The one great differential mark between man and the brutes is his higher development of brain power, by which he is enabled to discriminate between right and wrong, or good and evil, and thus to improve his bodily and social condition. The individual who obstinately refuses to avail himself of the great mental power within him not only deprives himself of the greatest pleasure in life, but also allows himself to sink to the level of the brutes from which he evolved, exhibiting at the same time a gross want of gratitude to the being who endowed him with so lofty an attribute. On the other hand, he who cultivates his mental faculties, and uses them for his own improvement and advancement, and also that of his fellows, fulfils the highest mission of man, and continually shows his deep gratitude to his mysterious benefactor.

To think is the grandest faculty of man. To think logically and well ought to be his noblest aspiration. To prevent, by any means whatever, the individual from exercising his right to think, and from giving expression to his thoughts, is a direct outrage upon the great author of us all, upon the individual himself, and also upon the whole human race. The greatest thinker of modern times, John Stuart Mill, says, “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise that, as a thinker, it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who with due study and preparation thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think ... complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”

We claim the right to think upon any and every subject, and also to express our thoughts before the world, in spite of the menace held out to us by those whose interests conflict with any honest expression of opinion. There is no tribunal but that of reason to which we possibly can submit any theory or proposition. To talk of faith as opposed to reason is to speak without seriously thinking. Such faith is but a weird phantom that haunts the irresolute and credulous unthinker, but which really has no existence at all. A man may say that he believes something entirely opposed to reason, but he deceives himself, for it is quite impossible to believe what does not appear to the mind to be in accordance with reason. Such a man accepts, but does not believe. We have faith in the existence of the island of Otaheite, although we have never been there ourselves. Geographers tell us that such an island exists on the other side of the world; and we have full faith in such an existence, because it is in accordance with reason. But if we were told that the king of Otaheite had never been born, but had, like Topsy, ‘grow’d,’ or that he and his subjects, instead of talking, crowed like cocks, or brayed like donkeys, we should not believe it, because it would be contrary to reason. Sensible and thoughtful people will, therefore, not accept anything as truth that does not accord with reason and I ask you tonight to follow me in my endeavour to submit the two important dogmas of my lecture to the test of reason, in the full belief that you are as anxious as myself to arrive at a reasonable and true conclusion regarding them.

The doctrines of the creation and fall are, as it were, the foundations upon which the huge superstructure of Christianity has been founded. Take away these fundamental doctrines, and the whole fabric totters to the ground; for without a fall there can be no possible need for a redemption, and the etceteras of the religion, such as the miraculous conception and ascension, baptism, and the eucharistic feast, vanish into thin air as vain imaginations and things of naught.

It cannot be too clearly and forcibly insisted upon that no fall necessitates no redemption, for the proposition is self-evident, and thus incapable of contradiction. If, therefore, we find the story of the creation and fall, as given to us in the first three chapters of Genesis, to be credible and reasonable, then our duty, upon another occasion, will be to examine the evidence for and against the subsequent theories of the religion, in order to discover whether they also are credible and reasonable. If, on the other hand, we find the story to be incredible and absurd, it will be our duty to reject the whole Christian scheme that has emanated from it. Our business at the present time is with these fundamental doctrines of creation and the fall, and our sole object is the elucidation of the truth, no matter whether it should be palatable or not to our minds. No sensible man can desire to retain that which is not true, for no system that is not founded on truth can be of any permanent service to the human race, but must on the contrary produce most pernicious results.

Having thus clearly explained my premisses, I shall now proceed to the examination of the first three chapters of Genesis, and shall divide my text into the two natural divisions suggested in the authorised version. The first chapter and first three verses of the second chapter contain what is known as the Elohistic narrative, so called on account of the deity being throughout designated Elohim—?????, the plural of Eloh (????), or Elyah (????), a compound word made up of El (??), a ram, and Yah (??), an abbreviation of Yahouh (????), the future tense of the verb Hahouh (???), to be. Eloh literally means ‘the ram will be,’ and is used to signify the ram-sun, the sun-god, or the sun in the zodiacal sign Aries, at the vernal equinox; the plural form, Elohim, being used to signify the ram-suns, or the six summer months of the year, in which the ram and the sun are together, from equinox to equinox. El signifies ram, or god, alone, or without the sun, in the winter period, and is always used to designate the evil principle, the wicked god, or the winter period, in contradistinction to Eloh, the ram-sun of the vernal equinox, and Elohim, the ram-suns of the summer months, the good principle, or the good gods. In this first narrative of the creation Elohim is rendered ‘God’ in the authorised version, though in other parts of the Bible it is rendered ‘gods,’ ‘men,’ or ‘angels.’ The remainder of the second and the third chapters contain the second, or Jehovistic narrative, so called on account of the deity being designated throughout, Yahouh, or Jehovah (so pronounced by Christians) Elohim (???? ?????), rendered in the authorised version ‘the Lord God.’ That these two accounts were not written by one person will become clear enough as we proceed in our examination, in which the rendering of the authorised version will be strictly adhered to.

