M^^

OassSTLj

Book W 2»

a

Copyright^0 L3_2_1

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT;

1

BOOKS BY JOHN DUNCAN QUACKENBOS

Enemies and Evidences of Christianity $1.50

History of Ancient Literature Net 1 .20

Hypnotism in Mental and Moral Culture 1 .25

Practical Rhetoric Net 1 .00

Hypnotic Therapeutics in Theory and Practice Net 2.00

Enemies and Evidences
of Christianity

THOUGHTS ON QUESTIONS OF
THE HOUR

BY

JOHN DUNCAN QUACKENBOS, A.M., M.D.

Emeritus Professor in Columbia University

New York: EATON & MAINS

Cincinnati t JENNINGS Sc GRAHAM

Copyright, 1899, 1909, by
EATON & MAINS

LIBRARY «W ..INGRESS
Two O'""- rt»*cejved

MAY 5 1809

dlSS^iL. XXa No.

TO MY MOTHER,

NOW WITH CHRIST,

WHOSE LOVING COMMENDATION WAS TO ME A HOLY STIMULUS

IN THE PREPARATION OF THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS,

THIS VOLUME

IS

AFFECTIONATELY AND REVERENTLY

DEDICATED.

PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION

TEN years have elapsed since this volume on
Christian evidences and reasons for Chris-
tian belief was given to the public. It is with
the feeling that what was said at that time in its
twelve chapters is doubly true to-day, and
doubly necessary, that the author has prepared
this new edition of the work. Ethical culture
societies and New Thought cults are claiming to
offer the world a better philosophy than that of
Jesus Christ. The churches are denounced as
mistaken and inadequate in their teachings.
Congregations are dwindling to an alarming
degree. The Sabbath is given up exclusively to
pleasure. Old-time obligations are laughed to
scorn, and systems that compromise with the
conscience are heartily welcomed. Our women
have become careless of the safeguards that
should surround their sex. Children are defiant
of parents, and parents forgetful of obligations
to children. A growing disregard of the moral
right of the man to life, property, character, and
reputation is conspicuous. And sins that burned
Sodom and caused the downfall of Greece and

io PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.

Rome are rampant in our metropolitan and rural
life.

In that these pages suggest a remedy for
existing conditions through a better acquaintance
with the spirit and teachings of Christianity,
they may be regarded as opportune.

The chapter on Spiritism has been entirely
rewritten in the light of the author's own inves-
tigations, and the preposterous claims of so-
called Spiritualists are offset by an exposition of
the Psychologic Proof of Immortality.

JOHN DUNCAN QUACKENBOS.
New York, March 15, 1909.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE
The Preeminent Claims of Christianity 15

What is Christianity More than Hinduism, the Pantheistic

Religion of India ? 38

What is Christianity More than Buddhism, with its At-
tractive Analogies to the Practical Teachings of Our
Own Faith ? 64

What is Christianity More than Confucianism, the Eth-
ical System of China ? 93

What is Christianity More than Muhammadanism, the

Monotheistic Religion of the Koran ? 118

What is Christianity More than Theosophy? 142

What is Christianity More than Spiritism, which Seeks to
Prove Survival of Death through Communication
with Disembodied Spirits? With an Exposition on
the True Psychologic Proof of Immortality 165

What is Christianity More than Christian Science? 198

What is Christianity More than Socialism, Communism,

and Economic Democracy ? 232

What is Christianity More than Altruism, or Socio-Com-

mercial Love ? 263

What is Christianity More than Agnosticism ? Modern

Doubt and Christian Conviction.. 294

Evidences of Christianity 333

Enemies and Evidences
of Christianity

The Preeminent Gaims of Christianity*

(What is thy beloved more than another beloved, O thou fairest
among women ? Song of Solomon, v. 9.)

In " The Crown of Wild Olive" it seems to
me that John Ruskin has described with sin-
gular discrimination the age upon which we
have fallen. After speaking of exaltation into
bright human life, he continues as follows :

"Then comes the period when conscience
and intellect are so highly developed that new
forms of error begin in the inability to fulfill
the demands of the one or to answer the
doubts of the other. Then the wholeness of
the people is lost. All kinds of hypocrisies
and oppositions of science develop them-
selves. Their faith is questioned on one side
and compromised with on the other. Wealth
commonly increases at the same period to a
destructive extent ; luxury follows, and the
ruin of the nation is certain."

What a faithful picture of the day in which
we live — a day whose grasp on truth is nerve-
less ; a day of false liberalism ; of misconcep-
tion, ignorance, and self-assurance ; of im-
patience of old restraints and established

16 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

boundaries; of sneer at principle; of gold-lust
and leisure-love ; of profound indifference, the
most fruitful factor in the production of evil.
Since the world curtsied at the lift of Roman
scepters, Christianity has not been so relent-
lessly assailed by open and insidious foes.

Antiquated Oriental systems are presented
as its rivals by skeptics and haters of the faith
who have purloined the noblest conceptions
and even the very phraseology of the gospels
to gild the base metal of Eastern philosophy.
Infidelity is maintaining agencies in heathen
lands for the collection of ammunition to be
used against the truth. Parliaments of reli-
gions give color to the heresy that salvation
is not through Christ alone ; and native advo-
cates of foreign faiths, while craftily conceal-
ing the organic defects of their own beliefs,
palm off on a credulous American public the
monstrous falsehood that all religions teach
in common these two great truths, the Father-
hood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.
Learned Brahmans and Buddhists are pa-
raded on our platforms, where they bewitch
the unwary with rechauffes of the arguments
of English infidels in favor of their false gods,
declaring that Christ and Buddha are one
and that there is no hope beyond the final

OF CHRISTIANITY. 17

reincarnation. Their bibles and catechisms,
agleam with Christian beauty, are circulated
in attractive print and binding, and the
heathen systems of the East are masquerad-
ing in the costumes of Western heterodoxies
with new and high-sounding titles. Every
section of our country has advocates of Ori-
ental occultism and pantheism in the adher-
ents of Christian Science, Spiritism, and
Theosophy. Our magazines and reviews
print eulogiums of new standards of faith and
morals. Cheap antichristian arguments
help to insure a sale for the Sunday editions
of our dailies, and not only corrupt millions
of home readers but are eagerly devoured, in
a swarm of reprints, by the ranchmen and
miners of the frontier.

Materialists are asserting that the brain
secretes thought as the sweat glands secrete
perspiration — that thought is material; and
Monists are pronouncing religion a product
of abstraction and reflection, and finding the
origin of all religions in the common wants
of mankind. Christ they place on a plane
with Buddha, Confucius, and Plato ; but by
tactfully admitting him to be the greatest of
human teachers they have secured a hold on

a Christian-bred class who are agnostically
2

18 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

inclined, and like the reed of Scripture are
shaken by every wind of doctrine.

But most dangerous is the teaching of that
broad universalism which, assuming that the
divine underlies all creeds, would make other
religions as pure and sacred as our own, and
include all faiths and isms in what Professor
Ellinwood has styled " one sweet emulsion
of meaningless negations, which patronizes
Christ and applies the name of Christianity
to doctrines the very opposite of its teachu

ings."

It has become fashionable among the ultra-
cultured to regard Christianity as " a respect-
able mythology," like the author of " Robert
Elsmere ; " to deny the existence of a personal
Deity, and define God as identical with matter
and energy ; to scout the responsibility of
man to a Being outside and above him, and
to limit his responsibility to his own self, and
to humanity from which it is declared he has
received the best it had to give and to which
he must return what he himself has pro-
duced.

Thinkers of the Guyau type, ignoring the
fact that Jesus commanded us to love God
with our intellects and that Christian civili-
zation is associated with the highest state of

OF CHRISTIANITY. 19

mental efficiency, assert that the essence of
the influence of Christianity is the develop-
ment of the heart at the expense of the brain ;
and after assuming the false premise, they
denounce such a development as a sort of
disturbance of equilibrium producing a nat-
ural monstrosity, and predict a future with-
out any religion.

Men like Goldwin Smith are proclaiming
that we but tamper with our understandings
and consciences when we claim that the Old
Testament contains both a divine and a hu-
man element. " Far better," he says, " to
admit that the sacred books of the Hebrews
are the works of man and not of God."

Others, of somewhat opposite view, hold
that the Bible is inspired ; but, they add, so
is the Bhagavad GitS. of the Hindus, and the
Tripitaka of the Buddhists, and the Analects
of Confucius, and the Koran, and Shakes-
peare's plays, and Milton's " Paradise Lost."
All are inspired ; but all are a mixture of
truth and error, and so require continuous
editing and correction to bring them up to
date and make them harmonize with the
times. And when the work is accomplished,
we are then, Dr. Hastings has naively re-
marked, " to believe and obey just as much

20 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

and just as little of any or all of them as we
please."

" Advanced " clergymen, falling into line
with other sensationists, are denouncing what
they style ki the traditional systems of divin-
ity," and unblushingly clamor for a u new and
real religion of some sort," "a gospel in the
vernacular of the twentieth century which
shall repudiate the hackneyed doctrine of
atonement" — vicars of Christ calling for a
new religion in place of our Jehovah-con-
ceived Christianity, old yet forever new — the
same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow — bear-
ing awful semblance to the Deity who de-
signed it for man, unchangefulness in the
midst of change !

Intellectual culture divorced from religious
training; is leading thousands to view Chris-
tianity with distrust. Forgetful that they
owe directly to the Christian religion every-
thing that makes life endurable, every uplift
of the present century, such persons are
always ready to listen to attacks on our na-
tional faith and to applaud the scurrilous
blasphemy of infidel lecturers. Thus they
are gradually laughed out of what little belief
in Christianity may still cling to their shriv-
eled souls.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 21

Masses of half-educated people are psychol-
ogized by the glaring transparencies of
science falsely so called, and enthusiastically
espouse the cause of every innovation. Many
do not know enough to believe the Bible.
Others know so much that they are blinded
by their knowledge, and hence really know
nothing. Meditation has become a lost art.
People hate to be made to think, and the
alternative is skepticism or credulity. Every
charlatan has a legion of followers. Euro-
pean enemies of religion are attempting to
force upon us their non-religion ; and with it
their Sabbath desecration, its natural mother,
and their anarchism, its legitimate child.
Old world indifferentism is spreading among
our people like a contagious disease. Prayer
is denounced as hallucination or madness.
So-called free thought renders the church
superfluous ; as in the city of Paris, where
one hundred and sixty-nine places of wor-
ship suffice for nearly three millions of
people.

This is one side of the canvas. The other
reveals a spectacle of studied appeal to the
animal passions of men and women, lighting
unquenchable fires in the hearts of the young
and susceptible. Everywhere the sensual is

22 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

emphasized ; in the theaters, clubs, restau-
rants— even in the amusements, dress, and
daily surroundings of professing Christians.
Christ is dishonored on either hand. The
very saloon has its psychology and art is
prostituted to inflame desire for drink. The
pageant sickens the soul : novels promulgat-
ing low views of the marriage relation, which
has degenerated from a spiritual union to a
physical partnership — fashionable women de-
claring it the height of immorality to become
mothers — communists teaching concubinage
to be less reprehensible than marriage — com-
munists forbidding to marry — other commu-
nists teaching and practicing the community
of wives in common with material property —
fanatics preaching a female Christ and a fe-
male principle in the Godhead — women at
the acme of spiritistic blasphemy affecting to
contract marriage with demons ! Recent
words of Gladstone recur to me : " The cita-
del of Christianity is in these days besieged
all round its circuit," and he whose soul does
not flame with indignation at these efforts to
corrupt and ruin his fellows is ignorant of the
full meaning of love to man.

It is my purpose in this series of addresses
to contrast Christianity with those ancient

OF CHRISTIANITY. 23

beliefs that false teachers are proclaiming its
equals ; to demonstrate its preeminent claims
to acceptance by man, and to show that it
can have no affiliation with the modern " isms "
that seek to destroy it by compromise and
accommodation. A host of religious faiths
is challenging our investigation and forcing
us into comparisons with our own. We need
have no fear of such examination if we are
prepared to note fundamental differences as
well as accidental similitudes. Such study
broadens our knowledge of Christianity itself.
He who knows Shakespeare alone does not
know Shakespeare, because he does not know
him in his relation to contemporary drama-
tists. So he who knows Christianity alone
does not know it, because he does not know
its points of superiority ; because he does
not know that all the vaunted truth and
beauty of oriental and classical pessimism is
found in the " Memoirs of Christ," our four
gospels, in completer form, in absolute per-
fection.

Moreover, Christianity courts rational in-
vestigation, demands that we should deal
with questions of faith with our understand-
ings, deprecates presuming on ignorance in
matters theological, abhors superstition.

24 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Christianity is the Religion of Reason ; it
is founded on rational premises. It is not
an instinct. It impels men to act in opposi-
tion to their instincts and propensities. If
it be superior to the Oriental religions it
must be capable of adducing incontestable
proof of its preeminence. The ultimate faith
of the world will be the faith " that satisfies
the reason of man with its explanation of the
fundamental principles of the universe on
the one hand, and on the other of the nature
and destiny of the human race."

Max Muller once said that the ancient re-
ligions of the world were but the milk of
Nature, which was in due time to be suc-
ceeded by the Bread of Life. What is this
Bread of Life more than the milk of Nature?
I feel that it is incumbent upon us to ap-
proach the subject with reverence for what
is pure and bright and true in other systems ;
in all kindliness and sincerity ; in thankful-
ness to God for the seers of the past, the
men with great ideals who looked for better
things without fruition, who did the best
they could with the light they had, and per-
haps in the providence of God have figured
as path-pavers for the religion of Christ. We
shall lose nothing by admitting the heathen

OF CHRISTIANITY. 25

cults to have had a part to play in Gods
educational system. But this is not an ad-
mission that Christianity is a mere evolution
from the religions that preceded it. These
religions, as we know them, represent so
many wrecks, so many falls from purity
and truth ; for all in their germs were mono-
theistic, all are based on faith in immortality.
Manetho indicates that the earliest creed of
Egypt was a belief in one God. Tablets
found amid the ruins of Nineveh contain
prayers to an Omnipotent One. " When we
ascend," says Max Miiller, " to the most dis-
tant heights of Greek history, the idea of
God as a Supreme Being stands before us as
a simple fact." The Vedic faith of India,
the ancient belief of China, the Shinto of Ja-
pan, testify to the existence of a God above
all gods. And Naville truly remarks that
11 Almost all pagans seem to have had a
glimpse of the Divine Unity over the multi-
plicity of their idols." The farther back we
go, the purer the faith we encounter. Thus
the Bible narrative is strangely confirmed.
The very moral precepts of the Sacred Books
of the East " condemn the nations who hold
the truth in unrighteousness, and enforce the
great doctrine that by their own consciences

26 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

all mankind are convicted of sin." Were
there such a thing as moral and spiritual evo-
lution, we should long ago have been a race
of gods, beyond the reach of temptation, no
longer in need of grace.

You will discover phenomenal moral ex-
cellence in some of the systems of religion
we are to study ; but you are to remember
that the Gospel is more than a perfect system
of ethics. The difference between religion
and morality is thus summed up by Ruskin :
11 Religion signifies the feelings of love, rev-
erence, or dread with which the human mind
is affected by its conceptions of spiritual be-
ing, and you know well how necessary it is
both to the rightness of our own life and to
the understanding of the lives of others that
we should always keep clearly distinguished
our ideas of religion as thus defined and of
morality as the law of rightness in human
conduct. For there are many religions, but
there is only one morality. There are mora!
and immoral religions which differ as much
in precept as in emotion. But there is only
one morality, which has been, is, and must
be forever, an instinct in the hearts of all
civilized men, as certain and unalterable as
their outward bodily form, and which receives

OF CHRISTIANITY. 27

from religion not law, but hope of felicity."
The Christian religion is essentially a moral
religion ; but it is vastly more, because it rec-
ognizes in love for God and love for man
the vital principle of the moral law. In the
following respects it is preeminent over all
other faiths :

I. Christianity is the only religion that
does for man what he cannot do for himself;
that furnishes any help outside himself to
aid him in his battle with the world and with
his own evil heart. It represents a hand
stretched down from heaven ; and the grop-
ing, imploring human hands that are locked
in the clasp of the Christ-hand are washed
from the stains of doubt and the blackness
of sin, and are led over obstacle and through
temptation and sorrow to a peace which no
system of philosophy or ethics has ever of-
fered. Thousands have been snatched from
the defaulter's shame, and the harlots de-
spair, and the gamblers self-destroying hand,
and the drunkards grave, by the saving grace
of Jesus Christ. And thousands of sinners puri-
fied and made strong by the faith of Jesus are
asking the unbeliever with startling signifi-
cance," What has your way of thinking done
for you ? Has it made you better, or stronger,

28 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

or happier? Has it enabled you to endure
the disappointments and sorrows of existence
with greater fortitude and resignation ? Has
it helped you to disentangle the perplexities
of your life ? Has it given you faith in an
Infallible Principle of Love that permits and
wills even all that you suffer ? " And his an-
swer is in the negative. He admits the phi-
losophy heralded as an improvement upon
that of Jesus Christ to be a failure. Christi-
anity beholds a personal Providence watch-
ing and guarding us ; a God who answers
prayer and shapes our lives and our eternal
destinies, whose judgment is unerring, whose
ordering is always for the best, whose long-
suffering is inexhaustible. Our God is not
nebular or remote, like the God of other
systems; but he is present in our lives, where
his guidance is so mysterious and tenderly
discriminating that many times we hardly
suspect its presence. In the fifth Logion of
the Gospel according to the Egyptians, Jesus
saith : " Wherever there is one believer, I
am with him. Raise the stone and there
thou shalt find me. Cleave the wood and
there am I." Christ present in all things,
always with us and in us ; the loving, helpful
friend, enabling us to do what we are power-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 29

less to accomplish alone ; the brother who
never misunderstands. How sweet it is to
be understood. How we prize human sym-
pathy and support ; but the sympathy and
support of Heaven as realized by the Chris-
tian are far sweeter. Remember that Jesus
alone has taught us to call God by the en-
dearing name of " father ; " thus, as Drum-
mond says, " importing into religion the
grandest word of human language."

II. Christianity is the only religion that
wipes guilt away, that offers any hope or
consolation to the sinner, that lifts the burden
of his remorse. Of other religions the con-
science-stricken offender is ever asking :

" Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart ? "

The child of sorrow is forever asking this
of other faiths, and they are speechless. They
are not dispensers of consolation, healers ot
the broken heart. But when I turn to this
New Testament, I find its every page glis-
tening with the bright promises of forgive-
ness and spiritual refreshment. I am bidden
to come freely unto the meek and lowly in

3o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

heart for the rest my soul longs for. " In
the exhaustless catalogue of Heaven's mer-
cies to mankind," wrote Dickens, M the power
of finding some germs of comfort in the
hardest trials must ever occupy the fore-
most place."

Xone but Jesus has ever ventured to say:
M Come unto me, all ye who labor," who are
oppressed with sins, who are sickened with
cares and disappointments and fears for the
future, and I will lighten your load, and break
the galling yoke of pride, and selfishness,
and worldly indulgence • for I am accessible
to the most obscure, the most depraved.
u And you shall have rest unto your souls;"
not inaction, for there is no true rest in a
life of indolence — in the paradise of the slug-
gard, in the cocoon of the Buddhist, in the
heaven of the coward, where there are no
ideals to be realized, no victories to be won.
This is not the rest Christ promises ; but
rest in harmony with the laws of beauty and
love and poetry, a conscious joyous existence
in eternity where I am known of mine, for-
given of God, and pledged to a gladsome
service. Show me such hope, such comfort,
outside of Christianity.

III. Christianity is the only religion that

OF CHRISTIANITY.

3i

transforms character and makes it beautiful ;
that transfuses God into a career ; thus plant-
ing a divine germ, a vital principle, which
slowly and spontaneously expands in the
sunshine of a magnetic love. You are struck
by the sweetness, the symmetry, the inde-
scribable charm of such a character. You
watch its daily growth in a culture that is
not of the earth ; and you are forced to ad-
mit the fact that no other religion can de-
velop so true a quality of holiness, such a com-
bination of the good and the beautiful. Far
be it from us to deny that Buddha and Con-
fucius prescribe admirable rules of conduct.
The ethics of Cicero and Seneca, of Aurelius
and Boethius, command our respect. But all
are practical failures because, while they
erect high moral standards, they confer no
power on man to live thereafter. And the
reason is that mere morality is mechanical.
It is the dead diamond, lustrous but soulless.
It flashes in its neutral setting, but kindles
no fires of aspiration. The difference be-
tween a moral man and a Christian man lies
not in the character of their deeds, but in
the motives that incite those deeds, in the
spirit of the life. One rivets his eyes to the
Star of Bethlehem, and treads onward and

32 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

upward with an energy nursed by its ray;
the other gazes out into an empty heaven
with the stare of a figure in marble or wax.

IV. Finally, Christianity is the only reli-
gion which, regarding death as " the climax
of communion between the soul and God,"
assures an immortality with high aim and
elevated desire. For this intensely positive
future, the Christian lives. His religion
teaches him the deathlessness of the soul ;
that what is called death is only a gradua-
tion from one school of life for matriculation
in another on the part of an indestructible
unit that can never die; and that the growth
of this immortal unit beyond the grave will
be in the line of its deliberate choice here.
Selfish, sensual, annihilation heavens have
been imagined by man. But the heaven of
Christianity is one in which the souls of the
departed possess consciousness and memory,
sympathy, sensibility to pleasure and pain, and
to experiences of happiness and misery. It is
a heaven where those who have gone before
keep us ever in remembrance ; where there
will be recognition of friends and exchanges
of histories when lips meet lips again. The
Bible nowhere excludes the thought of recog-
nition ; nowhere hints that the love stronger

OF CHRISTIANITY. 33

than death, the personal affections that are
the mightiest agencies in the formation of
character here, are to be swept out of exist-
ence as the murmur of eternity breaks upon
the ear, plunging the soul into an isolation
that either knows no love or finds no scope
for its activity. The heaven of Christianity
is a heaven of conscious life, of fellowship
with God and the redeemed, of growth and
progress of soul ; not of swoon, or absorp-
tion in a Something-Nothing God, but of
activity, of advance in knowledge, of develop-
ment of capacities latent at death, of slum-
bering genius unrecognized on earth, till
the soul arrives at the perfection of refine-
ment, power, and happiness.

There is no hope like this in any of the
great religions of the Orient. One by one,
as we take them up for consideration, we
shall find them wanting in these four con-
spicuous characteristics of Christianity.

Such is the faith we Christians profess. Is
it not our duty to make it superlatively at-
tractive ; so full of the comfort and sympathy
men are longing for that our Christ and his
Gospel will seem to them as the shadow of
a great rock in a weary land, as a gushing
spring to the fainting traveler, as the bright

34 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

beam of outer day spied by the poor prisoner
through his dungeon grate? And may we
not commit the error of exaggerating the re-
quirements for admission to the fold, remem-
bering that no soul is too low to be reached
by the sympathy of Jesus. We are the
almoners of the riches of God's grace. Let
us make friends, then, of the outcast, the
misguided, the souls that hesitate between
doubt and conviction in these days of mental
unrest when the scale-pans of faith and
no-faith tremble ominously in even balance.
For every soul, I care not how black it seem,
is like the Cavern of Luray — perhaps dark
to the casual glance through some crevice,
but when the torch is lifted and its recesses
are flooded with the light of the Gospel it
will flash, like the cave, with supernatural
beauty.

Christianity makes love the mainspring of
its ethics, and love impels to action. The
sounds of a great battle are distinctly audible;
and it ill becomes Christian men who have
the requisite ability and knowledge to stand
aloof from the battle-ground of rational con-
troversy. I say battle-ground, and battle-
ground of fearless disputation, in contrast to
the slumber-chamber of willful indifference

OF CHRISTIANITY. 35

and the quadrangle of imbecile denunciation
from afar. We are face to face with error in
many monstrous shapes, and this error can-
not be overcome by blinding our eyes to it,
or by discordant notes of warning, or by the
occasional remonstrances of a handicapped
pulpit. The times demand an active partici-
pation in the warfare by men and women
who have rubbed the sleepy- seeds from their
eyes and are fully awake to the startling
necessities and perils of the hour.

I cannot but believe that in the provi-
dence of God the day has come when the
great forces of this world are about to com-
bine for the spread of enlightenment and
truth. I look upon the Spanish-American
War as having been permitted by Provi-
dence in order to arouse the old American
spirit and convert this nation into a mighty
imperial people physically able and intellec-
tually adapted to shape and sway the desti-
nies of the earth ; to carry our flag, with our
civilization, institutions and religion, to the
uttermost heathen, to the people sitting in
darkness, and make them glad unto temporal
happiness and eternal salvation. God be
praised that England has joined hands with
us in this great and holy mission. Race-

36 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

patriotism is the talk of the hour. We are
of the same stock — possessed of the same un-
faltering adherence to principle, the same
deathless love of country. England's mis-
sion hitherto has been to carry her civiliza-
tion outward into the wide world of squalor
and heathenism ; ours, to receive into this
fair land the heterogeneous masses from
other countries and unify and educate them
here, making them useful and intelligent
members of this great commonwealth. So
transcendently successful has been the double
policy (differently directed yet single in its
issue) that to-day one hundred and fifty mil-
lions of human beings, in Great Britain and
her colonial possessions in Africa, Asia, and
Oceania, in the United States and in the Do-
minion of Canada, write or converse in the
English language. And one quarter of the
landed surface of the earth is under the do-
minion of English and American people, who
rule one third of the population of the globe.
England and the United States together can
say to the nations, " Do this," and it will be
done. The United States and England to-
gether can put an end to wrong belief and
wrong action in every corner of the world;
can terminate once and forever Turkish

OF CHRISTIANITY. 37

atrocities and the Muhammadan slave trade ;*
can break the chains of every oppressed race
by a single mandate ; can flash light into the
dark strongholds of heathenism and sav-
agery, and bring the Hindu and the Buddhist,
the Confucian, the Taoist and the Shintoist
of Japan to the feet of the Saviour, and thus
to a perfect acceptance of the principle of
love as the law and inspiration of human ex-
istence. When the Orient apprehends this
principle, the Orient is ours.

What is Christianity More than Hinduism, the
Pantheistic Religion of India?

(By their fruits ye shall know them. Matthew vii. 16.)

A religion not professed and practiced
within reach of investigation enjoys this
decided advantage over those that are ac-
cessible to personal criticism, viz., its radical
defects are hardly perceptible, while the im-
agination, particularly if the religion be eulo-
gized by native professors and enthusiastic
oriental scholars, encircles it with an aureola
of graces. Remoteness in time and place,
tending to the obscuration of imperfections
and the looming of merits, assuredly imparts
the traditional enchantment to our view. No
faith has been more the subject of such intel-
lectual mirage than Hinduism. But when
you hear it discussed by its own swamis
your potential admiration must shortly be
transformed into actual disgust. It will not
stand the definition given to it by your men-
tal lorgnette. You are struck by its vague-
ness. You can not fathom the meaning of
those who attempt to analyze its potpourri
of dogmas, for hardly two are in accord.
You will not accept its final uncompromising

EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 39

creed that nothing really exists but the one
universal spirit, or impersonal self, Brahm,
and that whatever appears to exist separately
is a mere illusion ; that this Brahm manifests
himself variously in sensible things ; and that
all living beings are but emanations from him,
and ultimately are absorbed into his essence
— human beings through 8,400,000 reincarna-
tions and 30,000 cycles of woe.

In order intelligently to comprehend the
religions of India, we must make ourselves
acquainted with two early Hindu works
which stand in very much the same relation
to Hinduism as does our Bible to Christian-
ity. These works are the Veda (the oldest
book in Indo-European literature, dating
from 2000 B. C.) and the Bhagavad Gita, or
Divine Song. The Veda, or Science, is a
collection of historical hymns, chants, prayers,
and sacrificial rites ; as well as of incantations
and spells in the efficacy of which, to ward
off disease, inspire love, endow with riches,
and bring misfortunes to ones enemies, the
ancient Hindus were unquestioning believers.
Among the Vedic writings are the Brah-
manas, which contain ancient rituals and
priestly dicta on matters of religious worship ;
and the Upanishads, treatises of a theosophic

40 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

nature reflecting the earliest attempts of the
Hindu mind to explore the mysteries of ex-
istence. " In the Vedic Hymns," says Pro-
fessor Hopkins, "man fears the gods and
imagines God. In the Brahmanas, man sub-
dues the gods, and fears God. In the Upa-
nishads, man ignores the gods, and becomes
God."

A number of the Vedic hymns suggest a pri-
mordial belief in One Supreme Being; while
others clearly evidence a descent from mono-
theism to polytheism. In the 1,017 metrical
hymns of the Rig-Veda (Veda of Songs, — by
several hundred authors, and comprising
10,580 verses), "thrice eleven " divinities are
addressed, the principal of whom are the
sun, the moon, the day, fire, the storm (In-
dra), the god of waters, the dawn-goddess
(Ushas), and the earth. These gods were
immortal ; clothed with power to answer
prayer, and punish those who offended them.
Certain hymns appear to embody a concep-
tion of one omnipotent, self-existent Deity,
" God above all gods," " that One alone who
has upheld the spheres." " Wise poets," says
the Rig-Veda, " make the Beautiful-winged,
though he is one, manifold by words." " He
is the only master of the world ; he fills

OF CHRISTIANITY. 41

heaven and earth. He gives life and strength ;
all the other gods seek for his blessing ;
death and immortality are but his shadow."
Thus the mytho-poetic religion of the Veda
would seem to stand out in mezzo-rilievo
from a monotheistic background. The Brah-
mans regard it in the light of a revelation
from the Creator to men ; and their teachers
declare that there can not be a Saviour unless
he be a revealer of the truth eternally en-
wrapped in the Veda.

The parts of the Veda especially studied
and quoted as authority to-day by educated
Hindus are the Upanishads, or Confidential
Communications, dating from 700 B.C. The
religion of these treatises is pantheistic.
They deal with the deepest mysteries and
most perplexing problems of human life and
human destiny; with the genesis of the uni-
verse and of the soul of man ; and in them,
it has been said, " religion awakes with
fuller spiritual life than is found in any other
pre-Christian system."

The teachings of these Upanishads are the
tap-root of six great Hindu systems of phi-
losophy, the chief of which is the Vedanta
(end of the Veda), with its pantheistic belief
in one ingenerable, immutable, incorruptible

42 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Reality ; its autochthonal doctrine that this
Spiritual Absolute exists truly, everything
else falsely, and that the only truth is the
unity of all souls in this one Impersonal Soul ;
its theosophic principle that a tenuous astral
wrapper clings to the soul at death, the ves-
ture of transmigrating spirits as they pass
from body to body and from sphere to sphere
through countless series of incarnations ; and
its extravagant claim that Brahm, as the op-
erative cause of the existence, continuance,
and dissolution of the world, is the real
author of all our acts, and we are not respon-
sible. You may remember that this was the
defense of the assassin of President Garfield,
" I am God's man ; God compelled me to fire
the fatal shot." " The soul is not an actor,"
are Krishna's words ; it is only the man de-
luded by egoism that imagines himself pos-
sessed of free will. We wander in God like
helpless somnambulists. Personal sin is
therefore impossible.

The Katha, the best known Upanishad,
teaches transmigration. " At death, some are
reborn as organic bodies, others go into in-
organic matter, according to their work and
knowledge." This doctrine satisfactorily ex-
plained the sufferings of seemingly innocent

OF CHRfSTIANITY. 43

persons, finding the cause of these in crimes
committed in a preexistent state. In the
pathetic Episode of King Nala, Damayanti
the Lotus-eyed, when abandoned by her hus-
band in the wilderness, thus gives utterance
to her grief:

" No good fortune e'er attends me ; of what guilt is this the

doom ?
Not a sin can I remember ; not the least to living man,
Or in deed, or thought, or language. Of what guilt is this the

doom ?
In some former life committed expiate I now the sin ;
To this infinite misfortune, hence by penal justice doomed.
Lost my husband, lost my kingdom, from my kindred separate ;
Separate from noble Nala, from my children far away,
Widowed of my rightful guardian in the serpent-haunted

wood."

A work which reflects the philosophy of
the Upanishads, and is believed to be the
joint production of a number of authors and
editors in the first or second century A. D., is
the Bhagavad Gita, or the Divine Song, called
also the Lords Lay and the Song of the
Adorable, by far the most important work
for the study of those who desire to under-
stand the religious belief of the higher classes
in India. This Bhagavad Gita is an anthol-
ogy of the best things in Hinduism. Its
philosophy is eclectic, and it seems to repre-
sent an attempt to harmonize the several

44 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

conflicting native systems by rejecting the
conglomerate but retaining the gems ; to pre-
sent the nonpareils of Hindu wisdom, the es-
sence of all the sacred writings. Mohini
Mohun Chatterji, the translator of a recent
edition of this philosophical poem published
in Boston " for the benefit of those in search
of spiritual light," calls attention to two hun-
dred and fourteen passages that are paral-
leled in the Bible ; not with a view of
proving that there was borrowing on either
side, but rather to establish his position that
both New Testament and Gita are revela-
tions from the Hindu god Vishnu, equally
worthy of acceptance. The effrontery im-
plied in presenting such an issue to the
American public is artfully seconded by a
dangerous commentary, completing the
equipment of the poem for its mission as a
deceiver of cultured thousands who are igno-
rant of Hindu philosophy and hence do not
perceive that most of the parallels are fanci-
ful, are mere coincidences, like many in Seneca
and Aurelius, or are transcriptions from early
Hindu versions of the Scriptures; who do
not appreciate the motive of the translator,
or recognize the intermixture of Christian
conceptions and the plunder of Christian

OF CHRISTIANITY. 45

terminology ; who fail to detect the absurdi-
ties, foolish repetitions, and conspicuous con-
tradictions ; and who are dazzled by the
occasional sublimity of the delineations. The
theosophy of this work antedates the Chris-
tian era ; but there is unmistakable evidence
of interpolations, of modifications of an orig-
inal text, evincing an effort to import into
the poem much that pertains to the history
and nature of Christianity — to make the re-
ligion of India, in other words, as Christian
as possible.

The Bhagavad Gita opens by withdraw-
ing the reader for a while from the tumult of
a great national war and introducing him to
a profound theological dialogue between the
god Krishna (Vishnu) and his favorite
knight, Arjuna, which dialogue constitutes
the poem. On the eve of a decisive battle,
with Arjuna hesitating to precipitate the con-
flict which may bring him a crown but at the
cost of many lives, the deity seeks to remove
the scruples of the knight in the following
sublime argument, in some respects among
the most exalted utterances of man : —

11 Ne'er was the time when I was not, nor thou, nor yonder

kings of earth :
Hereafter, ne'er shall be the time when one of us shall cease

to be.

46 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

The soul, within its mortal frame, glides on thro' childhood,

youth, and age ;
Then in another form renewed, renews its stated course

again.
All indestructible is He that spread the living universe ;
And who is he that shall destroy the work of the Inde-
structible ?
Corruptible these bodies are that wrap the everlasting soul-—
The eternal, unimaginable soul. Whence on to battle,

Bharata !
For he that thinks to slay the soul, or he that thinks the soul

is slain,
Are fondly both alike deceived : it is not slain — it slayeth not ;
It is not born — it doth not die ; past, present, future knows

it not ;
Ancient, eternal, and unchanged, it dies not with the dying

frame.
Who knows it incorruptible, and everlasting, and unborn,
What heeds he whether he may slay, or fall himself in battle

slain ?
As their old garments men cast off, anon new raiment to

assume,
So casts the soul its worn-out frame, and takes at once

another form.
The weapon cannot pierce it through, nor wastes it the con-
i suming fire ;

The liquid waters melt it not, nor dries it up the parching

wind ;
Impenetrable and unburned ; impermeable and undried ;
Perpetual, ever-wandering, firm, indissoluble, permanent,
Invisible, unspeakable."*

Such an elevated treatment as this of
the souls immortality, which, en passant, is
transplanted bodily from the KathS, Upani-

* Milman's translation.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 47

shad, is nicely calculated to deceive the
unwary Western reader, so ready in his en-
comiums as to the lofty thoughts and moral
grandeur of the Gita. But, if the same be
analyzed, it will be seen unmistakably to re-
flect the doctrines of transmigration, ante-
mundane life, and personal pantheism.

The pith and marrow of Hinduism is con-
tained in this poem. All real existence of
the individual soul is denied, and the eternal
identity of a given soul with every other
human soul and with the Soul of God is
flatly proclaimed. The apparent existence
of many souls or selfs, explains the trans-
lator, is due to the operation of a power
called Falsehood because it is not the Spirit
of God, which is the only Reality. The Git&
further teaches that the Supreme Being is
one and secondless, and the true self or in-
nermost spirit in us is no other than this
Supreme Being. Therefore every person
who abstracts his mind from all considera-
tions of the false self, his apparent soul, can
justly say, " I am God. God is, and he and
I are one ! " " The wise man is Myself," says
the god Krishna. " This is my opinion, be-
cause the wise man is established on the
road to the superior goal, which is Myself.*'

48 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Think of a God Supreme having only an
opinion, and actually presenting it as a de-
batable question. Such is the pantheism of
the Gita, evident in many other passages, to
wit : " The Supreme Spirit is the act of
offering. The Supreme Spirit is sacrificial
butter, offered by the sacrificer who is the
Supreme Spirit, into the fire which is the
Supreme Spirit/' " The universe is produced
out of the Divine Substance which never
changes. It is not a thing, but it is the power
of the Deity." Chatterji feebly explains that
it is identical with the Deity, but at the
same time the Deity is not the universe.
They are, however, identical.

The God we worship is not an abstrac-
tion ; but the self-conscious, self-consistent*
personal Author and Finisher of nature in-
finite, absolute, perfect — in whom the human
reason discerns a comprehensible beginning,
an all-sufficient cause, and a sovereign guid-
ance to a premeditated and clearly foreseen
termination. And the universe, to quote the
words of Dr. William M. Bryant* " the
universe in Space, hanging on nothing, as
Job described it, can be but the perpetually
complete utterance of this Perfect Mind as

* In " Life, Death, and Immortality."

OF CHRISTIANITY. 49

the absolutely spontaneous, self-moved, all
inclusive One, beyond which there is no
Reality whatever."

Christianity teaches the presence of God
in nature and the universe, but not the iden-
tity of God with nature and the universe, or
of nature and the universe with God. This
latter philosophy it has ever deprecated.
Immanence and identity are separable ideas.
An able Catholic writer* recently said :
" Like pantheism, Christianity admits God in
the world and the world in God. Unlike
pantheism, however, it does not make us
frail mortals of God's own substance, nor
God of ours, but leaves him superior to us by
the whole length and breadth of his infinity.
Yet does he surround us all, men and things
alike ; support us all, empower us all to act ;
and without his aid would we one and all,
earth and heaven, cease to be, as darkness
follows when the sun withdraws its light.
Thus the very desideratum which pantheism
is supposed to furnish, namely, a God in the
world and a world in God, is found in Chris-
tianity more nobly and more rationally ex-
pressed."

Further, the God of Christianity is not

* Edmund T. Shanahmi.

5o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

only universal, but he is also concrete ; con-
crete in the incarnation Christ Jesus; not an
impersonal Christ, but a specific person on
whom the heart's affections may be fixed. As
President Hyde of Bowdoin College re-
marks : " A Father who has begotten no Son,
and sent forth no Spirit into the world, is to
all intents and purposes no God at all. The
abstract universal and nonentity are equiva-
lents/' No wonder the Hindu calls his god
both Something and Nothing, both Supreme
and Not-Supreme.

The human mind naturally thinks in par-
ticulars and, therefore, demands concrete ex-
pression. The soul of man cannot long
remain loyal to a God who is nothing more
to it than a nebular philosophical abstraction.
The universal must become resolved into the
particular. The intangible Divine must be-
come incarnate in the tangible human. The
impalpable spiritual must apparel itself in
flesh and blood in order to impress men and
women with its reality — in order to kindle
their love, enlist their service, inspire the
sacrifice of their fortunes and very lives.
And this is what we have in Christianity ; a
human brother, a concrete Mediator be-
tween us and the infinite Jehovah. To this

OF CHRISTIANITY. 51

concrete Saviour the human intellect can rivet
itself. This personal Jesus, human affections
can center themselves upon, and human reason
can apprehend, and human hope embrace,
and human faith forever trust. The keynote
of our faith is sounded by St. John in the
thirty-first verse of the twentieth chapter of
his Gospel : " That ye may believe that Jesus
is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that be-
lieving ye may have life in his name." There
is no Oriental uncertainty about this. The
purpose of the Gospel is clearly set forth,
to save men through faith in a crucified
Christ. Had I no other evidence of super-
natural wisdom in Christianity than the fact
that the God of Christianity sent into this
world, for the salvation of sinners and the
consolation of the stricken, a personal, con-
crete, accessible Saviour, Christ Jesus, that
fact alone would be convincing !

And as for man, Christianity does not
make him one with God, the same in substance
with the perfect personal Wisdom and the
perfect personal Love. But it regards every
human being as a thought of God committed
to this earth for its embodiment, develop-
ment, and execution ; not as God incarnate,
for Christianity knows but a single incarna-

52 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

tion, even Jesus Christ, the only begotten
Son of God ; begotten of his Father before
all worlds, God of God, Light of Light,
very God of very God, begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father by
whom all things were made.

What a contrast between the loose panthe-
ism of the Bhagavad Git&, which declares
that those who worship whatever God they
choose are sure to gain the heaven they long
for ; and which together with the personality
of God blots out man's responsibility for sin —
and the clear idea of the fatherhood of God,
and the brotherhood of Christ, and the im-
mortality of the individual and responsible
soul, as projected in the New Testament.

Nor is this God of the Gita a god of love
like the God of Christianity. He is depicted
as the one Creator, Regulator, and Destroyer
of the universe and all it contains. As the
universe is declared to be God, this god, in
his role as the destroyer of the universe,
figures as a suicide — and this is moon-struck
madness. He is defined as having no rela-
tion to anything, and declares, " There is
none either hated or loved by me," He does
not hate the vicious or love the virtuous ;
and yet the Second Hexad closes with this

OF CHRISTIANITY. 53

striking contradiction on the part of the truly
inscrutable God of the Gita : " Those who
worship this immortality-bearing law, regard-
ing Me as the supreme end, are excessively
beloved by me."

There can be no love in a religion that
enforces the distinctions of caste and exhorts
to a life of quietism or passive meditation.
" He whose joy is within," says the god of
the Bhagavad Gita, "whose diversion is
within, whose light is within, is the man of
right knowledge. Becoming the Supreme
God, he attains to efifacement in the Supreme
God." To our amazement we are subse-
quently informed that renunciation or cessa-
tion of action is the same thing as action, be-
cause it implies an act ; and that the acme of
renunciation is that state in which the inten-
tion to renounce is also renounced. The
chapter ends with the following admission on
the part of the astonishing Blessed Lord of
the Bhagavad Gita, the infinitely attributed
Attributeless, the neither Aught nor Naught,
the Something-Nothing God, the Supreme
Paradox — who states with characteristic hu-
man reserve, " The man of meditation, in my
opinion, is superior to the man of penance
and to men of action. This is my opinion."

54 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Of course there are other opinions differing
from that of Almighty God ; and again we
are forced on to debatable ground.

The God of the Gita describes himself as a
passive on-looker ; as Pure Indifference ; and
the great aim of Brahman philosophy is to
teach men to abstain from actions both good
and bad. Actions it regards as the shackles
of the soul. When the soul rids itself of ac-
tion by continuous contemplation it will re-
turn to the condition of separated spirit, its
proper impersonal nature ; to " the fontal
unity of undifferenced spiritual existence,"
and become insphered in Brahm. So the
promise given by this deity, of heavenly en-
joyments in a future state as the result of
meritorious works which he has just discour-
aged, if not forbidden, must, to the devotee
who in a previous chapter is told to expect
effacement, involve two preposterous contra-
dictions. There is no such thing as rational
immortality in the Indie system.

