glory of
their fragrance over the lake of the atoll.
Away with your heaven and other submarine night
mares of the world before sunrise. All hail a new
heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness !
Emerged at length from the deep, we are religious, but
our religion has burst asunder the fetters of your
theology; we are pious, but we visit your temples with
fire and desolation ; we are worshipful, but we urge on the
car of Progress over the shattered fragments of your gods.
�CHIVALRY.
13
CHIVALRY.
They knelt ’fore the altar’s gilded rail,
The beautiful and the brave,
In the dim old abbey down in the vale,
O’er high-born dust in the grave.
And martyr holy and tortured saint
Were limned on the glorious pane,
And the sunbeams threw on the carvings quaint
A golden and crimson stain.
And the organ peal shook the dead in their grave,
And the incense smoke died away
Down the dim-lit chancel and solemn nave
Where the dead in their marble lay.
The orange wreath in the morning’s breath,
And the warrior’s nodding plume,
In the hoary cloister smiled at Death
And the warp and the weft of Doom.
And the noblest blood in the land was there—
The chivalrous sword and mail;
And the naked breasts of the Norman fair
Throbbed around that altar’s rail.
And the father leant on his battle brand,
And the mother dropped a tear,
And De Wilton’s Edith laid her hand
In the gauntlet of De Vere.
And the bridal ring and the muttered words,
And the gems and the plumes of pride,
And the whispers low, and the clank of swords,
And De Wilton’s girl was a bride.
*
*
*
*
Heir to wide lands, she bore him a son
On a sweet and a silent day :
Where the breach was won, and lost, and won,
De Wilton was far away.
�14
addenda.
And he wore her glove by his mangled plume
And her kiss on his lip still lay,
1
nd his blade flashed dread as the bolt of Doom
From the morn till the noon of day.
Wherever raved wildest the storm of blades,
And the red rain bloodiest fell
Wherever thickest the troops of shades
Were hurled to the realms of Hell
°e Vere’s blue flag with his Edith’s hair
Waved in the reeling van,
And rose and fell, ’mid groan and yell,
In the chaos of horse and man.
It sank at last in the hurricane
That raged round the knights of De Vere
And the world span round his reeling brain ’
Laid bare by a foeman’s spear.
Hearts rained out blood, helms glinted fire
Mid the death groan and hurraa •
An^ kn,ghthood’s pride toiled, tugged, and died
Wheie the spangled banner lay.
For Edith s hair on that broidered soy
Lay trampled in dust and gore;
And Rudolph had sworn to bear it with joy
bo her bower or return no more.
He sprang with a shout from the reeling sod
A gash on his helmless brow,
Raised his red hand aloft to God,
And hissed his dauntless vow :
“Ye saints,” quoth he, “this soy’s my shroud,
Or I bear it to Edith again !”■_
_
BUA.^ld
tbe burst of the thunder-cloud,
Or the dash of the roaring main,
The foe swept on ten thousand strong
O’er Rudolph’s wounded ten;
&
quakes, the mountain shakes
Neath the tramp of armed men.
And vassal thralls with husky cheer
Rush o’er the banner fair,
�CHIVALRY.
15
The blazoned scutcheon of De Vere
And Edith’s golden hair.
Firm faced the host the glorious ten
For Edith, God, and Home—
Swung the angry sea of ten thousand men—
Dashed the battle’s bloody foam.
*
*
*
*
His horse lay on the carnage ground,
Upon that flag of woe ;
His mangled vassals lay around,
And Rudolph lay below,
’Mid battered helm and shivered lance,
And corslet, helm, and glave;
And all the wrecks of War’s wild dance
When waltzing to the grave.
*
*
*
*
Sighed o’er the field the young morn’s breath :
The foemen found him there,
His pale lips pressed in ghastly death
To Edith’s crimsoned hair.
They laid him down by the side of her bed,
The monks who his body bore;
His eyes had the glare of the eyes of the dead,
His armour was dyed in gore.
A friar essayed the ladye to cheer
Jn the mournful tidings of ill;
But the faithful heart of the bride of De Vere
Ever, forever was still.
Though the babe still lay on the high, white breast
That milk to its dear lips gave,—Years laid him again on that bosom to rest,
When he fell in the ranks of the brave. ’
*
*
*
*
She followed her lord to the halls of God
Ere that sorrowful day was done;
For her lord had died on the trampled sod :
To a corpse she had borne her son.
�i6
ADDENDA.
Now the sire and the dame and their gallant boy
All rest ’neath the marble there,
And over them waves the banner of soy,
With Edith’s blood-stained hair.
And swords have clashed to the valiant tale,
And the voice of the minstrel sung,
How fair were the maids, how deadly the blades,
When the heart of the world was young !
price Twopence.
Every Thursday.
THE
SECULAR
REVIEW:
A JOURNAL OF AGNOSTICISM.
EDITED BY SALADIN.
Order of your Newsagent, or send direct to the Publishers—W.
Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, London. E.C.
HISTORICAL PAMPHLETS.
A Reply to Cardinal Manning, by Saladin ...
...
The Crusades, by Saladin
...
...
...
The Covenanters, by Saladin
...
...
...
Christian Persecution, by Saladin ...
...
...
The Flagellants, by Saladin
...
...
...
The Iconoclasts, by Saladin
...
...
...
The Inquisition, Part I., by Saladin
...
...
The Inquisition, Part II., by Saladin
...
...
The Dancers, Shakers, and Jumpers, Part I., by Saladin
The Dancers, Shakers, and Jumpers, Part II., bySaladin
The Persecution of the Jews, Part I., by Saladin
...
The Persecution of the Jews, Part II., by Saladin
...
01
o 1
o x
o x
o x
o x
0 I
o 1
o 1
o 1
01
01
London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, 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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"Religious education" : a letter to Cardinal Manning
Creator
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Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 3 v. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Ross's reply to a sermon preached by Cardinal Manning on 26 September, 1885. Includes bibliographical references. "by Saladin" [title page]. Saladin is the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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W. Stewart & Co.
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[n.d.]
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N595
N596
N597
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Education
Religion
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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 ("Religious education" : a letter to Cardinal Manning), 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>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Henry Edward Manning
NSS
Religious Education