According to the first narrative, god (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth and all they contain in six ordinary days, and rested from his work on the seventh day. It has been asserted by some zealous but not over scrupulous Christians that days of twenty four hours’ duration were not meant by the writer, but that the word ??? (day) signifies an enormous lapse of time; but it is quite clear to anyone with average intelligence that an ordinary day was meant, or else there would have been no use in saying that the evening and the morning were the first day. Moreover, we are distinctly told in Exodus XX. 10, 11, that we are to keep the seventh day as a holiday, “for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day.” We therefore have here the creation of the world, with day and night, but no sun, in one day, which we must admit at once is an absurdity, for it is beyond all doubt scientifically proved that this world could never have existed for one moment without the sun round which it revolves, and our common sense tells us plainly that without a sun there could never have been days and nights, or evenings and mornings.

On the second day we are told that god created the firmament, and called it heaven, and that this firmament separated the waters above from those below, which clearly proves that the writer had no other conception of the universe than that it was limited above to the height of the clouds, and bounded below by the earth itself. The third day was set apart for the gathering together of the waters into seas and rivers, and for the creation of the vegetable kingdom, which again is contradictory of all known scientific facts, for there was still no sun in existence. At last, on the fourth day, the sun was created, as also the moon and stars, all being placed in the firmament, between the clouds and the earth, for the sole purpose of acting as lamps and marking time for this world. The writer evidently imagined that the only object of the heavenly orbs is to light up this world, to divide our day from our night, and to limit our seasons, being, apparently, ignorant of the fact that our days and seasons are regulated by the motions of the earth itself, quite irrespective of the movements of the celestial bodies. He was also clearly under the impression that the sun was, after our earth, the largest body in the universe, the moon being next, and the stars the smallest; whereas the sun is five hundred times larger than the earth and all the planets and their moons put together; while the earth is about forty nine times larger in bulk than the moon; and some of the stars are immensely larger than our sun, and all of them, moreover, suns themselves.

It is sufficiently evident from this account that the world had been in existence for three days and three nights before the sun was made, and that vegetation had in the meantime been produced, which is, we know, an absurdity. There are some ingenious individuals who have declared that this is quite possible, for there are, they say, lights that are unconnected with the sun, and that the writer evidently alluded to these faint glimmerings; but I assert confidently that, leaving out of the question the light derived from the stars, so far as we know from science, there is no light known which is not either directly produced from the sun, or a reflection of the sun’s light from some other object.

On the fifth day were created fishes, birds, and mammals in the form of whales. Now there has been so far no creation of land animals except birds, and yet the writer declares that whales were made, being clearly quite ignorant of the fact that whales are not true fishes, but mammals, belonging to the sub-kingdom Mammalia, to which belong also horses, cows, apes and men. Whales were not evolved until long after creeping animals, such as lizards, serpents, etc., and took to the water again after having been, in the parent form, long accustomed to dry land, just in the same manner as did the walrus, porpoise, sea-cow, dolphin and seal, all of which are mammals. It was not until the next (sixth) day that creeping animals were created, according to Genesis, and yet we know well enough that they slowly evolved from molluscs, or soft-bodied animals, at a very early period, ages before such species as whales and cattle existed. On the very same day, according to the narrative, god formed an androgynous, or hermaphrodite man, having two sexes, and being the fac-simile of himself. Many ancient races believed that their god was androgynous, and no doubt the writer of this account held the same opinion, regarding the good principle of the summer months, or Elohim, as a bi-sexual and reproductive deity. If this be not the correct view of the matter, it would be interesting to know which of the two sexes the god of Genesis partakes of.

On the seventh day god rested from his work; but we do not find any record of his having done anything to cause fatigue, except giving utterance to his fiat day by day.