In contrast to this ascetic inertness is the
Christian life of active energy, the faith ac-
companied with works, the loving to live that
we may live to love. The Christian does not
flee from the world, but remains at work in
it. Flight would unfit him for citizenship in

OF CHRISTIANITY.

SS

the Kingdom of the Hereafter. The spirit
of his religion is one of utmost warm-hearted-
ness, conditioned by a recognition of equality
in rights and conditioning in turn the exist-
ence of true democracy. Chatterji publishes
his desire to banish all " unbrotherliness "
from the earth ; and yet this Song of the
Adorable that he has so artfully edited em-
phasizes the duties of caste before all other
obligations. Its spirit is thus distinctively
antagonistic to forces now at work to achieve
the unification of mankind.

Such are the main teachings of a book that
is most popular in India and most widely cir-
culated in translations through Western
lands; which figures as the text of Hindu
swamis now among us because, they declare,
America is starving for spiritual refreshment,
and because, in spite of the ignorance of its
upper classes and the savagery of the rank
and file, there are many souls thirsting for
higher things; a thirst which Hinduism is
going to assuage. Hinduism ! I have shown
you the best of it ; but when you scan the
pages of its other religious books you will
hardly fail to approve Max Mullers numer-
ous omissions from his translations of the
Sacred Texts of the East. " Had many pas-

56 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

sages not been suppressed/' he explains, " I
should have been prosecuted for publishing
obscene literature." And these are the reli-
gious oracles, these are the Bibles that are
lauded to the skies by Hindu swamis, amid
the approving smiles of hare-brained Ameri-
can maids and mothers — women supremely
ignorant of the true nature and trend of Hin-
duism and equally so, I say it to their shame !
of the essential doctrines of pure Christian-
ity ; women who are utter strangers to the
original Indo-Iranian texts, and wholly uncon-
scious of the amazing preeminence of the
Bible from a literary as well as a moral stand-
point ; women easily captivated by supple-
chapped Hindu graduates from English col-
leges, and always on the qui vive to indorse
every slur upon the religion of their fathers
and the moral perfection of Jesus.

Pantheism or the identity of the universe
with God, reincarnation, ascetic inaction —
the upper classes of India hold these tenets
of the Gita, while the millions are steeped in
fetishism, and worship a multitude of gods.
You may well ask, What have three thousand
years of pantheism, ascetic practices, caste
distinction, rhythmic breathing to free the
soul from the sufferings of transmigration,

OF CHRISTIANITY. 57

silent concentration to shorten the time of
reaching a perfection which is effacement, re-
volting methods of self-torture as means of
growing in holiness — what have three thou-
sand years of all this done for India? " By
their fruits ye shall know them."

You have your answer in the social wretch-
edness beneath which India is prostrate; the
poverty, the squalor, the neglect of sanitary
requirements, and in the legitimate outcome
of it all, the cholera, the leprosy, the bubo
plague, the famine, as every-day experiences ;
in the heart-rending ignorance of the super-
stition-ridden millions, the worshipers of back-
yard stocks and niche-set images and grisly
shapes asquat in the mandirs and idol-houses ;
in the prevalent fetishism, or adoration of the
spirits believed to be incorporated in amulets
of tigers' teeth and serpents' fangs and
quaintly-fashioned shells. You have your
answer in the perverted conceptions of mo-
rality that approve a god of robbers, whose
Thugs choke their victims to death as an act
of religion ; that accept deities who are repre-
sented as licentious drunkards throughout
the national literature. You have your an-
swer in the frightful immorality of certain
sects whose amorous gods delight in adultery

58 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

and incest ; whose rites are characterized by
the most shocking sensuality ; whose priestly
lechers have woven the details of Christian
story into the flesh-colored legends of Krishna
and have stolen from Christianity the notion
of a Trinity in order to harmonize the oppos-
ing claims of Brahmanism, Krishnaism, and
Sivaism ; and whose Woman Trinity, com-
posed of the female principles of Brahma,
Vishnu, and Siva, with its worship full of
sadism and bestial abominations, would seem
to out-Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zido-
nians.

You have your answer in such absurdities
as the beast-hospitals of western India, where
all kinds of invalided animals, including epi-
zoa, which superstition forbids to be killed
and so put out of misery, are supported and
treated, and where loving care that is due to
humanity alone is lavished on brutes ; where
cities in which God is denied, man worshiped,
and vermin revered, are subjected to special
taxation for the maintenance of sacred rats ;
and where holy monkeys affected with the
bubo plague are left at liberty to infect hu-
man beings with deadly microphytes, the san-
itary authorities being powerless to interfere
in the face of a fanatical opposition.

OF CHRISTIANITY. S9

You have your answer in the miracle-
mongering and trickery, and in the daily
spectacles of filthy faineants standing in dis-
tressful attitudes, with arms upstretched till
muscles stiffen, with eyes fixed upon the sun
till the sense of sight is burned out, with
finger-nails clinched in doubled-up hands so
that the life of inaction, the object of per-
verted desire, becomes imperative.

Finally, you have your answer in the fash-
ion of child marriage, which is the climax
curse of India. Matrimony is enjoined as a
religious obligation at the age of five or six.
Babes are born to children of twelve. Ner-
vous systems are bankrupt at twenty; and
society is largely composed of emasculated
degenerates. Widowhood (and there are
child widows as young as nine years of age)
is regarded as a punishment for crimes com-
mitted in a preexistent state ; hence these
child-widows are treated as reprobate ; as
under the ban of Gods displeasure. Cursed
by her husbands relatives as the contriver
of his death and cast into a prison cell with
a life sentence, the lot of an Indian girl-
widow is one of helpless, hopeless misery.
— Creeds are indeed to be rated by their
products.

60 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Hinduism is a failure because, by teaching
ultimate effacement through innumerable
transmigrations of the soul, it virtually pro-
claims the doctrine that birth into the world
is the greatest of misfortunes.

Because it perpetuates under the authority
of religion, the social tyranny of caste, where-
by certain privileges or certain disabilities
are transmitted from parents to children ;
wrhereby the laboring classes are cut off from
the kindly interest and ministrations of the
better elements of society, and thus insur-
mountable barriers are erected to separate
man from his brother.

Because it degrades woman from the po-
sition she occupied in primitive Aryan com-
munities, where, although the practice of
bride-purchase prevailed, polygamy was rare.
Christianity sufficiently establishes its di-
vinity by the moral and social uplift it has
always meant for the sex that its Founder
forever glorified through the motherhood of
Mary the Virgin. The gods of Hindustan
care only for men.

Because it seeks to obliterate the God-es-
tablished differences between man and brute.
The brute does nothing but live. He has
made no advances during the six thousand

OF CHRISTIANITY. 61

years he has been under observation, his in-
stincts being mature at birth. He has no
aspirations, no ambitions ; he does not live
for the future ; he is without responsibility-
Man differs from the mere animal in that he
lives for something, consciously and respon-
sibly lives. But Indian Yogis and Mahat-
mas are only human vegetables that reek and
rot in the fetid atmosphere of the falsest re-
ligion devised by intelligent man. The pur-
suivants of Christ are distinguished by the
cognizance of Progress — a widespread, eager,
and enlightened progress ; a progress in in-
telligence, knowledge, and charity, without
sacrifice of Christian sentiment or Christian
principle. Hinduism is all maudlin visions
relating to a foggy future; Christianity con-
cerns itself with the exigencies of an intensely
real present. The one has been character-
ized as all spirit and life ; the other, as all
letter and death. Christianity has evolved
from barbaric germs the mighty nations that
control the world's affairs. Hinduism has
dragged from the heights of social and reli-
gious purity a race once foremost in litera-
ture, art, and military power, to sink it in the
depths of a frightful obscenity tinseled with
religious names and flaunted in the temples

62 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

of the gods. The intellectual and moral
status of the Christian world to-day is the
strongest evidence that can be demanded
or adduced of the truth of the religion which
has wrought it.

How, then, is it possible to be sincerely
enamored of such a faith as Hinduism? On
what ground is such vaporing as that of
Mrs. Besant warrantable ? " We have for
years sent hosts of missionaries, with millions
of money, to convert the Hindus, with little
success. Now they send over a few men at
slight expense, and have converted every-
body." The last allegation is false ; but it is
unfortunately true that misguided Christian
teachers went into India with a cross in one
hand and a scourge in the other ; and that
the unprincipled representatives of Christian
nations have for four centuries interpreted
to the natives, from a purely selfish point of
view, Christ's command to love one's neigh-
bor as one's self. The tongue spoke of
charity, the arm drove a poniard to the heart.
The fault has not been with the poor heathen,
but with the false Christianity that has been
exhibited to them.

When we are confronted with the super-
stitions, the shocking sensuality, the awful

OF CHRISTIANITY. 63

degradation that are the legitimate products
of Hinduism, our hearts cry out in a great
longing to set things right. Is it not enough
to melt the whole Christian church into a
unity, an alliance of spiritual forces against
these powers of darkness ? Has it not, at
this dawn hour of the twentieth century, be-
come the duty of Christians to fuse all
points of disagreement in one great hearts
love for the Saviour, and carry the message
of his sacrifice and resurrection as a single
consistent army of the Cross to the nations
from whom God still is hidden by the umbra
of an eclipsing theosophy ; who, looking
heavenward for the face of a life-giving Sun,
meet only the total shadow of an intercept-
ing hopelessness, projected through a vast
full of too distant stars?

What is Christianity More Than Buddhism, With
Its Attractive Analogies to the Practical Teach-
ings of Our Own Faith?

(They have no helper. Job xxx. 13. I do nothing of myself. John

viii. 28.)

Dean Stanley somewhere said : " The great
aim which God has placed before the human
intellect is the quest of truth — truth for its
own sake. And,1' he adds, " the most excel-
lent service universities or teachers can ren-
der to the human reason in this arduous en-
terprise is not to restrain or to blindfold it,
but to clear aside every obstacle, to open wide
the path, to chase away the phantoms." It is
in the spirit of this wholesome counsel that I
approach the subject of Buddhism, with the
purpose of laying bare to your view the heart
of its gospel. What is there in the so-called
"wisdom-religion" that has bewitched intel-
lectual thousands in Europe and America?
What charm about it to give origin to the im-
pression that it can " lift us into larger power
and gladness ? " What the secret of effect
in the seductive pictures that are limned of its
beauty in the boudoirs of the superlatively

EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 65

refined ? Will this " divine science, which
the chosen noble few have known since man
first recognized himself as a god," be found to
retain its seemingly attractive features when
illuminated by the search-lights of truth?

Let us first glance at its place in history.
Buddhism represents an intellectual revolt
against the religion of the Brahmans, against
sacerdotalism, caste, and ecclesiastical corrup-
tions ; and this revolt a reader of the Upani-
shads is constrained to anticipate. He is
sensible of a lull before the cyclone, and he
is not surprised to detect a storm-center soon
after at Kapilavastu, the capital of the Sakyas,
whose prince Siddhartha became the Buddha,
the foremost reformer of the non-Christian
world.

As Buddhism sprung from the Vedic and
Brahman systems, it has much in common
with them. But, unlike Hinduism, it is athe-
istic. Hinduism is chiefly concerned with
God ; Buddhism with man. The founder of
the latter system brought himself to believe
that a loving Father was unnecessary. So
far as worship is involved, there is no God to
the disciple of Buddha. The late Bishop of
Calcutta recounts that he once asked a

Buddhist, whom he found at prayers in a
5

66 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

native temple, what he was praying for. The
answer was, " Nothing." "To whom are you
offering prayers ? " he continued. "I am pray-
ing to nobody," was the characteristic re-
sponse. A Buddhist cannot pray as do we,
for he cannot conceive of a personal Provi-
dence ; therefore he has nothing to pray to.
His apparent prayer is meditation on the re-
puted perfections of Buddha and on the hope of
final effacement in a state called Nirvana,
implying the extinction of personal identity.
Nirvana is defined by modern Buddhists as
11 a condition of total cessation of changes ;
of perfect rest ; of the absence of desire, and
illusion, and sorrow; of the total obliteration
of everything that goes to make up the phys-
ical man. Before reaching Nirvana, man is
constantly being re-born ; when he reaches
Nirvana, he is re-born no more."

In Nirvana, according to another author-
ity, there is " complete fading out and cessa-
tion of desire. Therefore is Nirvana called
a letting go, a loosing hold, a relinquishment
and non-adhesion. For Nirvana is one; but
its names,based on its oppositions, are many —
to wit, complete fading out, complete cessa-
tion^ letting go, a loosing hold, a relinquish-
ment, a non-adhesion;the perishing of passion,

OF CHRISTIANITY. 67

the perishing of infatuation, the perishing of
desire, non-origination, deliverance from con-
ception, deliverance from re-birth."

Buddhism, moreover, makes every man his
own Saviour, or attainer of annihilation in this
Eternal Nothing, this Essenceless Quiet. It
is thus out of harmony with the central tenet
of Christian teaching, that man can be saved
only through the merits and sacrifice of God's
own Son. All are doomed to suffer in their
own persons, and not vicariously, either in the
present life or in future states of existence.
The penalty of sin is re-birth. Human units
may assume an indefinite number of forms.
Hewho is to-daya man may, in previous states,
have led the life of a horse, dog, bird, fish,
snake, worm. The doctrine of re-births is
founded on the theory that " perfect justice,
equilibrium, and adjustment are inherent in
the universal law of Nature ; and that one life
is not long enough for the reward or punish-
ment of a man's deeds. The great circle of
re-births will be more or less quickly run ac-
cording to the preponderating purity or im-
purity of the several lives of the individual."*
Like Hinduism, Buddhism teaches renuncia-
tion of action and self-mortification as means

* Olcott's tl A Buddhist Catechism.*'

68 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

of putting an end to re-births and hastening
the final doom of effacement.

A multitude of worthless legends obscures
the life-history of Buddha, and makes it dif-
ficult to construct an authentic biography.
The story of his career assumed its present
form about 600 A. D. He appears to have
been a warrior-prince of the Sakyas of Oude,
who at the age of twenty-nine (about 530
B. C.) renounced his kingdom, and went out
into the world, actuated (unlike the Prophet
of Nazareth) by a purely selfish motive,
viz., the desire to save his own soul. The
improvement of the human race did not enter
into his calculations.

The legend runs as follows : One night,
when all were asleep, Siddhartha arose, took
a last look at his wife and infant son, mounted
his favorite white horse, and rode to the pal-
ace gate. The Devas had thrown a deep
sleep upon his fathers guards, so they heard
not the clatter of the horses hoofs. The gate
opened noiselessly of its own accord, and
Siddhartha rode away into the darkness. In
the jungle he surrendered himself to Yoga
discipline, with the hope of discovering the
reason for human sorrow and of freeing him-
self from sickness, death, and rebirth. But

OF CHRISTIANITY. 69

self-mortification made him no wiser. He
finally reached the conclusion that knowledge
could not be attained by mere fasting or self-
inflicted torture, suddenly gave up the ascetic
life, and seated himself under a Bo or Bodhi-
tree (tree of knowledge) at Buddha-Gaya, to
meditate. He had resolved to become Buddha,
or Enlightened, for his own good alone. But
while he sat beneath the Bo-tree, the story
goes that the god Brahma came down and
persuaded him to become a universal Buddha
and save the human race. Buddhists point
to this experience under the Bo-tree as the
Great Awakening in which their prophet was
inspired to preach a new gospel. The Light
of Supreme Knowledge, the Light of the
Four Truths, was suddenly flashed into his
soul, and he became Buddha, the Illuminated
One, the All-Wise.

The Four Noble Truths thus revealed to
Buddha, and as he taught them, are : —

I. Birth is sorrow ; growth is sorrow; sick-
ness, death, age, is sorrow ; clinging to earthly
things, separation from what we love, craving
for what cannot be obtained — thus poetically
put by Sir Edwin Arnold : —

" First of the ' noble truths ' — how sorrow is
Shadow to life, moving where life doth move,

70 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Not to be laid aside until one lays
Living aside, with all its changing states,
Birth, growth, decay, love, hatred, pleasure, pain,
Being and doing ; how that none strips off
These sad delights and pleasant griefs who lacks
Knowledge to know them snares."

II. Birth and rebirth (the chain of reincar-
nation) result from the thirst for life, together
with passion and desire.

III. The only escape from this thirst for
life and its pleasures is the annihilation of
desire.

IV. The only way of escape is by follow-
ing the Eight-fold Path, the Good Law of
Buddha, which leads to Nirvana, viz. :

i. Right Views (freedom from delusion).

2. Right Aims (worthy of an intelligent
man).

3. Right Speech (kindly, open, truthful).

4. Right Conduct (honest, peaceful, pure).

5. Right Livelihood (hurting no living
thing). ^

6. Right Effort (in self-training and self-
control).

7. Right Mindfulness (an active, watchful
mind).

8. Right Contemplation (earnest thought
on the mysteries of life).

These are the famous four great truths

OF CHRISTIANITY.

7i

and the eight-fold path so eulogized by
American Buddhists — borrowed by the way
from a Brahman source, for Buddha was
anything but original. There is nothing re-
markable about them. All they stand for,
and infinitely more, is taught, and better
taught, in the New Testament.

The sacred books of the Buddhists are
called the Tripitaka, or Three Baskets. One
is metaphysical, another disciplinary, and the
third contains discourses for the laity with
the aphorisms of Buddha. They are written
in a dialect of Sanscrit, and are made up of
600,000 stanzas, representing, exclusive of
repetitions, twice as much matter as our
Bible. The altruism of the Tripitaka is illus-
trated in such precepts as the following : —

" Like a beautiful flower, full of color but without scent, are
the fine but fruitless words of him who does not act accord-
ingly.

" As the bee collects nectar, and departs without injuring
the flower, or its color and scent, so let the sage dwell on earth.

"Let no man think lightly of evil, saying in his heart, 'It
will not come near unto me/ Even by the falling of water-
drops a water-pot is filled ; the fool becomes full of evil, even
if he gathers it little by little.

"The succoring of mother and father, the cherishing of
child and wife, and the following of a lawful thing— this is the
greatest blessing.

"The giving of alms, the abstaining from sins, the eschew-
ing of intoxicating drink, diligence in good deeds, reverence

72 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

and humility, contentment and gratitude — this is the greatest
blessing.

" Let us live happily, then, though we call nothing our own ;
not hating those who hate us, free from greed among the
greedy. We shall then be like the bright gods, feeding on
happiness."

This is the attar of Buddhistic philan-
thropy ; the few distilled drops from thou-
sands of precepts.

The Four Great Truths and Rules of
Practical Conduct were first promulgated at
Benares. Absence of all such malevolent op-
position as Christianity militant encountered
in storming the intrenched vice of the Ro-
man Empire, the fascination of the neighbor-
morality teachings, and the personal magnet-
ism of Buddha himself, — explain his success.
But the religion he founded, despite its eth-
ical elements, and its humanitarian trend in
deprecating war, in enjoining kindliness to
man, and in substituting real for mere cere-
monial righteousness, has never developed
sufficient energy to supplant the older reli-
gion of any country in which it has secured
a foothold. During a struggle of many cen-
turies it disputed with Brahmanism for the
supremacy of India. Pushed out at last to
the northeast, it made its way into Thibet,
China, and Japan, where it has demonstrated

OF CHRISTIANITY. 73

its powerlessness to overthrow the revolting
nature-worship of the Mongolian races. It
exists side by side with Confucianism, Taoism,
and Shintoism, and is accepted with them by
those who profess these faiths. At the pres-
ent day, the followers of this religion, who
once outnumbered those of any other, have
dwindled to about 100,000,000.

What, then, can be the secret of its suc-
cessful appeal to people of higher culture ?
What explains the position of a Buddhist
priest who declared at the Parliament of Re-
ligions in Chicago : " There is no better
place in the world to propagate the teach-
ings of Buddhism than America, where
Christianity is merely an adornment of soci-
ety and is deeply believed in by very few?"
Is it that the Oriental upholders of Buddhism,
recognizing its rapid loss of vitality and
the relaxing of its grasp on the vast popula-
tions once loyal to its sway ; foreseeing that
it is destined to be swept from the earth by
a combination of intellectual forces against
which they are powerless to contend — are, in
the hope of deferring the sky-set of their faith,
turning to Europe and America and offering to
Western Aryans, as Buddhism, a bastard sys-
tem of altruism sugared with sweet extracts

74 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

from the Gospels, wholly unlike the faith that
Buddha taught with " its corner-stone of athe-
ism and its cap-stone of annihilation ?"

A work that has done much to encourage
the deception, by reason of its burlesque pres-
entation of Buddhism in an up-to-date style
of dress, is Sir Edwin Arnold's " Light of
Asia/' a poem full of noble sentiments, but
which does not tell the true story of this faith,
and is worthless as an historical or critical
piece of literature. The beauty of the poem
is the glimmer borrowed from Christian
pearls ; its ugliness, the gloom of native
slime-pits. It purports to be a tale in verse
of the life and teachings of Gautama Buddha,
"the Saviour of the World," by an Indian
Buddhist — who, however, plagiarized whole-
sale from the New Testament and the life
of Christ to fleck with abnormal lights and
colors a dead and hideous canvas. The
black original is not wholly painted over ;
blotches of background stand out conspicu-
ous amid the ingeniously applied re-touches.
What of sublimity can a cultivated mind see
in its doctrine of reincarnation ?

" Life runs its round of living, climbing up
From mote, and gnat, and worm, reptile and fish,
Bird and shagged beast, man, demon, deva, God,
To clod and mote again."

OF CHRISTIANITY. 75

Most degrading is the thought that a human
soul has ever tenanted the body of a beast.
Most repulsive, from the standpoint of intel-
ligence and refinement, is Lord Buddhas ex-
planation of how and why his heart took
sudden fire at the first glance of the radiant
Sakya girl, Yasodhara, whom he made his
Queen : —

" We were not strangers.

While the wheel of birth and death turns round

Past things and thoughts and buried lives come back.

I now remember, myriad rains ago,

What time I roamed Himala's hanging woods

A tiger, with my striped and hungry kind ;

I, who am Buddh [that is the avatar of a supreme god],

couched in the kusa grass
Gazing with green blinked eyes upon the herds
Which pastured near and nearer to their death.

Amid the beasts that were my fellows there,

Met in deep jungle or by reedy jheel,

A tigress, comeliest of the forest, set

The males at war. Her hide was lit with gold

Black-broidered like the veil Yasodhara

Wore for me. Hot the strife waxed in that wood

With tooth and claw, while underneath a neem

The fair beast watched us bleed, thus fiercely wooed.

And I remember at the end she came

Snarling past this and that torn forest lord

Which I had conquered, and with fawning jaws

Licked my quick heaving flank and with me went

Into the wild with proud steps amorously.

The wheel of birth and death turns low and hi<rh.M

76 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

And this is Mr. Arnolds Saviour of the
World, the Teacher of Nirvana and the Law,
that it is the fashion to go into raptures over
— a confessed beast-lover who sings mere ca-
pricious brute selection instead of that lofty
Christian virtue, that all-absorbing passion
for one immortal soul which excludes all
others from its silent depths, which knows no
intermission and no change of flow, and which
for those who recognize the spiritual side of
marriage continues through eternity. Chris-
tianity takes the high ground that those who
enter into the marriage relation from other
motives than such sublimed love infract God's
seventh command ; and in taking this ground,
it makes of love between the sexes a rational
and spiritual susceptibility, in striking contrast
to the animal passion of the Buddhist, passed
from birds to beasts, and from beasts to men
and women, through eons of transmigration.

And another view, no less repulsive to intel-
lectuality, is that of the Buddh throwing him-
self under the paw of a hungry tigress to make
a meal for her cubs, as an act of merit-bearing
renunciation. How distinctive the teaching of
Christianity here ! For a good man one would
hardly dare to give his life ; and where stands
he who throws it away on brutes and vermin ?

OF CHRISTIANITY. 77

Buddha's mission, according to this modern
exposition of the faith, was " to seek deliver-
ance and that unknown Light." Christ's is
to offer deliverance and shine as the Light
of the World. Buddha is a seeker after the
truth. Christ is the Truth. " And where
my quest will end," says the all-uncertain
Buddha, " I know not." Christ knew his end,
and ever proclaimed it to be the cross ! Bud-
dha laid out an endless road to Heaven,by way
of Hell. Christ opened a direct highway to
his Kingdom through a service which he es-
pecially declared not to be grievous. If you
will read the " Light of Asia," thoughtfully
through, and afterward one of the Gospels,
I feel confident that you will arise from your
study impressed, as was I, with this convic-
tion : Buddha says and does everything as a
man ; Christ, as Almighty God.

The essential note of the theology, if it
may be called a theology, is true to the spirit
of Buddhism : There is no hope for man only
in man. There is no Father, as proclaimed
by Jesus, who in his human nature did noth-
ing of himself. Every man is his own Saviour
Your modern Buddhist neither acknowledges
nor expects anything from divine power. A
personal God he regards as a gigantic shadow

78 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

thrown upon the void of space by the imag-
ination of ignorant men. Says the editor of
Olcott's " A Buddhist Catechism :" " O ye of
little faith, crouching beneath a gigantic
shadow thrown upon the void of space, know
that there are as many gods — no more, no
fewer, as there are human beings who have
ever conceived an idea of Deity."

So the tables are reversed and man has be-
come the creator of the gods. Later Asiatic
Buddhists, longing for a concrete object of
worship, made Buddha a god. American
Buddhists regard him as a saviour having
equal claims with Christ, — " An all-seeing, all-
wise counselor ; one who discovered the safe
path and pointed it out; one who showed the
cause of, and the only cure for, human suffer-
ing. In pointing to the road, in showing us
how to escape dangers, he became our guide.
And as one leading a blind man across a nar-
row bridge over a swift and deep stream saves
his life, so in showing us, who were blind
from ignorance, the way to salvation, Buddha
may well be called our saviour." These are
the words of an American gentleman, ex-
tracted from a so-called Buddhist catechism
that is circulated by the thousand copies
among a mass of persons as ignorant of what

OF CHRISTIANITY. 79

Buddhism and Christianity really are as they
are eager to dethrone the Son of God.

The Buddhism which is influencing West-
ern thought is largely counterfeit, consisting
in the main of an altruistic philosophy notice-
ably inferior to that of Christ's, though lib-
erally borrowed from it. No intelligent
Westerner who understands Buddhistic prin-
ciples could for a moment consistently em-
brace them. He would have to begin by re-
nouncing the world with its responsibilities
and pleasures, by severing all ties of family
and friendship, and by adopting a life of med-
itation and absolute inaction. For the thor-
ough-paced Buddhist believes that actions,
good or bad, are the direct cause of those
repetitions of life he so much dreads ; of the
ghastly immortality of transmigrations and
measureless woe. His object is thus to cut
short the rotation of the kaleidoscope and
find an opiate for desire, the source of human
misery, in the suppression of action and the
obliteration of personality. Life is not worth
the living to a sincere follower of Buddha,
the greatest of pessimists.

Inaction must certainly antagonize all that
is altruistic in Buddhism. An exuberant love
will not brook confinement behind the selfish

So ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

pales of contemplation and mystic ecstasy.
These are perversions, spiritual abortions.
Genuine love must act, and act with judg-
ment. And to love one's neighbor means
more than to serve him, to make his interests
our own. It is to love in others, even the
mean-spirited, the uncharitable, the evildoers,
that which is eternal ; that which is best and
purest in man and hence is reflected from
God. The consistent Christian lives as if he
always so loved. But a faith which contem-
plates ultimate soul-swoon has in it no place
for such an affection.

Jesus Christ assures us of what has been
called " an immortality of ever intensifying
consciousness, involving not merely rest and
freedom from pain but also infinite activity
(free and self-consistent as well) bringing the
richest, deepest, most positive enjoyment." *
In the heaven of Jesus, we retain our identity
as fellow citizens with the saints and of the
household of God. In the future state of
Christianity, where the separated soul, beau-
tified by death, becomes immediately con-
scious, there will be growth in strength, prog-
ress in intellectual discernment and power ;
in susceptibility to Beauty, which is God, and

♦Dr. Bryant's " Life, Death, and Immortality."

OF CHRISTIANITY. 81

*

growth in beauty itself — the beauty of the
divine image. In the heaven of Jesus, we
come to our own again, our own who for
reasons we cannot penetrate and dare not
question have been removed from our sight
and laid beneath the myrtle. It is the Here-
after where we know what he does now ;
where the cause of his action is clearly dis-
cerned and is satisfying to the soul ; where
we learn that our disappointments are the
appointments of a God who inflicts suffering
because he loves ; where we apprehend that
the idolized son, the affectionate daughter,
the father who is the support of the family,
are taken because they are ripe for heaven,
ready to be graduated from an inadequate
training school here with an admittatur to the
University of Eternity, better adapted to
their needs and capacities ; because, per-
haps, they have service to perform for their
Master there and can no longer be spared ;
because — who knows ? — they are too frail to
withstand the storms that are gathering about
them on earth ; to save them, it may be, from
temptations they could not have resisted,
from mental or bodily anguish that would
have crushed the soul. Our finite minds may
not fathom the purposes of the Infinite, nor

82 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

safely attempt to limit the Limitless. If it be
true that in that future life the soul progresses,
refines, perfects — bereaved mother, you have
everything to look forward to in your reunion
with the child who was taken before his in-
tellect was matured, before the life so full of
promise had time to blossom ; every improve-
ment to expect in the character that here was
so prone to err, so impatient, so rebellious,
yet withal so impressible and loving. In the
heaven of Jesus, we come to our own again ;
our own purified, and elevated, and God-
taught ; made up into jewels of separate
beauty by the divine Lapidary ; not grains of
gold fused in an unwrought ingot, their indi-
viduality forever lost. Which of these states
of salvation appeals with greater force to the
emotions and the reason of man ?

Modern creed-mongers and apostles of
ethical culture, who fain would contribute
their puny modicum to the accumulated mass
of force antagonistic to Christianity, are fond
of asserting that our faith is but a reflection
of the more ancient Buddhism which they
style the Christianity of the East ; that Jesus
unscrupulously plagiarized from the Tripit-
aka ; that the biography of Christ as con-
tained in the Gospels is merely a clever copy

OF CHRISTIANITY. 83

of the history of Buddha and of the libidinous
Hindu god Krishna. And infidel writers of
England and the Continent are in the habit
of coupling Buddhism and Christianity as
sister religions, the daughters of a common
mother.

The theory that Christianity is a distorted
photograph of Buddhism has been honey-
combed by modern scholarship. It is incon-
ceivable that such plagiarism, did it exist,
should have been undetected by highly edu-
cated, sharp-witted Pharisees who were on
the look-out for damning evidence ; by Cel-
sus, the ancient exponent of the plagiarism
theory ; by Porphyry, who proved, to his
own satisfaction at least, that Pythagoras
was the prototype of Christ. The borrow-
ing was all the other way. Christianity is
the worst of solvents ; Buddhism is as ab-
sorbent as a sponge. Intent only on prov-
ing that Jesus was the Messiah of the Old
Testament, and always planting the Cross
of Golgotha in the foreground of their the-
ology, the early Christian fathers repelled
the aggressive attacks of Gnosticism (the
doctrine that knowledge, not faith, is the
way to Heaven) ; of Neo-Platonism (which
proclaimed the emission of all things from a

84 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

supra-essential One, the emanation of matter
from the soul, and the way of return to God
through virtuous deeds and philosophic con-
templation) ; and of Manichaeism (a mixture
of Gnosticism, Persian Zoroastrianism, and
Buddhism — with its old story of duality, and
its ascetic teachings with their anomalous
outcome of profligacy of life). Christianity
is as intolerant as truth itself, the most in-
tolerant of conceivable realities. Christi-
anity knows no accommodation, no compro-
mise. It disclaims all kinship with other
faiths. Wherever accepted, it forces aside
its predecessor, and establishes the exclusive
worship of one sole Deity, who it declares is
a Personal Spirit. And as it extends, it edu-
cates, because its genius can be understood
only by intelligent people. Buddhism, on
the contrary, has shown itself always ready to
amalgamate with other faiths, no matter how
corrupt. By its contact with Christianity, its
original atheism became modified into the-
ism ; and as early as the seventh century
A. D. it had adopted a trinity, an adroit
counterfeit of the Tripersonal God.

It is by reason of this assimilative ten-
dency that Buddhism lacks definition, that
no meaning can be extracted from its jungle

OF CHRISTIANITY. 85

of contradictions — which fact leads the fool
of the nineteenth century to conclude that
therefore they must be full of significance.
The confused pictures made by its lenses
have for centuries delighted the muddled
Asiatic mind. They are equally pleasing to
his. There is so much aberration (much of
it chromatic) that one never knows when he
is within and when without the focus of ex-
act belief. Ones creed takes shape from
ones desires. Hence the secret of the blood-
less conquest of easy-going Asia. Hence a
special cause of the popularity of Buddhism
in Europe and America — the wide latitude it
permits in the line of belief and practice.
In contrast to its vagueness, the great
truths of Christianity have such clearly
chiseled outlines that they must be accepted
for what they are, and not for anything the
worldly convert may wish them to be.

The assertion that Christianity and Bud-
dhism are sister faiths because they appear
to have a common ethical basis, is a monstrous
presumption on American credulity or igno-
rance. The points of dissimilarity so far out-
number the casual features of resemblance as
to preclude the possibility of a common
parentage. One religion is the antipode of

86 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

the other. There are no true parallels. Let
me conclude by asking your attention to the
following irreconcilable differences between
the religion of Buddha and that of Jesus.

Buddhism teaches the doctrine of Karma
(the Doing), that a man is eternally bound
by the consequences of his own deeds. His
record must be faced ; his score must be
settled somehow. What we call the soul is
indeed blotted out. " With us, soul is com-
monly said of the spiritual, and conse-
quently imperishable and changeless, prin-
ciple of the human constitution ; z. e., spirit,
in the proper sense. With the Buddhist,
soul is that semi-material and changeful
part of man which enters into his present
constitution, and may survive the disso-
lution of the physical frame, but is not
thereby become immortal. It is Plato's
psyche or Paul's spiritual body ; the ghost
of exoteric religions ; the perispirit of French
psychists ; the astral form or biogen body of
spiritism and theosophy. The soul sooner
or later perishes like the physical body."* It
is Karma that survives ; the aggregate of
merits and demerits that controls the des-
tiny of the sentient being, —

* Olcott's " A Buddhist Catechism."

OF CHRISTIANITY. 87

" The Karma — all that total of a soul
Which is the things it did, the thoughts it had,
The ' self ' it wove, with woof of viewless time,
Crossed on the warp invisible of acts."

In this doctrine of Karma is involved the
mystery (inexplicable even to the Buddhist)
of the transfer of responsibility for sin from
one transmigrating person to another. An
infant comes into the world oppressed with
the intolerable burden of some other human
beings sinfulness. Acts determine the char-
acter of descendants. " Our acts, therefore,
live in their effects or subsequent forms. Un-
til we can remove all material desires from our
acts, they will always necessitate material ef-
fects and produce reincarnations. . . . Atten-
tion is to be drawn to the fact that this law
offers a satisfactory explanation of the appar-
ent injustices of life. We find around us not
only pain and suffering, but also moral excel-
lence and depravity, forced upon individuals
by circumstances over which they seem to
have no control." *

Buddhism knows no forgiveness of sins;
its only hope lies in a higher birth. Chris-
tianity promises perfect deliverance from
the spiritual results of transgression, free
pardon for all sins save one — the ascrib-

* Olcott's 4i A Buddhist Catechism."

88 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

ing of the miracles of Christ to Satanic
agency (aspersion of the Holy Ghost).

Buddhism is an incongruous miscellany of
humanitarian and agnostic elements, which
has notoriously failed to improve moral con-
ditions because there is no spiritual energy
behind its ethical utterances. And herein
lies the gist of contrast between this religion
and Christianity, rather than in the letter of
their respective precepts. Christianity un-
reservedly pronounces that the energy which
prompts its adherents to action, which lights
an ethereal fire in the soul, is the power of
the Holy Spirit. Buddhism, on the contrary,
exhorts : " Be righteous by your own power.
Be your own Inspirer, your own Comforter,
your own Christ. Expect no help from a
supernatural source."

Buddhism bids men get rid of all notion of
self, ego, personal identity, and manufacture a
mass of personal merit with a view to a
better birth hereafter and ultimate self-aboli-
tion in Para-Nirvana. Christianity bids men
get rid of selfishness, and so make them-
selves reasonably fit for life in heaven
in the presence of eternal beauty and
goodness and truth. The Christian is ask-
ing, What shall I do to gain this future?

OF CHRISTIANITY. 89

The Buddhist, What shall I do to blot it
out?

Christianity, regarding withdrawal to a re-
cluse life as a crime against society, urges
men to labor. Buddhism constrains them to
abstain from action, and pass their lives in
apathy and melancholia. Christianity puts
its soldiers into the field and arrays them
against spiritual foes. Buddhism locks its
votaries in a castle on some dreamy Morro,
and cautions them to, evade the battle.

Christianity teaches that love perdures ;
Buddhism, that it is to be extinguished by
absorption in a loveless and unlovely Brahm,
of whom Browning wrote that " a loving
worm within its clod were diviner."

Buddhism belittles the sacredness of home
life, and laughs to scorn the exalted joys of
the married state. It favors monkhood, and
enjoins entrance into a monastic commu-
nism. Buddha was a hater of woman, a self-
ish deserter of wife and child ; and to-day,
any Buddhist who desires to make trial of a
new mistress has only to enter a retreat and
remain celibate for a month. He thus secures
a legal separation from all female companions,
and the right to marry any woman he may
select. For Buddhist women, eighteen hells

9o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

are especially prepared ; but if they live vir-
tuously through fifteen hundred reincarna-
tions, they may be born once more as infant
boys, and thus have a chance to attain
Nirvana.

Christ was a friend of woman. He re-
garded and treated her as the equal of man,
and was thus the first to proclaim her eman-
cipation. None other has ever been so con-
siderate of the sensitive nature of woman as
Jesus Christ ; none other has shown such a
knowledge and appreciation of the depth of
her affection. None other ever spoke so
reassuringly to faltering woman. None
other ever so richly rewarded the faith of con-
fiding woman. None other has ever been so
forgiving to fallen woman. None ever built
such safeguards about the chastity of woman,
or spoke in such scorching denunciation of
assault upon her purity. None other has
made marriage so holy and indissoluble a
union. None other used it to typify the
divine relation to the Church, the Bride of
God. None but Jesus ever spoke to woman,
even to his earthly mother, as the Almighty
from his throne. What wonder that woman
was the last to wet his cross with her tears,
the first to peer into the vacant sepulcher !

OF CHRISTIANITY. 91

Finally, Buddhism is the child of supersti-
tion, and thrives only where the light of
science cannot penetrate. It knows no
growth, no progress. It is nepenthes to the
spirit of advancement. It is stagnation in-
carnate. Its Para-Nirvana appropriates, and
in appropriating palsies, the thinking ener-
gies of its devotees, who have no conception
whatever of a spiritual side to life. It has
produced no brilliant types of manhood,
evolved no heroes, upbuilt no states. Chris-
tianity strikes an essentially different and in-
comparably higher note in its recognition of
the spiritual nature of man and thus of the
true oneness of the human and the divine
nature, man in Gods image. Those who
profess Christianity afford the strongest evi-
dence that its innermost spirit is the spirit of
aspiration and achievement. Argue as you
may in support of the basal teachings of
other religions, Christianity alone has meant
for man a loftier realization of truth and a
nobler conception of duty. Christianity
alone has carried the soul to the summits of
its being.

Christianity is the religion of reason ; and
as such it embodies the spirit of inductive
philosophical method, regarding appreciable

92 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

facts as the utterances of eternal science and
interpreting science, the universal law of
God, through the facts as he discovers them.
In the light of the facts revealed, while
clearly apprehending the unity, personality,
and unerring justice of God, man has recog-
nized himself as the miracle of miracles ; has
learned to know himself in his three-fold
nature, animal, rational, spiritual ; and to set
a value on himself as possessed of special
aptitude for a higher than mere terrestrial
life.

Buddhism (to sum up its doctrines as pre-
sented in the Olcott catechism, which has the
indorsement of native high priests), teaches
the highest goodness without a God ; a con-
tinued existence without what goes by the
name of soul ; a happiness without an objec-
tive heaven ; a method of salvation without a
vicarious Saviour; a redemption by one's
self as the Redeemer ; and a sumrnum bonum
attainable in life this side of Nirvana.

It is plain that one cannot, as swamis are
urging on the lecture platforms of Greater
New York to-day, serve both Christ and
Buddha. Shall it then be the flickering re-
flected Light of Asia or the Eternal Self-
luminous Sun of the World ?

What is Christianity More than Confucianism,
the Ethical System of China ?

(Excellent wisdom is found in thee. Dan. v. 14.)

In the number of its adherents, Confucian-
ism, the native faith of China, stands second
to Christianity among the world's great re-
ligions. There are more Christians to-day than
believers in any other one creed. Hinduism
is the third religion in the scale of numerical
comparison, Buddhism the fourth, and Muham-
madanism the fifth. In view of its position
as numerical second among the faiths of the
earth, as well as by reason of its claim to have
laid the foundations of the most permanent so-
cio-political system the world has ever known,
Confucianism assumes an importance some-
what out of proportion to any menace it may
be in itself to Western religious thought.
Supplement this with the fact that China
is well embarked in that career of colonizing
conquest which Napoleon predicted would
some day move the world, and interest be-
comes intensified in her positivism as a work-
ing system ; in the causes of her arrested
development ; in her ethics, which explains

94 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

and enforces the obligations of the Five
Human Relationships of prince and minis-
ter, parent and child, husband and wife, elder
and younger, friend and friend, and, secondly,
of the Five Cardinal Virtues of benevolence,
righteousness, filial piety, ceremony, and faith-
fulness ; in her claim to teach the universal
brotherhood of men by her insistence upon
the negative form of the Golden Rule (What
you do not like when done to yourself, do
not to others) ; and in her conception of a
Supreme Being.

China prides herself upon her antiquity,
and her literature carries us back to the re-
motest past. For all that remains of her an-
cient letters, the so-called Sacred Books, we
are indebted to the editorial pen of her phi-
losopher Kung, or Confucius, the beloved
teacher, who stands out in bold relief as the
most distinguished personage in her history.
Born in an evil age (551 B. C), when cor-
ruption had sapped the foundations of gov-
ernment, and misrule and violence were every-
where rife, Confucius early dedicated himself
to the cause of social and political reform.

Tradition relates that in his youth he was of
so impatient a temper that he could not endure
the drudgery of learning, and decided to give

OF CHRISTIANITY. 95

up literary pursuits for some manual employ-
ment. One day, as he was returning home
with a full determination to go to school no
longer, he happened to pass a half-witted old
woman who was rubbing a bar of iron on a
whetstone. Asking the reason of this strange
proceeding, he learned from her that she had
lost her knitting-needle and was endeavoring
to make another by rubbing down the bar.
Her words acted with magical force upon the
young philosopher. "If a half-witted old
woman," he said to himself, " has resolution
enough to rub down a bar of iron into a
needle, it would be unworthy of me to dis-
play less perseverance when the highest hon-
ors of the Empire are within my reach."
Inspired with new vigor he returned to his
books, and in his twenty-second year entered
upon his labors as a public teacher, opening
his house as a school for all who wished to
learn the doctrines of antiquity. His merits
were recognized ; political positions were
conferred upon him ; and at last, as minister
of crime, we find him making heroic efforts
for the betterment of social conditions. But
then, as now, reformers were unpopular, and
the neglect of his sovereign led to his retire-
ment. For thirteen years Confucius wan-

96 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

dered from state to state, disseminating his
precepts among the fifteen millions who con-
stituted the population of what was then
China. In all this work, the sage claimed to
be only * a transmitter" believing in and lov-
ing the ancients, not an original thinker. He
died at seventy-three, a disappointed man be-
cause no monarch had appeared to make a
fair trial of his theory of government.

