                 19 page printout, page 13 - 31
                     THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS
                           CONTROVERSY

                            CHAPTER I

                   The Revolt Against Religion

             The World -- Revolt Against Religion --
     A New Age of Mankind -- The Origin of the Rebellion --
    The Battle of the Nineteenth Century -- Enter Science --
                     The Voice of the Heart

                THE WORLD-REVOLT AGAINST RELIGION

     SOME years ago I sat with a group of scholars in a room of the
beautiful Oxford University, in England, and we passed the time
with a new game, a scholars' game. We were all masters of some
branch of history or literature, and we each chose the age in which
we would have preferred to live.

     In quick review we traveled from solemn Egypt to wonderful
Babylon and voluptuous Syria. Athens with its glorious art, Sparta
with its stern discipline, Rome with its mighty triumphs,
captivated one or others of us, and the springtime of the modern
age, the Italy of the Renaissance, the France of Louis XIV, the
England of Shakespeare, spread all their color and life and freedom
before us.

     But there was a general agreement that this age in which we
live is the most interesting on which the sun has ever shone. It is
an age of reconstruction. Somehow a finer earth than man ever knew
before is struggling into form. We have at least such sense of
mastery and power as the world never had before.

     The great civilizations of early history remained feudal
monarchies for thousands of years. In our time many thrones have
been overturned in ten years, and more totter on their foundations.
We bring to judgment every tradition and every institution that the
past had bequeathed to us. We enslave giant forces, and do with
them prodigious things, of which no ancient sage had the dimmest
vision.

     An inevitable part of the new spirit, the most dramatic and
historic part for one who knows the long story of man, is that we
summon before our revolutionary tribunal all the religions in the
world. Our code is the Rights of Man -- new thing under the sun.
Our justification is that we have found the world full of hoary
illusions, like the divine right of kings and constitutions. Our
standard is truth and service and we look placidly at the
guillotine in the public square to which we commit everything of
the "ancient order" that proves not its value in this.

     Do not imagine that this is a pleasant picture of a group of
pretentious youths and maidens remaking the world in an American
city. There is a world-revolt against religion. The new rulers of
Turkey are fighting orthodox Mohammedanism. The students of India,
of China, of Japan, of Egypt, discuss their historic creeds and
sacred books with as little reverence as an Open Forum in Chicago
discusses -- when it condescends to discuss -- the Old Testament.


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     And from the cities of the world the revolt spreads to the
valleys, even to the deserts. I met in London a full-blooded
African, a doctor of philosophy, who had been deposed for teaching
heresy in a central-African college. A realistic recent French
novel, "Batouala," shows the natives pouring back from work on the
coast to their primitive villages, to fling ridicule at all
religious beliefs. We are broadcasting the revolt, and there is no
kraal of blacks or group of Eskimo huts to which it will not
penetrate tomorrow.

     This is a new phenomenon in history. A strange and wonderful
story is the history of religion. We will tell its beginnings in
the next chapter, its long and weird developments in later
chapters. It is a story of revolutions. Dynasties of gods fall like
dynasties of kings, and new dynasties rise. "The gods pass, but God
remains," said an eloquent preacher. Good rhetoric, but bad
history.

     It is a question today of God, not gods. More than two
thousand years ago, in Asia, there was a phase of the history of
religion something -- just a little -- like ours. Buddha in India,
Kong-fu-tse in China, urged men to concentrate on human problems
and "ignore spiritual beings, if there are any." But on the mass of
the people they had no permanent influence. It was the same in
ancient Greece and Rome. Never before in history was there any
movement remotely approaching, in depth and breadth, the modern
revolt against religion.

     So undeniable is it, that a Christian periodical recently
predicted, in an editorial, that the end of the world was at hand,
since the reign of Anti-Christ had visibly begun. More serious
religious writers, like Dean Inge, the famous spokesman of the
Church of England, draw the more sober conclusion that "doctrinal
Christianity is doomed." The reign of Christianity as a system of
doctrines -- any doctrines -- is over.

     But there are superficial folk who think that the revolt is
just a temporary phase of modern life or thought. People have been
seduced, they say, by the glamour of science, by the plausibility
evolution. Already, they cry, science is disowning its offspring,
and a new light breaks on the heavy spiritual horizon.

     All this is as superficial and inaccurate as religious
statistics are. The revolt is no passing phase, but the culmination
of a steady historical development during two centuries. It is so
little due to science that it was widespread before science began.
It was quite general amongst educated people before Darwin wrote a
line on evolution. We must understand it aright, and so I take the
reader back to the beginning of the revolt and lightly sketch its
progress.