This story is so palpably absurd as to need no argument to prove it so, were it not for the fact that certain crafty persons, seeing the utter impossibility of reconciling it with science and reason, have seen fit to invent new interpretations of the original, in order to give it an appearance of truth. One sect maintains that the days were epochs, and not ordinary days, which, if it were true, would merely augment the difficulty by making the earth to have existed, with vegetation, for ages instead of days, without the sun; but we have already seen that this theory will not hold ground for a moment.

Another more cunning class of religionists have propounded the hypothesis that the whole story is meant to be an epitome of what occurred at the origin of the universe and life, and that ordinary days were really meant, and purposely utilised to epitomise long periods of time, as was customary with ancient writers, who frequently availed themselves of poets’ licence in this manner. This theory is prim facie a plausible one, and has, no doubt, satisfied many restless and thoughtless spirits amongst us; but in reality it differs but little, if at all, from the preceding hypothesis, both leaving us in much the same position. They declare that the very same order is maintained in the narrative as that adopted by scientists; that both agree that the earth was formed first, and then, in the following order, vegetation, fishes, birds, beasts of the field, and man. We know well enough, however, that the sun is absolutely necessary for the existence of the vegetable kingdom; that birds did not appear before reptiles and worms, but long after them; and that placental mammals made their appearance, not before creeping animals, and kangaroos, opossums and others of the marsupial species, but many ages after them.

In direct contradiction of this fable in Genesis, we learn from science that our solar system once existed in a condition of highly attenuated nebulous vapour; and that in the course of millions of years this huge chaotic mass of matter, with its sum of force or energy, subject alike to the laws of gravitation and transformation, gradually condensed, and became moulded into cosmic order, forming in process of time a number of rotating spherical nebular masses, in a state of intense heat, owing to the shock of their recently united atoms. These spheres gradually cooled by radiation, consequently contracting and becoming possessed of a more rapid rotary movement, throwing off from their equatorial regions large rings of vapour, which in their turn also condensed, and, under the influence of the same two laws, formed separate spheres for themselves. Thus gradually came into existence our sun, planets and moons.

In the course of time, as our earth cooled down, large volumes of water were precipitated on the surface, causing an enormous wear and tear of the now solid rock of the earth’s crust, which eventually gave rise to depositions of various kinds of earth grits, in layers, one above the other; which strata have been divided by geologists into periods, according to various peculiarities observed in the course of their deposition. In the earliest of these periods, owing to the gradual change that took place in the relative proportions of the atmospheric gases, and to the great decrease in temperature, a peculiar combination of the molecular atoms of the earth’s substance took place, which resulted in the formation of an albuminous substance, called protoplasm, possessing the power of absorption, assimilation, and reproduction by fission, or, in other words, developing the property called life. Under the influence of the laws of heredity and selection this primordial germ of life gradually developed into higher and still higher organic forms of existence, from AmoebÆ to Gastroeada, or molluscs with mouths; next to Vermes, or worm life; then to Vertebrata, or back-boned animals; through fishes; amphibians, living both in and out of water; reptiles, from which eventually evolved birds; and marsupials; up to placental mammals, such as whales, quadrupeds, apes and men. The gradual evolution of these species occupied many millions of years before the date of the creation in Genesis (B.C. 4004), during which period the face of the earth underwent manifold and great changes.

Now, in the name of common sense and reason, does this hypothesis agree with and corroborate, as it is said to do by some divines, the 1st Bible story of creation, in any manner at all? I maintain that the man who replies in the affirmative does an injustice to his reasoning faculties and outrages the common sense of his fellows. The theory of creation is absolutely opposed to that of evolution on every point.

Now let us examine the second narrative, as given in the second and third chapters of Genesis. Here we have a direct contradiction of the story in the first chapter; for we are told that god created the earth, the heavens, vegetation and man, but not woman, all in one day. We are also told that there had been no rain upon the earth, and yet that “there went up a mist from the earth,” which we know is impossible. “But,” say the orthodox, “everything is possible with god.” The reply of the evolutionist is, “Can god, then, make a stick with one end only?” God next planted a garden, in which he placed his newly made man, after giving him instructions to eat of every tree within it, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fruit of which was not to be touched, and the penalty of disobedience being instant death. Then, in fresh contradiction of the first narrative, beasts of the field and birds were created, after man; after which Adam, the man, named them all; but how he acquired the power of speech necessary for such a feat is not recorded. For absurdity the next part of the narrative exceeds all that has preceded it. God created cattle and birds in abundance, but yet could not manufacture a suitable partner for the man; so he adopted the strange device of taking from Adam’s body, while he slept, one of his ribs, with which he made a woman. Now it must strike every thoughtful man and woman that this act was the very acme of stupidity, for surely it would have been far easier to have created the woman at once by another fiat, or to have created a spare rib with which to make the woman. To attribute such conduct to the great author is surely the height of irreverence.