Yet after his death his influence was des-
tined far to exceed his most sanguine expec-
tations. It has been greater than that of any
other human teacher. No other has ever
spoken to so many millions or received such
honors from posterity. For more than
twenty centuries, the moral axioms of Con-
fucius have been taught in the schools of
China ; educated persons repeat verbatim
page after page from his classical books;
and scores of his precepts are familiar to the
masses, who have positively no other moral
law to guide them.

Confucius disclaimed divine inspiration ;
he made no change in the ancient religion.
The aboriginal monotheism is occasionally
reflected in his sayings, but the Almighty
was "the Unknown God" between whom
and humanity the philosopher descried no re-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 97

lationship. The study of man should suffice
for man. The existence of the soul after
death, he admitted ; but as to the nature of
immortality, he was silent. " While you do
not know life," he said to an inquiring disci-
ple, " what can you know about death ? " He
never suspected that the true reward is not of
this world. Thus no impulse was given to re-
ligious thought, and the craving of the human
soul for certainty as to its future remained un-
satisfied. Confucius tactfully evaded the
question of post-mortem consciousness :
" Were I to say that the departed are pos-
sessed of consciousness, pious sons might dis-
sipate fortunes in festivals of the dead ; and
were I to deny their consciousness, heartless
sons might leave their fathers unburied."

The aim of Confucius was to inculcate
lofty principles of conduct for the govern-
ment of men in their relations to one another
and to the ruling powers. The whole duty
of man was comprised in the performance of
obligations connected with the Five Rela-
tionships. Filial piety, fraternal submission,
and veneration for the men and institutions
of ancient days, were the foundations of all
virtuous practices. His golden rule (the sole
original thought of Confucius) " What you

98 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

do not like when done to yourself, do not
to others," expressed in written language by
a single picture letter, was the one word
(Reciprocity) he specially commended as
embodying the sum and substance of duty.

The philosophical writings of Confucius are
preserved in the form of sayings called An-
alects ; in books entitled the Great Learning
and the Doctrine of the Mean ; and in the
works of Mencius, a disciple and expounder
of the sage. The Confucian Analects shine
among the laconics of the world.

By way of example : —

" The Master said : ' In the Book of Poetry are three hun-
dred pieces, but the design of all may be embraced in one
sentence — Have no depraved thoughts.

" Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it.

" Learning without thought is labor lost ; thought without
learning is perilous.

" Good government obtains when those who are near are
made happy and those who are far off are attracted.

" Three friendships are advantageous : friendship with the
upright, friendship with the sincere, and friendship with the
man of observation. Three are injurious : friendship with the
man of specious airs, friendship with the insinuatingly soft,
and friendship with the glib-tongued. Have no friends not
equal to yourself.

"Fine words and an ingratiating appearance are seldom
associated with true virtue.

" Shall I teach you what knowledge is ? When you know a
thing, to hold that you know it ; and when you do not know a
thing, to confess your ignorance,— is knowledge.

OF CHRISTIANITY.

99

" With coarse rice to eat, water to drink, and my bended
arm for a pillow — I have still happiness even with these ; but
riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a
floating cloud.

" What the superior man seeks is in himself ; what the small
man seeks is in others. The superior man thinks of virtue ;
the small man thinks of favors which he may receive. The
superior man is catholic ; the small man is partisan. "

In the Great Learning, based on the teach-
ings of Confucius, it is insisted that the wel-
fare of the people should be the single aim ;
and the divine right of kings to rule except
in accordance with the principles of justice
and virtue, is denied.

" The ancients who wished to establish illustrious virtue
throughout the empire," says the Great Learning, " first ordered
well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they
first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their fami-
lies, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate
their persons, they first rectified their hearts.

" From the loving example of one family, a whole state be-
comes loving; and from its courtesies, the whole state be-
comes courteous : while from the ambition and perverseness
of one man, the whole state may be led to rebellious disorder.
Such is the nature of influence.

" It is not possible for one to teach others while he cannot
teach his own family. There is filial piety, there is fraternal
submission, there is kindness. Therefore the ruler, without
going beyond his family, completes the lessons far the state.

" What a man dislikes in his superiors, let him not display in
the treatment of his inferiors ; what he dislikes in inferiors, let
him not display in the service of his superiors. What he
hates in those who are before him, let him not therewith
precede those who are behind him. What he is unwilling to

ioo ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

receive on the right, let him not bestow on the left. This is
what is called ' The principle with which, as with a measur-
ing-square, to regulate one's conduct.' "

Mencius lived in a degenerate age, but
without fear or favor threw himself into
the arena to wrestle with wickedness. Puri-
fication of heart was his remedy for evil ;
the sinlessness of childhood, his standard of
moral purity. " The great man," said Men-
cius, " is he who does not lose his child's
heart." Your attention is asked especially to
this saying : " The noblest thing in the world
is the people. To them the spirits of the
earth and the fruits of the earth are inferior.
The prince is least important of all."

It will be seen that one prevailing spirit
breathes through the books of the Chinese,
a spirit of conservatism. China is guided by
an ideal constructed for her by Confucius.
Of this ideal she has never lost sight, and it
has kept her vast civilization homogeneous
and held her states together through thou-
sands of years. But her light has been de-
rived entirely from the earth, and in this fact
we must seek the explanation of her ar-
rested development. She has been without a
vital principle of growth ; without that spirit
of progress which has carried our Western

OF CHRISTIANITY. 101

civilization transcendently beyond the limit
reached centuries ago by China — reached in
letters, reached in fine art, reached in applied
science, reached in altruism, reached in states-
manship ! There has been quantity without
quality. Beauty ? Yes, of a certain pattern, in
the exquisite forms in porcelain, in the prod-
ucts of the loom, in the creations of the brush;
but beauty lacking something — counterfeit
beauty that fails to thrill the soul, to raise the
mind above the sphere of the gross and sen-
suous and fix it on types that stand forever
as inspirations to high resolve and noble en-
deavor. And nowhere is the evidence of
this more marked than in what is called
Chinese poetry — poetry without inspiration,
invention, insight — odes, idyls, mere didactic
verse from which the mind can draw no fire ;
which do not awaken to the divine side of
things, nor to the nobility that slumbers in
human souls.

Poetry is transfiguration, the transfigura-
tion of life. The poet remakes the universe*
and beautiful indeed are the forms of nature
when transfigured by his God-given power
As certain vibrations of ether, impinging on
terrestrial matter, have been transformed into
heat energy which has become fixed and tan-

io2 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

gible in the diamond crystals of the Kimber-
ley peridotite, so the aspects and semblances
of common things that fall continuously on
the soul of the poet are transfigured by his
genius, and materialize as so transfigured,
through an energy intangible, unintelligible,
divine, in those jewels of verse

" That on the stretcht fore-finger of all time
Sparkle forever."

Thank God that man is gifted with this
power of transfiguration ! — for it is this seeing
the Divinity in common things that is the
most potent instrumentality in keeping alive
in the heart of man a true love for his Maker.
It is this faculty of transfiguration which, in
the providence of God, has been ordained to
save the world from materialism, positivism,
indififerentism. Poetry is beauty plus spirit-
uality ; and its aim is to keep open the path
that leads from the corporeal to the incor-
poreal, from the seen to the unseen. It is
thus a witness-bearer for God. The fact that
there is poetry is evidence in itself of the
existence of a Being spiritual, personal, supra-
natural. The message of Christ and that of
true poetry are in harmony.

There is no poetry in China, no suggestion
by mans imagination, in musical words, of

OF CHRISTIANITY. 103

noble grounds for the noblest emotions, be-
cause there is no high spiritual life. Beauty
is a mere empty form. Until the home-
keeping hearts of a nation and the very
school-children — by whose breath a Talmudic
writer declared the world may be saved —
live in the earnestness that springs from a
union of beauty and spirituality, that nation
must remain in some degree barbarian in its
instincts. In China, beauty and spirituality
are divorced. The standards of desire, the
objects of aim, the stimuli to action, are there-
fore the opposite of high and true. There is
no love of truth for truth's sake.

The Supreme God of the ancient Chinese
hymns, the powerful and righteous ruler of
the universe (Shang Ti), has disappeared
from the national apprehension, and the
idealism of the remoter past took its flight
with monotheism. The Chinaman's spiritual
nature has become stunted in its develop-
ment, that part of him which should inspire
to all higher achievements. The descent
from primitive monotheism in ancient China
stimulated the development of two great
national practices : a formal organized wor-
ship of God on certain state occasions by
the Emperor alone in behalf of the masses,

104 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

and a worship of ancestors by the common
people severally. These two institutions
have combined to warp the Chinese into the
matter-of-fact, unideal, backward-looking be-
ings we know them to be. " In the removal
from their consciousness of the idea of per-
sonal relations to God, we recognize the
withdrawal of that power which under the
Christian religion exerts a perpetual attrac-
tion into a higher realm. And in the wor-
ship of ancestors we have a well-worn chan-
nel for the continual drawing off of religious
energy. Ancestor worship has been uniformly
represented by those who have made a study
of the underlying motives of the Chinese as
the immovable thing at the bottom of all
their immobility. It is the one thing that
characterizes all the Chinese." * Tablets,
bearing the name of the departed ancestor,
the hour of his birth and that of his decease,
are worshiped twice a month with tapers and
incense. Death is believed to liberate three
spirits from the body of flesh ; one occupies
the grave, another seeks the invisible world,
the third takes up its habitation in the me-
morial tablet. This ancestor worship envel-
ops in gloom every Chinese household, and

* The Rev. F. H. Johnson in " Positivism as a Working System."

OF CHRISTIANITY. 105

assures the permanent rule of the sceptered
dead.

The Rev. F. H. Johnson, of Andover, called
attention in 1883 to the positivism of the Con-
fucian religion, an oriental prototype of the
social system of Auguste Comte, which deals
only with positives, excluding from philoso-
phy everything but natural phenomena or
properties of knowable things, and which
deprecates and discourages all inquiry into
causes as useless and unprofitable. " Out of
the conception that the material prosperity
of the people occupied the highest place in
the mind of God," he says, " that Shang Ti
saw with the people's eyes, that the wants of
the people were the revelation of his will —
grew as naturally as a widespreading tree
may grow from a tender shoot, the system
that makes the central idea of existence, the
supreme object of devotion to be the 'collect-
ive good of the collective life/ The very
same idea, in fact, that at the epoch of the
French Revolution was made prominent in
Europe, and subsequently flowered into the
elaborate social system of Comte, developed
in China more than four thousand years ago
that idea of the state which is its exact coun-
terpart. And as the elevation of this idea to

106 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

the supreme importance usurps the place of
God in the modern system, so in China it
quietly and gradually pushed the thought of
God farther and farther into the distance.
As the emperor existed for the good of the
collective life, or state, so also Shang Ti, one
step higher in the grade of being, existed for
the same purpose. And if the physical and
social well-being of the human race was the
one idea that absorbed the mind of God, it
should be the absorbing idea of every indi-
vidual man who would be in harmony with
the ways of heaven. We have already seen
with what boldness Mencius laid down the
doctrine that the people are the most impor-
tant element in the state, the spirits of the
land and grain the next, the emperor the
least. The same course of reasoning was un-
consciously carried out to include the Ruler
of Heaven also, as one who, in the highest
capacity of all, served, and was therefore sub-
ordinate to, the idea of the state." Thus
the state becomes the God Supreme in the
Chinese idea. Confucius was virtually a na-
tionalist.

Christianity antagonizes this phase of pos-
itivism (to continue the quotation) by "its
individualizing of man. There is no loss of

OF CHRISTIANITY. 107

power, as in the worship of the ideal of the
state, by the conception of divided oppor-
tunity and divided responsibility. Chris-
tianity points out a goal to be labored for,
not by the human race in its corporate capac-
ity, but one which is to be gained or lost by
individuals. The destiny of each man, in one
view, stands by itself. The opportunities of
life cannot be taken from me by the failure
of my neighbor to appreciate them. They
cannot be made fruitful to me by the com-
bined earnestness of all the other members
of the community in which I live. My will is
the arbiter of my destiny. The prospect of
infinite blessedness and never-ending devel-
opment thus appeals to each individual, not
as to a fractional part of the human race, but
as if he stood alone with God in the universe.
The Almighty has encompassed him behind
and before, and laid his hand upon him.,,

The Christian conception of God involves
a belief in an immanent Supreme Being, ap-
proachable in prayer by every human crea-
ture, no matter how humble, how sinful, and
pledged to answer prayer — for spiritual bless-
ings, absolutely ; for temporal blessings, con-
tingently, that is, in harmony with the highest
interests of the petitioner. The God of Chris-

108 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

tianityis near; into his hands we commit all
our interests ; to his loving care we commend
our dear ones ; we ask him to appoint our
lot as seemeth good to his wisdom and love ;
we trust his Holy Spirit to preserve us from
our own evil hearts, from such combinations
of passion and allurement as we cannot, by
reason of the frailty of our nature, resist. We
look to him for a higher state of blessedness
beyond the grave. The eye of the Christian
is fixed on a future where he has faith that
great and unsearchable things will be un-
folded. Christianity is a religion full of as-
pirations, characterized by an unquenchable
thirst for more knowledge of God — the God
whom Confucius may have known but cer-
tainly did not honor. Christianity adds faith
in this God to faith in man. It repudiates
the philosophy that would discard God and
concentrate enthusiasm exclusively on hu-
manity. It supplies a motive power that
Chinese positivism cannot generate; that cold
morality, " with its stern laws and rigid for-
mulas, its lofty aim and seemingly unapproach-
able ideals, must be invested with before it
can bring the recalcitrant sinner under its
wholesome and beneficent control — even the
affectionate heart and the tender appeal of

OF CHRISTIANITY. 109

religion." * The moral sense and the religious
sentiment, distinct in origin, are, when pres-
ent together, mutually sustaining, reciprocally
active. It has been wisely said that "moral
laws are but an expression of the necessities
of human existence ; and the general agree-
ment of the ethical codes of the great nations
of the past is due to the uniformity of the
conditions of life on the globe." Thus all re-
ligions have a somewhat similar moral as-
pect; but it is far from true that they are
sprung from a common universal system of
ethics — that morals constitute religion, as
certain culture-ridden moderns would have
us believe — that the teachings of Christianity
are but a reliquary of the ossified ethical pos-
tulates of dead saints clothed with no higher
authority than Buddha, Confucius, or Seneca.
After a life-long study of Chinese character,
Dr. Legge reaches the conclusion that the
highest attainments of the followers of Con-
fucius in moral excellence are not to be com-
pared with those made by docile learners in
the school of Christ. It is not strange that
the discriminating Mencius declared : " That
whereby man differs from the brute is small,
and the mass of men cast it away."

♦ President Hyde, in M Practical Idealism."

no ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Confucianism, then, is a dreary agnostic
system. It is without a concrete Christ to
bring men into closer relationship with an
almighty Creator and Father. The idea of
a propitiatory sacrifice is repugnant to its
philosophy ; hence there are no proper priests
in China. The Emperor acts as a minister
of religion for the whole people, who take no
part in the ceremonial. Christianity, on the
contrary, accepts the expiatory offices of a
single High Priest, the Lamb of God, whose
sacrifice of himself once offered at Calvary —
once and for all — is a full, perfect, and suffi-
cient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for
the sins of the whole world. Hence Chris-
tianity, not ecclesiastical misinterpretations of
it, knows no altar, no priesthood, no spiritual
brokers who make deals for humanity on the
floor of the Celestial Exchange. It unmis-
takably teaches that assumption of mediato-
rial prerogatives implies attempt at subtrac-
tion from the all-sufficiency of Christ, the
only Mediator between God and man.

Confucianism does nothing to promote
neighbor-love. To be sure the earlier clas-
sics made reciprocity in practice the rule of
life ; but reciprocity has two sides. There
may be mutual animosity as well as mutual

OF CHRISTIANITY. in

affection. " Recompense injury with justice,"
said Confucius, and " kindness with kind-
ness." This is eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth
doctrine, from which has been canceled the
factor of forgiveness. To be sure it is writ-
ing kindnesses in marble, but not injuries in
dust. The man who returns good for evil is
looked upon in China as a coward ; he does
it from fear of personal injury. The Con-
fucian system finds nothing reprehensible in
revenge. Under the sway of its negative
Golden Rule official tyranny thrives, frightful
cruelty, suicide, infanticide, inhuman punish-
ments that would put to the blush the tor-
tures of the Spanish Inquisition. The Golden
Rule in negative form has failed to amelio-
rate. Jesus gave positive character to the law
of reciprocity : " Whatsoever ye would that
men should do to you, do ye even so to
them." It is distinctively a Do, not a Don't ;
it is love rampant, not dormant.

And what has negative reciprocity done
for woman in China ? She is regarded as a
necessary evil — men must have mothers.
She has no rights the superior sex is under
obligation to respect. Young maidens are
daily sold into domestic servitude. Young
women are trafficked in for immoral use.

ii2 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Girls are bought to be trained for the stage
by theater-managers who acquire with each
unfortunate the power to put her to death.
Children of fifteen are traded in marriage to
rear generations in slavish submission to ty-
rannical husbands. Neither Confucius nor
Mencius said or did anything looking to the
improvement of the social position of women.
The married life of the greater philosopher
was unhappy. Led by her loose conduct to
divorce his wife, he derived from his own per-
sonal experience an unfavorable impression
of the marriage relation, and so speaks con-
temptuously of conjugal fidelity while giving
his sanction to concubinage. The test of a
good wife in China to-day is absence of jeal-
ousy on her part toward her husband's para-
mours.

Confucius lays down a law of chastity for
wives, from which husbands are exempt. It
was the white life for one. Christianity rec-
ognizes no such distinction, but imperatively
demands a white life for two. It asserts the
claim that human beings are to find superla-
tive happiness in the domestic relationships;
and that the man who is a party to the holy
covenant of matrimony should be able to
offer to the woman of his choice exactly what

OF CHRISTIANITY. 113

he requires in her, a body and soul unsmirched
with sexual impurity. This is high ground to
take, but it is Gods ground. Marriage based
on any other principle, marriages contracted
in order to secure worldly comforts and en-
joyments, marriages that are entered into as
mere legal or business partnerships, selfish
and sensual marriage unions — all loveless,
and obnoxious to the criticism of our Lord
that in the resurrection they marry not in this
way, as did the Sadducees of old — such mar-
riages do not cement affections and make the
consecrated homes to which angels may be
believed fondly to stoop. The sanctuary of a
pure and godly home is closed to the woman
of China, who has no occasion to bless the
national religion, the enforcer of her degra-
dation.

Chinese women, again, have no right to
fraternal consideration ; have no mind ot
their own. Christian women are placed by
the Founder of their faith on the same foot-
ing with men in all matters of right — domes-
tic, social, political. And when Christendom
itself shall have become Christianized, their
voices will be heard and their opinions re-
spected in the council chambers of every
state.

8

ii4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Filial piety is the characteristic national
virtue. Reverence for parents while alive,
and a show of grief for them when dead, are
organic duties of Confucianism. But the
obligation is one-sided, not reciprocal as in
Christianity. Parental government is tyran-
nous in the extreme. A father wields abso-
lute power in his family, a mother-in-law ex-
acts a galling service. The child must bend
or break. Confucius went to too great
lengths in his demands on filial piety, wholly
indifferent to the fact that the obligation to
serve father and mother involves reciprocal
duties on the part of parents. Christianity
emphasizes the principle that, whereas it is
incumbent on the child to respect, honor, and
obey within the limitations of conscience, it
is binding on the parent to maintain his chil-
dren properly, to educate them physically,
intellectually, and morally, and to inculcate
lessons of love. Christianity condemns all dis-
qualification of father and mother for their
high calling as character-formers by worldly
vocations and avocations — by the follies of
fashion, the exactions of business, the de-
mands of club life. It denies to the heartless
women who style themselves society's queens
the right to squander in aimless indolence or

OF CHRISTIANITY. n5

gratification of self the time that belongs to
their offspring. It rebukes those self-seeking
men who are so impatient of contact with
sinlessness and innocence that they find it
irksome to unbend to the little souls God has
placed in their charge. And it pronounces
the secret of that ideal training which makes
a heaven of home to be the combination and
cooperation of a manly, intelligent, unselfish,
chivalric fatherhood and a gentle, self-deny-
ing, patient, dignified motherhood, in and
through a Heaven-founded and Heaven-
blessed unity.

Finally, the third element of Christianity
most conspicuously lacking in Confucianism
is Progress. With progress the religion of
China has no sympathy. China was all the
world to Confucius, who is largely responsi-
ble for the national exclusiveness of which
the Great Wall is a symbol. There was noth-
ing beyond that wall worthy of the attention
and emulation of a Chinaman. The Museum
of Confucianism has always been its own
stenosed and insufficient heart. There is no
spirit of upward and outward growth, de-
scribed as " the spirit which is ever struggling
to express and realize itself in higher forms,
which promises to the human race far more

n6 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

than it has ever yet accomplished, which leads
men on with visions and hopes, which does
not suffer them to be satisfied, but which
makes them restless, daring, willing to risk
all for the sake of an ideal good." This is
the spirit of Christianity, the spirit that ex-
plains Western supremacy. But the people
who are moral and nothing more, never ex-
pand, never climb out of the trench into
which they have settled. They become crys-
tallized according to some law of intellectual
physics. For them, life does not broaden and
deepen and intensify, eternity has no charms,
heaven no reality. " Excellent wisdom "
alone is inadequate.

China needs a religion that reveals the
eternal God and presents the high ideals of
Christianity to the boyish minds of its mil-
lions,— the superstition-dispersing gospel of
Jesus Christ, whose thought of a Father God
and a concrete Redeemer must bring peace
and satisfaction to the souls that contemplate
an impossible moral perfection. What Con-
fucius left unfinished, Christianity is now
called upon to complete. The heart of our
nation warms to-day toward a race that has
long been represented among us, a people
that is becoming the national drudge, nay

OF CHRISTIANITY. 117

more, that is aiding us to win our battles in
the southern seas. Earnest men and women
are endeavoring to make it easy for the chil-
dren of the Celestial Empire to fall in love
with Jesus Christ; for Chinese raw material,
when shaped on Western looms and dyed
with the pure tints of Christian doctrine, is
second to none. Waked from the sleep of
centuries, in a happy forgetfulness of its time-
honored exclusive policy, the conservative
race is asking for light, for education, social
regeneration, soul-peace. God speed the
efforts making in the world to-day to bring
into the family of Christ the greatest nation-
ality of the East !

What is Christianity More than Muhammadanism,
the Monotheistic Religion of the Koran ?

(Being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who work-
eth all things after the counsel of his own will. Eph. i. n.
Woman is the glory [not the merchandise] of man. I Cor. xi. 7.)

At the Parliament of Religions convened
at the City of Chicago in 1893, reference
was made to the progress of Islamism in the
United States ; and it is not to be frivolously-
passed over that the religion of Muhammad,
divested of its wonted savagery and never
so winsome and debonair, is at this very
hour conducting an intellectual crusade
among the nations that stripped it of its
prestige in the holy wars of mediaeval times.
The drowning man is clutching at the tradi-
tional straw. Muhammadan missionaries
are abroad, striving to convince the unen-
lightened and restless populations of central
Europe, as well as the credulous elements of
American society, that there is but one self-
active mind in the universe and a single all-
dominant Allah, or Will — thus striking at the
primal psychological truths of soul-immor-
tality and self-activity of human intellect, and

EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 119

teaching submission to blind fate with the
implied abdication of reason.

Many ill-balanced minds are appropriat-
ing the deftly cast baits and considering the
advisability of " turning Turk ; " so that ear-
nest Christians would seem to be under obli-
gation to fit themselves for effective combat
with this subtle phase of what has been
called "the new Enlightenment." It is my
purpose this morning to discuss those char-
acteristic features of El Islam that are irrec-
oncilably opposed to the spirit and teach-
ings of Christianity, and to inquire into the
claim of this religion to represent a bona fide
step in the spiritual evolution of man.

Arabia gave birth to the founder of El Is-
lam, " the Saving Faith." Among some of
the nomad tribes who made this peninsula
their home, the rites and tenets of Judaism
prevailed, though in a form more or less cor-
rupted; others had become adherents ol
Christianity, first introduced into their
country by the preaching of St. Paul, but at
this time a mere caricature of the faith of the
gospels. On the northeastern frontier, th<
fire-worship of the Persians had gained a
foothold; but by far the greatest number
adored as gods the heavenly bodies or

i2o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

graven images erected to their honor in
temples and groves.

In Mecca, the sacred city of the Arabs,
was born, in the year 569, Muhammad, who
by uniting his countrymen on the basis of a
common faith laid the foundation of their
greatness. In early life an humble mer-
chant, as he approached middle age he
became subject to attacks of melancholia,
during which, he stated, the angel Gabriel
appeared to him, communicated a new rev-
elation, and commanded him to proclaim it
to the world.

The principal points of this faith are found
in the Koran (Recitation or Reading), which
the pretended prophet gave to his country-
men and which they accepted as their sacred
book, precipitated piece by piece from a
Mother Bible in Heaven, and issued in fly-
leaves by Muhammad. The Koran is made
up of 114 Suras, or divisions; a mingle-
mangle of rabbinical legends and biblical
lore, with no claim to originality beyond the
modus inspirandi. Perusal of it insures as-
sent to Carlyle's characterization : " A wea-
risome, crude, confused jumble, incondite ;
endless iterations, long-windedness, entan-
glement ; insupportable stupidity, in short !

OF CHRISTIANITY. 121

Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any
European through the Koran." Hunting
for usable stuff among its chattocks is far
from remunerative.

The Koran, however, clearly teaches that
there is but one God, by whom divers proph-
ets— Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus,
and Muhammad, the last and greatest of all
— had been sent to instruct the human race.
Christ, the son of Mary, is not God nor
equal to God, only an apostle. To the as-
surance that every man has his appointed
time to die, it adds a promise of eternal hap-
piness to those who may perish in propagat-
ing the faith. Unbelievers are to suffer for-
ever ; but all " the faithful " will be cleansed
from their sins, however great, by a longer
or shorter period of punishment, and be
finally admitted to a paradise of sensual
pleasures. There they shall dwell in marble
palaces, attired in silken robes, surrounded
by fruits and flowers, and rivers of wine, and
women of resplendent beauty.

Emanuel Deutsch defines Islam as Juda-
ism adapted to Arabia, plus the apostleship
of Jesus and Muhammad ; and he bids us
look for its source in the Talmud — not that
Muhammad ever heard of this delightful

122 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Jewish encyclopedia enlivened with parables,
jests, and fairy stories, but that the Jews he
knew, and on whose Judaism he founded
Islam, were Talmudic in their forms of be-
lief and social practices. No doubt, the in-
fluence of this Judaism was vastly stronger
than that of the distorted or pseudo-Christi-
anity of the Arabian tribes, which had de-
generated into Mariolatry or hero worship,
and whose professors Muhammad justly de-
nounced as idolatrous.

A friend* who spent the past winter and
spring in Muhammadan countries, and has
been thrown into companionship with intel-
ligent missionaries of quarter century service,
brings back this answer to my query, " What
is the best that Islamism has done, or is do-
ing, for humanity ? " I quote from her letter
the statement of the Rev. Dr. Alexander, of
the United Presbyterian Church of America,
Vvho is stationed at Assioot on the Nile :
" Muhammadanism has brought the mind to
a belief in the unity of God, and tried to dis-
abuse it of a faith in idols ; and it has in the
past taken a stand for total abstinence, as the
Koran positively prohibits the use of strong
drink ; but," he continued, " the tenets of the

* Miss Evelina S. Hamilton, of New York.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 123

religion are a dead letter ; intemperance pre-
vails and saint-worship is winked at. The
whole system is on the decline, having no
hold for good on the people, who in the re-
bound are lapsing into infidelity of the rank-
est kind." " The worst phase of Muhammad-
anism," Dr. Alexander said, "is its attitude
toward woman. Polygamy is the rule. Any
man in moderate circumstances may have
four wives (the Sultan has a new wife every
year). Divorce is allowable for the merest
trifle ; and when a wife is thus put aside a
new one is at once found to complete the al-
lotted number. It is not uncommon for a
man of thirty or thirty-five to have had forty
wives. Women are uneducated ; and as
they are often cast adrift, with no resources,
life becomes to them an intolerable burden.,,
"At Beyrout," my friend adds, "we dined
with Professor Porter, who has been for
twenty-five years connected with the Ameri-
can College in that city. Professor Porter
declared that he could see no way in which
Muhammadanism was of benefit to humanity,
as the whole system was one stupendous
falsehood from beginning to end. While in
Damascus we attended service at the Irish
mission with which Dr. Crawford, an Atueri-

I24 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

can evangelist, has been associated for forty
years. After service, I had a conversation
with Dr. Crawford, who declared that the in-
fluence of Muhammadanism was everywhere
demoralizing ; that while it teaches a belief
in one God, it fabricates so many lies about
what this God requires of mankind that his
commandments mean nothing; for the Koran
as interpreted at present gives the greatest
possible latitude to human depravity." The
Rev. William Jessup, of Zahleh, who with his
young wife has consecrated life to missionary
work in Syria, confirmed these views, and in
addition spoke of the intolerance of Muham-
madanism, which exterminates other religions
that oppose it, and crushes with oppressive
measures those that seek to thrive beside it.
Islamism, then, in the opinion of those
who have studied it most recently on its na
tive soil, as well as in the experience of mis-
sionaries who have been in touch with it fo
a quarter century or more, has done
nothing for humanity except to darken and
deprave. The cause of this, as I apprehend
it, lies : first, in its doctrine of fatalism ; sec-
ondly, in its insistence on the chattelism of
woman ; and, thirdly, in its divorce of moral-
ity from religion.

:

OF CHRISTIANITY. 125

Islam means submission to the will of
Allah no matter how tyrannical, hopeless
surrender to an eternally foreordained order
of things. Muhammadans believe in Fate ;
Christians, in Providence. It has been as-
serted that Islam shares its fatalism with
Christianity, "for creative omnipotence is but
another name for fatalism." This is sophis-
try. It is true that predestination is taught
in Scripture, notably in Romans viii., " For
whom he foreknew he also foreordained to
be conformed to the image of his Son." And
in Ephesians i., God " hath chosen us . . . be-
fore the foundation of the world, . . . having
foreordained us unto adoption as sons
through Jesus Christ." How is this to be
interpreted ? The seventeenth Article of Re-
ligion defines predestination to life as " the
everlasting purpose of God, whereby he hath
constantly decreed, by his counsel secret to
us, to deliver from curse and damnation
those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of
mankind; and to bring them by Christ to
everlasting salvation as vessels made to
honor." The Greek pronoun o^ translated
uwhom," describes a body of believers con-
sidered collectively, and not severally as in-
dividuals. Such predestination takes not

i26 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

away mans free agency and responsibility,
which the Scriptures positively affirm. God
foreordained from the beginning a great
company of human souls to pass triumphant-
ly through this life of probation, and thus
be rendered fit for companionship with the
Lamb through eternity, in place of the angels
who fell by transgression. He has promised
absolutely to give his grace to all who ask
in a sincere desire for aid to join that com-
pany of the elect. All men may be saved, if
they please, by faith in Jesus Christ, whose
Church is charged with the sacred mission of
commanding them everywhere to repent.

Calvin taught in his " Institutes" that God
has decreed the future ; that man falls ac-
cording to appointment of divine providence,
but always by his own fault. Beza, the suc-
cessor of Calvin, dared to proclaim that " the
Almighty created a portion of men to be his
instruments with the intent of carrying out
through them his evil designs." This is
ultra doctrine. God has never played the
role of tempter.

Christianity is antipodal to Muhammadan-
ism in that its very essence is freedom, inde-
pendence of compelling cause. It has always
permitted and encouraged the freest exercise

OF CHRISTIANITY. 127

of the intellect. A characteristic primitive
fact of mind, to which every man's con-
sciousness testifies, is that not only mind or
spirit exists, preserving a conscious identity
through all its changes and modifications,
and hence is a single, indivisible, intelligent
entity, capable of existence apart from this
body ; but that such mind, soul, self, spirit,
or Ego, is essentially self-active — spontane-
ously (of itself) thinks, feels, and wills, and
not through the agency or compulsion of
some higher Mind or Over-Soul. And, what
is more to the point, every Christian is re-
peatedly aware that he is acting in direct
opposition to a divine Mind which is con-
straining him to follow some different course.
Our God foreknows, but does not fore-
compel. There is an unequivocal difference.
It is inconceivable that the Almighty should
legislate against murder, for instance, and
then force a man to kill. Every mother in
the land who has two children essentially
differing in character relatively foreknows
what each will do under the stress of passion
and allurement. The one will be sure to
yield, the other to resist. And yet this
mother puts forth all the energies of her love
to save the weaker child. She well fore-

128 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

knows but does not fore-compel. What is
relative foreknowledge in the case of an
earthly parent is absolute with God. Such
is the teaching of Christianity.

Nature is spoken of by the scientist as a
domain of rigid law, and man is the only
child of nature that can comprehend that
law. Because of this, his destiny is in his
own hands, for he can direct and utilize the
forces of nature. So argues the biologist.
By analogy, man's spiritual destinies are
within his control. Thank God it is so
ordained ; for nothing is more chilling to
spiritual expansion than a belief in one un-
alterable destiny. " There are two ways of
looking at Gods will," said Drummond ; "one
at the love side of it, the other at the law ;
one ending in triumph, the other in despair;
the one a liberty, the other a slavery." With-
out such liberty of the human will, which St.
Paul taught equally with the absolute sover-
eignty of God, character-formation, ordered
of God, were impossible.

Secondly, let us examine the influence of
the Muhammadan religion on woman. Its
whole spirit tends to oppress her sex. Her
" little soul," as it is designated, seems hardly
worthy of consideration. She is so degraded

OF CHRISTIANITY. 129

that she has ceased to value herself. The
women of the higher harams are a dejected,
discontented set, with no object or employ-
ment in life ; and they who enter the seraglio
of the Sultan leave hope behind them, for
they know that the " Devil's Current " in the
Bosporus sweeps to a watery tomb all in-
mates who survive their charms.

Muhammad was an apostle of unbridled
lust and dealt infamously with the gentler
sex, regarding woman as the mere instru-
ment of mans passion. He tempted his
dupes to war by promising a distribution
among them of maiden captives. He gave
loose rein to the slave trade, that his follow-
ers might provide themselves through its
channels with a miscellany of mistresses.
He married seventeen wives himself, and
was the owner of hundreds of odalisques.
He excluded women from the mosques, and
thus drew to the dregs the wine of moral life.
His system cast a pestilent shadow over
domestic happiness, and still is freighted
with its loathsome fruit of wife-purchase and
polygamy. Dr. Peters states in "Nippur"
that, according to the Muhammadan idea,
marriage is nothing more than a business

transaction. The Arabs in the vicinity ot
9

t3o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

the excavations haggle over the price of a
woman as if she were a mere commodity.
Sixty dollars buys a wife of extra quality ;
forty dollars, a fair article at Nippur. The
minimum price for a woman in the East is
less than two dollars in our money. A wife
so purchased is regarded as a chattel, the
personal property of her husband, the de-
fenseless victim of his lechery and truculence.
Despite its appropriation of Talmudic adorn-
ments, Muhammadanism has overlooked one
gem that glistens in the Talmud : " It is wom-
an alone through whom the blessings of
Heaven are vouchsafed to a house. Men
should be careful lest they cause her to weep,
for God counts her tears."

In contrast to the attitude of Muhammad
is that of Christ. Everywhere in the Gospel
story is woman treated by her Saviour as a
social equal, as a companion worthy of his
sympathy and entitled to his counsel, as a
ministering angel in his daily walks and be-
fore his cross of agony, as a confidante and
witness at the empty sepulcher. Jesus re-
garded woman as much an individual as
man, as much a unit in Church and home
and nation. He recognized in Martha of
Bethany the anxious housewife who grandly

OF CHRISTIANITY. i«

serves in all the duties and employments
of home life; in Mary her sister, the spir-
itual side of womanhood, that rises from
the earthly to the heavenly and is lost in
contemplation of the Divine ; in Mary Mag-
dalene, the strength of womanly devotion,
the trust that bridges the gulf of death ; in
Mary the Forgiven, the depth of holy con-
trition. Woman in the Gospel system is
made the equal of man in every question of
privilege ; endowed by her Maker with power
to choose her own course of action, with a
right to the same consideration as a social
and intellectual unit, to the same educational
advantages, to the same opportunities of
making a livelihood, to the same compensa-
tion for equally good work. Where does
God make any distinction between the obli-
gations binding upon man and those incum-
bent upon woman? Is not the moral law
uttered for the good and observance of both ?
Have the promises of this Bible any refer-
ence to differences of sex ?

I say it reverently, if Jesus Christ had
walked among men in this democratic age
he would, I believe, have given more positive
expression to a tenet that is deeply imbedded
in his divine philosophy, even universal suf-

132 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

frage at the polls of the nations — suffrage
that does not exclude superior intellect and
taxed property interests from their right to
representation in the legislative chamber
simply because in the providence of God
they happen to be the endowments of woman.
Psychological science is here in accord with
Christian teaching ; for it demonstrates and
importunes us to believe that each one of us,
without regard to sex, is a self-conscious
unit, capable of self-examination, self-criti-
cism, self-consistency, cast in the image of
the Mind Infinite, trammeled by no limitation
to its development, with no horizon to the
evolution of its deathless powers.

Marriage with the Muhammadans is a
civil act, dissoluble at the pleasure of the
husband. A wife that cloys the appetite or
taste may be divorced without the slightest
disloyalty on her part and without the assign-
ment of any reason by her husband, who has
only to say in the presence of a third party,
" I divorce you. Begone !" The dragoman
of the party just referred to was an Egyp-
tian Muhammadan who had divorced two
wives. One was only fourteen years old
when he married her ; but her mother had a
way of leaving the door ajar which was

OF CHRISTIANITY. 135

annoying to him, so he divorced his young
wife lest she should inherit the same trait.
The second wife was accustomed to shed
tears when he left home in the prosecution
of his calling. Interpreting this as a sign of
bad luck, he dissolved their marriage with
the utmost sang-froid.

To the Muhammadan, conjugal love is an
unknown quantity. He is utterly dead to
the divine instinct which prompts an un-
reserved psychical as well as physical union
of two intelligent beings of opposite sex, two
complementary personalities who find in
love the hearts blood of their mutual faith.
There is no realization of Tennyson's beauti-
ful thought :

" Either sex alone
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies
Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfills
Defect in each, and always thought in thought,
Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow,
The single, pure, and perfect animal,
The two-cell'd heart, beating with one full stroke
Life."

In no system of religion, ethics, or phi-
losophy is there a conception of the mar-
riage relation approaching in nobility that
of Jesus Christ. He looked upon marriage
as vastly more than a mere animal living-
together. With him, it is a union of bodies

i34 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

and souls ; a compact rational, moral, and
grandly spiritual. There is not the slightest
insinuation in his teachings of woman's in-
feriority to her husband.

And Christ's law makes marriage dissolu-
ble for the one specific cause of proved un-
faithfulness alone. There is in the Christian
Church no " free divorce" which disunites
married pairs because of incompatibility or
failure to fulfill any of the obligations of
marriage as interpreted by the state. What-
ever may be the ruling of the civil law, the
Church of Christ can never sanction the put-
ting asunder of those whom God has joined,
except for the one cause defined so precisely
by its Founder. Bishops may indeed give
permission for remarriage on the part of
those divorced for causes other than adul-
tery, but their notes of indulgence will be
protested when presented on high. The
only rational basis of marriage from the
Christian outlook is affection, love in each
party to the contract stronger than that
entertained for any other human being. " For
this cause," said Jesus (Matt. xix. 5), "shall
a man leave his father and mother, and shall
[literally] be glued to the woman of his
choice [here Christ assumes that an engage-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 135

ment is as sacred as a marriage], and the two
shall be one flesh."

This spiritual side of marriage is hidden
from the eyes of the Muhammadan husband,
this love side of marriage is undreamed of
by the Muhammadan wife — the love that
springs in the heart of Christian woman ;
so disinterested, so ingenuous, so near when
most forgotten, so wise, so steadfast. What
man will say that he has ever been able to
overdraw his account with this love, that his
drafts have ever been dishonored ? What
man will claim his worthiness of such devo-
tion, or urge his ability ever to requite it ?

" The love of woman quivering to the blast
Through every nerve ; yet rooted deep and fast
Midst life's dark sea."

This is the love that makes home sacred and
motherhood beautiful. There is no man
who is not susceptible to its influence, who
cannot be saved from a downward career
by the strength and affection of true woman-
hood. I am sure that if American woman,
from her of the squalid tenement to her of
the burnished mansion, would make home
what God intended it should be, there would
be no need of crusading against saloons,
for the hearthstone would possess superior

i3o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

attractions to the public bar ; there would be
no demands for legislation to authorize the
sale of alcoholic drinks in clubs and corner
hells on the Sabbath ; there would be no
such attempted insult of Him who spoke
the word, alike to man and woman, " Thou
shalt not commit adultery," as the offering
of bills in our legislatures to legalize prosti-
tution in the great cities of the United States!
Never, if the American mother would but
prayerfully study her duty, and fearlessly
and unremittingly discharge it!

Therefore I feel that all we can do to edu-
cate American women up to a sense of their
responsibility, all we can do to fit them by
college education coupled with Christian
training (divorce one from the other, and
your higher education but turns a girl into a
selfish prig, estranges her affections from her
parents, and teaches her that it is a mark of
advancement to say, not in her heart, but
openly and with a sneer at believers, " There
is no God, and every man is his own Christ,,))
— therefore I say, all we can do to fit young
women by college education coupled with re-
ligious training for their noble work as re-
formers of society must hasten the consum-
mation we all devoutly hope and pray for.

OF CHRISTIANITY. i37

Assuredly, when we come to think of it, the
national force that has for generations been
wasted in America is woman ; and we have
cause for rejoicing that at the close of this
nineteenth century, preeminently "woman's
century," it has come to be recognized that
no nation can be truly great in which the
rights of woman are not upheld, and her re-
fined intellect is not respected as a directing
agency and an impelling power.

Finally, Christianity is, as we have seen, a
moral as well as a rational religion. Confu-
cianism, it will be remembered, exalts moral-
ity at the expense of religion. Muhammad-
anism plainly exalts religion at the expense
of morality. There is about each of the lat-
ter systems a fatal dissymmetry. Both have
in consequence antagonized progress ; both
have failed to make good at the soul's depths.
Muslims assume no moral obligations and
simply live for the present, the Koran incul-
cating a belief in fate which destroys all con-
cern for the future. And indeed, as Maeter-
linck asks, can any true sentiment of the
future ever come to the man who has not had
his resting-place in some pure woman's heart ?
Amid an environment of popular wrongdoing
and political oppression, the votaries of El

138 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Islam seek satisfaction in the thought of their
religious superiority to other nations. It is
as a Pasha said in the hearing of my friend
Adams, the missionary, " True, we are great
scoundrels in Turkey — but, thank God ! we
have the true faith."

In divorcing morality from religion Mu-
hammadanism destroys that refined ethic
sense which is the appropriate soil for the
growth of spiritual sentiment. It reacts to
congeal the conscience, presents immoral
motives for conduct, and has naturally ended
in formalism and moral paresis.