                      A NEW AGE OF MANKIND

     The period which inaugurated modern times, as we shall see, is
known as the Renaissance or Re-Birth. It was an age of great
nervous vitality, like ours: an age of mental intoxication. And one
of the reasons was that the imagination of men was fired by the 


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discovery of a new world, America, and of a new universe, for
Galileo had shattered the toy universe which had hitherto cramped
the thoughts of men.

     How many in the seventeenth century knew of the work of
Copernicus or Galileo? Comparatively few: for ninety per cent of
the people of Europe were unable to read, after a thousand years of
absolute domination of the religion which the late Mr. Bryan
described as "the greatest patron learning ever had." Only the
educated ten percent knew aught of Galileo and the new astronomy,
yet the discovery ran like fire through the veins of Europe. The
old creed was based, in a sense, on a conception of the universe
which was now proved false. The solid firmament which men had
imagined above them cracked and rolled away. The mind soared into
vast spaces.

     But the universe which Galileo and his successors revealed was
still puny in comparison with the universe as we see it through the
great eye at Mount Wilson Observatory. I will not speak of its
vastness. That makes no difference in principle, except that it
must disturb any man who persists in thinking that on this earth,
this metal speck in a trillion-mile universe, there exists the only
race of intelligent beings!

     Far more important and unsettling is the discovery of the age
of the stars. If all the stars were strewn by the hand of God over
the heavens in creation's morn, it would not matter much if they
numbered two thousand, or, as they do, over two billions. But if
they were so strewn, we should expect them to be of approximately
the same age. Yet they differ in age by billions of years. Stars
are just rising from their cradles, or still lie in the giant wombs
of nebulae; stars hundreds of billions of years old are slowly and
feebly sinking out of luminous existence, and between the extremes
is a vast population of stars as varied and graduated in age as the
throng on a city street in the afternoon. It is a new universe. We
see no hint of a beginning or an end. Life on the planet earth is
a brief episode in an eternal process.

     Yet, they do not know all this down yonder in the picture-
theaters and cafes. But they feel it. The mightiest power that the
earth has yet known, science, is vaguely understood to have
discovered that the old story of creation and supreme ruler rested
on a foundation which has been shattered. The dynasty of gods has
fallen. Man must make a new constitution for his new republic, the
commonwealth of men.

     I touch here only, as a symbol of an illustration, one aspect
of the new knowledge which has shaken the old creeds. That new
knowledge is the most solid thing, the most permanent and growing
thing, the greatest achievement of our age. No petty attempt to
shut it out of schools will keep it back. It is the proudest symbol
of the triumph of modern man. Of it was born the genius, applied
science, which has transformed the face of the earth.

     I mentioned schools. They are scattered all over this city,
even amongst the grim tenements of the poor workers. Palatial high
schools rise here and there, and a short distance away is a 


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university. Downtown is a great public library, and here and there
rise the steel towers of radio transmitting stations. We have such
knowledge as the world never had before, and we have a machinery
for distributing it just as immeasurably beyond anything that the
world ever had before.

     The greatest writer, one of the greatest thinkers, of the old
world was Plato. How many Greeks, would you say, read one of
Plato's dialogues during his lifetime? I should say, a few hundred.
And now. ... Some years ago I translated a book, Ernest Haeckel's
"Riddle of the Universe," and sold half a million copies of it in
a few years. I wrote a defense of it, and sold fifty thousand
copies of this in a few months. H.G. Wells has sold over five
hundred thousand copies of his voluminous "Outline of History."

     We thought that our cheap printing was the last word in the
diffusion of knowledge, and suddenly a marvelous piece of new
machinery, the radio, has been presented to us. From an obscure
little room in the heart of London I have told the great story of
the birth and death of worlds to a million hearers. From a room in
the suburbs of Winnipeg I have talked on evolution to half the
astonished farmers of central Canada. And the work, the educational
work, of wireless is only in its infancy. Even now the man who has
great truths to tell, and the power to articulate them, can speak
from Denver or Chicago to the whole of the United States, to people
in the remote aldeas of Mexico, even to such as can understand in
Brazil and Peru. And when we get one universal language, as we
will, the truths of science and history and sociology will roll out
over the entire earth.

     Knowledge spreads subtly, as it did in the Renaissance, and it
begets a new spirit even in men who are not conscious of having any
new knowledge. There is a new spirit in our generation. We are apt
to resent all authority, but we certainly do resent the authority
of dead men. Those generations who lived in ages of profound
ignorance had no right to legislate for us. Creeds made in Dark
Ages are like drawings made in dark rooms. We are going to
reconsider all creeds and institutions which were framed before the
light of modern knowledge broke upon the earth.

     It is a reasonable attitude. I said "reconsider," remember,
not reject." We will keep what is sound and useful -- in moral law
or civil law, theory or practice. The profoundly unreasonable man
is the one who refuses to reconsider what his fathers taught him,
or the man who uses only a one-sided literature, written by
interested people, in making his examination of his beliefs. The
new generation demands freedom to read both sides and form its own
judgment.