It is quite evident that both these stories were not written by one author, and that both cannot be true, for they totally contradict each other, and are written in quite different styles, the deity himself being differently designated in each. We are told by certain parties that if we do not believe these stories we shall most certainly be roasted for all eternity; and indeed the New Testament distinctly bears out this fearful fiat. According to this, every man in the whole world who has been unfortunate enough to hear these two accounts read, and who is endowed with sufficient intelligence to discriminate between a pop-gun and an elephant, will inevitably perish; for it is impossible for any sane man to believe two such contradictory statements. It is not within the power of any man to do so. You might just as well demand of a man that he must believe that a brick and a pan-cake are identical articles. He could not do so, no matter how hard he tried.

Compared with these fables, how ennobling, grand and sublime is the theory of evolution. We behold the great and mysterious energy of universe operating in a manner calculated to inspire our minds with wonder, awe and admiration. The truly marvellous development of ourselves from a chaotic nebula of attenuated matter, through all the varied and manifold stages of existence, with their beautiful and useful properties, is indeed an overwhelmingly convincing evidence of the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent, although absolutely inscrutable author; and I doubt much whether anyone ever approached this subject with an honest desire to be guided by reason in his search for truth, who did not experience this profound reverence for the unknown author. Can we believe that these two narratives in Genesis are also calculated to inspire such a sentiment in the minds of those who are fairly well educated and amenable to reason? What kind of a deity, think you, is this god of Genesis? The concluding portion of the 2nd narrative will at once inform us.

This story is well known to all of us, and is a very remarkable one, for we learn from it the startling fact that the serpent, or devil, was the greatest benefactor to the human race, and, moreover, truthful; while god was the greatest enemy the race ever had, and was guilty of falsehood and treachery. God placed this man and woman in the garden, in front of a very strong temptation, pointed out the temptation to them, and threatened them with instant death if they yielded to it. This god is supposed to be omniscient, and therefore knew well enough before he placed them there that the poor creatures would fall on the very first temptation. Can we conceive more glaring injustice and diabolical cruelty than this? Now the serpent knew very well that they would not die if they ate the fruit, but that, instead, they would become wise; and eventually he persuaded them to eat. Who spoke the truth, god or the devil? Did the man and woman die on the day they ate the fruit? Far from it. That day, were there any truth at all in the narrative, would have been the grandest day ever known to man; for by the eating of that fruit was made known to him the difference between good and evil, that he might be able to seek the one and avoid the other; his benefactor being the serpent, or devil, the circumventor and conqueror of god.

But notice further on how impotent this so-called almighty deity really was. He exclaimed in fear, “Behold, the man is become as one of us [which was precisely what the devil predicted] to know good and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and live for ever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden.” Now how easy it would have been for an omnipotent creator to have annihilated his own work, and thus cleared the way for a fresh start. It would be interesting to know who the “we” were that the writer refers to, if not an androgynous deity or a multitude of gods or goddesses.

What was the consequence of this sin of Adam and Eve? Every man and every woman ever born upon this earth is guilty of this sin, and will eternally burn in hell fire, says the Christian church, unless they believe that this circumvented god became a man, lived on this earth, and died the death of a criminal, in order to give satisfaction to himself for the outrage committed on his divine majesty by three of his creatures. The countless myriads of human beings who have inhabited this earth during the six thousand years (according to Bible chronology) that the world has existed, are all and each under this fearful curse, although they had no more to do with Adam’s sin than the man in the moon, and had no power to prevent it. These people have been brought into the world, whether they liked it or not, and are subject to this penalty, the enormous majority of them being inevitably doomed to eternal torment; for there have lived many millions of people who never even heard of the Bible, its gods or its scheme of redemption. We may go farther and declare that all are inevitably doomed, for we cannot conceive that anyone can believe such a story as that of the fall. No one will venture to assert that infants and idiots can believe anything, therefore there is no hope for these unfortunates, whatever chances there may be for others.

As the expression of the infantile imagination of primitive man, after emerging from his brute ancestry, and commencing to exercise more fully his reasoning faculties, these fables are easily understood; but as the writings of men who had been inspired by the almighty power to record a true account of the origin of nature and man for the use of others, they must be at once rejected by all reasonable and thoughtful people as gross absurdities. We can easily understand how the mind of primitive man pondered over the strange mixture of good and evil in the world, just as the awakening mind of a child would do to day; how the mystery would be explained by the analogy of the celestial movements; and how, as the result of the infantile reasoning, the good principle became associated with the mental conception of a venerable old gentleman, who planted a garden, and performed the principle part in the drama just described from the third chapter of Genesis.

