THE

RELIGIOUS MISCHIEFS OF CREDULITY.

[1879.]

AT

KIND FRIENDS,

T the special request of your valued minister, I have consented to address you this morning on a definite and important topic. The pulpit in the opinion of some ought to be confined to those utterances which the ancients entitled Prophecy, while for intellectual instruction a lecture-room ought to be reserved. But in the practice of our nation a demand is made, and has always been made, for discussion in the pulpit concerning the foundation and safeguards of religion, the sources of error and the attestations of truth, as well as for exhortation and rebuke, for encouragement and grateful remonition. Accordingly, I propose this morning to consider whence arises the danger to us of slidings back into foolish and pernicious superstition, such as have hitherto ruined most historical religions.

If a

The problem may in some conjunctures be insoluble. little sect, ever so enlightened, were flung into the midst of a dark world, it would in the second and third generation ordinarily be absorbed back into that world. Persecution, hereditary institutions, and strict intermarriage with none but church members, may, as in the case of the Israelite people, perpetuate the original religion without loss of purity. But we, who profess Theism, have no such separation from surrounding beliefs. If not we ourselves, yet our children, are liable to drift back into many notions which we regard to be pernicious. What has previously prevailed to distil error into immature minds will prevail again and again, if not sedulously guarded against.

No distinction between man and brute strikes me so powerfully, as the tendency of every race of men to discern with the mind beings invisible to the eye. At first indeed the tendency is, to people the very air and the heaven with spirits; but afterwards, to discover such a unity in the world-wide spiritual action, as denotes One Supreme God, whose limits in time, space and

power we cannot define. Various animals familiarly known to us display all the human affections, not excluding Love, Friendship and Gratitude; nay, some of them show a sense of Duty, and of Self-Reproach when they fail of duty: yet not one of them gives the slightest indication of discerning supersensible spirit, which is the first step into what we account to be Religion.

In this fact I think a very important principle is contained. As the higher intellect of man alone opens to us any object of religious worship, so it is to the impartial judgments of cultivated intellect that we must appeal in the study of religious truth. Intellect reveals to us a spiritual agency in the universe of matter, and hereby a living and ruling God, eternal and supreme, therefore free from all human disturbances of soul; too great to be jealous or malignant. His grandeur assures us of his goodness; his omnipresence convinces us of his universal knowledge. Our wants, pains and tender affections show that he designed our mutual support, and that the practice of brotherly love among ourselves is our best service to him. Nor only so, but, by one step further of reflection, we infer that, as our knowledge can only be a very small part of his knowledge, so our kindness, our benevolence, is nothing but a little flame proceeding from him as from an infinite fire; whence the sacred utterance, that "God is Love." In this last step our Affections take a very important part in filling up our portrait of God; but the severest' criticism and never-ceasing re-examination is needed, lest anywhere, in our inferences from the thing created to the Creator, we impute to him what in us merely indicates weakness and imperfection. Long experience in many nations abundantly warns us, how over-quick and undiscriminating are mankind, how credulous in religion pre-eminently, and how quickly their credulity depraves religious doctrine.

Our bias is vehemently towards poetical imagination, love of fancy and gossip, easy belief of reports, zeal for the marvellous, weak-minded desire, dislike of patient thought, and readiness rather to adopt the judgments of another, than to think for oneself. These tendencies have almost everywhere invented and propagated religious error, and that, of the most noxious kind;error which maligns God and demoralizes man. To this day Protestant Christian teachers may, on perhaps any Sunday of the year, be heard, advocating as wise philosophy the doctrine of making the wish father to one's thought,-a doctrine very prolific of ancient folly. Hence it is that Unitarians slip back into Anglican

orthodoxy and Anglicans into Catholic sacerdotalism. Nor will a Theistic body, any the more, ever attain stability, if it undervalue the force of delusion which has hitherto a hundred times pulled down into feeble and hurtful superstition the hopeful beginnings of purer doctrine. Who of us can have any acquaintance with the New Testament on the one hand and the tenets of the Catholic Church on the other, and not marvel how the Societies which began from the religion of the New Testament were degraded into saint-worship and Popery? What influences, we at first ask, can have bridged over such an interval? History replies, that human Credulity is vast and ever springs up anew; that although Man, as distinct from Brute, discerns that which is invisible, yet prevalently he dislikes the effort. He prefers to bow before, not God, but some visible symbol of God; an image, or a prophet, or a priest: and instead of reasoning concerning morals in order to learn duty, like a child he prefers to have precepts dictated to him by authority. Thus he readily becomes an idolater, and surrenders his conscience to some official guidance, sometimes to a book called Canonical, sometimes to a living director.