Christianity cherishes the spiritual aspect
of human relationships, while Muhammadan-
ism grovels in the carnal. The latter is a
religion of self-gratification, the former a re-
ligion of self-sacrifice. War and sensuality
shaped Arab destiny. El Islam blazed into
savage frenzy which swept over Europe in a
whirlwind of fire. The Koran teaches a re-
ligion of violence. The key of El Islam to
mens hearts was the scimitar ; the key of
Christianity is the soft word that turneth
away wrath and persuadeth to brotherly feel-
ing and action. The spinal cord of the sys-
tem of Muhammad was fanatical zeal ; the
impulse that flashed through its motor fibers

OF CHRISTIANITY. 139

to the outer world incited the activities of
fear. The scheme was cunningly devised to
play upon the apprehensions and supersti-
tions of men. The Koran encourages slav-
ery, concubinage, and murder, as means of
propagandism. The Bible accompanies the
injunction to disseminate its faith with prom-
ises of future spiritual gratifications. The
divine Paymaster of Christianity compensates
in eternity.

There can be no greater contrast between
Christianity and El Islam than that which
marks the plans of the two religions for the
reconciliation of man with God. The one —
salvation through the atoning blood of Jesus
— is declared to be the purpose from eternity
of an all-wise, all-prescient, all-pitying Crea-
tor, immanent in the universe, accessible
through Christ, identical in spiritual nature
with man who is made in his image and
hence is immortal, ever inviting the chil-
dren of men to personal relationship with
himself and preparing them for such relation-
ship by the development of religious instincts
in their souls.

The contra-God of El Islam is remote ;
sagacious and just, but out of reach, nebular ;
without love, with no scheme of atonement

i4o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

for human sin as the chevisance of such love.
Muhammad ridiculed the idea of Christ's sac-
rifice. It were unworthy of Allah, says the
Koran, to have a child, to become incarnated
in a son whose human life should be given
for humanity. Hence the Muhammadan be-
lief that it devolves on man himself to propi-
tiate offended Deity ; hence the system of ac-
cumulating credit, of banking a surplus of
merit in heaven by acts of hospitality, and
the like, on earth. Muhammadanism, like
Buddhism, virtually makes the individual
man the author of his own salvation ; and in
so doing it is vaunted to teach the inherent
dignity and worth of human nature.

Be not deceived by the rose-colored pic-
tures of El Islam drawn by chauvinistic self-
seekers. We are not to judge of a faith by
a few moral or psychical principles. Bosworth
Smith appropriately said, in a famous speech :
" The religion of Christ contains whole fields
of morality and whole realms of thought
which are all outside the religion of Muham-
mad. It opens to mans moral nature humil-
ity, purity of heart, forgiveness of injuries.
Its ideal life is most elevating, most majestic,
most inspiring."

Muhammadanism is putrid to the medulla.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 141

It contains no element that makes for right-
eousness Its influence on civilization has
ever been withering. It aborts all tenden-
cies to a higher culture. Its characteristic
sequelae are intellectual torpor complicated
with moral anaesthesia It cannot be Chris-
tianized By no conceivable compromise can
the two faiths, each an aspirant to the sway
of the world, be merged in a common reli-
gion. Education alone will break the shackles
of the Muslim ; translation from his narrow
sphere of bigotry, intolerance, and self-conceit
to the broader, purer, grander, open-handed,
free-hearted life of the outside world of prog-
ress and enlightenment. And the meridian
of this schooling must be reached in his
abandonment of the religion of sense and
fate and his acceptance of the religion of rea-
son as projected in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Man is man only through his control by this
highest faculty of intellect.

" Man is not the prince of creatures
But in reason ; fail that, he is worse
Than horse, or dog, or beast of wilderness."

— Nathaniel Field*

What is Christianity More than Theosophy?

(Jesus saith : " I stood in the midst of the world, and I found all
men drunken ; and my soul grieveth over the sons of men because
they are blind in their hearts." Gospel according to the Egyptians,
Third Logion.)

Extraordinary interest is manifesting
today, not only among European nations but
throughout our own country as well, in an-
cient Hindu mysticism. Minds in unstable
equilibrium — the inquisitive and adventurous
element that cultivates stances, exhibitions of
thought-transference, and whatever is new or
radical in philosophy, with a view to glean-
ing some knowledge of the occult world or,
as they say, of penetrating the true relation-
ship of man to the universe — are easily
fanned into flame by teachers of Mahatma-
ism, Blavatskyism, and other strange phases
of thought, who claim to be specially qualified
or specially privileged to pry into the Divine
nature.

While Western science is tending to mate-
rialism— a materialism that attributes all
psychical phenomena (all shades of thinking,
feeling, and willing) to enormously compli-
cated forms of motion ; that characterizes

ENEMIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 143

affection, faith, hope, fear, as only molec-
ular changes in the gray matter of the brain,
and reduces thought to phosphorus, thus
justifying Carlyle's definition of it as a Phi-
losophy of Dirt — while Western science has
this trend, various antiquated superstitions
are reviving not only in the purlieus but at
the intellectual centersof Christendom, — mag-
ical and Eleusinian practices, alchemy, nat-
ural astrology advertising its ability to deter-
mine individual destinies from configurations
of planets and stars, palmistry, the science of
the divining-rod, professed intercourse with
demons and with the dead. These and many
others, dredged up from the mud of ancient
spiritual crime and washed of their telltale
stains, are being foisted on a receptive pub-
lic as the novel results of recent scientific in-
vestigation.

" Unless we mistake the signs," says the
author* of " Isis Unveiled," "the day is ap-
proaching when the world will receive the
proofs that only ancient religions were in
harmony with nature and ancient science
embraced all that can be known. An era
of disenchantment and rebuilding will soon
begin — nay, has already begun. The cycle

* Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

i44 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

has almost run its course ; and the future
pages of history may contain full evidence,
and convey full proof, that

1 If ancestry can be in aught believed,
Descending spirits have conversed with man,
And told him secrets of the world unknown.' "

During the last few years, what is called
Theosophy, or Theosophical Philosophy,
"the Secret Doctrine," has made startling
headway, following in the wake of Spiritism
and claiming to contain the essence of
ancient Indie wisdom. It is practically Oc-
cultism, defined by A. P. Sinnett as "not
merely an isolated discovery showing human-
ity to be possessed of certain powers over
Nature, which the narrower study of Nature
from the merely materialistic standpoint has
failed to develop ; it is an illumination cast
over all previous spiritual speculation, of a
kind which knits together apparently diver-
gent systems. It is to spiritual philosophy
much what Sanscrit was found to be to com-
parative philology ; it is a common stock of
philosophical roots. Judaism, Christianity,
Buddhism, and the Egyptian theology, are
thus brought into one family of ideas." *

Modern Theosophy owes its origin to a

*kkThe Occult World."

OF CHRISTIANITY. i45

Russian adventuress, Madame Blavatsky,
the professed messenger of its custodians,
who, after devoting herself for more than
thirty years to occult pursuits, came to New
York in 1875 anc* there organized the Theo-
sophical Society under the presidency of one
Henry S. Olcott. The objects of the Society
are set forth as follows :

I. To form the nucleus of a Universal
Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinc-
tion of race, creed, sex, caste, or color.

II. To study Aryan literature, religion, and
science.

III. To investigate unexplained laws of
Nature, and the latent powers of man.

Subsequently a fourth object of the soci-
ety, the destruction of Christianity, was re-
vealed. To quote Blavatsky : " Later it has
determined to spread among the 'poor be-
nighted heathen ' such evidences as to the
practical results of Christianity as will at least
give both sides of the story to the communi-
ties among which missionaries are at work.
With this view it has established relations
with societies and individuals throughout the
East, to whom it furnishes authenticated re-
ports of the ecclesiastical crimes and misde-
meanors, schisms and heresies, controversies
10

146 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

and litigations, doctrinal differences and Bib-
lical criticisms and revisions, with which the
press of Christian Europe and America con-
stantly teems. Christendom has been long
and minutely informed of the degradation
and brutishness into which Buddhism, Brah-
manism, and Confucianism have plunged
their deluded votaries, and many millions
have been lavished upon foreign missions
under such false representations. The The-
osophical Society, seeing daily exemplifica-
tions of this very state of things as the se-
quence of Christian teaching and example —
the latter especially — thought it simple jus-
tice to make the facts known in Palestine,
India, Ceylon, Cashmere, Tartary, Thibet,
China, and Japan, in all which countries it
has influential correspondents." The malev-
olence here is unmistakable.

The Theosophical Society now numbers
some five thousand members in Europe, Asia,
and the United States — as a rule imperfectly
educated, marvel-mongering charlatans. It
supports scores of magazines in various lan-
guages, and representative " branches " to dis-
seminate its blasphemous teachings in all
corners of the globe.

Blavatsky professed to have received her

OF CHRISTIANITY. 147

revelations from a brotherhood of sages
called Mahatmas, resident in an oasis of the
Desert of Gobi, who informed her that the
advances of modern science, and especially
the spread of evolutionary philosophy, had at
last fitted the world for the reception of their
profound teachings. So she was deputed to
act as an intermediary between theoutside pub-
lic and the masters immersed in philosophic
meditation — and so etherealized by their
melancholic stupor as to be unable to endure
contact with coarse human nature. In league
with this impostor were Monsieur and
Madame Coulomb, who accompanied her to
India and were installed as managers of her
nefarious business at Madras. Money ex-
torted from rich dupes was expended to equip
a house with all the paraphernalia of decep-
tion ; and every artifice was enlisted to
propagate the new philosophy. The accom-
modating Mahatmas were untiring in their
miracle exhibitions. Although two thousand
miles distant, by mere effort of will they
could " precipitate " an astral letter into a cab-
inet or project an astral personality into the
reception-room. Flowers dropped from no-
where into the awe-struck circle, unseen bells
jingled, and the usual phenomena of the

148 ENEiMIES AND EVIDENCES

spiritistic stance were now induced through
the marvelous psychic powers of the Mahat-
mas. Spiritism, appealing to the low and
grossly ignorant masses, had fallen into dis-
repute. Theosophy, with this attractive gar-
niture of the supernatural, pressed its claims
on a more cultured class, and under the dig-
nified name of Esoteric Buddhism now affects
an intent to enlighten the benighted West.
What matter if Blavatsky, betrayed by the
Coulombs, was proved to be an impostor !
What matter if the Mahatma letters were
shown to be in the Madame's handwriting !
What matter if the officials of her society
were convicted of cozenage, and their theos-
ophy had degenerated into theosophistry !
There still remained the grand moral teach-
ing with its unselfish thought to better social
conditions, and the elite of all "deceived de-
ceivers :y were still proud to acknowledge
themselves Esoteric Buddhists.

The esoteric or occult elements of Theos-
ophy outbud from the Upanishads. Their
germs are to be found in those " excursions
into the higher and freer regions of thought," as
Professor Whitney called them, which charac-
terize these Brahmanical treatises. The sev-
eral schools of Hindu philosophy recognized

OF CHRISTIANITY. I49

the existence of a subtle inner body corre-
sponding with the astral body of modern
Theosophy, according to which four elements
constitute man :

i. The material or physical body, visible
and tangible ; no passive piece of mechanism,
but a living creature with a consciousness of
its own.

2. The fluidic perisoul or astral body, the
tenuous involucrum or vesture of the trans-
migrating spirit, on which the characteristics
of the physical body are impressed.

3. The soul, Ego, or individual.

4. The spirit or Divine Father and life of
man's system.

The physical and the astral body consti-
tute the masculine principle ; the soul, the
feminine principle ; the spirit is an emana-
tion from God and therefore is God. The
astral and mental bodies, as formed at re-
birth, are purely the expression of the Ego.
The physical body is the instrument on
which the Ego plays.

The astral body, more specifically, is an
ethereal duplicate of the physical body, the
ghost or materialized form of communicating
intelligences. Although it is admittedly pos-
sible in the intervals of spirit life, Sinnett

iSo ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

declares that the Mahatmas disapprove of ac-
tive intercourse with departed human beings,
for such communications may retard and em-
barrass the spiritual development of those
who have once been in advance of us, as
garden plants pulled up by curious children
are checked in their growth.

Turning now to the diagnostic features of
Theosophy, we encounter a system the very
opposite of that to which we have pinned our
faith— a repellent, irreversible fatalism which
knows no pardon for the sake of a vicarious
Saviour, but demands that sin be atoned for
by re-birth into hundreds of earth lives, many
of them passed in heart-sick agony, some in
one sex, some in the other ; for the Ego of
Theosophy is sexless. Theosophists declare
that this theory of incarnation is founded on
the personal experience of so-called " Adepts,"
and hence has claims to our acceptance that
Christianity, the religion of unquestioning
faith, has not. But where is the proof of re-
incarnation ? Among the millions who have
transmigrated there certainly should some-
where be one, call him Adept if you please,
retaining a recollection of some prenatal ex-
periences. The testimony of one such per-
son would outweigh tons of published twad-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 151

die — one, with the refreshing assurance of the
Philosopher of Agrigentum, who declared ;
" I perfectly remember the time before I was
Empedocles, that I was once a boy, then a
girl, a plant, a glittering fish, a bird that cut
the air." We have all been other people,
but not one of us can recall a single happen-
ing in any former life. And yet the theory
tallies with a widespread fancy that some-
times it would seem as if we were being re-
introduced, after the lapse of dreamy years,
to scenes and experiences and thoughts once
familiar. Wrote Dante Rossetti : —

" I have been here before,

But when, or how, I cannot tell :
I know the grass beyond the door,

The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
" You have been mine before —

How long I may not know :
But just when at that swallow's soar

Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall— I knew it all of yore.
"Then, now— perchance again !

O round mine eyes your tresses shake !
Shall we not lie as we have lain

Thus for love's sake,
And sleep and wake, yet never break the chain ? "

Perhaps you may suspect these verses of
Rosettis were suggested by Buddha's intro-
duction to Yasodhara. Plato taught pre-

152 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

natal existence, and treats the soul's intui-
tion of the Beautiful as a reminiscence of it.
In Wordsworth's Ode on the " Intimations of
Immortality,'' beautiful expression is given to
the preexistence theory : —

u Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting :
The soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar :
Not in entire forget fulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home."

Theosophists have even pointed to the
Bible itself for proof of their fundamental
doctrine. You will remember the question
the disciples put to Christ: " Master, did this
man sin or his parents, that he was born
blind?" (John ix. 2.) The Jews at that time
believed in the transmigration of souls. If
congenital blindness was a punishment for
sin, then that sin must have been committed
in a previous state of existence. But Christ
said, No. The man's affliction was not the
penalty of personal or inherited transgres-
sion. "Neither hath this man sinned nor his
parents ; but that the works , of God should
be made manifest in him."

Theosophy offsets the Christian doctrine

OF CHRISTIANITY. 153

of atonement with its Hindu theory of
metempsychosis — which must be de fide be-
cause the Mahatmas so teach. It traces the
history of human souls from inorganic em-
bodiments to reincarnations of men in other
men. The practical working of the plan may
be illustrated as follows : A New York vaude-
ville actress of unsavory reputation dies ;
and her Ego with its unattractive Karma
transmigrates into a boy consecrated to the
Church, whose life-struggle with tuberculosis,
poverty, and disappointments, makes consider-
able impression on the total of wickedness
amassed by the woman of the stage. The
relentless Ego, with the imposed penalty thus
partially discharged, next finds expression in
the person of an Austrian gambler, who adds
vastly more to the original account than the
clergyman was able to cancel. Hence, when
the wandering Ego accepts from a heartless
destiny, as its fourth tenement, the body of
an Italian microcephalic child born with
various stigmata of degeneration, its short
but painful physical life crushed out by the
hideous freightage of inherited sin, substan-
tially checks the accumulating moral deficit.
And so the ever-varying surplus of unatoned-
for offenses is passed along ad infinitum.

iS4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Thus the Theosophist, while accepting the
testimony of revelation that the world lies in
wickedness and that this wickedness demands
expiation, provides a system of retribution
by running foil with the Vedanta. Pain and
self-sacrifice indeed atone for sin, but by a
method grotesquely complex and mon-
strously unjust ; for no one knows whose sins
his sufferings are making satisfaction for, nor
the nature and extent of those sins. Such is
the fantastic speculation that results when
fools who " rush in where angels fear to
tread," attempt to improve on the Divine
scheme.

Theosophy teaches the evolution of the soul
by means of these repeated incarnations, and
boldly calls into service the Darwinian
theory to relight the long-extinguished
corpse-candles of a heathen graveyard.
Says Annie Besant, on whom has fallen the
mantle of Blavatsky : —

" One divine Life, given as a seed for the
life of man ; that seed growing by reincarna-
tion, the infolded powers of the Spirit be-
coming the unfolded powers of the man
made God — such is the secret of evolution.
Those who in the early days of humanity
gave to it revelation dealt with the early

OF CHRISTIANITY. I55

stages of the human soul, stimulating its
growth; those who appealed to intuition
recognized the growing soul which possessed
a harvest of experience ; those who spoke of
happiness and virtue as one — were grasping
after the oneness of all things and the per-
fect happiness that lies only in the develop-
ment of all. Thus (that is, by reincarnation)
the human soul develops out of ignorance
into partial knowledge, out of partial knowl-
edge into divine life.

" Even conscience is evolved by reincarna-
tion. Born into the world utterly ignorant
and therefore without knowledge of good or
evil, the soul at first could not recognize any
difference between right and wrong. At that
early period every experience was useful
simply as experience, and everything en-
countered in life had some new lesson to im-
part to the infant soul. It was found that
happiness followed some actions — those that
were in harmony with the laws of nature —
and that misery followed others — those that
were in contravention with these laws. By
these results the soul slowly learned to dis-
tinguish between the actions that made for
progress and those which made for retarda-
tion. As the soul passed through incurna-

156 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

tion after incarnation, it gathered a large
store of these experiences of actions and
their results. Certain classes of actions had
led to happiness and growth, other classes to
unhappiness and delay. The first classes, it
decided, were those which it was desirable
to repeat, while the latter should be entirely
avoided. When the time had arrived for the
return to earth, and the soul was employed
in making for itself a new mind, it wove into
this new mind the conclusions on desirable
and undesirable actions to which it had come
when reviewing its previous earth-life. Some
of these were clear and definite : ' That
course of action led to sorrow, this course to
joy ; performing that deed I reaped misery,
performing this I found content and peace.
In the future I will avoid that, and I will do
this/

" These conclusions form what we call con-
science or moral instinct. Regarding the
nature of conscience in this way, we arrive
at an understanding of its limitations. When
anything comes before the soul similar to its
past experiences, the registered decision as-
serts itself and the * voice of conscience ' is
heard ; but when new circumstances arise
and no registered decision is available, con-

OF CHRISTIANITY.

*57

science is dumb." This is evolution out-at-
elbows !

Theosophy is thus clearly a furbishing up
of worthless wares to render them market-
able ; a rehabilitation of Brahmanical philos-
ophy, linked with an attempt to drive sense
and science into its jumble of mystical non-
sense, as is unmistakably shown by the
Besant theory of the evolution of conscience ;
a compound of Upanishad conceptions and
the commonplaces of modern science, with
the design of dazzling at any cost. It places
a scientific construction on childish Hindu
fables, which it claims possess a recondite
meaning, its interpretations being of much
the same nature as a contention that the
History of Goody Two-Shoes is really a
quaint treatise on the nebular hypothesis of
La Place, or the polyhedric theory of Senor
Soria. Theosophy affects peerless scholar-
ship, but talks learned nonsense. Blavatsky's
"Isis Unveiled " is chaos itself. It is voluble in
its hints of amazing secrets to be revealed
and promise-crammed of supernatural powers
to be acquired by mysterious training; and
these are the lures that deceive. Carlyle
somewhere said that England contained
thirty millions of people — mostly fools ! The

15*

ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

remark might well be extended to some
other lands which are overstocked with suf-
ferers from psycho-sensorial disturbances.
Herein you have an explanation of the popu-
larity of Theosophy. Surface-skimming
Christians are easily entrapped by the
tuzzimuzzy shreds of oriental wisdom.

Theosophy has adopted from pagan re-
ligions the conception of a female principle
in Deity ; an idea rigidly excluded by pure
Christianity, which regards the mother of
Jesus only as blessed among women. Deity
is without sex.

Theosophy borrows its god from the
Bhagavad Gita ; the Attributeless yet in-
finitely Attributed, the Impotent Nothing of
Hindu philosophy. Its supreme being is
thus a powerless nonentity, a distant spiritual
jelly-fish, a god without ethical vigor, with-
out the personality accorded to atoms. In-
deed, Theosophists are teaching that each
true upward step in their evolution implies a
getting rid, a subduing, a dissolving, of the
personality. The god of Theosophy cannot
feel for man. His knowledge of what takes
place on earth is comparable to the knowledge
a photographic film possesses of the scenes
that are focussed upon it. He is deaf to the

OF CHRISTIANITY. 159

cry of the sin-convicted for pardon and up-
lift. There is no God to the Theosophist
save the god each man can himself become.
He is now awaiting a twelfth and last Mes-
siah, whose mission is to harmonize into one
religion the discordant teachings of eleven
predecessors — Adam, Enoch, Fohi, Brigu,
Zoroaster, Thoth, Moses, Laotsze, Jesus,
Muhammad, and Ghengis Khan ! Such is the
pretended dream of this false system — a fus-
ing of all the faiths of the world in the cruci-
ble of Theosophy ; a reduction of the uni-
verse to one substance, whether it be mind,
or matter, or neither, from which principle
all the phenomena of the physical and the
spiritual world are deduced. And this is
palpable monism.

Christianity proclaims the eternal respon-
sibility of the individual soul for every
thought and word and action, and insists
upon the necessity of repentance for the re-
mission of sins. Theosophy teaches that
there is no real punishment for sin except
what is incident to earth-life, under the laws
of cause and effect, or under the laws of re-
incarnation in some lower human tenement.
There is no exclusion from a future of hap-
piness by reason of unrepented of, or un-

160 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

atoned for, sin. The heaven of Theosophy,
Nirvana, when attained is practical efiface-
ment of the conscious Ego, intellectual syn-
cope that knows no wakening ; a worthless
salvation. Under such a system men are
not deterred from sin, for, there being no in-
tellectual activity in Nirvana, thought not
only ceases, but ceases to be damnation (the
hell of Christianity).

The fact that death does not interrupt the
course of consciousness ; the fact that we
are to be immediately and forever conscious
of all the thoughts we have entertained, the
passions we have indulged, the ingratitude
we have cherished, the regret for unim-
proved opportunity, the remorse for thought-
less or malicious action ; the fact that it is
consciousness which will make eternity a
heaven or a hell for us, is among the most
awful of human apprehensions. Christianity
is the religion of consciousness ; Theosophy
is the hypothesis of swoon. The one " be-
gins nowhere, leads nowhere, ends nowhere."
The other begins with God, the Creator of
all things visible and invisible ; leads on to
Christ, the concrete crucified Redeemer;
and ends in a heavenly life characterized by
conscious possession of bodily and mental

OF CHRISTIANITY. 161

powers, by association with glorified loved
ones, -by joyous activity in an affectionate
and freely rendered service. The one deals
with phantoms ; the other, with actualities.
The Theosophist is indifferent to verities,
and dabbles in the theoretical and the occult.
The Christian adduces incontestable facts in
evidence of his belief, and uncompromisingly
thrusts aside theory in his loyalty to the Re-
ligion of Reason.

The intent of Theosophy is to dishonor
Christ ; hence it pompously trumpets the
welcome doctrine that men have no need of
a Saviour, and has seized on the theory of
reincarnation, through which every man may
atone for his own sins, in order to rid the
world of a necessity for Jesus. Its cardinal
tenet is salvation through personal effort
and merit, won by one's own Ego, slowly at-
tained in many incarnations.

Christianity, armed with incontrovertible

proof of the death and the resurrection of

Jesus of Nazareth, points ever to the Cross on

which the Son of God and the Son of man

gave his life for the sins of the whole human

race — for the brothers who lived in the elder

time, reaching out their helpless hands to

Heaven; for the thousands of millions who
11

i62 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

have been hidden from the Sun of Right-
eousness in the depths of ignorance and fa-
naticism ; for the thousands of millions who
have caught the energy of the divine sun-
rays and lifted the nations from the plane
earthly to the plane angelic. Through the
blood of Christ and the electing grace of
God, man is saved. Christianity proclaims
Jesus Christ the all-sufficient sacrifice for
sin. once offered, on Calvary — once and for
all time. In this concrete, approachable,
comprehensible Saviour, human reason finds
its God incarnate, and owns its rightful alle-
giance.

Theosophy represents an organized as-
sault on the Son of God. Through the lips
of Col. Olcott it has announced its inten-
tion " to tear Christianity to tatters." Bla-
vatsky, perhaps in a spirit of paronomasia,
named the monthly ororan of her sect " Luci-
fer." And yet, through its pretended mis-
sion to spread pure and noble thoughts, The-
osophy tempts so insidiously as to disarm
suspicion. The gospel it presents for our
acceptance bristles with moral aphorisms,
and exhorts to a virtuous, unselfish, philan-
thropic life. But its beauty is as the beauty
of flowers that win their pallid tints and

OF CHRISTIANITY. 163

nauseous odors from the festering bodies of
dank cemetery corners. It begins with a
complimentary patronage of Jesus, making
him a great Mahatma who rose through suc-
cessive incarnations to a control of natural
laws and forces. It ends by ushering him
off the stage into an inconspicuous seat
at the rear of its theater. Thousands of
ardent seekers after truth have been at-
tracted by its pinchbeck excellences. Thou-
sands who have embraced Theosophy would,
at the outset, have recoiled with horror had
they been able to penetrate the meretricious
brilliancy of the photosphere and view the
black, forbidding crust behind.

We cannot contemplate without a sigh
men and women burying their talents in this
whited sepulcher of delusion, wasting their
lives in a fruitless search for the gold of truth
— their duty forgotten, their labor misap-
plied, their learning sacrificed, their genius
abused, their God defied. Christianity, like
a benignant Sun, is shining on these mis-
guided ones ; but their moral polyopia multi-
plies the image of the luminary, or intellec-
tual amaurosis hides its life-giving radiations
from their souls. We cannot but feel that
they are included amongthe number of those

1 64 EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY.

we are warned against in these clear and
specific words of him whose second com-
ing we await in faith, the Alpha and Omega
of all Messiahs :

" There shall arise false Christs, and false
prophets, and shall show great signs and
wonders ; insomuch that, if it were possible,
they shall deceive the very elect. Behold, I
have told you before. Wherefore if they
shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the des-
ert ; go not forth : Behold, he is in the secret
chambers ; believe it not. For as the light-
ning cometh out of the east and shineth even
unto the west ; so shall also the coming of
the Son of man be." (Matt. xxiv. 24-27.)

What is Christianity More than Spiritism, which Seeks
to Prove Survival of Death Through Communica-
tion with Disembodied Spirits ? With an Exposi-
tion on the True Psychologic Proof of Immortality.

(Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall
depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines
of devils [literally, doctrines concerning demons, or spiritual
intelligences]. I Tim. iv. i.)

About thirty years ago, Robert Dale Owen
wrote to the skeptical President Felton, of
Harvard College:

"Time, the great teacher, will decide
between us. Ten years — probably less — will
see the question determined whether the spir-
itual hypothesis is destined to grow in favor
and assume station as a reality, or to sink into
discredit as a mere figment of the brain."

The Spiritual Hypothesis has grown in
popular favor. It has not "blown over" as
was predicted. It shows no signs of wane.
Spiritism, which has been rampant in the
world for forty centuries, numbers to-day five
hundred millions of adherents among the
pagan nations, the devil-worshipers of the
Eastern hemisphere, who believe they are in
communication with unseen powers ; and out
of the eighty-five millions of human beings
who constitute the population of the United

166 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

States, no fewer than fifteen millions are
tinctured with spiritistic beliefs. Thus this
faith which leads the swarm of lying wonders
has assumed proportions that warrant a thor-
ough investigation of its doctrines.

Among the remarkable claims advanced by
its advocates is that of novelty; it is heralded
as new; as "the harbinger of a Modern Dis-
pensation which is to revolutionize the faith
and practices of mankind/' But there is
nothing new about Spiritism. It has cursed
the earth since the days of the Nephilim.
The older world abounds with its desolate
shrines and corroded idols. History repeats,
age after age, the story of belief in mysterious
invisible malevolent powers, whom men feared,
consulted, and sought to conciliate. Those
who accept the Bible as the inspired word of
God are constrained to believe that there
exist in the universe intelligences other than
human selfs.

We learn from passages in Scripture that
when the eyes of men have been divinely
opened they have beheld angelic beings in
the surrounding air, and as individual exist-
ences, taking part in human affairs. Thus, in
Job, Satan, in answer to a question of the
Lords, says that he is come "from going to

OF CHRISTIANITY. 167

and fro in the earth, and from walking up and
down in it"; and he is afterward made a
direct instrument of the Almighty in his deal-
ings with man. So, in the 2 2d chapter of
1 Kings, the prophet Micaiah thus explains
the infatuation of King Ahab: "Hear thou
therefore the word of the Lord : I saw the
Lord sitting on his throne, and all the host of
heaven standing by him on his right hand and
on his left. And the Lord said, Who shall
entice Ahab that he may go up and fall at
Ramoth-gilead? And one said on this man-
ner, and another said on that manner. And
there came forth a spirit, and stood before the
Lord, and said, I will entice him. And the
Lord said unto him, Wherewith ? And he
said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying
spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And
HE said, Thou shalt entice him, and prevail :
go forth, and do so."

Elsewhere in Holy Writ particular angels
are represented as being sent on divine
errands, and while thus commissioned as hold-
ing intercourse with men. God has given us
a past pregnant with such examples for our
instruction and security. While history was
making, and humanity was inexperienced, he
directed men in visions; he taught them by

168 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

miracles ; he corrected their disobedience by
punishments severe and startling; he removed
promptly by death the adulterer, the child-
stealer, the perjurer, the necromancer, or con-
suiter with the dead. But with the coming of
the Son of Man a new day dawned, a day of
peace on earth, good will toward men. We
are left now to study the past that we may
deal with the exigencies of the present and
forecast the contingencies of the future. More-
over, the tares and the wheat, in Gods prov-
idence, are permitted to grow together till the
harvest.

Modern Spiritism is based on the theory of
consultation with the dead and of the possibil-
ity of supernatural manifestations by the
departed through the agency of specially
qualified persons called mediums. Such com-
munications are believed to prove the survival
of bodily death by the human personality,
The phenomena of the siance — including the
suspension of various physical laws ; automatic
phenomena like table-tilting; spirit writing,
drawing, and photographing; luminous appear-
ances, spirit music, quasi-human voices, trance-
speaking for the communication of messages;
impersonation, other personalities taking pos-
session of the medium ; and materialization

OF CHRISTIANITY. 169

of flowers, etc., the crowning wonder of Spirit-
ism— have been explained as follows :

(1) They are purely imaginary.

(2) They are accounted for on certain sci-
entific principles which are not yet perfectly
understood.

Are the phenomena entirely imaginary ?

When scientific men, deliberately met for
the purpose of investigating inexplicable phe-
nomena, decide that such phenomena are not
due to trickery but exhibit an unfamiliar force
acting in the physical world otherwise than
through the brain or muscles of a possessed
medium, we cannot but believe that, divesting
Spiritism of all the humbug, and making due
allowance for imposture, self-delusion, and
hallucination, much will be left that seeks
explanation in some better theory than that
of imagination. We certainly have incontes-
table evidence of the genuineness of the
phenomena.

Less than a quarter-century ago any person
who seriously devoted himself to the investi-
gation of spiritual phenomena was regarded
as a psychasthenic. A suggestionist was
outside the pale of professional respect.
Hypnotism was moonstruck madness. Every
so-called spiritualist was insane. To-day the

170 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

world's deepest thinkers are accepting the
truths and construing the facts of abnormal
psychology. Learned societies are chron-
icling the events of the sdance, and men of
broad culture and unquestioned sincerity are
seeking to prove thereby the immortality of
the soul and the possibility of bodily resurrec-
tion, and, what is more, they are doing it with-
out incurring any liability to the charge of
superstition, "a belief in the supernatural
without sufficient evidence."

Leaders of science are becoming conscious
of a superphysical world, which men have
sought to apprehend since men began to
think. Psychology, which in its practical
phase contemplates the development of
spiritual faculty, is recognized as a study par-
amount. The depth and power and death-
lessness of the human personality — all objects
of non-sensuous intuition (noumena) — have
come to be clearly apprehended ; materialism
is scouted, and sanguine observers, sensing
the dawn of a new epoch, see implied in the
promise of things a proximate application of
Emerson's philosophy — "When the Master of
the universe has points to carry in his gov-
ernment, he impresses his will in the structure
of minds" — let us interpret it, in the evolu-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 171

tion of the spiritual consciousness of man, the
logical method of improving environment and
unmaking heredity.

Careful observers have proved that ideas
actively present in one mind can be trans-
mitted to another by what is called telepathy,
the modus operandi of which is entirely un-
known, though a transmitting agent must be
implied ; that is to say, a brain from which is
liberated — whether voluntarily or subcon-
sciously— something supremely active, some-
thing of the nature of physiopsychic vibration,
which expanding concentrically in all direc-
tions, reaches the brain of the percipient,
bringing with it the agent's thought. Con-
temporary psychology tends to the doctrine
that " different consciousnesses or different
aggregates of states of consciousness may
combine and interpenetrate somewhat anal-
ogously to what theologians mean by the
communion of souls." The fact that the
" control " is altogether different from the
waking self of the medium, and often displays
unaccountable acquaintance with the life his-
tories of persons the medium never met and
knows nothing of, is frankly stated in his
Psychology by Professor James of Harvard
University. Thus the objective consciousness

172 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

is not the whole personality of the man, but
only a fraction of the spiritual part, the real
organic life of the human being, the created
copy of God. There is a consciousness of
which we are objectively unaware.

Professor Myers has shown that in " lapses
from waking consciousness we gain glimpses
of faculties as yet unexercised and unbreathed,
the mere existence of which is proof that man
is called to nobler destinies and equipped for
a larger stage than this material life can fur-
nish." It is upon these hidden faculties that
the ingenuous medium or psychic uncon-
sciously draws, and their spontaneous exploi-
tation explains all the phenomena of the
stance except such as are accounted for by
fraud, self-deception, and hallucination. The
medium himself is "the intelligent fourth
dimensional being" to whom certain men of
science have referred these phenomena ; and
the psychic force employed is inherent in all
human beings, but developed and subcon-
sciously utilized only in a few. We need not
have recourse to the supernatural to explain
what is merely supernormal.

There is no evidence to prove that the
spirits of the dead are concerned in stance
phenomena, which have been witnessed and

OF CHRISTIANITY. 173

verified by many careful, honest, and intelli-
gent observers. The idea of such spirit inter-
course is repugnant to reason. Aside from
the fact that, if the communications be
accepted as messages from the souls of the
righteous departed, such a belief cannot be
reconciled with an exalted conception of the
state of disembodied spirits — a state of wan-
dering about the earth and being conversant
with human affairs — we are confronted with the
equally significant fact that the intellectual
status of all circles is foisonless and low. No
important truths are communicated; the reve-
lations made by our alleged deceased relatives
are distasteful to us, and, what is most conclu-
sive, utterly at variance with their gifts and
characters. Spiritism mocks us by picturing
appalling mental degeneration as the conse-
quence of death. Not a page of mediumistic
literature has the smallest value. More
unmitigated rubbish was never issued from
the printery.

In its position that nothing can be holier
than the communion between a human being
and the spirit of a loved one gone before,
Spiritism discards a Divine Comforter, com-
municating spirits perform the offices of the
Holy Ghost. Thus affection for ones dead

i74 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

kinsfolk takes precedence of God-love, and
faith expires. The attitude of sympathy and
condonation here assumed by certain Chris-
tian clergymen, who are proclaiming that
those whom we have loved and lost are free
to come back to us in spirit form to console
and to direct, manifestly implies attempted
subtraction from the honor, the glory, and the
sacred function of the Holy Spirit of God.
It is the blasphemous voice of Theosophy
sounding from the Christian pulpit. For
" liberated souls," declares Annie Besant in
her Theosophical Revieiu, " remain among us
as Revealers, as helping divine Teachers,
bearing the burden of the flesh ; quickening
by their spoken words our nascent intuition,
and by their revelation of truth aiding us to
climb more swiftly toward the light."

The theory that both God, the Infallible
Guide, and well-meaning but fallible disem-
bodied souls are together inspiring and direct-
ing human beings, often necessarily at cross
purposes, would involve an inevitable clashing
of influences that must long ago have thrown
the world into chaos. The theory of Mas-
sey's, that the Holy Ghost speaks to an
afflicted mother through the spirit of a de-
parted child, while not consonant with reason,

OF CHRISTIANITY. 175

is nicely calculated to destroy our belief in
the immediate accessibility and nearness of
Deity. The Bible presents no instance in
which any spirit but the Spirit of God has
ever influenced men for good.

You may well ask, if communication with
the dead were lawful, and fraught with satis-
faction, would God have concealed from men
so innocent a means of gratifying the most
intense longings of human nature ? The
answer of the centuries is " No." What one
of us has not laid away in the grave at least
one whom we would give worlds to commu-
nicate with, one whom we would gladly have
sacrificed our life to save ? And O, if we
could open communication with the departed,
if we could feel that they were ever near us,
how greatly would the burden of our sorrow
be lessened ! But does it not seem presump-
tuous sin in you and in me — when God, for
purposes that we cannot fathom and dare not
question, has decreed a temporary separation
— to defy the divine fiat and spend our time,
our substance, nay, prostitute our intellects,
in a wicked and unprofitable search for a
means of defeating it ? I can but regard
such a course as the rankest rebellion against
the Almighty, and I can only interpret it as

176 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

evincing a deplorable deficiency in that faith
which alone can save. Resort to Spiritism is
a pathognomonic symptom of shattered trust.
It is smirching many Christian lives with the
slime of the serpent. I cannot but recall the
touching lines of Wordsworth in " The Afflic-
tion of Margaret," the widow of Penrith :

" I look for ghosts ; but none will force
Their way to me. 'Tis falsely said

That there was ever intercourse
Between the living and the dead.

For surely, then, I should have sight

Of him I wait for day and night

With love and longings infinite."

The inspired monarch of Israel, whom God
delighted to indulge, decided this question for
you and for me when over the body of Bath-
sheba's firstborn he cried out in the anguish
of his heart, " I shall go to him, but he shall
not return to me."

It is as truly said to-day as in the Egyptian
"Minstrel's Song" which thrilled the land of
lotus bloom four thousand years ago, " As-
suredly none that hath died hath ever yet
returned." And we are left to wonder with
Umar Khaiyam :

" Strange, is it not ? that of the myriads who
Before us pass'd the door of darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the road
Which to discover we must travel too ! "

OF CHRISTIANITY. 177

The proof of immortality is not to be
sought for in the vaporings of Spiritism.

A psychologic evidence of existence after
death has been found in the fact that immor-
tality is an apprehension of human reason.
There is hardly a page in the history of
serious literature — from the venerable bible
of the Egyptians to modern expressions of
human thought and hope — which does not
bear witness to the vehement desire of men
to catch some glimpse of the great Afterward.
They would fain believe the Unseen World
not altogether bournless and unfathomable —
the lifeless, loveless dwelling place of the
dead — and welcomed any teaching that pro-
fessed to solve the mystery. Age after age,
the reason of man has impressed a conviction
of the deathlessness of the soul

Is it probable that such general belief in

existence after death, and such widespread

horror of annihilation, is well founded ?

Have we any tangible proof that the soul is

imperishable and destined to a conscious life

beyond the grave? Is incarnate humanity

capable of anything that assures of post-mortal

existence? Has psychology any argument to

offer? Evidence of persisting personality has

been believed to lie in the theory of unfin-
12

178 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

ished lives — in the infinite perfectibility of the
mind, which is cut short in its development
even in the longest of human lives. Some
thinkers have deduced immortality from the
laws of the indestructibility of matter and the
conservation of force. No particle of matter
has ever been destroyed, no energy is ever
dissipated. Carrying this natural law into the
world spiritual, we may infer the imperishable
nature of the soul, for all life is governed
by consistent law. Science teaches the con-
tinuity of existence.

Many see in the inexpressible yearning
after immortality the strongest psychological
reason for its reality. The indwelling desire
implies assurance of its gratification. It is
impossible to think of one's self as ceasing to
live. This was Cicero's proof — " because the
souls of the best and wisest have such antici-
pations of a future state that they center their
thoughts only on eternity." Why should the
thoughts of men, from the very beginnings of
history, have been busied in such a quest?
Would God have implanted a longing so
universally in man if he had no intention of
gratifying it? No emotion, no passion, no
craving, no desire that is not intended by
divine love to be indulged sometime, some-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 179

where, somehow. Are we to believe that here
is an exception? Is it not contrary to the
divine plan to endow any being with capabil-
ities never to be developed ? Surely, God is
not taunting man with a lie.

But with all this, Classical Science is un-
satisfied, and rigorously demands more con-
vincing proof than such as is rooted in
personal feeling. It does not accept Emer-
son's opinion that "the implanting of a desire
indicates that the gratification of that desire
is in the constitution of the creature that feels
it. The wish for food, the wish for motion,
the wish for sleep, for society, for knowledge,
are not random whims, but ground in the
structure of the creature, and must be satis-
fied by food, by motion, by sleep, by society,
by knowledge." Science declines to refer the
same argument to the immortality of the soul.
The materialist contends that emotion, voli-
tion, thought, consciousness itseif,are functions
of the brain, and must therefore come to an
end when the brain ceases to function. Per-
ish the brain, perish intellect, susceptibility,
will — perish the man. Haeckel declares the
very soul to be a mere function of the brain,
and to be lost with the decomposition of that
oman. The end of the earth life is therefore

180 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

absolute finality. Our hearts sink within us
as we listen to the array of syllogisms
whereby our hopes of a future life are made
to appear like foolish dreams. But the cor-
relation of mind and brain by no means
proves their identity; and if we can establish
the fact that mental operations go on without
brain or sense cooperation and at a distance
from the body, we shall have proved the
existence of an immaterial principle, a spiritual
substance, in man. This, psychological sci-
ence incontrovertibly demonstrates to-day. It
is no longer true that "serious souls are bet-
ter believers in immortality than they can
give grounds for." Psychology and Scripture
agree in affirming man to be of twofold
nature — immaterial as spirit or soul and
material as body. On one side of his being
he is animal and mortal; on the other, by
reasoa of his essence as a free, self-conscious,
spiritual personality, he takes class with all
incorporeal intelligences. Psychology has
proved a double consciousness. Every hu-
man being is now conceived of by students
of mind as existing simultaneously in two
worlds, described as the objective, supralimi-
nal, or world of waking life, in which he
communicates through his senses with the

OF CHRISTIANITY. 181

phenomenal universe, and the subjective or
transliminal, the world of sleep, of an all-com-
prehensive outside existence, of which the
earthlife is but a fractional expression or seg-
mentary manifestation. The objectively con-
scious man is thus continuous with a higher
spiritual self, which in its turn is continuous
with God (Rom. vii; Gal. v). And the ideal
evolution of character consists in bringing the
frail objective or earth life wholly under the
happy influence of a higher, better self, inter-
penetrated by the Spirit of God and inclosing
supreme happiness within itself.