Tho whole story bears the strongest marks of being the production of an infantile intellect. The simple manner in which the writer tells us that the man and woman sewed fig leaves together and made aprons for themselves is sufficient evidence of this. We cannot believe that Adam and Eve went through the many processes necessary for the production of the needles and thread, with which to sew their leaves together. Then the conversation between god, as he took his stroll in the garden in the cool of the evening, and Adam and Eve, is just what we should expect from the crude imaginations of our early ancestors; as also is the manner in which the man placed the blame on the woman, and she in her turn upon the serpent. The curse, too, is precisely in the same style; first the serpent, then the woman, afterwards the man, and lastly the earth itself being brought under the divine anathema. No less apparent is the absurdity of the writer stating that Adam called his wife Eve “because she was the mother of all living,” when there were then no other human beings in existence; and declaring that god made coats and breeches (see “Breeches Bible”) of skins, when as yet death had not entered into the world. Such fables cannot be accepted as true history by the intellect of the nineteenth century.

That we suffer for the sins of our fathers is unfortunately too true; but that we shall eternally frizzle for them I declare, without the least hesitation, to be a vile falsehood and an insult to our intellects. The vices and diseases of our ancestors are undoubtedly reproduced in ourselves, as are their good deeds and lofty sentiments; and we again transmit these properties to our offspring. We have, in fact, the power of rendering happy or miserable those who follow us, and making the general state of society somewhat better or worse. Our great mental attributes were not surely evolved within us for no purpose, and to lie dormant, but that we should exercise them and use them for the moral and social improvement of ourselves and our fellows. But to imagine that we shall suffer again in some other condition of existence, because of our fathers’ sins, is the height of insanity.

Respecting the authorship of these fables, we are told that the book which contains them, as well as the other four books of the Pentateuch, were written by Moses, under the inspiration of what is called the holy ghost; but when we examine these books we find that this is without doubt false, for it is not possible for any man to record his own death and burial, and the lives of a succession of prophets who lived after him, as is done in the last chapter of Deuteronomy. Then, again, in the seventh chapter of Genesis clean and unclean beasts are mentioned in connexion with the ark fable, whereas, according to the Bible, clean and unclean beasts were not declared such until 600 years after Moses is said to have died; which proves that Genesis was not written before that late period. The town of Dan is also mentioned in the fourteenth chapter, which town had no existence until 331 years after the recorded death of Moses. In chap. XXXVI. a list is given of all the kings that reigned over Edom “before there reigned any king over the children of Israel,” proving once more that this book was not written until long after kings had reigned over Israel. Numerous other passages might be quoted to show that Moses could not have written the books that are ascribed to him. To cut the matter short, however, we are told in the 2nd apocryphal book of Ezra that he and his clerks wrote all the books of Moses; and in Chronicles and Kings that Shaphan discovered the writings in an old chest.

We find, therefore, not only that these fables of the creation and fall are not true records, but that it is not known who wrote them, although suspicion attaches to one Ezra; and yet we are expected to hang our chances of salvation upon them. We are handed these books and told by a priest that they were originally derived from god. Now instead of believing the man, and taking no pains to find out what the volume really contains, as is unfortunately the habit of most people, our duty is clearly to investigate the matter, and try to find out whether that priest speaks the truth or not, whether he has any sort of interest in making us believe the volume to be the word of god, or, assuming that he himself honestly believes it to be so, whether he is a sufficient authority on the point. Let us, for instance, take the case of a stranger to the Christian faith, one who never heard of the Bible or its gods, and who meets a Christian priest in the backwoods of America. The holy one informs the stranger that he possesses a book which has been written by god, through the medium of the inspired minds of a number of holy men. Would you consider the stranger to be a man of sound mental faculties if he at once accepted the word of the parasite, and shaped his whole career according to the teaching of that book? Most assuredly not. The most natural thing for the stranger to do would be to stare in amazement at the saint, and wonder whether he was quite right in his mind. Observing that the priest was really in earnest, and apparently of sane mind, he would parley with him, asking where he procured his book from; who were the very holy parties who had been inspired to write it; when and where they lived; and who knew anything about them: in short he would demand from the unctions one his credentials before believing such an astounding assertion as that god wrote a book. The replies would be after this fashion. The book was derived in the first instance from a publisher’s shop, where it had been printed with lead type and black ink, from another printed copy, which had been printed from another copy, and so on back to the first printed edition, which was copied from a translation of various Hebrew and Greek ‘originals.’ It was about two thousand years, he would say, since some of these ‘originals’ were written, and the remainder were supposed to be of much earlier date; but who the actual writers were he could not tell, although it was beyond doubt they were guided by god’s inspiration, for it was so declared in the writings themselves, which had never yet been doubted, except by a few naughty men who were now in hell. Do you think this would be good enough for the stranger? Of course not. Then, in the name of common sense, why should we accept these Bible books without enquiry? To accept any anonymous writings in blind faith as being the production of particular individuals, without corroborative evidence, is the act of a fool, not of a wise man. A sensible person will make some enquiry about them before accepting them.