If we search the phenomena to the bottom, assuming a noble form of religion in which God is taught to be a censor and judge of human conduct, we are forced to admit that in great masses of mankind another great cause tends to the degradation of doctrine; namely, an evil conscience, which shrinks from realizing the presence of the Most High. The desire to be religious without forsaking sin, is not at all rare, and often lies at the bottom of hero-worship, polytheistic idolatry, and saint-worship. This is so large a topic, that I allude to it timidly, lest it draw me off. Suffice it now to say, that idolatries induced by a low state of public morals do not easily shock those who have been born under them: thus in spite of a nobler remnant left in a church originally pure in doctrine, there is apt to be everywhere a gravitation downwards. Hero-worship, Prophet-worship, Saintworship work up; and the worship of the One Holy God declines.

How necessary it is to resist the first beginnings of Heroworship, the very notorious history of the Christian Church abundantly warns us. Mohammed knowing Christianity only by the practices of the Eastern Church, might scarcely distinguish Christians from avowed idolaters. How strangely gratuitous is the worship of the Virgin Mary, whom Moslims widely suppose to be the third person in the Christian Trinity! What facts have

been transmitted concerning this Mary, whom the Church has crowned with a blaze of glory? No particle of information which can pretend to be historical has reached us, except a very few meagre notices of the four Gospels and Acts, which do not imply in her any elevation, moral or ecclesiastical; while in some passages a strong disapproval of honouring his mother is expressed by Jesus himself. Nevertheless she was his mother: thát sufficed for the Church! Fond fancy urged, that because she was his mother, she must have more influence with him than we can have hence (as if she were mother of some Eastern Sultan) to coax her was the most hopeful way of winning her son. Such is the whole rationale of Mariolatry.

Great indeed is Credulity, and it prevails. In each successive age the single word Credulity explains all the ecclesiastical phenomena. Credulity from the very beginning of Christianity was confounded with Faith, and hereby guaranteed, that Credulity should go on conquering and to conquer. The writers of the Gospels make no claim to be inspired, yet they offer to us no means of testing their accuracy. While narrating marvels of a past age and a foreign country, the idea does not seem to have crossed them that any one should wish for some attestation. Yet this did not damage their credit with readers. The Churches first received them with reverence, and presently pronounced them to be divine writings. And why? Because, when they no longer had Apostles to lean upon, it was convenient to have authoritative books: therefore the books were accepted as infallible; therefore also ingenious violence of interpretation to twist them into harmony was thought legitimate. The same logic prevails to this day.

Judaism had been as uncritical as was Christianity. In the Jewish people the idea of criticism was not yet born,-nay, nor even in Greece,-at the time when a Jewish scribe professed to have found in the temple the book of the Law. Still, no vital harm was done to religion; for, according to the doctrine then made authoritative in Jerusalem, God was the one rightful object of worship: man was not intruded into an ambiguous deity. But Christianity involved from the first a disastrous enigma concerning the character, power, rank, and person of Messiah,— a topic on which the Jews had no authoritative tenet nor any single dominant opinion. In the dark utterances of the prophets it was not clear whether the same individual was always prefigured. If one great personage was truly intended in them all,

nothing is more certain, than that when the prediction was fulfilled, and Messiah came in reality, he must know his own functions, his own rank, power, character and nature, as King or as Prophet, local or universal,-human or divine. It became therefore his FIRST AND OBVIOUS DUTY to expound this whole matter to his countrymen.

Now, how much of the Four Gospels ought to be believed, I do not know, much less do I assert; but I suppose that every Christian, and nearly every non-Christian, believes so much of their tale, that Jesus rode into Jerusalem with popular acclamations, under circumstances carefully planned to suggest that he hereby claimed for himself, as Messiah, the throne of David; that when interrogated by the High Priest, he professed to be the Messiah; that in presence of Pilate he, either by silence or by assent, avowed himself to be the King of the Jews; also, that his fixed refusal to disown the latter title drove Pilate with great reluctance to sentence him to a cruel death, as a possible leader of insurrection against the Roman power. Yet Jesus, while so claiming to be Messiah as to make it the test article with his disciples, died without expounding the full meaning of the title which he assumed, but left the question as a never-failing source of evil controversy to the church, and at length of bloodshed to the world; which, if he had had any foresight, we cannot suppose he would have done.

It appears that in the wild and silly prophecy called the Book of Enoch, which in that uncritical age actually passed as the composition of Enoch the seventh from Adam,-Messiah was represented as the Son of God and Judge of the world. Again: In the high rhetoric of the eighth chapter of the Proverbs, Wisdom is personified; hence one mystical interpretation adopted by weak minds identified Wisdom with a divine person. Further: a rhetorician, writing in Greek,-anonymously, yet so as to insinuate that he was Solomon, son of David,-carried this personification and glorification of Wisdom to a still higher pitch. The Hebrew Proverb writer had said that Wisdom was God's familiar companion and object of delight from the beginning of all things. The Grecian bursts into a stream of rhetoric which culminates in the declaration, that "Wisdom is a whiff of the power of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the All-ruling, an effulgence of eternal light, an unspotted mirror of the Divine energy and an Image of his goodness. Being one, it can do all things; staying within itself, it makes all things new; and