The higher self, Inner Man, or Ego, is
gifted with spiritual perception, with super-
normal powers of apprehension and insight,
with absolute command over expression
through a bodily organism that is practically
boundless within the limitations of physical
possibility and moral right, with susceptibility
to impression by other human personalities
and kindred spiritual intelligences, with tele-
pathic powers to impress these in turn, and
with a measure of prescience that on occasion
forecasts what is to be. Immortality is a per-
ception of this spirit or Jiigher self, which is
not produced by the brain, but acts independ-
ently of the brain, using that brain as the

182 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

essential organ of transmission for its knowl-
edge, general resources, and supersensible
powers. It is the purpose of hypnotic sug-
gestion to induce such transmission, and so
establish a subpersonal control over organs of
body and faculties of mind. Not only may
irregularities in the fulfillment of physical
functions be remedied by assumption of the
natural psycho-physical control, and so
diseases that are not organic cured, but all
attitudes of the objective mind — its trends of
thought, opinions, beliefs, desires, propensities,
tendencies, emotions, and passions — are con-
trollable and alterable by this higher human
personality along lines that are moral and true.
Immediate insight into principle, quickness
and ease of comprehension, general facility
and naturalness in application, reproductive
memory, creative imagination, faculty, talent,
genius, are all transferable from the trans-
liminal nature through the brain, whose func-
tion is merely transmissive. All these things
are now everyday occurrences (vide the Em-
manuel Movement in our Churches); and it
is continually made evident in psychic experi-
ments that physical wholeness in given areas
and centers of the brain is the condition of
perfect transmission by means of these areas

OF CHRISTIANITY. 183

and centers. Transfers cannot be made, or
made to advantage, through the medium of
poisoned, ill-fed, or worn-out cells. We can-
not go beyond the limit which the brain lays
upon intellectuality. Mind can manifest itself
normally through healthy nervous matter
only. The first obligation of the suggestion-
ist, therefore, is to study the brain he is about
to use as his transmitting agent, and, where
necessary, strengthen and replenish it before
inspiring the transliminal self to attempt,
through a defective organ, difficult or impos-
sible expression. Let the brain be sound, and
the immediate output of intellectual and
moral power in response to suggestion is little
short of the miraculous.

Here again it is clear that the brain does
not create spiritual energy. Further, the
argument that the brain transmits and does
not produce is illuminated by the fact that the
suggestionist gives a successful impulsion
when the brain is asleep, the subject knowing
nothing about it objectively; and the dynamic
appeal that is made materializes in post-hyp-
notic action when the brain resumes its nor-
mal transmissive function again. When I put
a patient to sleep in order to break an evil
habit by suggestion, or inspire expression of

1 84 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

potential talent, do I suggest to a dead brain?
No. I talk to something that uses the torpid
unfeeling brain when it comes to life again —
something that conditions the very function-
ing of that brain — something that I can direct
to wake that brain at my pleasure and make
that brain serve its purposes — call it what you
will, Soul, Ego, Subliminal Self — but that
something is the undying Spirit of the man
that identifies him with the eternal. When
the brain stops acting, the individual con-
sciousness which it transmitted " will vanish
entirely from this world, but the sphere of
being that supplied the consciousness," to
quote Professor James in "Human Immortal-
ity," " remains intact in that more real world
with which, even while here, it was (as we
have shown) continuous." The human per-
sonality depends on the brain for its earth
life, but not for its cosmic or eternal life.
"The death of the body," said Kant, "is the
end of the sensational use of the mind, but
only the beginning of the intellectual use.
So the body is not the cause of our thinking,
but merely a condition restrictive thereof; it
is really an impeder of our pure spiritual life."
It stands in the way of an actualization of the
full powers of the Ego.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 185

I have said that immortality is a perception
of the superior spiritual Self, and this to me
is a full psychologic proof of immortality.
But to those who have never entered into
that close relationship with the transliminal
mind that rapport implies — who have never
felt the touch of a soul — with many of whom
spiritual discernment is likely to be in an em-
bryonic state, this subjective attestation may
seem vitally insufficient. More satisfying
evidence is demanded of continuing personal-
ity, after the death change, and such is
forthcoming although it is not based on well-
attested instances of communication with the
dead. At the present stage of investigation
there exists no convincing evidence of tele-
pathic intercourse with the departed.

By telepathy is meant the direct communi-
cation of one mind with another, otherwise
than through the normal operation of the
recognized sense organs — that is, without the
use of words, sounds, odors, looks, gestures,
or other material signs.

In the law of telepathy, developing into the
law of spiritual intercommunication between
incarnate and discarnate spirits, Professor
Myers discerned dimly adumbrated before his
eyes the highest law with which human sci-

1 86 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

ence can conceivably have to deal. The dis-
covery of telepathy opens before us a potential
communication between all life. And if, as
our present evidence indicates, this telepathic
intercourse can subsist between embodied and
disembodied souls, that law must needs lie at
the very center of cosmic evolution. It will
be evolutionary, as depending on a faculty
now in actual course of development. It will
be cosmic; for it may — it almost must — by
analogy subsist not on this planet only, but
wherever in the universe discarnate and incar-
nate spirits may be intermingled or juxtaposed.

This is a beautiful theory and is undoubt-
edly true ; but to induce from it an assurance
of immortality would be icarian in the
extreme, despite the position taken by Profes-
sor Hyslop and Sir Oliver Lodge.

The author of this volume has never heard
a spiritistic medium say anything that was
not readily comprehensible on the theory of
thought-transference. He has never seen a
medium do anything that could not be ration-
ally explained as due to the action of super-
sensible psychic force which he believes to
inhere in every human personality, but which
only a few human beings have power con-
sciously or 'unconsciously to exploit in their

)

OF CHRISTIANITY. 187

earth lives, or make visible and tangible
in the so-called phenomena of the seance.

Brutes are capable of telepathic communi-
cation with one another. It cannot, then,
seem marvelous that a professional trance
medium in perfect training should be able to
project her transliminal self indiscriminately,
or, with method in her ecstasy, force her way
subjectively into the penetralia of selected
human minds, and so possess herself of infor-
mation calculated to confuse, deceive, or other-
wise impress her investigators.

As heretofore stated, the proof of immor-
tality is found outside the delusions, tricks,
and veritable psychic phenomena of Spiritism.
The gold of its fact is concentrated in a pay-
streak of supersensible realities which render
it not only possible but certain.

Science is forced to admit the existence of
a superphysical world, and recognizes the
existence in man of a more comprehensive
consciousness than the supraliminal self,
whose spiritual powers are exercised in spite
of, rather than by aid of, the material organ-
ism ; and that so soon as man is conceived as
constantly dwelling in this wider range of
powers his survival of death becomes an
inevitable corollary.

188 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

These powers are of the nature of clairvoy-
ance, clairaudience, prescience, automatic
writing, psychometry, mind-reading, mental
healing, and allied phenomena — the suspen -
sion of physical laws like the spontaneous
movement of ponderable bodies — variform
abnormal physical phenomena, in which "pur-
posive human-like intelligence " manifests
itself as a direct cause. Self-projection along
these supernormal lines is facilitated by the
induction of hypnosis. The more deathlike
the state of the body, the more lucid the per-
ceptions of the spirit. When the mind is
thus measurably divested of all physical tram-
mels, the inherent faculty of the spirit utters
itself more freely. Time and space have
practically no existence; matter is transpar-
ent; the experiences of everyday life are
transcended ; supranormal visual perception
obtains.

If prevision, retrocognition, clairvoyance
and other transcendent faculties can be
proved to inhere in the soul, the soul's inde-
pendence of the body is made manifest.

" If," to quote Podmore (" Modern Spir-
itualism "), " in states of trance or ecstasy the
soul has knowledge of things distant and
things hidden, can foretell the future and read

OF CHRISTIANITY. 189

the past as an open book, it seems a lawful
inference that, as such faculties have not been
acquired in the process of terrestrial evolution
and find but little employment or justification
here, they must testify to a world of higher
uses and an evolution not conditioned by
our material environment." And they most
certainly do.

Clairvoyance (trance lucidity) is but the
translation of spiritual perception into the
earth life. It is independent of the senses.
It rs a kind of extra-corporeal activity which
certain persons under favorable circumstances
have the power to make objective. Peculiarly
sensitive organizations seem to be gifted with
the needful something requisite to mental
communication with persons at a distance (te-
lepathy), with events happening in remote
places (telepathic clairvoyance), even with
things that are about to be (prescience).

Psychological records contain a number of
well-authenticated illustrations of clairvoyance
The writers own experience along this line is
limited to a single subject — an ignorant, un-
sophisticated German maidservant who, on
four occasions, while in a state of hypnosis in-
duced by a friend, described accurately the
contents of rooms which neither she nor the

igo ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

operator had ever entered, and at one seance
told in minute detail the doings of each mem-
ber of a family living three miles from the
scene of the experiment. In each instance
the girls body reclined in a chair, absolutely
dead to all sensuous impressions. The author
is familiar with three other similar cases, in
which the indiscernible immateriality that ani-
mates the organism disengaged itself from that
organism to see and hear from ten to three
thousand miles away, and what it saw and
heard at a designated time stood the test of
verification.

Akin to clairvoyance is X-ray vision, the
power to see through opaque bodies, which has
been induced by hypnotic suggestion. Tran-
scendental perceptive power of this nature,
self-projective in the earth life, has been called
the sixth sense.

The annals of Psychical Research Societies
contain not a few accredited instances of its
application to the finding of missing articles
and persons. Ultranormal faculty is every-
where recognized as inherent in the human
personality.

Now, if certain delicately constructed human
beings have seen what is going on at a speci-
fied time and place, even on the other side of

OF CHRISTIANITY. 191

the Atlantic, and what they have reported has
been proved to be true, as is the case, then
one of two hypotheses is established. Either
the objective soul {psyche) is absent from the
body at the time of the act of seeing, etc., or
the higher spiritual self, endowed with cosmic
knowledge and having access to all happenings
in time and space, informs the objective self,
which answers through the lips. In either
case there must be an intangible, immateriate
part to the man, above the body and outside
of it, operating independently of its organs.
This supersensible element, the permanent
element in man, does not die with the body.
At the moment of the death of its body it has
been known to appear in recognizable but
purely subjective shape to friends at a dis-
tance, or to inform such friends of its gradua-
tion from life by telepathic impression. To
quote Maeterlinck: "No sincere mind now
dreams of denying the possibility of these facts
supported by documentary and other evidence
as conclusive as that which serves as a basis
for our firmest scientific convictions. If the
apparition of a person whom I love, clearly
recognizable and apparently so much living
that I speak to it, enters my room to-night at
the very minute when life is quitting the body

i92 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

that lies a thousand miles away from the spot
where I am, that is, no doubt, very strange,
even as everything is strange in a world of
which we do not understand the first word ;
but it shows at most that the soul, the spirit,
the breath, the nervous and indiscernible force
of the subtlest part of our matter, can disen-
gage itself from that matter and survive it
for an instant, even as the flame of a lamp
which we extinguish sometimes becomes de-
tached from the wick and hovers for a moment
in the darkness."

Psychical science thus proves inductively
that spiritual existence is independent of a
bodily organism, that personality can and does
survive the shock of death, and that conscious-
ness of personal identity perdures, but tells us
nothing of its duration after dissociation from
the body, or of its occupations in post-plane-
tary life which is hidden from our view by
physical limitations — life in the mighty cycles
of eternity. This higher everlastingness which
Christians mean by immortality is to be under-
stood and won only through the process of
the Cross.

The Christian religion, which has stood the
test of centuries, which has passed through the
ordeal of fire and sword and triumphed over

OF CHRISTIANITY. 193

ignorance and prejudice and infidel assault,
inculcates a belief in one God, the Maker of
heaven and earth, and of all things visible
and invisible — a belief in one Saviour, Jesus
Christ, begotten of this God before all worlds,
who for our salvation came down from
Heaven, and as the Infinite Power above all
law took upon him man's nature in the womb
of the Virgin, assuming a human body with a
human soul; who suffered death and de-
scended into the place of departed spirits that
he might undergo the condition of such as
die and so satisfy the claims of death ; who
has risen and sits at the right hand of the
Father as our Advocate and Judge — a belief
in the Holy Ghost, the same God though not
the same person as the Father and the Son,
whose function is to regenerate mankind.
Thus in the unity of the Godhead there are
three persons, of one substance, power and
eternity.

Christianity further teaches the existence
of one universal Church, the flock of the
Good Shepherd ; composed of the visible
Church of Christ, a congregation of faith-
ful men in which the pure word of God is
preached and the sacraments of Baptism and

the Lords Supper are duly administered ; and

13

194 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

the invisible Church, consisting of those who
have gone to their reward, the accepted of
God gathered out of all nations, with the holy
angels. At the head of this Church is Christ;
and the terms of admission, baptism with wa-
ter, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost, coupled with repentance and faith.
O ! what a privilege to belong to this Church
of Christ, militant and triumphant ; to serve
as a constituent part of such a glorious organic
whole!

And finally our religion assures those who
profess it with its beautiful belief in the com-
munion of saints — that all the members of the
Church visible are mystically united in Christ
with one another and with the members of the
Church invisible, having spiritual fellowship in
common, and in addition thereto fellowship or
communion with the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit in faith and love and prayer. Thus
Christianity makes the living and the dead
one blessed society, loving and worshiping the
same Lord ; we remembering them and they
remembering us ; we living in the blessed
hope, nay, certainty, of meeting and recogniz-
ing them in the life of the world to come, in
the same glorious resurrection when this cor-
ruptible shall have put on incorruption and

OF CHRISTIANITY. 195

this natural body shall rise a spiritual body
and be endowed with spiritual powers through
eternity.

And there is but a single road that leads to
those who lie in the churchyard. That road
was laid out by the Almighty millennia ago,
and it passes through the valley of the shadow
of death. You and I must traverse it, because
it is the ordained way. We know not when
the call shall sound for us to set forth upon
this thoroughfare of the ages. Let us await
God's time and accept his place of meeting in
patience and in faith. Let us not be angry at
the dispensations of his providence which may
have removed from our embraces those we
hold most dear. Let us not judge by fallible
sense Him who in perfect wisdom, perfect
love, is ordering for the best. Now we see
through a glass, darkly ; but the time is com-
ing when we shall see face to face, when we
shall understand it all.

"God's plans, like lilies pure and white, unfold ;
We must not tear the close-shut leaves apart,
Time will reveal the calyxes of gold."

Ah! dear friends, in that last parting hour,
when we are summoned to hear those "many
things" Christ has reserved for our ears, if
we shall feel that we have sincerely tried to

196 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

serve Jesus and are deserving, through his
merits, of admission to the employments of
heaven — what pen can describe, what tongue
express the peace, the rapture that shall be
ours in this prospect of immediate restoration
to the bosoms of those we love ! God give
us grace so to live this life of probation that,
when we come into the presence of Him by
whom and in whom the sundered souls that
are dearer to us than all the interests of life
are even to-day growing in beauty and loveli-
ness, we may be adjudged worthy to mingle
with them in a communion whose joys tran-
scend the imagination of man ; in an eternal,
indissoluble companionship.

Psychology, much as it would wish to, can-
not say this to us. Orthodox science has no
consolation to offer when the doleful sable
tells its story of another-loved one summoned
to join the circle of those who wait upon the
farther shore. Spiritism sets us aghast with
its doctrine of a woman God ; its denial of the
vicarious sacrifice of Christ ; its teachings
regarding marriage, which are subversive of
all respect for the institution as ordained of
Heaven ; its constitution of every man as his
own Christ and of free love as the ideal of
social happiness, while pretending to attemper

OF CHRISTIANITY. 197

our sorrows by placing us in communication
with separated souls. It is faith alone that
can bridge the gulf of death, and keep us in
spiritual fellowship with those we hold most
dear. Assuredly, the possibility of such faith
is a most impressive proof of the soul's
immortality.

What is Christianity More than Christian Science ?

(For the time will come when they will not endure sound doc-
trine ; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves
teachers, having itching ears ; and they shall turn away their
ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. 2 Tim. iv.
3,4.)

I extract from Guyau's " The Non-Re-
ligion of the Future " this characteristic dec-
laration of modern infidelity:

" The time is at hand when religious proph-
ets will be replaced by great poets, great
metaphysicians, great men of science. Each
of us will be able to choose his own prophet,
to prefer the genius which is best adapted to
his personal intelligence and best serves as
an intermediary between him and the eternal
Truth ; and each of us will be in the last re-
sort his own priest."

Alas ! there is justification for such a state-
ment. Religious prophets are everywhere
betraying their trust. The understanding re-
volts at the spurious interpretations so-called
ministers of Christ are placing on the eternal
words of God. Reverence shudders at the
prominence they give to man and his antics
in the temples of the Almighty, where abso-

EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 199

lute simplicity alone is appropriate as the
grandest compliment the finite being can pay
to the Infinite. Sensibility is shocked at the
plebeian and unfeeling manner in which they
bandy the utterances inspired by the Holy
Spirit. Taste shrinks from their affectation
of the offensively grotesque in pronunciation,
choice of words, manner of delivery, and cos-
tume, and shuts her ears to their micaceous
styles aglist with the cheap sparkle of a fac-
titious rhetoric. Consistency blushes at their
denunciation of the Bible as a misleading
gloss, at their double discount of the veracity
of the New Testament, and their consequent
repudiation by one Christian church only to
be cheerfully welcomed by another with their
budget of heretical views. What wonder that
intellect is driven from our churches to swell
the ranks of agnosticism and irreligion !
What wonder that the Son of God is shelved,
and every man aspires to be his own high
priest ! What wonder that the Holy Spirit
is frozen out, and the weak brother so impa-
tiently turns from Christianity falsely so
called to try the spirit of every new Ism that
is advertised !

I believe it is this shifting notion of what
constitutes Christianity, due to the splinter-

2oo ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

ing of our faith into so many different phases
of doctrine ; this conspicuous lack of church
uniformity which is unfortunately construed
by the superficial observer to mean lack of
church unity — that has contributed most to
the prevailing indifferentism and unrest, and
made possible and even popular the insidious
attacks of Antichrist in the form of oriental
fata-niorgana or behind the mask of up-to-
date economic democracy and self-seeking
business love.

Among the present foes of Christianity, I
reckon none more dangerous than so-called
Christian Science, which comes in the guise
of a good Samaritan, with a metaphysical
remedy for disease in one hand and a mil-
dewed theosophy in the other. To the piv-
otal doctrines of this new religion I ask your
attention this morning. They are to be found
in a book entitled " Science and Health, with
Key to the Scriptures," by the Rev. Mary
Baker G. Eddy of Concord, N. H., the chief
expounder of the system. This work — a
volume of 665 pages, of which 150,000 copies
are in circulation — is styled by Christian
Scientists "the Bible-and-Book," " the only
ordained pastor " of 300 American churches
erected by the adherents of the sect, and

OF CHRISTIANITY. 201

cepted as their gospel by at least one million
persons in the United States.

A determination to learn what this Chris-
tian Science as a practical religion really is
led me, on the evening of Friday, April 22d,
1898, to attend service at the First Church
of Christ Scientist, No. 137 West Forty-
eighth Street, New York. A large congre-
gation, in which bonnets predominated, was
in attendance. The exercises opened with
the singing of a hymn, followed by the read-
ing of Psalm xci. with passages from "Science
and Health." Silent prayer (not to God)
was next announced, at the termination of
which the lady in charge made a long ad-
dress, blazoned as extemporaneous, but which
smelt phenomenally of the lamp. The prin-
cipal point made by the speaker was that
the ninety-first psalm, which had been re-
peated and chanted for two thousand years,
had never been understood until Christian
Science made plain its mystic meaning. The
"secret place of the Most High " is the Ego,
or realm of spiritual thought, into which the
person conversant with Christian Science
methods can retire at will ; and when once
ensconced in this temple of his interior he
realizes the idea of the Psalmist and all dis-

202 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

ease and sin "gravitate away from him." He
is no longer in danger of the pestilence that
walketh in darkness.

In the course of the address, matter was
pronounced an illusion ; the giving and taking
of drugs was deprecated as criminal ; and
publicity was given to a number of remark-
able cures, all which might have been mere
coincidences — post hoes rather than propter
hoes — or at most the results of telepathy. For
example, a man returns from his business all
but maniacal with a neuralgic headache.
While he is pacing the floor in agony, his
wife seeks " a healer," whose treatment is as
follows : " Go home and tell your husband
that physical suffering is an illusion. There
is no such thing; he has no headache." Armed
with this prescription, the sympathetic wife
starts for the chamber of suffering, to find that
at the very time the words above were ut-
tered by the healer the headache left her
husband and he became himself again. At
the invitation of the speaker, whose eyes
rolled dramatically as she rehearsed the par-
ticulars of a number of such cures, men and
women arose from their seats and " testified,"
proclaiming their obligation to Christian
Science. Tic douloureux,grip,deafness, quinsy,

OF CHRISTIANITY. 203

neurasthenia, even business cares, financial
distress, imminent bankruptcy, disappeared
or lost their sting under similar treatment.
One lady testified that her spectacles were
blown off by the wind and smashed on the
sidewalk, leaving her helpless. Instead of re-
pairing to an opticians and having a new pair
of glasses fitted to her eyes, she bethought
her of a neighboring Christian Science healer,
who promptly relieved her hypermetropic as-
tigmatism by simply telling her that her eyes
were all right and glasses were superfluous.
Since this episode her sight has been per-
fect.

A subsequent investigation of Mrs. Eddy's
own church in Concord revealed still sleazier
" springes to catch woodcocks/'

Apart from the ludicrous features of such
exhibitions, it is sad to think that persons ap-
parently intelligent should be so susceptible
to imposture, so ready to accept the prepos-
terous tenets of this new religion, the ma-
terial object of which is manifestly the enrich-
ment of its " healers " and authors at the
expense of gulls. But these days of higher
education and emancipation for woman
awaken in some women activities that seek
illicit and perilous outlets. The platform

2o4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

and the pulpit offer to such unstable minds
overpowering attractions ; and when to the
glamour of public life is added the prestige
that attends the promulgation of a new
faith — the brummagem notoriety of the claim
to a new revelation from a Mother as well as
a Father God to a woman who poses as a
female Christ — a respectable fraction of the
sex thus favored falls promptly into line.
The temptation to exchange their normal
positions as centers of love and joyousness in
the home-circle for offices environed by flat-
terers and fame-mongers proves irresistible,
the allurement of the craze for ephemeral
distinction, of the opportunity to be admired
by imbeciles for gabbling nonsense.

To these Christian Science converts, the
assertions of Mrs. Eddy and her feminine
vicars are as unintelligible as they are to
Mrs. Eddy herself. The text-books of this
woman are a gallimaufry of disconnected,
rambling, vacuous postulates. By way of
example : " Love thine enemies is identical
with Thou hast no enemies ; because your
enemies are your best friends." " He who is
ignorant of hygienic law is more receptive of
spiritual power." (Why ?) " We need a clean
body, rendered pure by mind, not by matter"

OF CHRISTIANITY. 205

(that is, by imagination instead of soap and
water). Under the heading, " Dirt and Hap-
piness," Mrs. Eddy says: " A hint may be
taken from the emigrant, whose filth does not
affect his happiness." (Personal uncleanliness
is thus indorsed.) " According to the Scrip-
tures, I find that every man is a liar." The
Scriptures nowhere commit themselves to
such a doctrine. In the Third Chapter of
Romans, Paul says, in arguing the preroga-
tive of the Jews, Let every (unbelieving)
man be a liar if necessary for the justifica-
tion of God.

The replies in her " Questions and An-
swers" are artful evasions or mawkish pa-
lavers. To the question, " Can Christian
Science cure acute cases, like membranous
croup?" is affixed the answer: "It cannot
fail to heal in every case of disease, when
conducted by one who understands it." Of
course that one has never as yet material-
ized. In the epidemic of membranous croup
or diphtheria at Woodsville, N. H., in the
fall of 1897, Christian Scientists treated
some of the cases with such appalling results
as to rouse the indignation of the medical
profession throughout the State. From the
medico-legal standpoint, the treatment was

2o6 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

equivalent to criminal neglect. There is~ no
authenticated case on record in which Chris-
tian Science has " healed " (if by " healed " is
meant removed) organic disease where medi-
cal science had failed — the pet falsehood of
its pulpit firebrands. The boast that this
school is "forced to receive most of its pa-
tients from the incurable list of medical
practice," is mere pibble-pabble.

Again, " Because God is supreme, materia
medica and hygiene are impotent." For the
same reason might be added, with equal con-
sistency, food stuffs are of no avail, and wash-
ing is an insult to the Most High, "their
only supposed efficacy lying in apparently
deluding reason."

In " Science and Health," Mrs. Eddy pro-
claims herself the discoverer of the adapta-
tion of truth to the treatment of disease as
well as of sin — a most impudent fabrication,
for this principle has been practiced since
the days of the patriarchs and prophets.
Truth is the conformity of thought with fact,
of a statement or belief with reality, and for
Mrs. Eddy to lay claim to priority in apply-
ing truth to the cure of sin and the treat-
ment of disease is an insult to American en-
lightenment or an incontrovertible proof of

OF CHRISTIANITY. 207

her own amentia or dotage. Mrs. Eddy-
places herself as a healer on a par with Jesus
Christ, although she floats in an atmosphere
far above his social level. The contrast is
conspicuous between Eddy, inaccessible in
her palace or driven about the capital of
New Hampshire, arrayed in purple, like a
queen in her victoria ; and her alleged pro-
totype, the lowly, approachable, sympathetic
Jesus, who had not where to lay his head;
who did not accumulate wealth by his serv-
ices as a healer, but went about footsore and
heart-sick in his mission of love. " Like
Jesus," she says, " the healer should speak to
disease as one having authority over it." In
this way she claims to have " changed secre-
tions, elongated shortened limbs, renewed
structure, restored the lost substance of
lungs, and established healthy organizations
where disease was organic." This is equiva-
lent to the assumption of divine power over
the laws of nature, an assumption that is not
surprising on the part of a woman who de-
clares that " God has been fitting me, during
many years, for the reception of a final rev-
elation of the absolute principle of scientific
mind-healing."

It was the metaphysics of Jesus — mark

2o8 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

well — not Jesus, that healed the sick. Jesus
Christ healed by Christian Science ; why,
then, should not Mrs. Eddy ? And if Mrs.
Eddy, why not a legion of aspirants to the
divine office ? " The miracles of Jesus Christ
did not belong to a dispensation now ended ;
but they illustrate," continues this fanatic,
" an ever-operative divine principle " — re-
cently become operative again, after a re-
tirement of eighteen centuries, in the art of
Mrs. Eddy, who presumptuously lays claim
to that power over nature possessed by the
God of nature alone ; that power which
opened the eyes of the congenitally blind,
cleansed the lepers neoplasms, and bade the
sepulcher give up its dead.

Christian Scientists point to the seventeenth
and eighteenth verses of the last chapter of
St. Mark's gospel in defense of their theory
that Christ gives the power of healing to all
believers : " And these signs shall follow them
that believe ; In my name shall they cast out
devils ; they shall speak with new tongues ;
They shall take up serpents ; and if they
drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.
They shall lay hands on the sick, and they
shall recover."

In the first place, the promise was mani-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 209

festly made only to the immediate converts
of the first century. In the Diatessaron, or
Harmony of the Four Canonical Gospels
compiled in the second century by Tatianus
the Syrian, the tense is past : " These signs
shall follow them that have believed on me."

In the second place, the Greek does not
bear the interpretation placed upon it,
namely, that all sick persons on whom the
early disciples should lay hands would re-
cover. The exact translation is : " They shall
place their hands on those who are not
strong (dppuoTovg — weakly persons, conva-
lescents) and they shall do well (aaXuq efrvoivy
If this power of healing had been trans-
mitted to all Christian believers, disease
would long ago have vanished from the
world.

In the third place, the whole passage is
pronounced by modern scholarship to be an
interpolation introduced into Mark's report
at an early period, when various forms of
evangelical tradition, written or oral, were
still extant. With this fact, it is not to be
presumed that Christian Science dreamers
are conversant.

Continues Mrs. Eddy in M Science and

Health : " " Denial of the possibility of Christ

n

210 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

tian healing robs Christianity of the very ele-
ment which gave it divine force and its aston-
ishing success in the first century." The false-
hood of this statement is transparent. It
was not the skill of its teachers in the heal-
ing art that made Christianity the intel-
lectual and moral conqueror of the heathen
world ; but it was its spiritual quality, its
character-transforming quality, its soul-sub-
duing quality, its message to the despairing
of a blessed eternity. It was because it con-
strained the assassin to spare, and the liber-
tine to pause, and the outraged to forgive,
that Christianity was enabled to win its
treasures from the very hot-beds of Roman
depravity. Christ crucified, not Christ the
healer, was and is its central figure.

Once more : " God does not employ drugs or
hygiene, else Jesus would have recommended
and used them in his healing." Hygiene im-
plies cleanliness, and Mrs. Eddy is recom-
mended to count the number of times the
word clean occurs in the Bible. There is
more hygiene, or sanitary science, in the
Bible than in any other existing book not a
monograph ; sanitary science anticipatory of
that of to-day in its safeguards against dis-
ease. It would seem that Mrs. Eddy has

OF CHRISTIANITY. 211

been sitting in judgment on God's sanitary
laws without ever looking into them. The
vital statistics of the Jews in various parts of
the world — the people who observe the hy-
gienic laws of Moses — show that the death-
rate of this race is everywhere lower than
that of the Christian or Muhammadan people
among whom they live ; that they have fewer
still-born children, greater average longevity,
and less liability to certain forms of disease,
including tuberculosis and scrofula, than
other races — and all this amid an environ-
ment of poverty and squalor. Nothing but
crass ignorance or deliberate intention to de-
ceive could have led to the statement quoted
above. Moreover, the astonishing success
attending capital operations in modern hos-
pitals, due entirely to surgical cleanliness,
clearly demonstrates what may be accom-
plished by a pains-taking Christian regard
for well-understood hygienic laws.

And as to medicines, we read of Hebrew
physicians and their healing with drugs from
Exodus on. Solomon was a proficient in
materia medica. Luke practiced medicine at
Antioch. perhaps at Troas ; and the skill
of " the beloved physician M is known to have
been such that his services were in demand

212 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

among the Asiatic Greeks. Did not God
cry with the voice of Jeremiah, in bewailing
the desperate estate of the Jews, " Is there no
balm in Gilead ; is there no physician there ?
Why then is not the health of the daughter
of my people recovered ? " This certainly
implies the divine sanction of medical treat-
ment, and faith in its success on the part of
the patient. Farther on, in the same book,
we read : " Thus saith the Lord, Thy bruise
is incurable, and thy wound is grievous. . . .
Thou hast no healing medicines." Others
have, who are not incurable; but in this case
Jacob, his servant, was not susceptible to the
effects of medicines on account of the " mul-
titude " of his iniquity. " They that be whole
need not a physician, but they that are sick,"
are our Saviours words, and they give un-
questionable sanction to the practice of med-
icine and the use of drugs. Jesus did not
depend on the efficacy of medicine in his mir-
acles of healing. Mrs. Eddy is in this in-
stance correct. He did what she cannot do ;
he commanded as God. Mrs. Eddy may de-
cry medical interference from her standpoint,
but she is not justified in so doing by the
teachings of this Bible. He who believes in
Jewish and early Christian practices must

OF CHRISTIANITY. 213

then, believe in administering approved
drugs as occasion requires.

The clerical profession cannot heal the
soul, cannot remit sins ; it is God alone who
does this. But its office is to direct souls to
God, of whom they may obtain forgiveness
by the employment of God-appointed means
and in God-appointed ways. In precisely
the same manner, the office of the medical
profession is to avert the physical consequen-
ces of carelessness, ignorance, or sin, through
the means God has placed at its disposal.
We have no right to withhold the curative
medicine, the drug, whatever it may be, that
poisons the protoplasm of the offending
bacillus or fortifies the human system against
the ravages of an exaggerated destructive
metamorphosis. Those who do so, trusting to
prayer alone, faith, metaphysics, or autohyp-
notism — those who fail to observe every pre-
caution and to do their human utmost to save
the sick in accordance with the latest devel-
opments of medical and sanitary science —
are murderers, under the Christian interpre-
tation of the law, " Thou shalt not kill." The
argument that " God does not provide drugs
for human use " is childish. Drugs are the
means provided by the Almighty for prevent-

2i4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

ing, curing, or alleviating disease ; and they
are just as much a means, in God's provi-
dence, as is food for sustaining the powers of
body and mind ; as is water for dissolving
and floating off waste products ; as is sleep
for restoring broken nerve currents and can-
celing the oxygen deficit in the brain. The
argument of Mrs. Eddy, if extended, would
climax in such absurdities as the following:
God did not provide clothes for human be-
ings to wear. They should go nude, imagin-
ing themselves warm and screened from one
another's sight. God did not provide shelter
for their protection ; let them stand out at
the mercy of the elements and by some
clever concentration of mental energy dispel
the illusions of hot and cold, soft and hard,
wet and dry.

11 The human mind," says Mrs. Eddy, " uses
one error as a medicine for another. It seeks
to oppose malice with revenge, to quiet pain
with morphine." Morphine — an alkaloid, not
an error — is an indispensable agent in treat-
ing inflammatory conditions. Every one is
aware that the abuse of the drug is the source
of untold suffering among men. So is the
abuse of tea, the abuse of food, the abuse of
common salt (the salt habit induces diseases

OF CHRISTIANITY. 215

of the kidneys and the skin), the abuse of
clothes, the abuse of pleasure-taking; all
harmless, if temperately indulged in, all
causes of physical, moral, or spiritual disease
if used to excess. It is perfectly justifiable to
quiet pain with morphine. For that purpose
the Lord provided this very principle, which
has been known to man as meconium, an ex-
tract from the poppy plant, for twice a thou-
sand years ; perhaps for another millennium
as the nepenthes, or sorrow-removing, pain-
subduing drug of Jove-born Helena.

To extract a final passage from Mrs.
Eddy's" Key to the Scriptures," embodying a
malicious thrust both at religion and the sci-
ence of medicine : " The ancient Christians
were healers. Why has this element of Chris-
tianity been lost ? Because our systems of
religion are governed by our systems of med-
icine. The first idolatry was faith in matter ;
the schools have rendered faith in drugs the
fashion, rather than faith in Deity."

This smacks of "the new journalism." If
the woman is not demented, she must be
aware that no school of medicine antagonizes
the faith the sick man has in his God and the
hope he may entertain of cure from the use
of drugs. The two faiths, as she calls them,

216 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

have no common ground of meeting. They
are utterly dissimilar, as distinct as is the faith
manifested in the morning prayer for guid-
ance and forgiveness from the faith in the
nutritive qualities of the articles of diet that
constitute the morning meal. When a mem-
ber of a Christian household is dangerously
sick, the relatives do not sit down and fold
their arms in hopeless helplessness, both giv-
ing up and giving in. Nor do they bid the
sick person persuade himself that his pain and
danger are illusory. But they make use of
all the means science is master of to save or
prolong his life ; and in the hope that the
prayer of faith may raise the sick they add
their petitions, but couched in language that
leaves the question open to the superior
judgment of God. This is Christian faith in
its highest exercise, a faith which, in submit-
ting the issue to a Personal Wisdom that can-
not err and to a Personal Love that cannot
fail, far transcends the theosophical self-assu-
rance of Christian Science. It is this attitude
in the Christian patient and the Christian
physician that effectually gives the lie to Mrs.
Eddy's assertion, " Material medicine substi-
tutes drugs for the power of God."

The treatment of the Christian Science

OF CHRISTIANITY. 217

healer is the antipode of that just described.
His aim is " to destroy the patients belief in
the physical condition by silently and audibly
arguing the opposite facts," representing man
as healthful instead of diseased, and showing
that it is impossible for matter to suffer, to
feel pain or heat or thirst, to be confined to a
sick room. If the case to be mentally treated
is consumption (directs Mrs. Eddy), "show
that the tubercles, hemorrhage, and decom-
position, are beliefs only — images of thought
superimposed on the body ; that they should
be treated as error and put out of thought.
Then they will disappear." This is arrant
quackery, and people treating tuberculosis in
this way should be placed behind bars. Tu-
bercular consumption depends on the pres-
ence of a well-known bacillus whose growth
ultimately leads to the destruction of lung
tissue. It has nothing to do with fear (a
favorite theory of Mrs. Eddy's), and can never
be subdued by any "belief of the mortal
mind." If taken in time, under certain con-
ditions the ravages of the parasitic plant may
be checked. Christian Science sophists assert
that disease is an illusion, there is no such
thing. Then they proceed, with pompous
mouthing, to " heal " the thing that does not

218 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

exist ; and end in a parade of wing-flapping
and delirious crowing over the conquest of
an enemy which they have pronounced purely
imaginary.

We might go on for hours rummaging this
literary rubbish-heap, this parody on logic,
" Science and Health, With Key to the Scrip-
tures," the Bible of the Christian Science
sect. But enough has been quoted to dem-
onstrate the harlequinade. As the Talmud
says, " The more flesh, the more worms."

Yet Christian Science treatment does re-
lieve the sick. It quiets pain, cures certain
disorders and, more than this, it singularly
elevates the moral, emotional, and intellectual
nature of those who trustfully submit to it.
The falsehood and the danger of the system
are encountered in the barefaced endeavor of
the impostors who are giving it publicity to
prove a mission of divine origin, and thus to
bolster its authority by miracle-mongering.

Christian Science effects its seemingly as-
tonishing cures through means well known
to every psychologist and educated physician :
hypnotism and auto-suggestion.

The phenomena of hypnotism are scien-
tifically explicable on the supposition of a
double Ego, a duplex personality, implying

OF CHRISTIANITY. 219

two distinct states of consciousness — one,
called the Primary Consciousness, involving
the minds recognition of its own acts ; the
other, called the Secondary Consciousness,
holding those mental processes and proce-
dures of which we have no knowledge. That
is, each human being is one individual with
two distinct phases of existence. Now it is
this secondary consciousness, subjective mind,
or subliminal self, that is amenable in hyp-
nosis to what is called Suggestion, or the in-
sinuation of a belief, impulse, or image into
the mind of the subject by emphatic declara-
tion. While the patient is in the hypnotic
state his subliminal self dominates his objec-
tive intellect and his objective will, and the
suggestions impressed upon it directly and
positively are fulfilled at the time and after
waking.

Both Christian Science healer and hypno-
tist seek to alleviate pain by arousing in the
subject the idea that it does not exist, and
each obtains control of the secondary con-
sciousness to effect his purpose. In ordinary
hypnotism there are two distinct conditions :
lethargy, or the inactive stage, and somnam-
bulism, or the alert stage. The first is a con-
dition of deep sleep ; the second, one of ex-

220 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

alted mind power and increased physical
activity in which the subject lives an unreal
life that he remembers nothing of after
awaking. But his subliminal self unhesita-
tingly accepts, in either of these stages, every
emphatic statement or direction of the hypno-
tizer, no matter how it may conflict with ste-
reotyped convictions and every-day experi-
ence. And, what is still stranger, suggestions
for post-hypnotic fulfillment are carried out
to the letter sometimes for months after the
treatment. In this way are banished from a
sufferer's life (I speak from my own expe-
rience as a physician) melancholia, morbid
fears, delusions, folie du doute ; natural sleep
returns to the couch of the insomniac ; the
physical functions of digestion, absorption,
and circulation are stimulated ; functional
disorders are permanently cured and serious
organic diseases substantially relieved.

Reputable physicians in Europe, as well as
in America, are reporting cases by the thou-
sand in which hypnotism has acted as a pal-
liative or cure. These cases include not only
functional nervous disorders like hysteria,
chorea, occupation neuroses, and insomnia,
but also diseases in which pain is a prominent
symptom, as sciatica, angina, and rheumatic

OF CHRISTIANITY. 221

affections ; and even such incurable maladies
as tuberculosis, locomotor ataxia, and can-
cer. The nervous systems are controlled, the
appetite is improved, and sleep is secured by
the establishment of functional harmony
through the power of suggestion.

The special means, however, to which the
Christian Scientist has recourse in his " heal-
ing" procedures is Auto-suggestion. It is to
be remembered that the subjective mind of a
given individual is as amenable to suggestion
by his own objective mind as by the objective
mind of an outside personality. Such sug-
gestion by an objective consciousness to its
own subjective consciousness is called auto-
suggestion. The part that self-induced hyp-
notism of this nature plays in the drama of
human life is little suspected by the mass of
men. It governs physiological changes ; it
controls the number of births on the higher
levels of society; it renders immune from dis-
ease, or prepares the soil for the reception of
bacteria; it explains much self-deception, and
at the same time much of that concentration
of mind on elevating ideals which, when
called into being by the eloquence of a Wes-
ley or a Moody, has snatched thousands,
without resolution or even consciousness on

222 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

their part of its presence, from the clutches
of sin.

It is the " I won't die" that makes a man
live twenty years of usefulness when his phy-
sicians have given him but a month of mis-
ery. It was the " I will live " that lifted John
Wickliffe from the pallet of death in the
presence of taunting friars, and indued him
with physical and mental energy to translate
the word of God into the majestic Anglo-
Hebraic of the fourteenth century.

The subliminal self is the medium of ex-
pression for hereditary propensities, and the
voice through which genius speaks. Hence
it may be argued with no small show of
reason, that the subliminal self of Stratford's
butcher-boy created the deathless plays of
Shakespeare.

I am not to be understood as meaning to
substitute auto-suggestion for the grace of
God. Yet in the providence of God, auto-
suggestion is made possible by his fusion in
the single mind of a double consciousness,
and who will deny that his saving grace, as
well as the malignant power of Satan, may
operate through this means ? Who will con-
tend that, having disclosed to us this mighty
instrumentality, God does not intend us to

OF CHRISTIANITY. 223

make a proper use of it? The error of
Christian Science consists in regarding auto-
suggestion, not as the means whereby the grace
is conveyed, but as the saving grace itself.

A striking characteristic of hypnotism is
its power to elevate the moral status of the
subject and give him a more nearly perfect
control over his mental as well as his physi-
cal organization. This is what Christian Sci-
ence patients refer to when they say they feel
better, experience a change, can endure busi-
ness reverses more resignedly, can overcome
obstacles more easily. Mrs. Eddy is right in
maintaining that the tendency of mental
healing is to uplift mankind. A third field
has opened to the scientific hypnotist, and one
which is sure to prove of the greatest inter-
est and utility — the educational field ; and
scientific men are studying the influence
which may be exerted by hypnotism in the
development of minds and the betterment
of morals. To-day, alcoholic drunkards ac-
cept the suggestion that drink is their most
dangerous enemy, and reform ; abusers of
drugs desist at the command of a highminded
operator ; kleptomaniacs, moral perverts,
criminals of all kinds, where they can be
brought into rapport with a hypnotist of

224 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

strong Christian convictions, are obliqued
from the career that leads to ruin. We need
not go to Christian Science for wonders in
the line of metaphysical healing. Persons
in search of treatment by suggestibility are
advised to shun the mountebanks of this
cult and have recourse to a reputable neu-
rologist.

The methods in vogue among Christian
Scientists of treating the dangerously or
hopelessly sick, by appeal to the subliminal
self, are unchristian and inhuman ; so much
so that repressive legislation is widely de-
manded for the protection of society from a
legion of charlatans whom existing laws do
not reach, and who are thus left at liberty to
denounce the wholesome measures of sani-
tary science, to assume responsibility for the
most dangerous forms of disease, and to
trifle ad libitum with human life.

Finally, Christian Science viewed through
the lens of theology is practically panthe-
ism ; a pantheism refracted from the ancient
Vedanta philosophy, with its illusion theory
of the outer world, through the dazzling
prism of modern theosophy. The funda-
mental doctrines of the new religion are
stated by Mrs. Eddy in four propositions

OF CHRISTIANITY. 225

which she says "will be found to agree in
statement and proof even if read backward."

" I. God is All. All is God.

"II. God is Good. God is Mind.

"III. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is mat-
ter.

" IV. Life, God, omnipotent Good, deny
death, evil, sin, disease. Disease, sin, evil,
death, deny Good, omnipotent God, Life."

The rankest pantheism — God is all and
all is God ! Spiritistic pantheists adhere to
the first proposition ; materialistic pantheists
to the second.

God, Man, and Nature, are one. " Man,"
says Mrs. Eddy, " is co-eternal and co-exist-
ent with God." The universe is identical
with God. There is no finite soul. There is
no matter. And this recalls the dream of
Professor Tyndall, who suddenly (he tells us)
saw, as if lit by a stream of light, the whole
universe traversed by lines of force, and
these lines in their ceaseless tremors pro-
ducing light and radiant heat. And dashing-
forward on the trail of his ideas, and thrilled
into creation by the emotion he felt, he de-
clared these lines were the lines of gravita-
ting force and that the gravitating force itself
constituted matter. Force and matter were

15

226 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

identical — matter or substance, and force or
tendency to acceleration. This is the intoxi-
cation of science.