Unfortunately for ourselves it is only lately that people have been wise or bold enough to use their reasoning faculties in these matters, the consequence being that the ordinary mind is now almost unequal to the task of unravelling the net which has been so cunningly spun around society by the Christian church. A careful investigation of the matter, however, leads to the inference that about B.C. 250 or 300 the Jewish chief priest Ezra, assisted by a number of clerks, commenced to form a national history out of the various legends they had picked up in their long wanderings, soon producing what are now known as the books of Judges (from the 3rd chap.), Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, which, together with the poems and incantations of various men of the tribes, they set forth as the divinely inspired history of their people. Not long afterwards the Persian system of creation, and story of the fall of man were committed to manuscript, and adapted to the requirements of the Jewish people by the substitution of their race in place of the Chaldeans as the chosen people of god; and thus were produced the books of the Pentateuch, with Joshua, and the two first chapters of Judges. This explains why the stories of the creation, fall, flood, tower of Babel, etc., are never mentioned in any of the books of the Bible after Genesis for the space of about a thousand years; why in all the books from Joshua as far as II. Kings the name of Moses is never met with, the most remarkable man in the whole Jewish history; and why such names as Adam, Eve, Seth, Cain, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Shem, Ham, Japhet, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never occur again after Genesis till the time of the so-called return from Babylon.

The real meaning of the Chaldean and Jewish stories of the creation and fall, which were derived originally from the constellations above, it would take too long here to unfold, but the riddle has been explained in my “Popular Faith Unveiled,” to which those who desire to further pursue the subject are referred.

For nearly two thousand years Christianity, based on these fables of the creation and fall, has had an unfettered career throughout Europe, its avowed object being to bring salvation to men in the next world, and to teach the doctrines of love, forbearance, humility and charity while in this world. Respecting the bringing of salvation to men in the next world, we cannot well determine to what extent the religion has been successful; but with regard to its earthly mission it has signally and utterly failed. The two thousand years have passed away and still the evils surrounding us continue, and are even intensified; poverty, misery, immorality and tyranny exist as of old, in spite of the promise to the church that she should be helped, even to the end, by the divine power. So far from love, charity, forbearance and humility being inculcated by the church, we find the followers of the meek and lowly one occupying high and lucrative offices, one declaring himself the vice-regent of god on earth, and others, in our own country, being in receipt of salaries ranging from fifteen and ten thousand pounds annually to two or three hundred, driving their carriages, sporting livery servants and cockades, stiling themselves as Reverend, Very Reverend, Venerable, Most Reverend Father in God, Right Honorable and other titles expressive of superior quality of make; and all in a constant state of warfare amongst themselves. One cannot take up a daily paper without seeing an instance of clerical intolerance, hatred, envy or malice. The Romanist damns the Protestant; the churchman rides the high horse over the dissenter, and would like to deprive him of what is vulgarly considered to be decent burial; the evangelicals denounce the high church party; the nonconformist bodies are all at constant war with each other on points of doctrine; and while all are eaten up with pride, egotism, selfishness, greed and mutual hatred, each sect declares itself to be the genuine teacher of love, forbearance, humility and charity.