     And it is precisely in the world of human interests that the
new spirit finds its strongest support. What a mass of ancient
illusions and delusions we have had to cast aside during the last
fifty or hundred years, and how much better and happier the world
is for discarding them! Protestant Americans ought to be the first
to perceive this. Their fathers broke the tyranny of the Papacy and
laughed at its divine claims. They rejected the asceticism (in 



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theory) of medieval Christianity, and permitted the clergy to
marry. They maintained that all the world had lied about religion
for a thousand years.

     Then they turned to illusions of State, and they smashed the
supposed divine right of kings. Christian Europe was wrong, they
said; pagan Greece and Rome were right. The proper human policy was
the Republic. Then they broke the chains of the slave, which the
church had blessed for ages. One by one they tore up a thousand
ancient illusions: social, medical, economic, political, industrial
and domestic. The floor of the nineteenth century was strewn with
dishonored traditions and creeds and illusions. The "land of the
free" prided itself, in the face of Europe, that it had the courage
to dethrone the dead and assert its mastery of its own affairs.

     Europe has slowly followed. The whole world rings with
disillusion. The Turks tear up the most sacred traditions of their
race. The Chinese cut off the pigtail and all that it symbolizes.
The Egyptians and Hindus fight for freedom, religious as well as
social and political. The Negroes of Africa aspire to form a
republic. Mexico defies its church. Empires break up. Kings fly
into exile. A hundred thousand pulpits are vacant.

     A new age! There never was anything remotely like it under the
sun. What a man does in Moscow or Shanghai or Tokyo today is known
next morning in Memphis or in Lima. Even the monks in the forbidden
city of Tibet listen and are moved. Nuns stir in their convents.
Large bodies of Catholic priests petition Rome to abolish celibacy.

     And there is a fine sentiment, as well as an assertion of
liberty, in all this. Never in the world before was there such a
flood of social idealism as there is in modern civilization. That
is the most solid answer to those who say that we are degenerating
in character. Our world rings with the cry of service and help. A
mere list of the social, philanthropic, educational, humanitarian
movements of our time would fill a chapter of this book. And they
are all new in, and peculiar to, what preachers call scornfully
"our materialistic age." Never in the world before was there this
concern for peace and brotherhood, for justice to the poorer
workers, for the sick and helpless and maimed, for children, for
education, for temperance, for suppressing crime and cruelty, for
gifts and holidays for poor children, for the thousand and one
misfortunes that linger amongst us from the bad old times.

     This finer sentiment reacts on religion. It is this, not
science, which has forced more than half of Christendom to abandon
one of the most distinctive dogmas of Christianity, eternal
torment. It is this, not science, which refuses to believe in the
primitive curse of the race and the atoning death of Christ. It
shrinks from blood and bloody sacrifices and bells. It refuses to
worship, because worship was the oriental flattery of sultans and
czars.

     The heart of man is as much in revolt against traditional
religions as is his head. To think of stemming the tide of unbelief
by excluding evolution from schools is on a level with the ancient
practice of sprinkling vinegar and aromatic herbs in an infected
room to check the infection.

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     It is an entirely new age, a revolutionary age. The struggle
of new thoughts and old traditions must now proceed to a finish. It
will never again be interrupted and suspended, as it was when the
civilization of Athens and Rome perished. There are today forty
civilizations with the same ideals, the same questions, the same
revolts. If twenty perish, the other score will carry on the work.

                   THE ORIGIN OF THE REBELLION

     Voltaire began it all, someone will impatiently exclaim. It
would certainly be difficult to exaggerate the share of that one
brilliant writer in founding modern skepticism, but history does
not run in that fashion. Movements do not issue, fully armed, from
the brain of any Jupiter.

     Skepticism goes far back in the history of the Middle Ages.
The poet Dante, the very flower of medieval literature, tells us
that there was a large group of skeptics of the most radical type
at Florence in his day. But those were dangerous times for
skeptics. The market-places stank with burning human flesh all over
Europe. It was necessary first to break the power of the Papacy, as
we will tell in later histories of the Renaissance and the
Reformation.

     We might assign a date for the birth of modern skepticism
round about the year 1677, and the birthplace was England. Why, of
all countries in the world, England, you will ask. Let me say at
once that the germs came to English soil from abroad. The Italian
writers, Boccaccio and Petrarch, the French writers Montaigne and
Bayle, might be counted the progenitors. All those influences of
the Renaissance to which I have referred -- the advance of
astronomy, the discovery of the East and West Indies, printing,
etc., -- made for criticism and skepticism. But in France and Italy
the Roman Church was still all-powerful. The noble Giordano Bruno
was burned alive as late as 1600 for teaching an enlightened
philosophy of the universe.