Pantheism must deny the moral personal-
ity of God as well as that of man, who is
only an illusion. It is the concentrated es-
sence of ancient heathenism, and moderns
who embrace it, whether they style them-
selves Christian Scientists or Esoteric Bud-
dhists, are pagans without the pale.

Christianity teaches the immanence of
God ; his omnipresence in Nature and in
man ; an organic relationship between Cre-
ator and things created ; but it explicitly as-
serts that, while the universe exists by and
through God, it is not what God is. There
is a Force which is not Me.

Mrs. Eddy declares also for preexistence,
and thus announces her belief in reincarna-
tion— probably obtained from dabblers in
modern Hinduism, as she is presumably igno-
rant of the Upanishads. " If man did not
exist before his material organization began,"
she maintains, " he could not exist after the
body is disintegrated " — a palpable non-sequi-
tur. " If we live after death we must have
lived before birth." Why? Because I, I, I
itself, I, Mary Baker Glover Eddy, the Ameri-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 227

can Blavatsky, say so ! Eddys autos epha
seems to be all that is required to give cur-
rency to the veriest balderdash. One Carol
Norton, the oracle of the cult in New York,
declares that "Christian Science is synony-
mous with common sense." This is quite
likely to be true, as ninety per cent of what
is denominated common sense is unqualified
nonsense.

And how does Christian Science regard
the Saviour of the world ? Spiritists call
him a medium : Neo-Buddhists, a Mahatma ;
Muhammadans, a prophet ; Mrs. Eddy harps
upon the theory that Jesus was a mere
demonstrator of Christian Science ! The
agony of the Son of God on the evening
preceding his passion she flippantly explains
as due to a consciousness of the prevailing
error that matter is real ; and the death of
Christ on the cross for the sins of the world
is, from her standpoint, only " an example
and proof of divine science." In boasting of
her metaphysical treatment as a reappear-
ance of the divine power exercised by Jesus
Christ, this woman is guilty of as shocking
blasphemy as the Jews of old who cried,
" He casteth out devils by Beelzebub!"

" Jesus of Nazareth," she patronizingly

228 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

says, " was the most scientific man that ever
trod the globe ; " he was only a man, how-
ever. Christ was the spiritual part of him,
Jesus the material ; a dual personality ! Chris-
tianity, on the contrary, affirms that " two
whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the
Godhead and Manhood, were joined to-
gether in one Person, the Son, which is the
Word of the Father, never to be divided —
whereof is one Christ, Very God and Very
Man, who truly suffered to reconcile his
Father to us and to be a sacrifice for the
sins of men."

Christian Science is pronouncedly anti-
christian in that it covers a nineteenth cen-
tury woman with the mantle of Jesus Christ
by making her the recipient of a revelation
whereby she is invested with the secret of
his miracles and clothed with the power to
perform them. Its worship is a cunning
counterfeit of that of the Church Catholic,
its claims are blasphemous in the extreme,
and its teachings are subversive of the sacred
doctrines to which all Christians owe alle-
giance ; for it denies the vicarious sacrifice of
Christ, interpreting his atonement as an
allegory, and withholds from sinners pardon
through a crucified Redeemer. " Jesus never

OF CHRISTIANITY. 229

ransomed man by paying the debt that sin in-
curs/' declares Mrs. Eddy, and " asking God to
pardon sin is vain." The Christian Scientist
has no need of a Saviour, no need of prayer.
Among the most startling of Mrs. Eddys
sayings are the statements: "Christ Jesus
was too good to die " (inference, he did not
die, neither will Mary Baker Glover Eddy),
and " Truth appears in the womanhood as
well as the manhood of God, our divine Father
and Mother " — the latter a revival of the
ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Hindu
conception of a female principle in Deity.
" Mrs. Eddy," cries an enthusiastic C. S. B.,
" has interpreted to a needy world the nature
of the Divine Maternity." After defaming
Christ in her printed works, discrediting his
divinity, casting him out as a spiritual ditch-
dog, denying his very death, this woman in
her Easter message to a congregation of
Scientists at Atlanta welcomes " a risen
Saviour," a " Christ with grave-clothes laid
aside," in language calculated with machiavel-
ian adroitness to blind persons inclined to
place a charitable construction on her teach-
ings. Thus she backs the strained rope of
her mongrel pantheism, while a host of shat-
terbrains purr their approval.

230 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Such is the faith that has bewitched so
many who were once Christians and enticed
them out of the fold ; so aptly stigmatized by
Dr. Gordon as " a sort of witches' caldron, in
which every conceivable heathen and Chris-
tian heresy is found seething and simmering
to produce the subtle essence called mental
medicine." In no other way can its strange
influence be accounted for than that it is one
of those delusions assigned by St. Paul to the
latter days, a device of the devil to focus
men's hopes on something else than the
justice and mercy of God. The ulterior ob-
ject of this mixture of falsehood, contradic-
tion, sophistry, fog, and moonshine, is to offer
men and women who have become restless
under what seem to them the restraints and
constraints of the Christian religion a
specious substitute for the simple faith of
their fathers. And human sheep are found
to flock in multitudes to its empty feeding-
troughs at the call of its mala fide shepherds.
Even persons of superior parts are the gud-
geons of its metaphysical glitter, giving
fresh points to Shakespeare's observation :

" What damned error but some sober brow
will bless it and approve it with a text."

Christian Science is a purse-clipping en-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 231

terprise a capite ad calcem. It has been
clever enough to see its opportunity in the
present epidemic of philosophical intoxication
which proclaims that a greater religion than
Christianity, delivered of the relentless de-
mand for something newer and better by the
midwife of inordinate conceit, has come upon
the scene — in the words of one who has
dropped the Christian plow handles, "to
glorify humanity in its goodness ; " to sub-
stitute " a higher, nobler, more beautiful
conception for the personality of God ; " and
" to make us all into Messiahs superior to
those ideas of Jesus that were neither
original, nor accurate, nor practicable."*

In the name of the Son of God, the
Founder of your faith, I caution you against
the imposture and the cunning overtures of
its adherents. It is unchristian, antichris-
tian, godless, Christless. Between this belief
and the religion of Jesus there can be no
possible compromise. Accommodation is
out of the question. One can not be both
Christian and Christian Scientist.

* V>. Fay Mills, in the u Metaphysical Magazine" for April, 1S99.

What is Christianity Mote than Socialism, Com-
munism, and Economic Democracy?

(If they say, . . . Cast in thy lot among us ; let us all have one
purse: my son, walk not thou in the way with them. Prov. i.
H-I5-)

Of all the unclean birds that prey upon
the ignorant, discontented, covetous elements
of society, the human vultures known as
Communists, Socialists, Christian Socialists,
and Collectivists, are at once the most detest-
able and the most to be feared. For it is
not the proletariat alone whose passions are
inflamed by the new " Gospel of Industrial
Emancipation," with its characteristic remedy
of legalized theft for the innocent possession
of wealth, which it declares a crime. Much
of the instruction given to young men and
women of the cultured classes is tinctured
with communistic views, and thus based on
that modern self-conceit which has a better
philosophy to offer to the world, a more ex-
cellent social system, than that of Jesus of
Nazareth. Such reckless teachings are
greedily adopted by penniless doctors of
philosophy whose hands are too white to lay
hold of the instruments of honest toil, and

EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 233

who hope that in some general revolution
against society, which their incendiary ora-
tory is calculated to incite, they may float
to the surface and live in position and af-
fluence at the expense of the common peo-
ple, whose deliverers from the tyranny of
wealth they insolently proclaim themselves
to be.

And then there is another type of your
college sensationist who — equally brazen in
his stand that the state has a right to correct
all inequalities of wealth by the leveling proc-
ess of taking from those whom it regards as
having too much to give to others who im-
agine they have not enough — insidiously
bolsters his position by appeal to Revelation.
He interprets Christianity as a mere variety
of Socialism ; he expounds the Bible as the
veritable text-book of communistic doctrines ;
and he accepts Christ as the greatest Social-
ist that ever trod the earth. On what princi-
ple such wresters of Holy Writ become
possessed with a knowledge of just what
Jesus " contemplated " with regard to an
" economic revolution " now storm-centering
in the world as the result of his teachings —
how they know that he upheld the broad
principle of their creed, "The wealth of the

234 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

rich is the robbery of the poor," or looked
upon " individual property as evidence of
moral fall," they do not feel called upon to
explain. Their extraordinary dicta suggest
the alternative of perfidious intent or intel-
lectual dystrophy, as there is absolutely no
justification for modern Socialism or Com-
munism in the teachings of Christ. The gov-
ernment of Heaven is anything but com-
munistic. Jesus responded with affirmative
emphasis to the question of Pilate, " Art thou
a King, then ? " and he will judge us in that
capacity as individuals, not by clans, or septs,
or communes. Spiritual rewards, he has de-
clared, will be proportioned to individual
services. How long such communistic teach-
ings are to be tolerated in this Christian land,
God only knows — how long this learned
swagger is to impose on society ; how long
sound is to go a mumming as sense and a
draff-cheap sophistry dipped in the dye-vat
of impudent assurance to masquerade as
logic ; how long argument subversive of ex-
isting systems is to take the place of honest
Christian endeavor for the amelioration of
society.

I have been asked whether Socialists are
not sincere in their teachings. I have never

OF CHRISTIANITY. 235

known one that was not punic. Through all
their agitation is clearly heard the clink of
gold. Show me the Socialist who would re-
fuse the gift of a square covered with build-
ings in the city of Boston, and I will admit
his consistency. The only sincere Socialists
are men without property, who have every-
thing to gain and nothing to forfeit by a re-
distribution of wealth ; persons whose circum-
stances are so exceptionally unfortunate that
they are willing to barter the sweets of liberty
for bed and board at the hands of a commu-
nistic society.

What now is this Socialism that offers so
great attractions to turbulent spirits alike
among the commonalty and the privileged
classes ? Let us understand clearly its mean-
ing and the nature of its revolutionary de-
mands. Then we shall be in a position in-
telligently to apply to its doctrines the
touch stones of Gospel truth.

Whereas definitions of Socialism differ, the
economic and non-religious doctrines main-
tained by its most advanced and enlightened
interpreters — notably Karl Marx, Bosanquet,
and Dr. Schaffle — are essentially the same
It is a system, having in view the abolition
of individual effort and competition on which

236 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

modern society is based, and the substitution
therefor of cooperative action introducing an
alleged more equal distribution of the prod-
ucts of labor. That is, it proposes to sup-
plant the present method of industrial com-
petition under which men have lived from the
beginning, each entitled to the products of
his own labor and receiving for them a sepa-
rate compensation regulated in amount by
their quality and the outside demand — it
proposes to supplant this system by a new
method of industrial cooperation whereby it
is designed that the majority, the laboring
classes, whose will Socialism accepts as law,
shall pool their labor in various productive
establishments, assigning to every member
his individual work, and distributing among
all as wages the common produce of all.
Socialism further implies the joint ownership
by all members of a community of the instru-
ments, appliances, and means of production,
including land and capital, railways, the
merchant marine, factories, machinery, agricul-
tural and other implements. Private enter-
prise, all business as now conducted, is to be
suspended. All manual laborers are to be
paid in products and amusements in propor-
tion to the work done ; and persons whose

OF CHRISTIANITY. 237

services imply intellectual application, like
teachers, physicians, experimenters in science,
and judges on the bench, are to receive
shares in the commodities produced by
national labor, the number of shares being
governed in each case by the time occupied
in work useful to the community.

Socialists propose a distribution of mate-
rial products among individual producers in
proportion to their work. This would at
once occasion the very inequality in the
wealth distributed that Socialists decry. Ac-
cumulation must take place in private hands
and hence a redistribution of private posses-
sions would shortly be necessitated. I am
aware that Schaffle holds that Socialism does
not contemplate a periodic redistribution ; but
in the nature of things, such would be inevi-
table. There is no way in which equality can
be preserved except by the redistribution or
wanton destruction of private property accu-
mulated in excess of community regulations.
Socialism claims to put an end to all inequal-
ities ; but as it requites labor unequally, ine-
quality must result from unequal payments.
The eleventh-hour people do not share in
this system with the whole-day heat and bur-
den bearers. Hence to preserve equality of

238 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

possessions, a certain surplus must either be
destroyed periodically, or periodically redis-
tributed. The only persons who would profit
by such an absurd system would be the un-
deserving poor — the lazy and alcoholic
paupers.

Then imagine the scenes on distribution
day. Who would be contented with the por-
tion parceled out to him by the public over-
seers of production. The success of such a
system involves absolute honesty, which no-
where exists ; infallible judgment to estimate
the division fairly, which is inconceivable;
mental and moral efficiency vastly superior
to that possessed by the average man. It
supposes human beings unswayed by jealousy,
strangers to passion, with low estimates of
their own services, always contented with
their apportionment, in every way above
board. In other words, the success of So-
cialism is conditioned by the universal prev-
alence of Gospel Christianity. Given that,
and no reason can be advanced for the desir-
ability of Socialism.

Socialism assumesas a fundamental doctrine
that labor is the sole constituent of value, and
regards wealth as transfigured labor and
hence theft on the part of employers from

OF CHRISTIANITY. 239

their employees. All employers are thieves ;
and all toilers who expend muscular energy
in producing anything are entitled to all they
produce. It condones stealing as a mere
over-violent readjustment of unfairly divided
values. It distinctly teaches that wage-earn-
ers always receive in money-wage less than
the full value of the product of their work ;
ignoring the fact that labor is a mere factor
in wealth, that it does not create the materi-
als or machinery it handles, and that it would
be helpless if not directed by supreme human
intelligence. A thing is worth what it will
sell for in market, whether it be a farm, a
bushel of potatoes, the manuscript of a story,
or a day's work. And a laborer is not
robbed because he receives from a capitalist
the full market value of his services. The
Rev. Dr. Behrends * aptly illustrates the point
in question : —

"The motorman and the conductor of a
trolley car might say : ' Our labor makes
this car run, and therefore we are entitled to
all the fares which are collected, or at least
to the largest share of them/ But they did
not lay the rails, they did not hang the wires,
they did not build the cars ; and they could

* In "The Revolutionary Demands of Socialism."

24o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

not do any of these things if they tried, and
therefore must pay the men who can. No
man is going to put his labor at another
man's disposal without a fair remuneration,
and the more skilled that labor is, the more
must be paid for it. Men do not build rail-
ways and buy cars for fun, any more than
motormen work for fun. But suppose road-
ways, and trolley wires, and cars were to be
had for nothing, can the two men on the
platforms run the cars? One man collects
the fares ; the other man turns the current
on or off, manages the brake, and rings the
gong. It keeps them busy; but what would
their work amount to if there were no power-
houses, no dynamos, no electric current in the
wires? Nobody needs to pay for the light-
ning; but not everybody knows how to make
it available ; and the expensive machinery of
the power-houses, with the cost of its repair
and renewal and efficient management, must
be paid for out of the fares collected. With-
out it the cars would not move an inch, and
nobody would pay any fare. The man who
turns the current on or off, and who handles
the lever, has at his command millions of in-
vested capital, not one dollar of which he
provided, and thousands of skilled workers,

OF CHRISTIANITY. 241

without whom his work would be utterly
unproductive. In all the higher grades
of industry, it is the machinery which
gives value to the product, not the man
who handles the machine. But was not
the machine made by somebody, and ought
not the men who made the machine to
own it and get all the profit out of it ?
But who made the machine? Can even'
man who uses a hammer and turns a lathe
make a machine ? Must you not have the
inventor and the draughtsman and the
superintendent of construction ? These men,
perhaps, work very little with their hands,
but they work with their heads ; and in
a world where heads are so necessary, they
have to be generously paid for."

Labor must not only have material to
work on and tools to work with ; it must
further be encouraged and directed by brains.
Inventiveness, capacity for management, cour-
age in the adapting of means to ends, as well
as manual labor, must be taken into account
as sources of wealth. Hence the claim of
labor to the whole product is unjustifiable
and immoral.

Socialists brand all private property as
robbery ! Riches are as much theft as stolen

16

242 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

goods acquired by violence or fraud. The
most upright farmer or straightforward
trader who has worked honestly for his
humble home and slender income is a robber
on the same plane as the foot-pad. " No
saint can own a farm ! " cries one with a mor-
bidly sensitive social conscience ; but in the
next breath he contends that a community
of sinners can. Others demand that all the
property in the world shall be confiscated
and then equally distributed. Nationalism,
or Economic Democracy, is but a phase of
Socialism. In the words of Edward Bell-
amy, it also proposes to " deliver society
from the rule of the rich, and to establish
economic equality by the application of the
democratic formula to the production and
distribution of wealth. It aims to put an
end to the present irresponsible control of
the economic interests of the country by
capitalists pursuing their private ends, and
to replace it by responsible public agencies
acting for the general welfare. That is to
say, it is proposed to harmonize the indus-
trial and commercial system with the politi-
cal, by bringing the former under popular
government, as the latter has already been
brought, to be administered as the political

OF CHRISTIANITY. 243

government is, by the equal voice of all for
the equal benefit of all."

Schaffle declares the Alpha and Omega of
Socialism to be the transformation of pri-
vate and competing capitals into a united
collective capital. Note how it is purposed
to settle with capitalists like the Rothschilds,
a family reputed to be worth five hundred
million. This wealth socialistic agitators
propose to appropriate — in other words, to
steal — and for fifty years pay the family an
annuity in the form of provisions, clothing,
furniture, luxuries, and amusements. In two
generations its members would be compelled
to support themselves by manual labor ; and
if they should object to this — why, let them
emigrate to a land where Socialistic ideas do
not prevail. Think of thus taking her prop-
erty from Helen Gould, who is preeminent
among American women in deeds of .judi-
cious charity, and distributing it among the
depraved classes to dissipate in drunkenness
and lust! It is this kind of agitation that is
filling the world with malcontents, with nihil-
istic robbers and dynamiters. And such
agitation is unfortunately rendered possible
by high-handed, dubious, and out-and-out
immoral procedures in the accumulation and

244 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

expenditure of wealth ; by the sight of gi-
gantic monopolies, syndicates, and corpora-
tions unscrupulously managed to starve out
thousands of humble honest bread-winners,
and thereby add to the wealth of grasping
millionaires.

It is not property that is the root of
all evil, as Socialists proclaim — but the
abuse of property, coupled with the spirit of
covetousness in rich and poor, that inordi-
nate passion for money and possessions which
knows no rest by day or night in their eager
pursuit — that malicious and brutish thirst in
the low-born for the belongings of those who
are better-to-do. Money-making has an-
other side, one that is not ignoble like this
toiling and hoarding simply to gratify the
property emotion, but one that is entirely
praiseworthy from the Christian standpoint
— accumulating by self-denial and honest toil
to provide for those we love — for the pure
women who are the sharers of our joys and
disappointments ; for children who may en-
joy educational and social advantages only
through our unremitting application. And
what can be nobler and sweeter than the
devotion of life to the honest acquisition of
moderate means for loves sake ? Christi-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 245

anity indorses such pursuit of riches 1 and
God Almighty has placed upon it the im-
print of his sanction in the reward of happi-
ness that as a rule accompanies it It has
been convincingly argued that no danger is
to be feared from the concentration of prop-
erty in the hands of the servants of Jesus ;
and of this there are numerous exemplifica-
tions. Consistent Christian capitalists are
never industrial oppressors, never parties to
the widely noised conspiracy of wealth
against the people. Their gauge of remu-
neration is its sufficiency for the comfortable
support of the wage-earner. This I have
seen grandly illustrated in my study of in-
dustrial conditions abroad ; and by way of
example I will ask your attention for a mo-
ment to the Christian management of the
worlds great thread works at Paisley, Scot-
land, as a standing rebuke to such as clamor
that our religion has invariably failed to es-
tablish congenial and mutually profitable
relations between employer and employee.
The prosperous manufacturers of this town
carry out practically in their daily inter-
course and business associations the princi-
ples of reciprocity as inculcated by Jesus
Christ. The men and women whose devo-

246 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

tion has rendered them rich in worldly pos-
sessions are made sharers in their material
prosperity, and their wealth is freely given
for the endowment of charitable institutions
in their native city. These Scottish employ-
ers further realize that the moral welfare of
their operatives is intrusted to their keep-
ing, and that it is made their duty to sur-
round it with every possible safeguard. As
a consequence, disaffection, discontent, and
what is infinitely more deplorable, the en-
forced adoption of a life of prostitution by
women employees as an alternative with
starvation, are unknown. The chaste lives
of the Paisley mill-girls contrast markedly
with the depravity that is the reproach of
our American system ; their cheerful homes
with the filthy tenements that disgrace our
great manufacturing centers.

Generous provision is also made for the
physical comfort and mental training of the
operatives. Beside the great Coats mill
stands a thoroughly equipped school-house,
erected by the owners for the accommodation
of " half-timers," or children who receive in-
struction during three days of the week and
work in the factory the remainder of the
time. In addition to this, a sewing-school is

OF CHRISTIANITY. 247

provided, where lessons are given free of ex-
pense in hand and machine sewing. The
Messrs. Coats have also built a dining-hall
where factory girls are furnished substantial
meals for as low as five cents in our money,
half-timers being supplied at half rates. Ex-
tensive baths are also connected with the
establishment for the use of employees ;
while the clerks have their separate dining-
hall and reading-room. After twenty years
of service, in case for any reason they be-
come incapacitated, deserving operatives are
pensioned at the rate of two dollars a week,
which is ample for their support in Scotland ;
and old and ailing pensioners are sent to the
seacoast for a month every summer at the
expense of the firm. The attitude of the
Coatses toward their servants is generally
characteristic of the Scottish merchants. The
rich manufacturer moves among his em-
ployees as a father, mindful of their interests
and jealous of their rights ; while they have
learned to look up to him with all the love
and respect of confiding children,, If the
s'pirit that inspires the noble deeds of the
public-souled men of Paisley should go
abroad among the mammon-serving employ-
ers of this land, the abuses that are voiced

248

ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

on every side would soon be rectified. That
spirit is the spirit of pure unselfish Chris-
tianity— the spirit which alone can solve,
with its divinely quickened insight, the per-
plexing problems of this age.

Christian teaching in regard to property
rights is very clear. Like all other rights,
they are essentially moral in character ; and
any employment of power incompatible with
the free exercise of these rights is immoral,
and hence of necessity unlawful and unjust.
We acquire a right to property by the labor
of our hands or brains, by voluntary ex-
change, by gift, by will, by inheritance. I
have a right to the results of my work, to do
with them as I wish. The product arising
from the innocent use of my powers is mine,
not yours ! not some society's ! And in this
principle is to be found the explanation of
American prosperity and of American prog-
ress. May God rebuke and baffle the un-
American agitators who would have it other-
wise. If you raise a crop of grain on land
not previously appropriated, that grain is
yours by all that is right, and just, and holy !
If you build a sawmill and intrust its con-
duct to employees, it does not follow that
these employees have a right to the profits

OF CHRISTIANITY. 249

of your mill ! Consistent Socialism clearly
antagonizes the Christian theory of human
rights — the right to life, liberty, and the free
choice of means of happiness ; the right of
self-defense ; the right to trade and get gain ;
the right to marry, and to train and educate
children. Man has divine sanction for exer-
cising all these rights, and no system devised
by man is justified in their infringement.
The lawfulness of doing what one pleases
with ones own was declared by Christ. As
interpreted by him, right implies moral liberty
to pursue and possess under certain pre-
scribed limitations everything that makes
for the attainment of happiness and the ful-
fillment of function and destiny. It has been
so from the beginning.

These principles are in accordance with
the laws of God. Where they have obtained,
civilization has evolved. Reason and expe-
rience are united in evidence that private
property is not " a social inconvenience " —
does not represent a spoliation of mankind.
It is held, in all enlightened countries, under
just limitations defined by law. Its posses-
sion does not imply unlimited license in its
use and abuse. So much for the morality of
the property-right

250 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

But there is a nobler side to its possession
and exercise by Christian men and women,
who regard themselves as stewards of the
Lord's goods, at liberty to dispose of them
only in the interest of the Divine Donor.
Such was the interpretation placed upon the
possession of property by the early Christian
fathers, who do not deny the right while re-
stricting it. Said St. Augustine : " Let him
who is unwilling to share his goods with the
poor understand that when he hears exhor-
tations to show kindness, God is not com-
manding him to give what is his own, but
rather to give up that which is God's."

Some communists, in harmony with the
teachings of Plato's Republic, interpret
monogamy as the exclusive possession by
one man of a piece of property, and hence
justify community of wives as well as com-
munity of chattels, attacking marriage and
advocating free-love. The so-called " com-
plex " marriage of the Oneida Perfectionists
really implies this. Schaffle admits the ex-
istence among Socialists in general of loose
views regarding marriage and family life.
Not only are the several kinds of property
common, but the persons of women among
the members of a community ; and he seeks

OF CHRISTIANITY. 251

to apologize for this state of affairs by at-
tempting to show that even among the well-
to-do and educated classes free-love is the-
oretically, if not practically as widespread as
free religion ! If this were true, there is no
argument in it. Morality and Christianity
have ever declared for monogamy and indis-
soluble marriage, have ever deprecated
plural and adulterous unions. In the social
system of Jesus, conjugal faithfulness is indel-
ibly intaglioed. Nowhere in the Gospel nar-
rative, thank God, is there the slighest trace
of the communistic principle that the hus-
band has a property right in his wife. Jesus
Christ proclaimed the equality of the sexes,
the sacredness and indissolubility of mar-
riage—nay, read the God-detested sin in a
single licentious glance. And Jesus, the in-
carnate God, whose heart bled for the peni-
tent harlot, in every breath, in every attitude,
in the enunciation of every social principle,
forever figures as the uncompromising foe of
divorce and prostitution.

Finally listen to the following words of the
German incendiary in his " Quintessence of
Socialism," regarding the Christian religion :
" Socialism of the present day is out and out
irreligious and hostile to the Church. It

252 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

says that the Church is only a police institu-
tion for upholding Capital, and that it de-
ceives the common people with a check
payable in heaven ! Hence the Church de-
serves to perish." There is no mistaken
tone to this avowal. The Church declares
expressly, What a man sows that shall he
(the individual, the private person) reap. Its
founder urged men to lay up treasures where
moth and dust do not corrupt, and pro-
nounced those eternally blessed who hold a
certified check in payment for deeds done
in the flesh to present, if you will, at the
great Banking House beyond the skies.
Happy indeed are the holders of these spir-
itual Christ-indorsed certificates. The So-
cialism of to-day either contemplates the
overthrow of all religion in its denial of the
existence of a God, or else it consigns reli-
gious questions to the Coventry of private
concern.

There must be ever an irreconcilable an-
tagonism between the irreligious and sensual
influences of Socialism and the spiritualizing
tendencies of Christianity — between a system
that is instigating the masses who have no
laid-up capital, to throw off all authority
both of church and state, and seize the prop-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 253

erty of the rich with the five billions of
dollars deposited in the banks and the loan
and trust institutions of the country, repre-
senting the proceeds of honest labor in a
thousand different lines ; that laughs to scorn
sexual purity ; that encourages the grossest
license, appeals to the baser passions of men,
and bids for the patronage of lawbreakers ;
that finds its national god in unbridled pleas-
ure at once the destroyer of the body and
the deadly dwale of the soul — between such
a system, and a religion that enjoins respect
for the powers that be, that declares the in-
violability of property, the sacredness of mar-
riage, and the law of moderation.

Where Socialism has been tried, it has
failed. Guaranteed physical support has not
been accepted as a satisfactory compensa-
tion for the surrender of individual liberty.
It is not true that the best work of the world
has been done by communistic institutions
as Dr. Herron contends in his book entitled
" Between Caesar and Jesus." The history
of human development is the history of so
many advances in civilization conceived and
executed by individuals — from Junius Brutus
who overturned the regal government at
Rome, from the heroes of Marathon and

254 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Thermopylae, from Alexander of Macedon
who paved the way for the spread of Christ's
Gospel in the Orient, to Constantine and
Charles Martel and Peter the Hermit, to
Alfred of England and Edward III., to
Wickliffe and Luther and Calvin and Wil-
liam of Orange and Henry of Navarre, to
Wesley and Whitefield, to Washington and
Lincoln. What had socialistic influences to
do with the inspiration of the men whom
God selected to plan and consummate the
mighty reforms of the world? This very
point is conceded by Dr. Herron in the
crowning contradiction of his chapter on
Private Property. " I sometimes think," he
says, " that a single man of great economic
power, with the heart of Christ in him, could
change the world," as if Christ himself had
not already enacted the part of that single
Man and completely changed the nature of
this world.

I repeat that Socialism so far as tried, has
proved a failure. The Shakers, who are So-
cialists, and teach, in addition to the commu-
nity of property, the doctrine of celibacy and
the duality of Christ — a male and female
principle, an eternal Mother — have dwindled
during the last fifty years to two thousand

OF CHRISTIANITY. 255

souls. The Oneida Perfectionists have
lapsed into the Oneida Company Limited,
each member having a separate interest rep-
resented by shares of stock. So experi-
mental Communism is dying everywhere, and
is only popular among laboring men whose
object is to see how little return they can
make for their wages. Its universal real-
ization would mean progress obstructed,
inspiration shackled, laziness enthroned, in-
differentism dominant, relapse to savagery
assured. It would be synchronous with the
advent of non-religion ; and in the accom-
plishment of the evolution pictured by its
abettors — in which " as slavery was suc-
ceeded by feudalism, and feudalism was dis-
placed by capitalism, so capitalism is now to
be superseded by socialism," half the inhabit-
ants of the earth and all perishable prop-
erty would be destroyed.

It has been argued in some quarters as
already intimated, that the Bible indorses
Communism ; and thoughtless Christians are
won through such misrepresentation. As
Socialism is non-Christian so is Christianity
non-socialistic ; and those who talk of Chris-
tian Socialism are compounding non-compati-
bles. The axiom of Christian morality is —

256 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Every man has a right to himself; that of
Socialism, No man has a right to himself —
to his liberty, or his property, or his char-
acter, or his happiness, or his reputation-
Society owns him, body and soul — intellect,
will, and conscience. He is without personal
rights and personal responsibilities. Hegel's
rule for all moral and social relations finds
no application here : Be a person and re-
spect the personality of others. Personality
counts for nothing in Socialism, whose aim
is so clearly the enslavement of society, not
its manumission. Beneath its cloak of al-
truism, glitters the murderer's dagger and
smokes the incendiary's torch.

I have said that Christianity is non-social-
istic. Technical collectivism was no part of
early Christian philosophy. While represent-
ing the practical application of his religion
to consist in social service, Jesus nowhere
commanded or even advised his disciples to
pool their earnings or turn over their prop-
erty into a common fund or stock. They
were not forbidden to have conflicting inter-
ests, nor to engage in business competition
in an open-handed manly way. We read that
early Christians had all things in common,
but this does not mean that they resigned

OF CHRISTIANITY. 257

individual interests in their property. If so,
they could not subsequently have disbursed
the products of its sale to their poorer breth-
ren as we are told they did. Had their
-property been fused in a communistic reserve,
there would have been nothing to dispose of
by private sale, no buyers, and no poor to re-
lieve. Individual generosity and poverty are
alike impossible under a perfect social sys-
tem. It was the practice, however, of primi-
tive Christians to make periodical distribu-
tions among such as were in need ; and when
you remember that a boycott was enforced
against all who joined the early Church, and
that they were cut off thereby from support,
sympathy, and even employment, you will
realize that the occasions for such charity
were frequent and pressing. Ananias was
not condemned for withholding his posses-
sions, but for robbing God. Peter settled this
question for all time in the searching inter-
rogatories, " While it remained was it not
thine own ? And after it was sold, was it
not in thine own power ?" The sin of Ana-
nias and Sapphira lay in prostituting the
holy almonership which they had assumed of
their own free will to the love of compli-
ment. They forged God's name to secure

17

258 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

credit with men. It were needless to multi-
ply instances of the retention of private
property by early converts, of interests in
real and personal estate by the original apos-
tles themselves and by their Christian rela-
tives and friends ; or to show that alms-giv-
ing in the early centuries of our era was a
voluntary expression of Christian love, and
not required authoritatively by the Church.
There was no disposition to force the rich
and talented to use their superior endow-
ments in the service of their fellow-men — a
course which would have been contrary to
all ideas of human rights ; which would have
taken away man's free agency, and with it all
individual motives and all credit for action ;
which would have cauterized the conscience
by transferring all responsibility to the com-
mune, and have reduced the image of God
in man to the psyche of the brute. The test
of a man's faith in Christ was the love of
that man for his brother. In illustration, I
quote from Justin Martyrs first and princi-
pal Apology (A. D. 138) : " And the wealthy
among us Christians help the needy (there
is no constraint except the love of Christ
which prompts). And we always keep to-
gether, and on the day called Sunday, those

OF CHRISTIANITY. 259

who live in cities gather in one place, and the
Memoirs of the Apostles are read. And
they who are well-to-do give what each
thinks fit ; and what is collected is deposited
with the President who succors the orphans
and widows, and those who are in want or
bonds, and the strangers sojourning among
us " — mark, not grudgingly or of necessity,
God loves a cheerful giver. What a beauti-
ful picture of charitable contribution in the
early Church ! Primitive Christians regarded
their property as held in trust for the Lord s
service, and wTere always ready for any claims
which that service made. It was not their
own, nor society's : it was God's. From the
Christian view-point, the argument of Dr.
Herron that the owner of property is simply
a steward having in trust what belongs to
others, is extremely vulnerable. Christianity
insists that he holds in trust what belongs
to God, who gave it to him and requires him
to administer it for the highest good of his
fellow-men — and sometimes he consults this
highest good by refusal to share it with them.
I hold my possessions as the vicegerent of
the Almighty. But at the same time I am a
free and responsible agent, and therefore I
exercise my own judgment as to how I shall

260 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

use and bestow my wealth. God judges me
by my motives. Such is and always has
been the Christian doctrine of property.

The Christian conception of man is that of
a social being who fulfills his terrestrial des-
tiny only by building his life into the lives
of others. The duties of this complete
Christian life are expressed in the require-
ments of common charity, the true spirit of
which is thus revealed by Christ himself:
" Then shall the King say unto them on his
right hand : Come, ye blessed of my Father,
inherit the kingdom prepared for you from
the foundation of the world. For I was an
hungred and ye gave me meat : I was
thirsty and ye gave me drink; I was a stran-
ger and ye took me in ; naked and ye clothed
me. I was sick and ye visited me ; I was in
prison and ye came unto me. Then shall the
righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when
saw we thee an hungred and fed thee, or
thirsty and gave thee drink ? When saw we
thee a stranger and took thee in ? or naked
and clothed thee ? Or when saw we thee
sick or in prison and came unto thee? And
the King shall answer and say unto them,
Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have
done it unto one of the least of these my

OF CHRISTIANITY. 261

brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matthew
xxv. 34.) Such ministration implies the pos-
session of private property and the power to
use it at will.

Failure to accept the social service desig-
nated in this enumeration is equivalent to
betrayal of the God-assigned trust, and synon-
ymous with unfitness for participation in the
enjoyment of the future social life of Christ's
kingdom.

The Utopia of Jesus is not beyond human
attainment because of the spiritual element
in his Socialism, which embodies the energy
adapted to the transfiguration of the universe.
It is to be remembered that the forces which
are capable of molding and perfecting human
society are moral and spiritual, not of the
earth, earthy. Character is the most power-
ful social efficiency. Dauntless courage,
manly resignation, self-control, suffering for
others, suffering for truth's sake, inflexible
loyalty to Christian principle, — are the real
instruments of permanent social betterment.
Love, from which all compulsion is elimi-
nated, is the perfect law of Christ and holds
all other virtues. The true reform of society
can result only from the indwelling of this
love in the hearts of men ; and a government

262 EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY.

is Christlike, or Christian if you prefer— not
because it is monarchical, democratic, or
communistic — but because, to quote the
words of Professor Shailer Mathews,* it is
" honestly seeking to realize the principles of
brotherly love on which are based the social
teachings of our Saviour." It is only by the
adoption of the divine ideals unfolded by Je-
sus Christ as the regulators of human inter-
course,— the recognition of that charity which
fulfills the whole Gospel law as the main-
spring of social progress, that we can hope to
realize in this world that civic harmony and
that social peace which are a true foretaste
of Heaven.

* " The Social Teachings of Jesus."

What is Christianity More than Altruism, or Socio-
Commercial Love?

(We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts.
Song of Solomon, viii. 8.)

Said Rose Cleveland: "Altruistic faith is
a faith in human nature's intrinsic worth : a
faith that the race is gravitating toward a
goal of final good, rather than of final evil :
a faith that humanity is persistently electing
itself to honor, glory, and immortality, by a
majority : a faith which declares life worth the
living; a faith which looks into poorhouses,
asylums, and penitentiaries, and still believes
in humanity reclaimable and infinitely worth
saving."

We could wish that Rose Cleveland had
added : And this faith is born only of a
grander and inconceivably higher, and all-
inclusive faith — a faith in the guiding hand,
the infallible wisdom, and the eternal love of
the God of destiny. What Miss Cleveland
describes so eloquently are wild fruits rip-
ened by the sunshine of Christian love on
the borders of its great harvest-fields — fruits
that have stolen their nurture from the crop

264 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

of the Perfect Altruist. What she calls Al-
truism is conditioned by Christianity. It is
the little sister with shriveled affections,
biased judgment, and mere terrestrial aim —
the mincing miss at the skirts of the divine
Almoner, whose breasts are like towers. The
nobler sister teaches that something must pre-
cede true benevolence, must underlie genuine
self-sacrifice, self-forgetfulness, suffering for
fellow-beings, devotion to man; and that some-
thing is the mother grace of which all others
are begotten in the soul — Faith in Jesus
Christ as the Son of God. The love that is the
child of this faith is the love that many
waters cannot quench, the love which is the
supreme good, the love which shall perdure
to witness Faith itself dissolve in realization
and Hope shade into fruition, while it goes
on forever — the love that constitutes the
absolute essence of the personal, self-con-
scious Jehovah.

" There is no good of life but love ;

What else looks good, is some shade flung from love.

Love gilds it."

Such a shade is Altruism, the opposite of
Egoism in the nomenclature of Philosophy.
The word is of Italian origin and means lit-
erally otherness, other-self, or love of others.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 265

It was coined by the philosopher Auguste
Comte to convey the idea quite nearly ex-
pressed by unselfishness, devotion to hu-
manity, true disinterestedness. Around this
notion cluster many theories of life, notably
the socialistic dream that with the coming
of equal facilities for maintenance and recre-
ation— the abolition of the interdependence
of private individuals by laws enforcing the
nationalization of land and capital and the
equalization of labor — discontent will vanish,
and with it crime. Altruism is thus sup-
posed to secure the greatest happiness to
the greatest number. Collectivists, Fou-
rierists, Tolstoiists — all pretenders to spe-
cialism in the profession of self-sacrifice — are
demanding that property shall be spontane-
ously given up for the common good, and
threatening an uprising of the people for the
purpose of seizing and redistributing what
they designate as unearned and unjustified
wealth. This is the way in which Altruists
love their neighbors as themselves. They
would better throw off their masks and appear
as the Nihilists that they are.

As a religion, such Altruism involves,
along with Socialism, a worship of the State,
the taskmistress, the recognized owner of

266

ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

labor and its products ; and involving such
worship, while proclaiming universal free-
dom, it really aims at establishing universal
servitude.

Evolutional Altruism, as taught by the
philosophers of the Herbert Spencer school,
declares that " there is a certain law of na-
ture which compels and governs the conduct
of human society in such a way that ulti-
mately each individual who composes it will
realize that the reason of his existence in
this world is not for himself but for society,
and that he must conduct himself accord-
ingly." But was not this law of nature, as
discovered in both Old and New Testa-
ment, coetaneous with man, and was it not
realized in the code of the ancient Hebrews
and in Christ's religion of self-sacrifice that
bids us do unto others — all others — as we
would have others do unto us ? The recog-
nition by the early Church of the claims of
humanity as superior to the claims of the in-
dividual or the claims of any society of indi-
viduals, has been dwelt upon in a previous
address. But these Evolutionists talk as if
abstract Altruism were a conception of their
own, a climax to be reached by successive
gradations of sympathetic activity ; whereas

OF CHRISTIANITY. 267

every reader of history and every student of
sociology is abundantly aware that it was
idealized and perfectly realized in the life of
Jesus Christ, and through him has asserted
itself in that of every consistent Christian.
Infidels are declaring that in nineteen cen-
turies there has been but one Jesus, yet the
world remains the same old world. The
falsehood of this assertion is pervious to the
most indifferent analysis. The world has
been transfigured by the Altruism of Christ ;
and modern civilization indisputably owes
its evolution to Christianity, the greatest
truth and love disseminating force this earth
has ever known. Evolutional Altruism has
adopted for its God what is best in mans
nature, and worships the Being of Hu-
manity. It knows no over-soul, regards man
as wholly sufficient unto himself, and finds
its inspiration entirely in human ideals. It
sprung from the Positivism of Comte, who
sought to eliminate the divine alike from as-
piration and inspiration. Thus stripped of
the supranatural element, Altruism, a fad of
the decade, has gravitated to the low level
of the temporal and the sordid. It is with-
out spiritual attribute, and hence no longer
expresses the highest quality of love, but

268 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

rather the purely business side which expects
more than it gives in the way of material
return. The Altruism of to-day makes love
a profession. It has degenerated into a
worldly socio-commercial philosophy, which
demands that everybody should make sacri-
fices for us, but that we need make sacri-
fices for nobody. It has been said that " the
power to appreciate others in terms of self
marks man off from the brute/' So the will
deliberately to treat others in terms of self
is the fundamental and inevitable outcome
of Christian belief, and marks the genuine
Christian off from the mere Altruist or pre-
tender.

The precept of the Bible is " Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself" — not better
than thyself as some neighbors expect, but
as thyself; that is, we are required as Chris-
tians to exercise our faculties and gratify
our lawful desires in such a manner as not to
interfere with the right of other human be-
ings to enjoy unmolested and unhampered
the means of happiness God has conferred
on them. And further, we are under obli-
gation, if we live up to the full spirit of the
injunction, to resent any invasion of our
neighbor's rights even as of our own. This

OF CHRISTIANITY. 269

moral principle alone justified our war with
Spain, to end her career of heart-sickening
oppression, of torture, ravishment, and
murder, in the realm of our nearest neighbor,
the Queen of the Antilles.

In Terence's master drama, " The Self-
Tormentor," Chremes, one of the characters,
makes the following reply to the question of
a neighboring country gentleman as to how
he found time to pry into other people's af-
fairs : " I am a man, and I have an interest in
everything that concerns humanity " — a senti-
ment worthy of a Christian, on hearing which
the Roman audience shook the theater with
their applause — " I am a man, and hence have
an interest in everything that concerns hu-
manity." The command given in the seventh
chapter of St. Matthew, " All things whatso-
ever ye would that men should do unto you,
do ye even so to them," equivalents a re-
quirement to estimate the rights of others
by the consciousness in our own bosoms of
the possession of exactly the same rights.
Hence Christianity requires us to be as care-
ful of our neighbor's life and property as of
our own, of his reputation as of our own, of
his character as of our own. This is to be
thoroughly unselfish, genuinely disinterested.