As a body the church has from the first opposed all progress. As early as the year 414 Bishop Cyril’s mob brained the learned Hypatia in a Christian church, for the heinous crime of teaching mathematics. The Pope and his pious court attempted to prevent the art of printing becoming known in Europe. Copernicus was excommunicated for the sin of announcing the grand truth that the earth revolves round the sun. Galileo rotted in the prison of the Inquisition for daring to say that the earth rotates on its axis. Bruno was burnt at the stake for declaring his belief in the Copernican philosophy. Newton’s theory of gravitation was denounced by the church. Descartes, Kepler, Locke, Laplace and Darwin all were abused and insulted by the holy ones for their heretical writings, which have brought us such blessings. The church opposed the abolition of slavery, both here and in America, the bishops in the House of Lords applauding king George when he said that slavery was a useful institution because it was taught in the holy Bible, and the southern States of the Union appealing to the ‘word of god’ in justification of their cruelty. The burning of witches, taught in the Bible, was vigorously encouraged by the church; and the cruel horrors of the Inquisition are too well known to need description. All measures of reform in our own country have been opposed by bishops and nobles together; the church and the state having aided each other in trampling on the people’s rights, and enslaving both their minds and bodies. In spite of the present very apparent poverty and misery, the people are exhorted by the church to increase and multiply, being told that it is a blessed thing to have one’s quiver full, and that it is wicked to listen to those who preach conjugal prudence, small families, and social thrift. In short the Christian religion has entirely failed in its mission, being a standing menace to all progress, and a cause of unceasing animosity all over Europe.

Do we imagine that all the priests and ministers of the Christian church believe the fables of the creation and fall? I would stake my existence on it that if we were to cut off their salaries there would be barely half a dozen parsons in each denomination who would stick to their soul-saving business. Their trinity is supposed to consist of god the father, god the son, and god the holy ghost; but if we represent the first by the letter l, the second by s, and the third by d, we should be much nearer the mark. £. s. d. is the Christian trinity, and pew rents, tithes, etc., the means by which the one thing needful is kept up. Ten million pounds sterling are annually spent in supporting the clergy of the established church alone, while poverty, wretchedness and crime confront us at every turn. The struggling workers of this country, not content with having to contribute towards the payment of £29,000,000 annually, as interest on the national debt resulting from accumulated religious war charges, are foolish enough to spend more than a third of this amount in keeping a host of state-made drones, who oppose all progress, drain the hard earnings from the workers, and assume haughty airs towards their poor dupes. In the face of the depressed state of our trade, and the poverty and misery around us, it is appalling to think of the enormous quantity of money that annually drifts into the pockets of these human parasites, both episcopalian and nonconformist alike.

We know well enough that the large majority of those laymen who profess to believe the fall and redemption scheme do not really believe it at all, but play the part of the believer in order to serve their own private interests. The laity may be divided into four classes:—1st, those few honest and sincere men who deceive themselves by imagining that they can really believe such unreasonable doctrines, and who attempt by their means to do what could be done so very much better without them. 2nd, those who are deficient in education and mental power, and who will accept anything the priest tells them, no matter how absurd. 3rd, those who have some little education but very little brain power, and who consider themselves very important members of society, when in reality the world does not know them even by name. They resent in their little minds the silent affront offered to them by their fellows, who, they think, ought to know their superior worth; and they look around for a little church or chapel, where the stream of intellect is sufficiently thin to allow of their feeble mental power being perceived. They join, take a leading part in the performances, carry the collecting box, open pew doors, hand hymn-books to strangers, and are happy in the consciousness of their importance, being gazed at Sunday after Sunday by an admiring congregation. Were these folk obliged to do their religious work under cover of masks, their names being at the same time studiously concealed from the congregation, the race of pew openers, box carriers, etc., would soon die out; but as it is, vanity, egotism and pomposity yet keep the race alive. The fourth class consists of sharp business men, with plenty of brains and fair average education, who join a church with a large congregation, and adopt the particular creed in vogue there, as a means of pushing their business, by assuming a mien of pious “respectability.” These are the men, devoid of all honour, who forfeit their manhood at the shrine of hypocrisy, and who ought more particularly to be shewn up in their true colors. Without these four classes the religion of the fall and redemption scheme would soon become a thing of the past. No mention has been made of the ladies, who, according to some rude and ungallant people, look forward to the lord’s day as one on which they can display their new bonnets, procure food for another week’s gossip, or hold sweet communion with the unmarried curate—all for Jesus. It is unnecessary to say that this may not be true, and that a higher and nobler motive may prompt the ardent zeal of the fair sex.

Do not believe the parsons when they tell you that your souls are in jeopardy for rejecting the Christian doctrines; the truth is that their incomes are in danger, not your souls. Take care not to follow their evil advice that it is a blessed thing to have your quiver full, and that the lord loves a cheerful giver. Have small families, being careful to bring into the world only as many as you can decently provide for, so as to give them a fair chance in the world; and let your creditors and your saving-banks, and not your lord, have your spare cash—your lord being but another name for your parson. When they tell you that you must take no thought for the morrow, and must not lay up treasure on earth, where moths and rust corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal, give them the cold shoulder, insure your life in some sound office, and leave the laws of the country in which you live to take care of the thieves, and their reverences to look after the moths and rust.

