Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
missionaries and Christianity. One placard was headed, “Leave these fanatics . . .
they cannot answer a simple question seriously put in to them connection with what
they say; they senselessly abuse you and your faiths without having studied them at
all; they are hirelings, working against truth and common sense and against the
dictates of conscience for a paltry piece of earthly bread. . . . You know well, and
it is a patent fact, that their harangues cannot stand discussion. Do not waste
time with impostors; serve the God of the Universe heartily; He alone will save
all who so serve Him.” This phase will yet much intensify. Christianity
will have to try and stand and defend herself which she is ill able to do
dialectically and historically. At present she says take me on trust, or, as its
advocates and those of Mahomedanism and Boodhism say, “by Faith,”—yea, the
blindest and most unreasoning faith. None can prove their three prophets to be Gods
or even to be miraculously sent from God, nor their Bibles inspired revelations nor
even historically correct: No; this and all such statements must be accepted blindly,
and then of course any other gulp is easy, and the unreasoning convert can speak glibly
and freely of “the peace and joy of believing,” and the misery of those “hard-
hearted unbelievers” whom his new God in his mercy, has foreordained from all eternity
“to everlasting misery with the devil and his angels in the fire which will never be
quenched.” He can set forth all the beautiful traits in Boodha’s as in Christ’s and
Mahomed’s life and character, and point to the many good biblical morals which no
one denies, but which are perfectly useless so far as the establishment of the faiths go.
Let me here quote from Professor Huxley what he has experienced in his scientific
researches as to the way in which Priests justify their unjust acts:—“Everywhere
have they broken the spirit of wisdom and tried to stop human progress by quotations
from their Bibles or books of their saints—In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of
modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus
of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the
patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives
have been embittered and their good name blasted, by the mistaken zeal of bibliolaters?
Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the
effort to harmonize impossibilities; whose life has been wasted in the attempt to force
the generous new wine of science into the old bottles of Judaism, compelled by the
outcry of the strong party? It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their
cause has been amply avenged.—Extinguished theologies lie about the cradle of every
science, as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that
whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced
to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated, scotched if not slain.
But orthodoxy learns not, neither can it forget, and though at present bewildered and
afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist, that the first Chapter of Genesis contained
the beginning and the end of sound science, and to visit with such petty thunder-