270 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

I have yet to meet with a mere Altruist
intolerant of criminal carelessness, the most
prolific cause of death. Christian love alone
is ever alert against murder potential. Chris-
tianity alone condemns the adulterators of
medicines and food-stuffs, the retailers of dis-
eased meat and depleted bacteria-ridden
milk, the dealers who sell rum to bloated
drunkards with the death stamp on every
feature ; the man who deliberately by the use
of morphine, absinthe, cocaine, alcohol, or
any other brain-stealer, puts himself into a
position in which he is likely to injure his
neighbors. Christianity alone rebukes the
nurse who neglects the patient placed under
her care ; the patient who disregards the
directions of a scientific physician with fatal
consequences ; the doctor who, ignorant of
the malady he is treating, goes on trying this
remedy and that until death puts an end to
his experiments.

Christianity arraigns the individual or
company that carelessly permits access to
danger of any kind — to live electric wire, to
stored dynamite or other explosive, to deadly
drugs, to road or bridge out of repair, to
steamboat or railroad train under circum-
stances of questionable safety. Christianity

OF CHRISTIANITY. 271

denounces as a crime the spreading of conta-
gious or communicable diseases through
thoughtlessness or willful defiance of sanitary
law, and places him who omits or refuses to
observe proper precautions on a par with the
common cutthroat. " Murder," says Presi-
dent Hyde of Bowdoin College, " is more
common in the United States to-day than
when the Indians roamed the wilderness
with tomahawk and scalping-knife. Every
death that comes prematurely through de-
fective sanitation, over-strain, anxiety, un-
kindness, sorrow, neglect, betrayal, discour-
agement— in so far as those conditions were
removable — is practically a case of murder.
And the landlord, the employer, the father,
the husband, the son, the merchant, the
neighbor, who might have relieved or re-
moved the unhealthful physical, nervous,
mental, or emotional conditions, and failed to
do so, is a murderer/' Again, I ask, does
selfish Altruism take this high ground ?

Christianity holds that he who covets his
brother's goods is a thief at heart ; while
socialistic Altruism clamors for confiscation
and redistribution of property. Under the
Christian law of obligation to care for one's
neighbors property as for one's own, the cat-

272 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

egory of dishonest transactions includes the
presentation of all wrongful motives to influ-
ence presumable buyers ; appeal to vanity,
jealousy, or ignorance; disparagement of prop-
erty in the hope of securing it at a re-
duced price ; exaggeration of the value of
articles on sale ; concealment of rise in value,
which is so much robbery of a seller; extor-
tion by employers of services for which they
do not pay ; neglect of work for which com-
pensation is received ; theft of time ; theft
of mental peace ; acceptance of bribes, which
is direct theft from justice, a cold-blooded
steal from one's constituents. I have yet to
see a non-Christian Altruist who is superior
to all these methods of infringing on his
neighbor's property rights.

Reputation is what others think of us. It
is as much property as bonds and real estate.
Hence to subtract from it in any way is theft
— as great a violation of justice as marketing
worthless certificates of stock. Does calcu-
lating Altruism go as far as this ? Did you
ever hear of its forbidding dissection of per-
sonal character in the farm-kitchen, in the
factory, the workshop, or in the boudoirs of
heartless society women. Socialistic Altruists
are urging the people to lay violent hands on

OF CHRISTIANITY. 273

the material property of their neighbors.
Think you they stop at the property rights
in reputation ?

And did you ever consider what neighbor
it is that usually furnishes a theme for the
tongues that are set on fire of Hell? It is
woman — " blest partner of our joys and woes,
angel of comfort to the failing soul " — woman,
who mayhap has passed through fiery suffer-
ing to show us what a woman true may be
— woman, calm and holy, that " sitteth by the
fireside of the heart, feeding its flames." The
brightest star that blazes in the constellation
of American principles is a deference for
woman unparalleled in the history of man-
kind ; and yet there is a legion of American
detractors, agitators of Socialism and Altru-
istic reforms, who are wont to speak of every
woman either as impure or as possessing a
virtue that is assailable. They see in every
honorable wife a specious bosom-cheat. They
read impurity on the sunken cheeks behind
the widow's veil. They ridicule with profli-
gate sneer " the rose which, withering on the
virgin thorn, grows, lives, and dies in single
blessedness." And they even find in pure
and simple maidenhood a mark for their
venomed daggers. Their carnal propensity

274 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

would hardly feel itself rebuffed by the sweet
dignity of an Evangeline, as, with the sacra-
ment still upon her lips,

" Homeward serenely she walked with God's benediction upon

her;
When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite

music."

Behold ! the reputation thief is on her trail,
eager to assault that chastity of honor which
Burke said feels a stain like a wound !

And what says Altruism of those whose
ears itch for the tales that are intended to
blast reputations — the moral soil-pipes that
collect and carry off contemptible, false, filthy
reports of men and women to foul the clear-
running streams of social life? Christianity
makes the ready listener a partaker in the
guilt of the scandal-carrier. It is your fault
if you accept all the evil you hear of your
neighbors. The highest Christian culture is
to think no ill, to speak no ill, to listen to no
ill. Charity rejoiceth not in iniquity. A
writer of poetic mind once said : " If, instead
of a gem or a flower, we could cast the gift
of a lovely thought into the heart of a friend,
that would be giving as the angels give."
How strong the contrast here — the gift of a
lovely thought to the malicious merciless

OF CHRISTIANITY. 275

calumny of socialistic agitators. For how
many noble thoughts has the sensational Al-
truist made you a debtor ?

I find your so-called Altruist everywhere
depraving character, teaching unscriptural
views regarding marriage and chastity, flaunt-
ing the free-love banner, scattering the fire-
brands of discontent, nursing malignant pas-
sions, proclaiming the right to steal, denying
the immanence of God. But Christianity,
armed with the prohibition, Thou shalt not
deprave, absolutely forbids the weakening or
undermining of moral restraints by all wicked
example and teaching, by all toleration of im-
moral word or action, by appeal to evil dis-
positions and perverted imaginations, by
ministration to the base appetites of men.
When we Christians contemplate the force
of example and silent influence — when we
consider how easy it is, by tone, or word, or
song, or look, or gesture, or shrug of shoul-
der, or exhibition of picture — to take from
the purity of a character — and when we
realize that God holds us responsible for the
slightest shadow we may cast upon the white-
ness of innocence, we must indeed measure
our words and gauge our actions with fear
and trembling. Do the apostles of socio-

276 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

commercial love go to this length ? Ah ! no,
for popular Altruism does not imply moral
quality. Popular Altruism, in justification of
the sinful lives of its supporters, explains all
virtue as due to the insufficiency of tempta-
tion.

Christianity loves the better self, the image
divine, even in the criminal and the outcast.
However obscure, however distorted, it is the
lofty purpose of Christian Altruism to give
definition to this image ; and we well know
that as the image of the intellectual and the
ethical Divine assumes its clear and beautiful
proportions, all sensual thought-forms are
forced out of focus. Altruism is not particu-
larly concerned with effort to remove hered-
itary or acquired sin. With the one, it is
the refuse heap for the castaway ; with the
other, it is the lapidary wheel for cutting and
polishing the blemished gem. How dwelleth
the love of God in the heart of the woman
Altruist who thrusts from her an erring sister
or the girl against whom even a slanderous
whisper has been heard, yet welcomes to her
drawing-room the notorious libertine who
openly makes merchandise of her sex ? Think
you that the Almighty makes any distinction
between the man and the woman guilty of

OF CHRISTIANITY. 277

infraction of his seventh command? I am
sure there is no such good society in Heaven ;
good society, which condones debauchery in
the man, but drives into a life of shame, and
a death of agony, and a future of what ? his
confiding victim ; good society, which curtsies
to the gold of divorced adulterers and adul-
teresses who look upon marriage as a stu-
pendous joke. Do you realize that there are
in the Borough of Manhattan fifty thousand
registered prostitutes, known to the police,
and fifty thousand more private mistresses
who ply their vocation clandestinely, the
greater part of them the victims of seduc-
tion? And do you know that ninety per
cent of these women unwillingly lead the life
they do ? That there is no alternative for
them with this career of sin ? Good society,
Christian society, has pushed them out to be
the scorn of a hissing world. No name in
Hell's dark catalogue too black to brand them
with. My God ! what frightful responsibility
rests upon the men who have sullied and
blighted young souls once

" Bright and pure
As a fresh opening lilac when it spreads
Its clear leaves to the sweetest dawn of May."

My God ! what responsibility attaches to

278 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

your good society, your Altruistic society, in
that it has done nothing to dry the tears that
wash out sin but cannot wash out shame —
in that it unblushingly countenances pro-
cedures that force into harlotry the unfortu-
nate daughters of toil.

Ah! how glaringly deficient in the principle
of doing it as unto God is the Christianity of
the day ! Your good society, your Christian
society, stands by untouched in the presence
of human misery and degradation — phlegmati-
cally beholds the confiding plundered by
ruthless speculators, and the poor in tatters
and nakedness, and men rendered bestial by
drink, and girls forced to dishonor by star-
vation wages, and jeweled patrons of the
bargain-counters literally trafficking in the
blood and virtue of woman. Ah ! how true
it is that what goes by the name of Chris-
tianity is not Christianity. Christianity is
not so cowardly as ever to ask, Is it safe?
Christianity is not so politic as to inquire, Is
it expedient ? Christianity is not so servile
as to question, Is it popular? Christianity
is not so economical as to query, Will it pay ?
Christianity only asks, Is it right ? Right to
give to my suffering brother of the abundance
God has given to me ? Right to unbend to

OF CHRISTIANITY. 279

the disreputable ? Right to speak kindly to
a fallen woman in hope to make her clean ?
Right to exhibit to her the serene beauty of
a holy life ? Right to admit her to converse
with those women whose spirits walk abreast
of angels ? Right, as Frances Willard cried,
" to place all women in circumstances of such
independence that they shall not be tempted
to make merchandise of those attributes of
their being which are the most sacred to God
and humanity ? " There must be heart as well
as head in religion. Does supercilious Al-
truism take these things seriously to heart?

The times are asking with startling empha-
sis, Is there nothing your Saviour wants you
to do that you are leaving undone to day ?
Is there no perverted imagination mocked by
the phantoms of anticipated indulgence that
you can win from debasing pleasures and lift
to commerce with the skies? Is there no
homeless girl who has learned too late that
men betray, and on whose ear is harshly fall-
ing the relentless doom of society, " Unclean
and outcast ! " to whom you can be brave
enough to say, " Sister in Christ, /do not con-
demn thee ? "

Is there no fallen woman pressing her
bleeding heart and beating her weary head

28o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

against the pitiless barriers an unchristian
community has built up around her, to whom
you can extend a sympathetic hand and help
her over the chevaux-de-frise that bar her
from communion with the good ? Do you
happen to live in a neighborhood

" Where every woe a tear can claim,
Except an erring sister's shame ? "

If so, you have work to do for your Saviour.
Up, and be doing it ! The disposition to
give the cup of cooling water here is more
acceptable to Him than whole burnt offerings
and sacrifices. For inasmuch as ye have
done it unto one of the least and one of the
worst of these his betrayed or misguided sis-
ters, ye have done it unto Him,

Once more, Altruism enjoins service with-
out regard to motives, fitness,or consequences.
Christianity, on the other hand, uses common
sense in its benevolence, and is inspired by a
regard for the highest good of its beneficia-
ries. Whereas Jesus Christ gave no encour-
agement to idlers, pickthanks, and beggars,
the Altruistic reformer seeks to emphasize the
permanent claim of poverty on the bounty of
the State or mutual benefit organization, and
thus puts machinery in operation to manufac-
ture a stock of dependents and parasites.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 281

Christianity condemns all unwise and in-
discriminate charity. The instinctive social
propensity, on the contrary, prompts men to
secure happiness for themselves by first ren-
dering others happy. The deed of so-called
charity may therefore proceed from no high
moral motive or sense of duty, but simply be
the expression of disinterested feeling. We
have to recognize the difference between such
emotional charity and that pure Christian
love of ones fellow-beings that is based on a
prayerful study of the philosophy of Jesus
Christ — that sends men forth into the house
of poverty and the bagnio of shame in obe-
dience to the divine command; that ties the
tongue of anger and even of reproach ; that
puts instead kind words into the mouth,
words of good will, words calculated to make
men better; that charity whose voice re-
sounds through the Gospel in the mandate,
" Live truly for yourself by living consist-
ently and discriminatingly for others."

Such love is a stranger to the sympathy
with one's self which is so characteristic of
Altruism. It does not condone the extrava-
gances of charity. It fearlessly disparages
merit in self-sacrifice pursued for itself alone,
and proclaims the test of spiritual value to

282 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

be, not the action, but the motive that
prompts the action. It is in full accord with
the Talmudic writer, that M the noblest char-
ity is to prevent a man from accepting char-
ity, and the best alms is to enable a man to
dispense with alms." M Give, it is like God,"
said Tupper. But Christian Altruism amends
this into u Give like God, and do no harm by
your gift." It recognizes the fact that un-
wise giving is not the cure for pauperism. It
deprecates all suicidal sacrifice, the sacrifice
of what is essential to an individual's own
highest development for the supposed ad-
vantage of some other individual. The only
sacrifice that Christian Altruism counte-
nances is a sacrifice not annihilatory of the
true self, but extirpative of what is false and
self-seeking in the self. Its devotion of life
and service to the welfare of others is thus
tempered with judgment. The self-sacrificing
woman who, in the face of recent scientific
conclusions to the effect that inebriates are
sufferers from a transmissible disease rather
than the slaves of a curable vice, deliberately
marries a drunkard to reform him, thereby
helps to perpetuate the evils she would cor-
rect and is false to her own better self. Gen-
erations to come have rights that Christians

OF CHRISTIANITY. 283

are under obligations to respect. We are
indeed at liberty to risk life itself for the
good of our fellow man, but a high-minded
man or woman must hesitate to jeopard the
health and happiness of a prospective family
for the purpose of satisfying the longings
even of the worthiest and purest affection.

The mistaken efforts of Altruism are
further manifested in the abuse of medical
charity, which encourages thousands of per-
sons who are abundantly able to pay for
professional services, to throng our dispensa-
ries and clinics. Thirty-nine per cent of the
people of New York receive — or to call a
spade a spade, in numerous cases steal — free
treatment and free medicine from the public
charities, the facilities in this line being
amply sufficient for a population ten times
as large as that of this city. The exagger-
ated devotion of certain pious women to all
kinds of charitable enterprises, whereby hus-
band and family are neglected and nothing
is left for the loved ones at home but head-
aches and impatient *words, is but a phase
of the same perversion. I have seen house-
holds broken up and cruel separations take
place because good wives forgot their su-
preme duty. This is not as God designed it.

284 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

I have seen nervous systems wrecked and
mental dyssymmetry result from making a
God of the imaginary demands of religion^
and pushing self-sacrifice to the verge ot
idolatry ! How true those words of Phillips
Brooks, " We must not be so full of the hope
of Heaven that we cannot do our work on
earth." And so the sentimentalists who fill
the murderer s cell with costly bouquets, with
gifts of cigars, wines, and delicatessen, and
pledge an ostentatious funeral after execu-
tion, but put a premium on the commission
of crime. That inspired daughter of God,
Mrs. Ballington Booth, has solved in a Chris-
tian spirit, and by a life of devotion not con-
spicuous for its neglect of home duties — the
great problem of the reformation of the pris-
oner for the protection of society. Christian
love must have activities ; but these activities,
like all other activities, have their limitations.
Finally, modern Altruism discriminates
in favor of the members of an order or so-
ciety. It urges the personal advantage of
membership in its fraternities, and seeks its
own to the exclusion of outsiders. Christi-
anity, on the other hand, enjoins universality
in self-sacrificing activities. " As we have
opportunity,'' counsels Paul, " let us do good

OF CHRISTIANITY. 285

unto all men," not merely to the members of
a mutual benefit society, not because they
are Odd Fellows, or Masons, or brethren
of some philanthropic order, but because
they are human beings. Under the Christian
system, "All work for each, each works for
all." " Everybody for me, I for nobody," is
the conspicuous dogma of Altruism, or Busi-
ness Love.

A good friend who belongs to the Inde-
pendent Order of Odd Fellows, in presenting
the claims of his brotherhood to my respect-
ful consideration, instanced a case in which
an Odd Fellow was seriously hurt in the
streets of a New England city, and thrown
from his carriage upon the sidewalk in front
of a pretentious hotel. As the bystanders
were carrying the injured man into the cor-
ridor, the proprietor dashed out, and with
the words, " I will not have my hotel turned
into a slaughter-house," ordered the bearers
back into the street. But upon the manifes-
tation of a secret sign by the swooning man,
his demeanor instantly changed. He de-
tected in the stranger a fellow of his order.
" Carry him in," he cried, " nothing in my
house is too good for that man." This inn-
keeper was an exemplary Levite, but a bad

286 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Samaritan ! A consistent Christian would
have said at the outset, " Nothing in my
house is too good for that man," not because
he is an Odd Fellow, but because he is my
brother in Christ, and as a Christian I re-
joice at every opportunity of this kind to serve
my Saviour. Christ is my Noble Grand ! "
Focus your eyes on the central sun, rather
than on the planet that borrows its light

Contrast with the incident just narrated
the following from Ian Maclaren's " Potters'
Wheel : " "A congregation made up of well-
to-do and easy-going people whom the
preacher has sought to move to the pity and
service of their fellow-creatures is coming
out of church. Just as they emerge, a run-
away horse knocks down and tramples upon
a young child. She is only a child of the
city — nameless and not lovely — who has been
in the park and was trudging home with a
few buttercups in her hand. It does not
matter. In such circumstances, Christian
people do not criticise nor calculate. A
little maid has been hurt, and her calamity
conquers the heart. Men are instantly
shaken out of their composure and rush to
her aid. Women forget their finery and wipe
away the blood. A whole company are of a

OF CHRISTIANITY. 287

sudden delivered from their selfishness and
inspired with human interest. Every sin —
pride, vanity, hardness, envy — is suspended ;
every virtue — love, sacrifice, gentleness, hu-
mility— is called into exercise. A crowd of
ordinary people has been suddenly raised to
practical sainthood by a stroke." There are
distinct inspirations behind this Christian
and that Odd Fellow exhibition of Altruism
—a scented and a scentless rose.

Most persons join altruistic societies for
material gain, for the personal advantage
they are led to believe will accrue to them-
selves ; for selfish sweets of love, not for the
good they may be instrumental in doing to
others. Hence such societies tend to culti-
vate self-interest, to the destruction of that
godlike spirit in man which scorns admis-
sion of weakness and dependence. I have
been flatly told tnat I was in request for
membership in a fraternity quite popular in
New Hampshire on account of the money
and service the brethren hoped to get out
oi me. The words were, " We want to use
you." I decided promptly that the highest
use the brethren could make of me for their
own good would be to continue independr
ent of me.

288 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

Another thing I have noticed is that men
who accept membership in secret organiza-
tions with social aims are apt to become in-
different to their religious duties, often cease
to attend divine service, interpret brotherly
love in its most contracted application to a
few favored think-the-sames, and practice
charity in accordance with their own pinched
whims. Such altruism is synonymous with
narrow-hearted favoritism ; it is the foster-
mother of hypocrisy.

I do not mean to condemn all secret be-
nevolent and social organizations, even with
their tendency to the abuse of the mutual as-
sistance theory, as well as to degeneration
into mere convivial clubs ; but I do mean
unhesitatingly to assert that they are all
slack-salted when contrasted with Christi-
anity— because of the immeasurably lower
level of the source from which their altru-
ism draws its energy.

Christianity unmistakably teaches that it
is not sacraments, nor ceremonies, nor secrets,
nor priestly ministrations, nor moral char-
acter, nor the whole synthesis of Christian
graces, that saves a man ! but the one thing
only God asks is living faith in Jesus Christ
— the fountain of a higher devotion, a more

OF CHRISTIANITY. 289

exalted brotherly love, a divine Altruism.
This is the root that disintegrates the soil of
indifference and selfishness and sends life to
the richest fruits of character. This was the
one thing the young man lacked who had
exhibited in so marked a degree the other
qualities of a perfect intellect.

I interpret the existence of altruistic socie-
ties as equivalent to an admission that Christ
is not enough ; for if Christ be all-sufficient,
and all-satisfying, surely every one of them
is superfluous. Their object as publicly de-
clared, viz., " to visit the sick, relieve the
distressed, bury the dead, educate the orphan,
improve and elevate the character of man,"
has been the avowed object of Christianity
for nineteen centuries, and has filled the
world with benevolent institutions, and has
given birth to multitudes of charitable or-
ganizations whose members in the name of
Christ extend a helping hand to every son
and daughter of sorrow. It is far nobler to
do this of one's own free will as unto Jesus,
than to do it because of obligation to a secret
society or philanthropic brotherhood — to do
it, as we all have known many to do, grudg-
ingly and of necessity.

Thank God for the heroic men and self*

19

290 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

sacrificing women who gladly give up ease,
wealth, social and professional distinction, to
minister to their suffering, sorrowing, sin-
burdened fellows — the wayward brothers of
the street, the sisters of the mill and factory }
the down-trodden mothers of the slums, the
fatherless and widow dazed and distraught
beside the new-filled grave. The incoming
of Christ into their hearts has been accom-
panied with the outgoing of personal ener-
gies in the warfare against moral and physi-
cal disease. Such altruism is inclusive ; it
holds all others. All lesser lights, all coun-
terfeits, imitations, and substitutes, pale in the
luster of its divinity.

Man is a social animal, and was not created
to live alone. His normal state is one of
quest for other personalities in sympathy
with his interests, enthusiasms, and purposes;
for other beings with souls of his soul, with
whom he may mingle smiles and tears. It
was a thought of the poets that angels
gather from such friendship half their joy.
Can we find it in perfection on the earth ?

You well remember these words of Christ :
" For whosoever shall do the will of my
Father which is in Heaven, the same is my
brother, and sister, and mother.,, (Matt. xii.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 291

50.) Here is the Altruist we cannot dis-
pense with ; the Perfect Friend, constant in
all things ; forgiving when slighted and even
insulted ; pointing the lost way in life's darkest
hour ; who companies the solitude of grief
and shares the thrills of triumph ; whose
whispered commendation is the greatest con-
ceivable stimulus to human action, the one
unchanging and inseparable Friend, of all
things the most rare, the Image of eternity.
Ah ! young man, when you have withstood
banter and ridicule at the hands of your com-
panions because you have insisted that
neither your person nor your property shall
be used as a means of grieving your God or
defiling your neighbor — when you have made
it plain that you are not afraid to play the
consistent Christian — Brave boy ! Listen to
the praise of your Saviour, whose will you
have respected, My Brother. Is it not far
sweeter than the approval of any altruistic
committee or confederation ? Is it not more
stimulating to lofty purpose and noble en-
deavor? Does it not strengthen you in your
resolve that there shall be no exceptions to
your rule, no favorites for whom you will re-
lax? And when your so-called friends fall
away in consequence of your inflexible ad-

292 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

herence to your convictions of duty, does it
not empower you to be thankful, to be proud,
that you are accounted worthy to suffer such
a loss for the sake of your Christian prin-
ciple ?

And you, young maiden, who mayhap have
denied yourself a consecrated home and shut
your heart to a good man's love in order that
you may act the mother to an orphaned
household or smooth the declining years of
an invalid parent, do you not know who is
watching the pearl of your hopes dissolve in
the acid of a cruel, yet sweetly unselfish de-
votion, and in recognition of your service for-
ever fills your loyal pathway with fragrance
from heavenly censers? Even He who has
proclaimed you his Sister, because without
complaining, without questioning its justice,
you have bent your fair head to his will.

And you, mother, who have laid your sweet
lambs in the earth, and you, wife, over whose
chosen one the grass is growing — where turn
you for the " faith that lifts, the courage that
sustains?" Is it not even to that jesus who
approves your womanly resignation to his
decree, and whose hand seems to rest upon
your arm, and whose " Peace, be still " brings
a great calm to the troubled waters of your

OF CHRISTIANITY. 293

anguish? Is it not that Christ whose words
are so articulate in your ears, My Mother?
Is there any such Noble Grand in your mu-
tual benefit societies ? Do you know of any
Worshipful Master who is able to discern
the hidden life or value at its true worth the
sacrifice and awful struggle ? Do you dream
of any consolation comparable to that the
Redeemer offers you ?

Mapla rj 'M.aydalrjvrj epxerat CKoriac en ovarjq —

Mary came when it was dark.

The presence of that forgiven woman il-
lumined the dismal scene on which pivots
the destiny of man, an empty sepulcher !
So, when all the heart-strings would pull the
heart asunder, the love of Jesus passing the
love of woman, will scatter the gloom of de-
spair, and the light of his grace, polarized in
its passage through the media of faith and
resignation will fill the darkened soul with
iris-hued comfort. And the sympathy and
support of the Divine Altruist are to be had
for the asking; the invitation supreme has
never been revoked: " Come unto me, all ye
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest. Take my yoke upon you,
and learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly in
heart : and ye shall find rest unto your souls.11

What is Christianity More than Agnosticism?
Modern Doubt and Christian Conviction*

(And he looked and said, There is nothing. 1 Kings xviii. 43.)

During the ten preceding Sundays, it has
been my privilege to talk with you upon the
false faiths and strange gods that may be
reckoned as dangerous foes to Christianity.
To-day, we are to consider non-religion or
Agnosticism, the fashionable unbelief which
maintains that the existence of anything be-
yond natural phenomena is unknown and un-
knowable, accepting no conclusions that are
not demonstrable by the procedures of ordi-
nary logic ; which in consequence denies im-
mortality and with it the existence of One
Supreme Omniscient Being, the primal Cause
of all life and the presiding Mind of the
Universe, and substitutes for intelligent de-
sign as an explanation of the things that are,
adaptation to purpose by natural selection,
that is, " by the gradual preservation of
better and better adaptations and the killing
off of worse and imperfect adaptations/' the
survival of the fittest, under the law of nature.
To instance from a Sunday lecture by the
late Professor Clifford, an English infidel: "A

EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 295

helper of men outside humanity, the Truth
will not allow us to see. The dim and shad-
owy outlines of the Superhuman Deity fade
slowly away from before us ; and, as the mist
of his presence floats aside, we perceive with
greater and greater clearness the shape of a
yet grander and nobler figure, of him who
made all gods and shall unmake them. From
the dim dawn of history and from the inmost
depths of every soul, the face of our Father
Man looks out upon us with the fire of eter-
nal youth in his eyes, and says, 'Before Je-
hovah was, I am ! ' Such is the message of
recent infidel philosophy.

Up-to-date Agnosticism, through the pen
of Mr. Grant Allen in his " Evolution of the
Idea of God," proclaims Deity to be an
evolved and abstract conception of the
human mind. The Jews carried about a
tribal god, Jahweh or Jehovah, a stone object
in a chest ; and this ancestral sacred stone at
a later date became sublimated and ethereal-
ized into the God of Christianity. Existing
men are declared to be the descendants of
people who have had religions for more
than a million years, Christianity being a
pure evolution. As we have no records
older than 6,000 or 7,000 years, it is difficult

296 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

to understand on what principle this author
knows so much about religion a million
years ago. If ancient literature and epig-
raphy prove anything, they unquestionably
prove a primitive monotheism, and establish
the fact that the heathen religions as we
know them to-day are the distorted images
of a pure faith which was originally revealed
to man.

Mr. Allen informs us with an air of inso-
lent nonchalance that Christianity confess-
edly sets out in its development with the
worship of a particular deified man, who, rev-
erenced at first by a few fishermen, grew
gradually into a divine personage. This but
uncovers the author's falsehood or exposes
his supreme ignorance of early Christianity;
for the disciples and their immediate con-
verts worshiped Jesus as their Lord and
their God. Mr. Allen continues: " The
Mother of God, the blessed Madonna, came
to have a practical importance in Christian
worship scarcely inferior to that enjoyed by
the persons of the Trinity;" and he foists
upon Christianity a host of minor dead men
and women, bishops, priests, virgins, con-
fessors, and the like, to prove that our re-
ligion at once surrendered its monotheism.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 297

It were easy to penetrate the veneer of this
sophism. Christians are neither saint-wor-
shipers nor Mariolaters ! Five hundred and
fifty miles of catacombs beneath the city of
Rome, entombing six million Christian dead,
give the lie to this infidel. These subterra-
nean galleries contain the earliest Christian
inscriptions and mural decorations full of
sweet trust, of unchilled hope, amid the
terrors of persecution, and everywhere inno-
cent of all leaning to the idolatrous. Within
her very bosom, incised in tile and marble
forever, Rome is mothering damning evi-
dence against these harlotries. The sepul.
chers of apostles and martyrs cry out in an
eternal protest. In these memorials of pure
Christianity, there is not the slightest insin-
uation of a belief in the efficacy of prayer to
saints, or of worship of the Virgin as co-
Mediatrix. In these solemn chambers, Christ
is the cynosure, the Alpha and Omega, the
all in all — " him first, him last, him midst,
him without end." This was primitive
Christianity.

In the erethism of his craze to belittle re-
ligious faith, Grant Allen endeavors to show
that adoration of the dead is the central
force in modern Christianity, and pronounces

298 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

corpse-worship the protoplasm of all religion.
But love for the dead, which Christianity ap-
proves, is a very different thing from worship
of the dead, which Christianity reprobates.
Mr. Allen has constructed in his mind an
effigy of Christianity, which he proceeds to
demolish with the usual weapons of the infi-
del. His book, a mixture of falsehood, Tar-
tufism, and self-conceit, is dangerous only to
the feeble-minded, or to those who have ac-
cepted instruction from theological systems
rather than from the pure and simple Word
of God.

Agnosticism derides the idea of a helper
outside humanity, makes sport of the his-
toric Christ, and blazons Jesus as "an alias
of the sun-God or an embodiment of the
vine-Spirit." Annie Besant, in a popular
lecture, voices as follows the position of mod-
ern infidelity : " The difficulty is not to
prove that Christ was believed to be an his-
torical personage after the fourth century,
but to bridge over the years A. D. 1-300.
You cannot carry the history of Christ and
the history of the gospels over that terrible
chasm of three centuries. I shall show how
various myths floating about became crystal-
lized around the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 299

I cannot admit the miraculous. That Jesus
of the gospels is miraculous is a stumbling-
block at the very outset. There are so
many incarnate gods in history, and they all
present the same birthmarks. They are al-
ways born at such a remote period, or at
some such an out-of-the-way place, that it is
impossible to submit their claims to scientific
investigation. Their births are always sur-
rounded by prodigies ; they always work
miracles when they grow up ; there is al-
ways something mysterious in their deaths :
they always ascend triumphant at last. I
allege that Jesus is one of these mythic char-
acters ! The essence of the spirit in which
science meets the record of miracles is the
spirit of Hume — that it is much more likely
that men should be deceived than that our
whole experience of nature should have been
contradicted."

In the several extracts I have brought to
your attention, is succinctly expressed the
attitude of the modern agnostic, viz. : No
God, no design, no Christ, no miracles ;
Nature a sort of linked succession of condi-
tioning causes and conditioned effects run-
ning itself through all eternity, under well-
understood physical laws that govern matter

300 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

and motion ; No First Personal Cause, no
Lawgiver, no cause and effect Connecter ;
Man the inventor of the gods ! As Aristotle
said, " Too much of Nothing."

Closing eye and ear to the hundred and
one monstrosities that are masquerading as
expositions of Christian belief, let us, — in the
first instance, grasp the essential characteris-
tics of the religion which agnosticism scoffs
at. Christianity certainly is not so narrow
as to brook confinement behind the bars of
denomination or school ; positively not so
bigoted as to enforce a claim to sovereignty
through some particular interpretation of
some musty document ; plainly not so child-
ish as to fancy that a panacea for sin exists
in ritual or dogma ; assuredly not so ungen-
erous as to condemn those whose beliefs de-
flect a degree from the perpendicular of one
of its sects, nor on the other hand so roman-
tic as to recognize in meretricious religions
chaste sister faiths. But Christianity is broad
and liberal and deep-hearted and withal dis-
criminating. It regards the Church only as
an instrumentality for our spiritual growth
and education; and teaches through that
Church the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ as
preserved in the Memoirs of his Apostles —

OF CHRISTIANITY. 301

not an inferential gospel derived from inter-
ested interpretations — never a conglomerate
gospel made up of New Testament jewels
and heterogeneous debris. Christianity when
referred to in this discourse will be under-
stood as the religion of the four gospels of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the origi-
nal springs of historical orthodoxy.

We are now in a better position to con-
trast the conclusions of agnostic logic, in the
first place, with the New Testament realiza-
tion of a God, at once transcendent, majesti-
cally enthroned beyond the skies, and im-
manent, an indweller in the universe, and its
phenomena, but not identical therewith.
Christianity finds this God everywhere, in
everything, and reads in the universe a vol-
ume which proclaims intelligent purpose
from its every page. It is in agreement with
the teachings of science, that there exists be-
tween every organism and its surroundings a
certain congruity or accord ; but it asserts
that this congruity is an evidence of divine
forethought, intention, provision. Such con-
gruity alone explains in a rational manner our
pleasure when we contemplate the structure
of the human hand, and see with what nicety
its many parts are adjusted to form a mem-

3o2 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

ber unequaled in strength, flexibility, and
usefulness. It alone makes intelligible the
astonishing adaptation to vision conditions
of the emmetropic eye, the only perfect opti-
cal instrument, the transformer of radiant
energy into light, self-correcting and self-ad-
justing, conveying sensations of color accord-
ing to class of nerve fibers impressed and of
form according to their number. And it
alone makes clear, as wisdom aforethought,
the striking harmony between this human
eye, to which blue gives sense pleasure and
red sense pain, and the predominance of the
violet end of the spectrum over the red in
the colors of external nature — of the preva-
lence of greens, and azures, and amethystine
grays, and wood-glooms, in hill and valley, in
stream and sky, in forest and prairie.

Do you realize that every flower is an ex-
pression of some insect's ideal of beauty,
shaped and tinted and perfumed by the Di-
vine Craftsman with the design of attracting
the moth commissioned to carry the pollen
of male uni-sexual growths to the glutinous
stigmas of fertile ovules ? Paleontology
teaches us that plants with gaudy blossoms
were bidden to bloom upon this earth simul-
taneously with the creation of nectar-seeking

OF CHRISTIANITY. 303

insects. The poet is wrong. There never
was a flower, in the purpose of God, born to
blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the
desert air. And then think of the metabo-
lism in plant life, whereby lifeless magnesia
and lime are converted, through the agency
of chlorophyl, into starch and sugar. Is this
an accident of the fortuitous concourse of
atoms ?

Even in the little things of creation, the
investigating mind detects the hand of the
Infinite. Atoms as well as mountain chains
reveal the vastness of the Divine Artificer's
resources, and kindle in a meditative soul a
sense of the Limitless. So infinitesimally
subtile and minute are the particles of ether,
that Tyndall estimated if all were swept to-
gether from the remotest corners of space,
they could be crowded into a common match-
box. In like manner, the imagination is con-
founded by the revelations of the microscope ;
the mind is appalled by the vastness of the
invisible world, is embarrassed and overpow-
ered in its efforts to comprehend the Potency
that fashions the minutest of structures and
becomes filled with a feeling of intense ex-
altation.

If you should examine the bottoms of the

304 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

little ponds to north of us, you would find
them covered to a varying depth with the
siliceous walls of dead microscopic plants
called diatoms, that form the tripoli or elec-
tro-silicon of commerce — so minute that
thousands of them would be required to bury
a pin's head. Their exquisite symmetry, del-
icate sculpturing, and matchless coloration,
give but momentary enjoyment apart from
the thought of complete adaptation to their
environment by divine wisdom, and com-
plete fulfillment in such adaptation of divine
purpose. The conscious apprehension of
such perfect congruity not only gives us the
pleasurable feeling of true Beauty, which in-
cludes the perfection of uses, but brings us
into loving touch with the Eternal God of
Harmony.

But when we leave behind the glories of
this lilliputian planet we have become accus-
tomed to, and stare through the windows of
the galaxy into immeasurable fathomless
space beyond, where universe of blazing suns
succeeds to universe as star succeeds to star
in the welkin above us — then it is that we
find ourselves confronting a mighty creative
instrumentality — an Absolute Author and
Finisher, unattainable by the conditioned

OF CHRISTIANITY. 305

processes of logical thought — God, Jehovah,
Eternal, One, Personal as is identity to the
soul. Then it is that we realize the truth of
the Psalmist's declaration, " The fool hath
said in his heart, There is no Personal God" —
then it is that the awful fact bursts upon us :
The unbeliever, the skeptic, the agnostic is
mad !

What are these stars ? To the careless
observer, the stellar universe is beautiful ; but
only he who grasps the moral force behind
the blue, who ascends to the creating and the
controlling Intellect, experiences the highest
satisfaction its beauty can give.

The moral force behind the sapphire — re-
gioned stars ! " It is not all that I see of the
British," said Hyder Ali, "that so impresses
me ; but what I do not see — the power beyond
the ocean — the power in reserve." So it is
the mysterious ulterior force, acting with
reference to a specific end, that awakens
within us Christians the devotional spirit in
its perfection. It is not so much the physi-
cal fact, as the truth of which that fact is an
utterance, and that Truth is God !

What are these Stars? The doctrine of

a plurality of worlds— that these heavenly

bodies are inhabited as well as the earth— is
20

306 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

perfectly consonant with reason and analogy.
It seems incredible that this insignificant
atom of the universe — our little world — a
dwarf amid myriads of giants that surround
it, should be exalted to an importance beyond
all the rest by being made the only one peo-
pled with immortal souls ! Is it likely that
the Almighty created the infinity of starry
hosts simply to give light to our diminutive
planet, or for the adornment of our noc-
turnal landscape, or even for the contempla-
tion of his own divine eye ? Do we find any-
where in the wide realm of nature the
slightest waste of material, or creative power
ever exerted without a purpose? Is any
portion of energy ever lost or destroyed ? Is
not every leaf a microcosm ? Does not a
clod of earth teem with bacteria ? and is not
a drop of water a universe in itself filled with
inhabitants of its own as perfectly fitted by
Divine Wisdom to their residence as are we
to ours ? And can we doubt that the same
design extends to the great objects of crea-
tion as to the small ? Can we reconcile to
our ideas of infinite love and wisdom the
thought that the stupendous worlds which
spangle our firmament are meaningless, use-
less, lifeless deserts ? Such questions will

OF CHRISTIANITY. 307

suggest themselves to the reflecting mind,
and may carry with them the conviction that
our sister planets, and even the distant
twinkling stars, are, have been, or are to be,
inhabited. Not necessarily by beings of like
physical constitutions with ourselves — indeed
that, under their different conditions of light,
heat, and electrical energy, would be impos-
sible ; but by other sheep, not of this fold,
adapted to their circumstances by the same
Omniscient Power that has fitted us to ours.
There are those who find no more in the
magnificence of the heavens than in the
bawbles of a jewelry shop ; yet the hand of
God has there " written legibly " that man
may know the personality as well as the
glory and omnipotence of the Maker. Is
there any rational explanation of all the in-
tricate machinery of the universe independent
of God? Can you conceive of cause here
without conceiving of it as power consciously
exerted ?

Intentional adaptation is the lesson of Na-
ture. The manifestation of thought in the
universe necessitates a thinker ! Christian-
ity discerns order which implies mind, as well
in the grouping of iridescent scales on a but-
terfly's wing as in the disposition of worlds

3o8 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

in the firmament It beholds its God again
in the economy of Nature, and interprets the
law of economy as an eternal principle, like
that of unity, proportion, order, harmony. In
common with the laws of physics and math-
ematics, they all imply the Divine. But not
order, nor developing purpose, nor omni-
present energy, nor physical law is God.
They are but utterances of Infinite Design.

When questioned by the officers of the
Inquisition as to his belief in a Supreme
Being, Galileo, the famous Italian physicist
and astronomer, mindful of the mathematical
principle that a hollow cylinder with its cen-
tral air-shaft is vastly stronger than a solid
cylinder of equal diameter, picked up a straw
from the floor of his dungeon, and facing his
persecutors, replied with all the courage of
his conviction : " Were there nothing else in
Nature to convince me of the existence of a
God, this straw alone would be sufficient."

There is either intelligent design in ac-
cordance with the universal, necessary, and
eternal principles of Science — or else the
universe is a chance product, which to me
would imply an infinitely greater miracle.

Grant for the nonce that certain chemical
elements combined by hap to make a sun ;

OF CHRISTIANITY. 309

it is in the highest degree improbable that
the same number of similar elements should
do so a second time. We might as well be
asked to believe that Hamlets and Paradise
Losts may be manufactured by shaking al-
phabets together in a tea-box. In illustra-
tion of the theory of chance repetition, Pro-
fessor Jevons calls attention to the fact that
in whist playing the number of distinct pos-
sible deals is so vast, and the variety of games
so incalculably great, that no one game could
be exactly like another except by intention.
Apply this well-known law of chance to the
universe, and it utterly fails to explain what
we see. It is much easier to admit design ;
there is more reason here for faith than
doubt.

A favorite Agnostic belief which denies
Gods personal authorship, and has much of
luck and hap about it, is the Darwinian the-
ory of self-evolving organisms — a very old
theory, by the way, and not original with
Charles Darwin, for Sanconiathon, the Phoe-
nician, taught in the fourteenth century R. C.
that intelligent beings were evolved from ani-
mals not possessing sensation. Grant the
truth of this, if you please, and where arc
we? Suppose we do share an animal nature,

310 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

an animal way of moving, digesting, oxygen-
ating blood, with higher brutes, and sub-con-
scious states with jelly-fishes. Suppose we
do possess a psyche in common with lower
animals. If God chose — I say if, for I do not
believe he did choose — to perfect the animal
part of me out of a medusa, what matters it ?
I know that I represent a spiritual order of
creatures. I know that I am made in his
image. If I could have risen to this from
lower forms of animal life, what faith I must
have in further possibilities of expansion.
There is practically no horizon to my devel-
opment. But however it may be, I cannot
but see God at the heart of primordial chaos
as I see him in the center of twentieth-cen-
tury civilization.

Now, granted the existence of design, of
perfect adaptation of means to ends, of parts
to wholes, of organisms to environment, —
which only they of unsound mind deny, — and
immortality must be admitted. Why ? Be-
cause, whereas the psyche or brute spirit whose
end is the mere animation of protoplasm
finds full scope for its activities and develop-
ment in this world — the pneuma or soul, that
whereby man is made a sharer in the attri-
butes of Deity, falls short of the climax of its

OF CHRISTIANITY. 311

growth amid an environment like this. " Deny
the existence of God,'1 said W. H. Mallock, in
the " Fortnightly Review," " deny mans free-
dom and immortality, and by no other con-
ceivable hypothesis can you vindicate for
man's life any possible meaning." The ca-
pacities inherent in man's nature demand
eternity for their evolution. Earth surround-
ings and soul possibilities are out of har-
mony. When I accept adaptation as the
exponent of all natural and spiritual laws, I
must believe in a personal God and concede
personal immortality.

Deniers of immortality contend that con-
sciousness is but a mere function of ani-
mated, healthy brain ; hence that a given in-
dividual must cease to be conscious when his
brain begins its physical decay at death.
This is true so far as the manifestation of that
particular consciousness through that par-
ticular brain is concerned ; for the brain is
simply a transmitter of consciousness, as the
telephone is a transmitter of speech. As-
suredly, the possibility of its transmission by
electricity does not affect the existence of
speech. The telephone does not produce
articulate audible sounds because it transmits
them. The piano is not the creator of music

312 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

because it is an instrument of musical ex
pression. Music, speech, consciousness, are
realities outside and above all media of trans-
mission.