It will, no doubt, be urged that Christianity has done, and is doing a great good in the world. This I emphatically deny. I readily admit that some good has been effected in the name of Christianity, but deny that the fall and redemption religion has been the cause. The same amount of good would have resulted with any other religion, and much more with no religion at all. All the good that has ever been effected in the world has emanated from lofty individual minds; but as chance has had it, the majority of these men in the past have been Christians, simply because that religion has prevailed in Europe for nearly two thousand years. In the present day this is not the case; and it is a fact beyond contradiction that all the leaders of thought of our time are men who have rejected the fables of the creation and fall as given in Genesis, together with the consequent redemption scheme, as false and vain. John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Tyndal, Carpenter, Huxley, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RÉnan, Victor Hugo, Schopenhauer, Haeckel, and in fact every other modern leader of thought, have rejected the orthodox faith; and yet we look forward to the future with bright hope, expecting a steady progress in man’s general welfare. Even when Christians themselves in days long gone by, attempted to introduce any useful reform, their church invariably persecuted them, as for instance Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, Luther, etc.; and the only Christian priest who ever propounded any theory which was calculated to be a lasting boon to society was Malthus, who declared that over population was the great cause of all misery, and that until people were taught conjugal prudence it was useless to attempt to ameliorate their social condition. This friend of humanity was bitterly denounced by the church, and to this day his followers are held in contempt, notwithstanding that the Malthusian principles are now endorsed by the leading social scientists, and that it is as clear as the sun at noon day that within the short space of 45 years the present population of this country—now about 36,000,000—will have doubled itself. The people now cannot support themselves, so how they will manage when the population is 72,000,000 it is hard to say. What with over population and land monopoly the future has indeed some terrible social evils in store for us.

Individual Christians undoubtedly have done something towards making their fellows happy, but not so Christianity, as witness the Inquisition and other enormities of the middle ages. But do the Jews, Unitarians and Infidels of to day do nothing for their fellows? What about Sir Moses Montefiore, who rejects the atonement? Have not the Agnostics just founded the Whitminster College for purely secular education? And what do we not owe to those heterodox scientists just mentioned? It is the fashion with some people to give the name of Christianity to the morality of this century; but this very ingenuous attempt to clothe one of the most immoral of the world’s religions with the garment of righteousness carries no weight for the scholar and the historian. There is as much difference between the morality of to day and the genuine Christian religion as there is between the north and south poles. The two are the exact antitheses of each other. The real reason that the human race has in the last hundred years so rapidly advanced in intellectual qualities and moral progress is not because it has become more Christian in its character but because it has gradually shaken off the yoke of Christianity piece by piece. The whole Mosaic cosmogony, with its flat earth theory, creation of man, etc., as taught in Genesis, has been destroyed by Copernicus, Newton, Laplace and Darwin; slavery has been abolished; witches are no longer burnt at the stake; polygamy is discountenanced; and human sacrifice, murder, rapine, theft and personal assaults are no longer justified. All these immoralities are distinctly and prominently taught in the Christian Bible, but have been expunged from the moral code of this century. Were Christianity now dead instead of dying the same amount of good would accrue to the race as before; and, judging from past history, there would be a very vast decrease in the opposition that has for two thousand years been offered to progress.

The question after all is not what Christianity has done, but whether or not its story is a true one. As already stated, if the creation and fall stories are not true the whole scheme of Christianity, with its god-man and its sacraments, is a fraud and a delusion. No religion that cannot bear the test of reason, and be maintained on a public platform can be founded on truth. If the Christian story be true there is no need for the holy ones to secure themselves behind the fortifications of ’coward’s castle’ every Sunday to preach their doctrines; the open platform being a more suitable place from which to propagate the truth. But what are the facts? The man who dares to submit the religion to the test of reason, or even to discourse publicly upon evolution or any other scientific theory that is likely to interfere with the steady flow of bullion into the collection box, is denounced from the pulpit, the holy ones branding him as a dangerous infidel, and using all the means in their power to blacken his character and to insidiously undermine his business. The challenge to debate is never accepted.

The question before us is a momentous one. Creation or Evolution? Moses or Darwin? We cannot follow both.