Chapter V: Part I: A Parable (4)

_When Jesus shall succeed in pacifying his own disciples; in healing the sectarian world of its endless and bitter quarrels, then it will be time to ask what else Jesus has done for humanity._

If the world is improving at all, and we believe it is, the progress is due to the fact that man pays now more attention to _this_ life than formerly. He is thinking less of the other world and more of this. He no longer sings with the believer:

The world is all a fleeting show
For man's delusion given.
Its smiles of joy, its tears of woe,
Deceitful shine, deceitful flow,
There's nothing true but heaven.

How could people with such feelings labor to improve a world they hated? How could they be in the least interested in social or political reforms when they were constantly repeating to themselves--

I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a stranger--
I can tarry, I can tarry, but a night.

That these same people should now claim not only a part of the credit for the many improvements, but all of it--saying that, but for their religion the "world would now have been a hell," * is really a little too much for even the most serene temperament.

* Rev. Frank Gunsaulus, of the Central Church, Chicago. See
A New Catechism.--M. M. Mangasarian.

Which of the religions has persecuted as long and as relentlessly as Christianity?

Which of the many faiths of the world has opposed Science as stubbornly and as bitterly as Christianity?

In the name of what other prophets have more people been burned at the stake than in the names of Jesus and Moses?

What other revelation has given rise to so many sects, hostile and irreconcilable, as the Christian?

Which religion has furnished as many effective texts for political oppression, polygamy, slavery, and the subjection of woman as the religion of Jesus and Paul?

Is there,--has there ever been another creed which makes salvation dependent on belief,--thereby encouraging hypocrisy, and making honest inquiry a crime?

To send a thief to heaven from the gallows because he believes, and an honest man to hell because he doubts, is that the virtue which is going to save the world?

The claim that Jesus has saved the world is another myth.

A _pictorial_ Christ, then, has not done anything for humanity to deserve the tremendous expenditure of time, energy, love, and devotion, which has for two thousand years taxed the resources of civilization.

The passing away of this imaginary savior will relieve the world of an unproductive investment.

We conclude: Honesty, like charity, must begin at home. Unless we can tell the truth in our churches we will never tell the truth in our shops. Unless our teachers, the ministers of God, are honest, our insurance companies and corporations will have to be watched. Permit sham in your religious life, and the disease will spread to every member of the social body. If you may keep religion in the dark, and cry "hush," "hush," when people ask that it be brought out into the light, why may not politics or business cultivate a similar partiality for darkness? If the king cries, "rebel," when a citizen asks for justice, it is because he has heard the priest cry, "infidel," when a member of his church asked for evidence. Religious hypocrisy is the mother of all hypocrisies. Cure a man of that, and the human world will recover its health.

Not so long ago, nearly everybody believed in the existence of a personal devil. People saw him, heard him, described him, danced with him, and claimed, besides, to have whipped him. Luther hurled his inkstand at him, and American women accused as witches were put to death in the name of the devil. Yet all this "evidence" has not saved the devil from passing out of existence. What has happened to the devil will happen to the gods. Man is the only real savior. If he is not a savior, there is no other.