A friend who is very dear to me, a graduate
of one of our great universities, recently
writes that he can find no satisfactory proofs
of immortality. He admits that nothing can
be destroyed, but doubts conscious identity
beyond the grave. He tells me he cannot
reconcile the idea of a future life of recogni-
tion and loving communion with an exalted
conception of the universe; that such a belief
seems to him to be founded on a false esti-
mate of the importance of the individual, as
it appeals to the selfish desires of mankind
by holding forth a hope of resurrection. In
this popular position of the day, what is ac-
corded to matter, force, and energy, is de-
nied to soul, viz., indestructibility. Moreover,
wherein lies the selfishness of working out
one's salvation in Christ? How is it any
more selfish than working out by attention
to business ones immunity from the cares,
discomforts, and suffering incident to life in
this world ? Although in so doing I may
invite a diagnosis of Gargantuan stupidity, I
must frankly admit that I cannot see. I fear

OF CHRISTIANITY. 313

the reconciliation of this difference between
us will have to be left to the great Eclair-
cissement

I recognize in the phase of opinion my
friend has honestly adopted a result of mod-
ern university instruction with its deplorable
tendency to unsettle belief. And I cannot
characterize in terms too condemnatory the
indifference of boards of trustees and col-
lege presidents to the religious training of
the youth for whose character-formation they
are largely responsible. At the judgment
seat they will be required to answer for their
pusillanimous evasion of duty — they who
should stand ready to sacrifice every con-
sideration connected with what is called the
higher learning to guard the honor and god-
ship of Jesus Christ not only in the Sunday
passiveness of high-priced pews, but in their
week-day service as fiduciaries of souls —
they who quiet their consciences by employ-
ing chaplains to talk religion to handfuls of
students, while paying large salaries to free-
thinkers and agnostics to distribute the
pseudo-sweets of skepticism among assaila-
ble thousands. It is the duty of the presi-
dent of a college which has long been re-
garded by the community as Christian in its

314 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

teachings and tendencies to purge his faculties
of all instructors, no matter how distinguished
from the world's point of view, who would
treat the social or theological system of Christ
as merely ancillary to some modern hypothe-
sis, or question the truth of the immortality
promised by him who said to the crucified
thief at his side, " To-day thou shalt be with
me in paradise." If consideration for what
society or culture may think of his action
weighs with such an officer, he is utterly un-
worthy of the sacred trust implied in his ac-
ceptance of the presidency of a Christian
university.

It is sad to contemplate the prevailing
trend of American higher education toward
religious looseness, apathy, and agnosticism.
Christian parents would do well to estimate
the risk involved in permitting educating
children to run the gauntlet of influences cal-
culated to undermine their faith. Christian
parents should regard it as their sacred duty
not only to investigate most carefully the
curriculum of the college they would select
as the training-mother of their sons and
daughters, but to test the class-room instruc-
tion itself with a view to becoming personally
acquainted with the dangers that must be

OF CHRISTIANITY.

3*5

encountered by young and susceptible matric-
ulates. Verily there is room in this Chris-
tian land for a great university distinctly
loyal to Gospel philosophy in its every de-
partment and in the aggregate of its schools
— a university in which the broad principle
shall obtain of Christ first, educational wares
and conceits second and subordinate.

Again, the attitude of your Agnostic toward
the miracles of Christ is one of contemptu-
ous, in many cases, of malicious ridicule. But
under our divine law of adaptation, were not
miracles consonant with the difficulties in-
volved in the transformation of human nature
by the introduction of the Christian system ?
Nothing short of miraculous intervention
could have been efficacious in enlisting the
affections and fixing the faith of the first be-
lievers. Miracles were the stamp of Christ's
authority.

Agnosticism either eliminates the super-
natural element from the gospel record, ac-
counting for the miracles of Christ on purely
natural grounds ; or else it regards the whole
history of Christ as a myth. " I allege," said
Annie Besant, " that Jesus is a mythical char-
acter. I cannot admit the miraculous." And
Renan went so far as to declare that " the

3i6

ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

passion of a hallucinated woman gave the
world its resurrected God " — that Christian-
ity is thus based on a lie — the false state-
ment of Mary Magdalene regarding the
empty sepulcher and the scattered cere-
ments.

Now Christianity is a system of belief
founded on the actual death and resurrec-
tion of Jesus Christ. Without these, as Paul
taught, our faith is vain. What ground then
have we for accepting them as facts? We
admit the miracle at which Agnosticism jeers
because, first, it does no outrage to our rea-
son ; because, secondly, we have irrefutable
testimony as to its occurrence. Once ap-
prehend a Supreme God, and the production
of any effect dependent for its cause on his
creative will becomes to you a possibility.
Says the Rev. R. L. Ottley, and well says :
" The abstract possibility of miracle seems to
be necessarily implied in the religious con-
ception of God as a free spiritual being to
whom the moral interests of the universe
are of higher importance than the uninter-
rupted maintenance of physical law." The
skeptic denies to the Almighty Lawgiver a
right which he concedes to every human leg-
islator, viz., the right to suspend the laws he

OF CHRISTIANITY. 317

has made ; the right " to intervene in his own
universe in behalf of his own good purpose."
There is a Super Nature as well as a Nature.
To quote St. Augustine : " The Supernatural
is the conception of an order of truths above
those of reason, and the conception of a self-
existent activity superior to that of mind and
matter as these latter display themselves or-
dinarily in the field of nature." Miracles are
indeed contrary to the natural order of
events, but not necessarily to the constituted
order of the universe. It is a very narrow
mind that regards what is called the regular
course of Nature as " the final gauge and
measure of the divine omnipotence ; " that
finds in the production of the visible universe
the limit of God's infinite creative energy ;
that fails to see in Nature itself only a tan-
gible phase of a far larger and grander
economy.

But for the moment, while recognizing their
possibility and their adaptation to the social
crises they were designed to meet and con-
trol in the interest of the truth, suppose we
set aside all miracles as imaginary — have we
anything left ? Anything in the human life
of the Son of God on which our souls can
feed, any inspiration, any comfort, any hope,

318 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

in the words of that Jesus of whom it was
said, " Never man spake like this man ? "
Words for all time, not for an age — teach-
ings which science cannot refute, which the
worst of infidels approve ; which Huxley him-
self, while contending that the Bible is a tis-
sue of lies, advocated the expediency of read-
ing and diffusing among the people? We
have left the religion of Christ adapted for
everlasting to the wants, the aspirations, the
disappointments, the sorrows of mankind.
No higher criticism will ever destroy it — no
obscuration of records, no inconsistent trans-
lations, no perishing of manuscripts, no ob-
literation of Scriptures. We believe and we
know that we have this eternally true religion
in the Bible; we have other things there, but
this is the jewel that is priceless. Therefore
I say let skeptics and critics take what they
will from the Sacred Text ; let them insist
that many a dogma of the church reposes on
no better foundation than erroneous render-
ings of the Vulgate ; let them ridicule the
bedevilment of the Gadarene swine ; let them
remain persuaded that the Pentateuch is a
recent forgery of Jewish scribes; let them
split Isaiah into four individuals. Grant that
the prophecies of Daniel were written long

OF CHRISTIANITY. 3i9

after the events predicted had occurred ; and
the Psalms of David date 500 years this side
of the poet king ; and that Moses, who was
known by name as a great lawgiver to
Manetho, to Strabo, and Tacitus, and Ju-
venal, to Celsus, and Porphyry, and Julian
the Apostate, never existed at all. Give in-
fidel and censor, and fault-finder of the If-
I-were-God type all they ask — and we Chris-
tians need have no misgivings. For the
religion of Jesus Christ is independent of,
and immeasurably higher than, traditions,
and translations, and canons of Scripture.
It must perdure in all its beauty and power
because it is so substantially interwoven with
the threads of human destiny as to admit of
no disentanglement, so deeply interfused
with truth inerrant as to constitute its very
soul. It is the brightening, reforming, exalt-
ing world-force that ties the human soul for-
ever to its God.

But are we under the necessity of dis-
pensing with miracles? Have we no unim-
peachable testimony regarding the greatest
of all miracles, the resurrection of Christ, on
which depends the validity of Christianity ?
Is it a historic fact ? Was it an empty or an
occupied tomb into which Mary of Magdala

320 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

peered? Is Jesus Christ the Son of God or
an impudent impostor? "Science," says
President Schurman, in " Agnosticism and
Religion," " is simply the record of the be-
havior of things under the established order;
neither her method nor her apparatus en-
ables her to go beyond this limit ; and when
Omnipotence comes upon the scene, she is
smitten with impotence. Only there are such
good reasons for faith in the continuity of
natural causation that no one can be expected
to believe, without the strongest evidence, in
a breach due to the miracle of supernatural
agency." Have we such evidence for the
resurrection of Christ ?

In cases where personal knowledge is in-
sufficient, we naturally turn to the experience
of others wrhence really comes the great mass
of what we know. It is what others have
seen or heard that constitutes history, estab-
lishes guilt or innocence, proves or refutes
crucial questions. Concurrence in the oral
or written testimony of a number of witnesses
determines facts with absolute certainty.
The story of the gospels, embodying the
consistent testimony of the four Evangelists,
is a perfect illustration of this kind of proof.
In connection with the substantial agreement

OF CHRISTIANITY. 321

of the four reports, I quote briefly from "An
Examination of the Testimony of the Four
Evangelists by the Rules of Evidence Ad-
ministered in Courts of Justice," in which are
presented the convincing arguments of Prof
Simon Greenleaf of the Harvard Law
School, a great American authority on this
very law of evidence : " The character of
their narratives is like that of all other true
witnesses containing substantial truth under
circumstantial variety. There is enough dis-
crepancy to show that there could have been
no previous concert among them ; and at the
same time such substantial agreement as to
prove that they all were independent nar-
rators of the same great transaction. The
discrepancies between the narratives of the
several Evangelists, when carefully examined,
will not be found sufficient to invalidate their
testimony. If these different accounts of the
same transactions were in strict verbal con-
formity with each other, the argument against
their credibility would be strong. All thai
is asked for the witnesses is, that their testi-
mony may be regarded as we regard the tes-
timony of men in the ordinary affairs of life.
If the evidence of the Evangelists is to be

rejected because of a few minor discrepancies

21

322 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

among them, we shall be obliged to discard
that of many of the contemporaneous histo-
ries on which we are accustomed to rely."

There is no discrepancy in the gospels re-
garding any essential fact or important doc-
trine or duty. Omission is not contradiction.
Matthew overlooked the vision of the shep-
herds; Luke the visit of the Magi and the
slaughter of the Innocents — but for this rea-
son Matthew and Luke are certainly not to
be adjudged as contradicting the other Evan-
gelists who mention these events ! More-
over, to continue the quotation from Professor
Greenleaf: "It is impossible to read their
writings and not feel that we are conversing
with men eminently holy, acting under an
abiding sense of the presence of God and of
their accountability to him. Now, though in
a single instance a good man may fall when
under strong temptation, he is not found per-
sisting for years in deliberate falsehood, as-
serted with the most solemn appeals to God,
without the slightest temptation or motive,
and against all the opposing interests which
reign in the human breast. If, on the con-
trary, they are supposed to have been bad
men, it is incredible that such persons should
have chosen this form of imposture, enjoin-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 323

ing as it does unfeigned repentance, the for-
saking of falsehood and every other sin, the
practice of self-denial and self-abasement, the
crucifixion of the flesh with all its earthly ap-
petites and desires, and hearty contempt of
the vanities of the world. It is incredible
that bad men should invent falsehoods to
promote the religion of the God of Truth.
From such absurdity, there is no escape ex-
cept in the admission that the Evangelists
were good men testifying to that which they
had carefully observed and considered and
well knew to be true."

The accounts given by these trustworthy
narrators of the life and character of Christ
display a wonderful uniformity, leaving no
room for doubt that the same Divine Origi-
nal sat for the several portraits. And this
Jesus, according to the accounts of his dis-
ciples (whose testimony regarding their
Master we are certainly under as great obli-
gation to accept as that of the disciples ol
Confucius, Socrates, and Buddha)— this Jesus
fore-announced his resurrection, and staked
upon its occurrence the truth of his divine
mission. The fact that he did so, pro>
that he was not an impostor. The fart thai
his twelve disciples held to their belief in his

324 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

rising from the dead amid a maelstrom of
persecution which whirled them to horrible
deaths, proves that they were not unprincipled
falsifiers.

But we are to remember that the gospel
accounts constitute but a small part of the
mass of ancient testimony in favor of the
Resurrection. The various Epistles of the
New Testament reflect first-century belief
concerning this event — the Epistles to the
Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians (char-
acterized by Renan as " unquestionable and
unquestioned") having been indited within
thirty years of our Lords death. And these
Epistles have borne witness through the ages
to the crucifixion of Christ for our sins, and
his rising for our justification. From these,
as well as from Tacitus, Pliny, and other
pagan sources, we learn that the personality
of Jesus Christ attracted unwonted notice in
the history of the time ; that he was crucified
under Pontius Pilate, and that thereafter his
followers, called Christians, founded churches
throughout the Roman Empire, worshiping
Christ as their Lord, and for love of him and
belief in his resurrection, joyfully accepting
the most painful and ignominious deaths
with songs of praise upon their lips. In the

OF CHRISTIANITY. 325

first Apology of Justin Martyr (138 A. D.)
addressed in behalf of the Christian Church
to the Emperor Antoninus Pius, we have di-
rect historical* testimony of the resurrection,
with references to Memoirs of Christ, com-
posed by the Apostles and called gospels,
as being read in the churches every Sunday
from Syria to Gaul. And Papias, Bishop of
Hierapolis, at the beginning of the second
century, bears witness to having received in-
formation respecting the first and second
gospel from John the Presbyter, who had
conversed with the immediate witnesses of
Christ's resurrection.

But further than this and of immensely
greater importance, God has brought to the
knowledge of the world, within the last ten
years, a Harmony of the Four Canonical Gos-
pels compiled in the second century, and from
that time to this locked up in Syriac and
Arabic texts. I refer to the Diatessaron, or
Fourfold Gospel, of Tatian the Syrian, a dis-
ciple of Justin Martyr, who embraced Chris-
tianity at Rome and constructed from the
four original standards he there studied a
composite gospel, read for centuries in the
churches of Syria. This Diatessaron was re-
ferred to by ancient writers before 250 A. D.,

326 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

and it proves incontestably the existence of
the four gospels, practically as we now have
them, at the threshold of the second century.
Hence they could not have been forgeries, or
the manufactures of the Council of Nice in
325 A. D., as has been declared by inventive
infidels to throw discredit upon them. The
three hundred years Annie Besant cannot
bridge have been bridged by God.

Once more, two institutions in the Chris-
tian Church — the Lords Supper and the
Lord's Day (which displaced the Jewish
Passover and Sabbath) have borne witness
from the beginning that Jesus really did die
and really did rise from the dead. Ration-
alistic infidels take pleasure in asserting that
he did not die, but passed into a swoon or
trance from which the aroma of the burial
spices awakened him to consciousness — but
it is the testimony of all history that Jesus
wras dead. Mural paintings in catacombs of
the second century perpetuate his death and
resurrection. All Palestine admitted it.
When Peter charged the men of Israel with
the murder of Jesus before the Sanhedrim,
the accusation was not repelled, as it would
have been if untrue; and John the beloved
disciple testifies, with scientific exactness that

OF CHRISTIANITY. 327

the physical cause of the death of Christ was
rupture of the heart, whereby the pericardial
sac was filled with blood — shortly separated
into serum and clot which followed the spear
thrust of the Roman soldier as blood and
water. Roman executioners were sure in
their work. And never man died like this
man. " Read the history of Christ from the
procession of palms to the crucifixion," said
Gladstone, "and what a superhuman majesty
is spread over the whole. You may talk of
all religions as being essentially one and the
same ; but what religion presents to its vota-
ries such a sight as this? The behavior of
our Lord in the extremity of his debasement
transcends all human limits, and exhibits
without arguing his divinity."

No contemporary doubted that the King
of the Jews was dead when Joseph of Arima-
thea, the friend of Pilate, laid his body in the
tomb. Within two months after the crucifix-
ion, on the day of Pentecost, the Apostles,
who were not deceived, who could not have
been deceived, proclaimed his resurrection,
and founded a Church which would have
been meaningless without it. You and I
have as logical a reason for believing that
Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead as

328 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

that Queen Elizabeth once sat upon the
throne of England, or that on May day,
1898, Commodore Dewey destroyed the
Spanish squadron in the harbor of Manila.

In conclusion, let me say to my doubting
friend : Examine the evidence, pro as well as
con, before you pass sentence. Remember
that intellects like those of Bacon and Kep-
ler, and Newton, and Daniel Webster, and
many modern men of science, looking at the
evidence, accepted it because there was reason
behind it. Do not, like the gifted author of
" Robert Elsmere," that story of the battle
of beliefs, inform yourself only in the nega-
tive writers, and remain ignorant of the Chris-
tian apologists. Do not allow your thirst to
be slaked by the scanty draughts of knowl-
edge that have quenched hers. Do not ac-
cept the unsatisfying substitute offered for
revealed religion by a woman whose mind
has been tickled, but whose soul remains un-
touched, and who gives back practically noth-
ing for the belief she would destroy. Re-
member, she would not seek to steal your
faith if it were not worth stealing. Judge
fairly whether historical Christianity rests
solely on testimony that is so easily over-
thrown, or whether it is its own best proof —

OF CHRISTIANITY. 329

whether it is an orchid hanging on emotion
only, or strikes its roots deep down into the
soil of intellect.

If you will look the seventh time from
Carmel, be sure you will detect the fluffy
cloud that forecasts the mighty rain. You
are under obligations to look that seventh
time. Take the road you are sure is the
right one. Take some road. Stand no longer
in dreamy hesitation or obstinate inactivity
at the crossing. Let me say to you that I
am confident I have incontrovertible evidence
of the existence of an All-Wise God, in the
nature about me, in the happenings of my
own life ; and of the death and resurrection
of his Son Jesus Christ at Jerusalem between
30 and 33 A. D. from the testimony of his-
tory. The burden of proof rests on the Ag-
nostic. Let him offset this with convincing
evidence to the contrary.

I believe also in the inspiration and authen-
ticity of this Bible as the revealed Word of
God. From it, you can subtract nothing. To
its genuine text, you can add nothing. It is
"a simple book for simple men." Only those
who know least about it prate glibly of its
inconsistencies. Only the Simonists of phi-
losophy falsely so-called levy tascal and black-

330 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

mail. Only they who have private purpose
or selfish aim to subserve would shroud its
clear statements in obscurity, or make it all
a mystical allegory requiring the skill of a
learned profession to decipher and explain.
"Turn it and turn it again," said a wise Tal-
mudic author, " for everything is in it" It
has withstood the attacks of the worlds infi-
dels from the spleen of Celsus and the blas-
phemy of Porphyry to the dangerous inaccu-
racy and willful misrepresentation of Robert
Ingersoll. Humanity is growing weary of
their driving sleet of falsehood and abuse
that passes as argument among illiterate
scoffers. If this book were vulnerable, rest
assured the weak spots would have been ex-
posed centuries ago; for no book on earth
has stood the cautery of such searing criti-
cism as the New Testament. The fact that
its haters have descended to pasquinade
demonstrates its inviolability.

Now if I believe in an all-wise, all-loving
God, at once transcendent and immanent, in-
finite in power and everywhere at work, a
Being to whom I owe my life and my all — a
God of love upon whom I can rely so implic-
itly as to say, Though he slay me, yet will I
trust in him — surely I can accept his plan of

OF CHRISTIANITY. 331

salvation for the race to which I belong,
through an Incarnation " stupendously divine
and yet so sweetly human," by the sacrifice
of Jesus Christ his only Son with whom he
has promised freely to give me all things.
And I can build upon the assurance he alone
has vouchsafed that this visible is not all ; on
the hope of a future life of happy activities,
on the interpretation of death as joyous arri-
val at the Fathers House rather than reluc-
tant departure from a strange and opportu-
nity-exhausted land.

Ah! dear friends, when we are called upon
to shake hands with Time; when we are ap-
prised no longer to go to those deep wells
of mystery with the cracked pitchers of our
imperfect intellects — O ! may it not be our
lot to feel with the philosopher of Malmes-
bury that we are taking a fearful step in the
dark, or with the mother of Hume that the
Pyrrhonism which we have embraced in lieu
of the simple, satisfying faith of our child-
hood is woefully insufficient — the mess of
pottage for the birthright. But may we look
back with joy and satisfaction upon lives of
loyalty to Him of Bethlehem, and forward with
hope uncomprised through faith in the Son
of God to a blessed certainty beyond the veil

332 EVIDExNCES OF CHRISTIANITY.

May God give us light, even the light of
the knowledge of Christ, to dispel all clouds
of doubt and agnosticism ; may God give us
faith in all his inexplicable dispensations;
may God bring us into that closest commun-
ion with the Saviour that must render our
position as Christian believers impregnable
alike to the assaults of Satan and the sophis-
try of man.

Evidences of Christianity.

(Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you
a reason of the hope that is in you. I Peter iii. 15.)

My concluding address must be intro-
duced with an apology. I stand here to-
night to give you a reason of the hope that
is in me, not reasons in full for that reason.
It were impossible in the brief space of one
hour to make any searching examination imo
the evidences of Christianity, or even intelli-
gibly to enumerate the sources of proof. The
presentation of a complete argument would
necessitate many courses of lectures and im-
ply a lifetime of thought.

Still, on the principle that, as intellect has
in this day so much more to do with Chris-
tian belief than mere feeling, every Chris-
tian should have some presentable theory of
his faith, it would seem wise to exhibit cardi-
nal results and all-satisfying convictions for
your serious consideration. And this is all
the more important because so few who bear
the Christian name, and who believe in the
Bible simply because their parents once told
them that it is the word of God, are at all

334 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

capable of advancing any rational reason for
their belief. If what may be said this even-
ing shall have the effect of stimulating per-
sonal research on your part, leading you, in
accordance with the advice of King Solomon
in Ecclesiastes vii. 25, to apply your hearts " to
seek out wisdom, and the reason of things,
and to know the wickedness of folly, even of
foolishness and madness," and I may add of
spiritual insensibility and agnostic indiffer-
ence, I shall feel that God has blessed my
unworthy but sincere efforts in the cause of
truth.

Incontestable evidences of revealed re-
ligion other than attested miracles, which
have already been considered, are to be
found :

I. In the fulfillment of predictive prophe-
cies.

II. In the spiritual victories of Christi-
anity.

III. In the debt of the world to the Chris-
tian religion.

IV. In subjective personal conviction.

St. Augustine somewhere wisely remarks,
" A Christian ought to study the prophets in
order that he may not forget why he be-
lieves." Fulfilled prophecy is indeed a

OF CHRISTIANITY. 335

" light that shineth in the dark places " and
as such is one of the most convincing evi-
dences of revelation ; for admittedly none
can know the future except the great Dis-
poser of historic events and the human
minds he selects for impression with visions
of what is to be. The political economist
sees in the records of the human race only
the automatic workings of a law of cause
and effect ; the Christian recognizes the dis-
pensations of that Being who has so con-
nected cause and effect as to compel events,
and who clearly foresees all the future. Vol-
umes have been written on the fulfillment of
prophecy, of which both infidel and Chris-
tian believer are as a rule entirely ignorant.
Not only is the career of the Messiah in his
character as God and Man, as Prophet,
Priest, and King, clearly portrayed by He-
brew seers — Christ thrown into superlative
relief, in whom and through whom the scepter
has not yet departed from Judah — but a
hundred and one several predictions, whose
minute fulfillment is most astonishingly au-
thenticated by modern observers and critics,
prove that Omniscience itself dictated these
forecasts of far-off days. The Christian
Bible is the only sacred book that unerringly

336 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

predicts, and hence bears unequivocal stamp
of inspiration. No thoughtful person can
read it without being spelled. It was written
to withstand the worst that malice and
hatred can project ; to impress human
natures so long as there are human natures
to impress. It is the voice of the only God
who has never failed to make good promise
or threat.

Leaving you to peruse the unanswerable
reasoning of Dr. Alexander Keith in his
work on prophecy, a most effective antidote
for skepticism, I shall ask your attention
only to a single instance of foreknowledge
which, so far as I am aware, theologians
have not estimated at its true worth. I re-
fer to the marvelous prevision of the tenth
chapter of Genesis, which anticipates the
great philological discoveries of the last fifty
years, and thus puts to the foil colorable
argument against the credibility of the Pen-
tateuch. The subject of this chapter is
Ethnic Affinities, and its statements are
conspicuous among what our infidel friends
have been pleased to characterize as the mis-
takes of Moses.

Confining ourselves to the genealogy of
Japheth, we here learn that Gomer the Celt,

OF CHRISTIANITY. 337

and Magog the Slav, and Madai the Indo-
Iranian, and Javan the Graeco-Roman, and
Tiras the Teuton, shall successively hold
sway ; and we may infer, through ascending
levels of civilization, to the climax plane the
Anglo-Norman stands upon to-day. The
parts played by these peoples of Moses in the
great drama of history, according to the Bible
accounts, correspond precisely with the parts
assigned by profane records to the founders
of Celtic France and Britain, whose golden
age has been fixed at one thousand years
before Christ ; to the first settlers of Slavonic
Russia, Poland, and Bohemia ; to the fathers
of Vedic Aryans and monotheistic Zoroas-
trians, of Pelasgian Greeks and Italians, of
Teutonic Germans and Scandinavians. Com-
parative philology, a science of this century,
from a study of existing speech has conclu-
sively proved that the tongues spoken by
the ancient Japhetic races, as well as the
descended modern languages, agree in their
words and grammatical structure. Thus it
establishes their kinship and proves the fore-
cast of Moses, who, looking into the tenant-
less forests of Europe predicted, fifteen
hundred years before the Christian era, their

occuprncy by the races who have made them
22

338 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

the foci of civilization. What is there but
the communicated prescience of the Al-
mighty to explain this clear vision of the
prophet wherein he beheld the future of
those nations of the Caucasian race that for
centuries enjoyed the dominion of the an-
cient world as well as of those that are now
foremost in physical and intellectual power ?
The prophecies of the tenth chapter of Gene-
sis are among the most awe-inspiring in the
Bible. They could not have been forged at
any time before 1850, because the knowledge
they embody has become known since the
middle of the present century. Hence, so
far as this chapter is concerned, the Penta-
teuch, if forged by modern Jewish scribes as
alleged, must have been forged within the
last fifty years, and this is the delirium of
infidel audacity. Age after age God discov-
ers to us new proof of the integrity of his
Word. Blot out every other prophecy of the
Bible, and this forecast of Japhetic distribu-
tion and supremacy would convince me of
the truth of its inspiration.

In passing, let me suggest that accurate
retrospect is as much a miracle as unerring
foresight — looking backward for eons into
ages of chaos and star-dust and inditing for

OF CHRISTIANITY. 339

future generations a true cosmogony. This
did the man Moses. His Genesis, and the
revelations of science so far as they go, are in
accord. Does he not show us that in the begin-
ning, whenever that was — a hundred million
years ago, perhaps — God created ; and does
not physics declare that matter is not self-
made when it assumes matter and motion
and explains the universe under their laws
as it knows them ? It has never ventured
to hint at a cause for either. Astronomy
and physics substantiate the account given
by Moses of a great primitive nebula or in-
definitely diffused gas filling the void of
space, of the separation of this into smaller
nebulous masses, of the concentration of
these masses into stars, of a self-luminous
earth with a photosphere like that of the
sun, and of the formation beneath the pho-
tosphere of a crusted plant-producing globe,
from which luminous heavenly bodies which
had existed through the first, second, and
third ages, at last become visible in the
fourth day synchronously with the loss of
photosphere. God created radiant energy
or light in the first day by setting particles
of matter in motion; but nebulous stars were
invisible from the earth until the luminous

340 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

gas that surrounded it cleared away. To-day
an observer on Mercury could not see the
sun through the fiery atmosphere that en-
wraps the planet. No inhabitant of earth
has ever seen Mercury's crust through these
luminous clouds. The apparent placing of
the creation of the sun and moon so long
after the creation of radiant energy, in the
fourteenth verse of the first chapter of Gene-
sis, is the strongest conceivable evidence
of the Hebrew cosmologists inspiration.
Science is just finding out what Moses clearly
beheld. Geology is confirming the order of
the successive appearances of life-forms on
the earth as related by him. His account of
the creation is forever receiving the support
pf fresh discoveries. Is it not infinitely more
rational to admit that these astonishing sur-
veys of universe construction, these anticipa-
tions of modern scientific discoveries, were
revealed by God, than to suppose that a
mere man, educated though he were in the
profoundest learning of the Egyptians, should
have transcended all imaginable exercise of
human faculties ?

You will remember that the Galilean car-
penter foretold to a trembling group of un-
lettered and unmoneyed disciples, in the face

OF CHRISTIANITY. 341

of the blackest of outlooks, the ultimate tri-
umph of his religion as a world faith. Nearly
nineteen hundred years have since passed,
years signalized by spiritual victories that
stamp such an announcement for the future
as divine. For never was conflict so unequal :
a handful of unlearned paupers arrayed
against the Roman Empire, fearlessly forcing
a new issue, even salvation through the sac-
rifice of Christ, and confirming the great
truth of the Jewish scriptures that there is but
one God. And what a world their Gospel
was launched in ! Rome was the center of
an appalling licentiousness that pervaded art,
literature, domestic life, public worship. The
city swarmed with divorced wives. Marriage
was a mockery. A chance exponent of con-
jugal virtue who clung to her single husband
was hissed as a one-man woman. Knights,
philosophers, poets, patricians, titled ladies,
and dancing girls, lay drunk together at the
feast. Sodom was out-Sodomed in the royal
palace. Murder in every phase was rife and
thought nothing of — infanticide, matricide,
uxoricide. Gladiator slew gladiator for the
delectation of harlots. Emperors controlled
by unprincipled courtesans steeped them-
selves in infamy and insane follies. Political

342 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

corruption was ubiquitous and brazen-faced;
every man had his price. The Empire was
hopelessly infiltrated with the poison of
nameless iniquity ; the imperial city was a
hideous malignant neoplasm. And philoso-
phy stood by, impotent to check the awful
ravages of the moral carcinoma.

Christianity comes upon the scene to win
its treasures from this cesspool of depravity,
teaching its lessons of forgiveness and self-
control, impressing its touch of love on the
ruffian of the arena and even on the heart of
the Praetorian soldier, who kneels to its new
God. In the flames of the stake torch, under
the teeth of the lion, and on the horns of the
aurochs, amid the stench and typhus of the
Mamertine prison, at the shambles of Diocle-
tian, where the weapons of the executioners
were dulled by the multitude of martyrs and
commissioned butchers sunk exhausted to the
sands — she ever uttered her divine message,
Peace on earth, Good will to men. From
every persecution she emerged with renewed
strength, until at last she saw the fabric of
pagan mythology shattered ; Caesar, the Sen-
ate, the Roman people, the iron legions —
power such as eye of man had never beheld
nor mind of man conceived, subdued by her

OF CHRISTIANITY. 343

persuasive art ; and she rose under Constan-
tine to imperial sway. Is it conceivable that
a faith without supernatural support and di-
rection could have passed through so fiery a
trial and accomplished such a result, the in-
tellectual and moral conquest of the Roman
world ? We are justified in asking, " Of what
is such a faith incapable ? " The Christian '
Church is a greater miracle than the Jew. It
lives, it thrives, it ever extends its dominion,
it bestows its gifts with regal grace and dig-
nity, it educates, it exalts, it comforts in mis-
fortune attd sorrow, it assures in the hour of
death. Can this Church be rooted in myth,
or fiction, or imposture ?

And then find another evidence of Chris-
tianity in its victories over individual char-
acter, its transfiguration of personalities who
know no law beyond their own passions into
personalities of opposite traits, dominated by
spiritual purpose. Nowhere perhaps is this
more impressively illustrated than amid the
realism of the Roman amphitheater, when in
response to the cry of " Christians to the
lions!" victims flaming with fever, human
prey with cyanotic lips and clammy hair were
dragged from the dripping dungeons of the
Esquiline and thrown to famished wild beasts ;

344 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

when Christian virgins were ravished by glad-
iators and hurled into the dizzy mellay of
striped and tawny carnivores, while emperors
surrounded by lewd bacchantes and prosti-
tuted vestals looked on and jeered. Amid
this dream of Hell, Christ reigned supreme in
the souls of those he called upon to suffer
for his name. An unearthly calm came into
their hearts, a holy radiance illuminated their
faces, they saw as it were the smile of their
Redeemer, and counting as nought the physi-
cal anguish, they cried, " O Christ, thy will be
done." It was this that filled the onlookers
with terror, this sustaining power imparted
by a mighty God in the quivers of the death
agony. And the same spirit is abroad in the
world to-day, and would empower men and
women again, should the demand be made
upon their faith, to hang upon crosses in am-
phitheaters and blaze in pitch-steeped tunics
for the sake of their Christian belief. Loy-
alty to Christ does exist. I believe with Ian
Maclaren that there has been no age " since
the days of the Roman martyrs characterized
by such devotion to the Saviour, whether you
gather the evidence from the Salvation Army,
which with all its seeming extravagances is
touched with a noble and simple heroism, or

OF CHRISTIANITY. 345

the missions" whose sweet spirits like Mary
Reed entomb themselves in leprosaries to
carry to the most repulsive of physical suffer-
ers the message of Christian consolation and
peace.

The ideal man of this age is the Christian
man — that true embodiment of all that is
pure, refined, tender, dignified, consistent,
humane, self- forgetful, noble, chivalric. His
kindly manners, his cheery conversation, his
courteous welcome, his hearty Godspeed, his
delight in comforting and helping and bestow-
ing little kindnesses and lifting better up to
best, are but the legitimate fruits of Christ
love. His sincerity rebukes the barefaced
falsehood of a recent writer on Altruism,
" Everybody is insincere in civilized coun-
tries." Think of it. Christian character
must have consistency, the jewel than which
there is nothing so rare, and I may add,
nothing so unpopular. There is no caste in
his Christianity. History reminds us that at
the festival of Christ's birth, the gala day of
all the year, the proud baron of the Middle
Age opened his hall to his vassals and stooped
to the meanest serf in friendly converse, while
his sons danced with russet nymphs on the
village green. All were brothers. But with

346 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

a consistent Christian every day is a Christ-
mass day, a feast of Christ, on which the
motor spring of his God love never fails to
bend him down to the poor and lowly, the
sick and sorrowing, nay, even to the dis-
reputable and ungodly. One ought to be
proud to have it said of him, "This man
eateth with publicans and sinners." One
should be happy when he hears it observed,
" This man will not worship in idol-houses
where ecclesiastical pride is enthroned with
all its ceremonial of colors, candles, censer
scents, and operatic music; where calculating
etiquette supplants natural courtesy, and
freezing reserve displaces sunny intercourse ;
where supercilious officials receive ones serv-
ice as if he were their serf and not their
equal before God ; where hard-souled but
sumptuously dressed patrician constituents
studiously give the cold shoulder to Christ's
poor." A discriminating divine once said,
" The man was never born who could long
carry the load of such a church with a Christ-
like love of souls in his heart"

Finally, the crowning grace of the char-
acter made new by Divine love is spirituality,
the diametric contrary of worldliness. How
the free soul within us detests the worldling.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 347

the man or woman in whose eyes sacred
friendship has only a money equivalent;
who, as Voltaire described it, " squeezes the
orange and throws the rind away;" who val-
ues you only for what can be got out of you,
and on the first opportunity returns your dis-
interested kindness with injuries that are
reflexly profitable. This is the spirit of the
world ; but spirituality sees the eternal value
of things, recognizes the touch of Heaven in
the commonest objects of earth, moves in an
atmosphere of sympathy and love, and is sen-
sitive to obligations that sway among angels.
Such spirituality no infidel can argue away.
It is the imprint of Christ's own hand, and
as such, is the strongest character evidence
that one may ask for the truth of revealed
religion.

But while admitting the character-trans-
forming powers of our faith in certain in-
stances, some will urge that Christianity is
disproved by the fact that atrocious crimes
have been committed in its name ; that it
has authorized orgies of blood ; that it has
poisoned the consecrated wafer to make way
with objectionable persons at the celebra-
tion of the Eucharist; that it kindled the
fires of Oxford and of our own Salem ; that

348 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

it has warranted sharp practices, theft, and
adultery, on the part of its supporters ; that
it winks at the expenditure of seven hundred
million dollars annually in this Christian
land for soul and body killing alcoholic bev-
erages, compelling the appropriation of an-
other seven hundred million dollars for the
relief of the destitution and the punishment
of the crimes that result directly from the
drink habit ; that its selfish professors,
though warned by the voice of medical
science, deliberately refuse to limit the
prevalence of preventable diseases by atten-
tion to a few simple hygienic precautions,
and thereby are become the most insidious
and heartless of assassins. There is but one
answer to this objection. Christianity does
none of these things. It cannot be held re-
sponsible for the acts of short-sighted or
color-blind adherents who have mistaken its
spirit and misapplied its precepts. The
virtue of a remedy is not to be gainsaid if
administered in improper doses or for the
wrong disease.

The third general evidence of revealed
religion is to be found in the progress of
the human race through nineteen Christian
centuries. Christianity furnished the educa-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 349

tional energy that lifted mankind above the
depressing influences of barbarism, and ex-
plains the condition of the world to-day. The
loyalty to truth, the conformity to high
ideals of duty and service, the aspirations
and grand enthusiasms characteristic of mod-
ern life, reflect the wondrous personality of
the Man of Calvary. Humanity did not
civilize itself. Its unaided attempts invari-
ably culminated in such a state of society as
obtained at Babylon and Nineveh, at Thebes
and Memphis, at Athens and Rome. When
left to himself man has always degenerated
mentally and morally. Whereas intellectual
brilliancy is seldom transmitted, and genius
never, vicious tendencies, as a rule, are. Such
is the moral of all pre-Christian tales,

4< 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past —

First freedom, and then glory ; when that fails,

Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last ;

And History, with all its volumes vast,

Hath but one page."

And how true it is to-day that in commu-
nities where religious obligations are for-
gotten, where church bell never summons to
worship, where children grow to maturity in
ignorance of the Bible, where the dead are
committed to the earth without God's beni-
son, where the solemnization of matrimony

350 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

is left to civil officers, where prayer is re-
garded as a delusion — how true it is that re-
lapse to moral hebitude is certain. In his
proclamation announcing Thursday, April 13,
1899, as Fast Day in New Hampshire, Gov-
ernor Rollins fearlessly states the issue of
the times : " No matter what our belief may
be in religious matters, every good citizen
knows that when the restraining influences
of religion are withdrawn from a community,
its decay, moral, mental, and financial, is swift
and sure. To me this is one of the strong-
est evidences of the fundamental truth of
Christianity."

Think for a moment what would result if
Christianity, Christianized by the living
Christ, completely dominated our modern
civilization. There would be no need of
laws, of courts, or of police protection ; of
jails, almshouses, and reformatories ; no ne-
cessity for standing armies and fleets of war
ships. Taxes would be reduced to one-tenth
of what they are. Poverty, drunkenness, and
prostitution, would be swept away ; industry,
prosperity, and a white life for all, would
take their place. Most of the diseases that
afflict humanity would disappear. Death in
youth or in the prime of life would be ex-

OF CHRISTIANITY. 351

ceptional; death from contagious maladies,
unknown. Death by violence, which is
largely if not entirely preventable, would be
so rare as to excite the severest reprehen-
sion. So if, instead of inventing flimsy sub-
stitutes for the religion of Jesus Christ, men
would honestly endeavor to carry out his
principles of brotherly love and civic econo-
my, a veritable moral and socio-political
Utopia would immediately materialize. And
this would mean permanency and progress,
not retrogression ; for the fruits of untainted
Christianity once tasted would never be relin-
quished for the bitter clusters of Gomorrah.

It were needless to point to the triumphs
of Christian civilization in this our day : to
the scores of applications of electrical en-
ergy; to the advances made in navigation ; to
the progress toward rapid and comfortable
land transit ; to the results of exploration
and colonization ; to the revolutionizing of
architectural methods in the construction of
factories, buildings for the transaction of bus-
iness, and homes ; to astonishing improve-
ments in the arts of pharmacy, medicine, and
surgery ; to everyday methods of protection
from infectious and contagious diseases by
inoculation with their attenuated poisons ; to

352 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

the application of meteorological knowledge
in a signal service system ; to the perfecting
of agricultural and botanical science ; to the
utterance of the spirit of philanthropy in great
institutions for the relief of suffering, the care
of the helpless and the insane, and the treat-
ment of moral obliquity; to the development
of aesthetic sensibility in the rude and vulgar,
with its accompanying increase in soul-recep-
tivity for ethical impression — and above all
to the opinion of learned men who are de-
claring that nature's secrets are still unknown.
" We are only on the threshold of discovery,"
says Professor Stevenson, " and the coming
century will disclose wonders far beyond any
yet disclosed. We know nothing yet. We
have gathered a few large pebbles from the
shore ; but the mass of sands is yet to be ex-
plored." The impulse to sift these sands in
the interest of humanity is but an expression
of Christian energy ; and whether the inves-
tigators are believers or unbelievers, the pos-
sibilities of this age along the multitudinous
lines of scientific research are conditioned
entirely by a civilization that is handmaiden
to the religion of Jesus Christ. Again I de-
clare the miracle par excellence of Christian-
ity to be the condition of this world to-day.

OF CHRISTIANITY. 353

In conclusion, the strongest of all argu-
ments for Christianity is the argument from
Christian experience, that subjective convic-
tion which springs from a personal acquaint-
ance and communion with the Saviour, that
sense of Christ within one through which he
knows the realness of his belief with the same
unswerving certainty that he knows his own
existence. This cannot be shaken out of the
believer in whose heart Christ dwells. He
will die for it. Is there any agnostic or the-
osophist or man of science who is prepared
to say here, to-night, I am ready to lay down
my life for my way of thinking, for my belief
— or unbelief — is more to me than human
existence and all that human existence stands
for ? There is no illusion, no imagination,
no insanity about Christian certainty. The
experiences of every follower of Jesus are too
intimately bound up with divine intervention
and direction. Who of us in reviewing his
life does not recognize the guiding hand of
Providence at every turn in answer to his
mothers prayers — the support in temptation,
the rescue from overwhelming agonies of
body and of soul, the reservation for achieve-
ments undreamed of and seemingly impossi-
ble ? We Christians feel a divine support
23

354 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES

unknown, outside of Christianity, in the his-
tory of man.

Have you this sense of God within you ?
If not, you are hardly equipped to discuss the
problem with those who have, for there is no
common ground on which you can meet them.
I can only advise you who may be agnostic
to make a personal experiment. Honestly
try Christianity. Permit your souls to be
touched by its sweet influences, to be waked
by its call to the finer and deeper and nobler
issues of life. I have no fear for the result ;
for I am confident that you will recognize a
mysterious change in your motives and wills
with a«sense of forgiven sins as a genuine ex-
perience ; I am sure that you will become
conscious of a progress begun toward spirit-
ual perfection ; that eternity will seem truer
to you than time, and that you will incline to
look upon death as a swinging open of the
gates of happiness.

A skeptical physician who attended a be-
loved Christian friend in her last illness, and
witnessed her holy departure, remarked to an
acquaintance of mine,. " After all, Christianity
does cut some ice." Ah ! my friends, to ex-
tend the inelegant metaphor, Christianity
cuts all the ice that is cut in the chamber of

OF CHRISTIANITY.

355

death. Philosophy has no consolation to
offer there ; infidelity averts her eyes ; agnos-
ticism whispers, " This is the end." But in
the beatific vision wherein the dying Chris-
tian beholds those heavenly things which it
has not entered into the heart of man to con-
ceive, and extends his hands to loved person-
alities that have gone before, and addresses
them by name in affectionate conversation as
the moment of dissolution draws near, we
who stand by have surest proof of the pres-
ence of that sustaining Jesus to whom mar-
tyrs, summoned to the arena from the sepul-
cher prisons of Neronean Rome, cried with a
holy joy, " Lead us on, O Christ ! to death
and glory."

MAY 5 »909

Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process.
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide
Treatment Date: August 2005

PreservationTechnologies

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive
Cranberry Township. PA 1 6066
(724) 779-21 1 1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

0 014 244 720 4$

«HI

\%IP111111

litiflll

«^^K«