     England was comparatively free, and an English ambassador at
Paris, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, brought home from the gay city,
amongst his French laces and perfumes and clarets, the germs of the
new skepticism.

     Not that England had so far been quite innocent of radical
doubts. Certain contemporaries of Shakespeare are well known to
have been skeptics, or Rationalists, and a careful analysis of
Shakespeare's plays shows that the great poet himself was probably
a Rationalist. It was not, however, until the middle of the
seventeenth century that the first heat of the Reformation abated,
and men, tired of the mutual abuse of theologians, began to write
freely about religion.

     There was still no science worth speaking of, apart from
astronomy, though the work of Lord Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton must
have helped. But this first phase of skepticism was due rather to
two literary influences: first, admiration of Greek and Roman
literature and morality, secondly, a candid study of the Bible
which the Protestants now urged all men to read. The Catholic taunt


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that in giving the world the Bible Protestantism led to skepticism,
is quite sound. There were now, since the Renaissance, large
numbers of gentlemen, besides the clergy, who could read. "Very
good," they said, "we will read your Bible," and the result was
deadly.

     I mentioned the date 1677, because in that year an English
bishop, Stellingfleet, published the first orthodox reply to
skepticism ("Letter to a Deist"). From the middle of the
seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century there was a
long series of brilliant and learned skeptical writers in England:
Herbert, Blount, Tindal, Toland, Lord Shaftesbury, Viscount
Bolingbroke, Collins and many others. The dreary tyranny of the
Puritans was over, or had passed to America. The land rung again
with the joy and freedom of the Renaissance. The Church of England
was lax and largely corrupt. Bishops had their mistresses at table
in London. Statesmen made bishops of their illegitimate sons.

     It is known to few, but it is an easily demonstrable fact,
that a Queen of England at this time, Queen Caroline (1683-1737)
was a skeptic. She scornfully refused the sacrament of the church
when she was dying, and her courtiers and statesmen, who were in
great part Rationalists, explicitly assure us that she rejected the
Christian faith. As I have shown in my "Biographical Dictionary of
Modern Rationalists," the evidence on the point is quite
conclusive. Queen Caroline and the greatest statesmen of her time
were Rationalists.

     In this first phase the skeptics were known as Deists, that is
to say, men who believed in God (Deus), but rejected all belief in
miracles or revelations, and therefore discarded Christianity.

     In modern literature there is some confusion of Deists and
Theists. A Theist, properly speaking, is any person who believes in
God, whether he believes in revealed religion or not. A Christian
is a Theist. The Deist believes in God and immortality, but he
regards all religions as natural growths, if not impostures.
Infidels, unbelievers, skeptics were other, and vaguer, names given
to these early Rationalists (or men who followed reason rather than
tradition or authority). All that is material to remember here is
that amongst educated people there has been a considerable and
continuous body of anti-Christians for the last two hundred years.

     And this body naturally grew with the spread of education and
the improvement of printing. The Catholic who boasts that
skepticism was rare before the Reformation conveniently forgets
three things: skeptics were burned at the stake; very few people
had any education except the clergy; and there were very few books
to read. Skepticism grew precisely in proportion to the spread of
education and of printed books. The industrial and commercial
development of the world brought about a large educated middle
class: merchants, doctors, lawyers, higher clerks, politicians,
literary men, artists, etc. The works of the English Deists
circulated amongst these, and the "Essays" of Montaigne, with
occasional flashes of discreet skepticism and the more openly
skeptical and exquisitely written "Dictionary" of Bayle were
translated for them.


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     Before we come to Voltaire, the greatest of all the Deists, we
have to notice an extension that ought to be known to every
American. Most of the great figures in American history at the time
of the War of Independence were Deists, some of them even
Materialists. Thomas Paine -- ignorantly called by Theodore
Roosevelt a "filthy little Atheist" -- was the second greatest
Deist in the history of skepticism. His rejection of Christianity
was as fervent as his faith in God. Benjamin Franklin was just as
unquestionably a Deist, and he himself tells us that he got his
ideas from the works of the English Deists. George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson were demonstrably skeptics.

     It is notorious that the king of Prussia, Frederick the Great,
the greatest monarch of Europe in his time, was a Deist. The
evolution of Germany had been checked by the appalling religious
war which had followed the Reformation. Now, in the eighteenth.
century, the country was again settled and prosperous. A leisured
middle class with a taste for letters appeared and increased.
Skepticism grew, as it did everywhere, in the same proportion. And
with German thoroughness the poets and philosophers -- the Goethes,
Schillers and Kants -- who now appeared, struck a sterner note and
carried skepticism to a deeper layer of the religious tradition.

     Meantime a certain measure of liberty had been won in France.
The Protestants had been massacred, but their deadly enemies, the
Jesuits, had in turn been expelled for their notorious abuse of
their position. Men were, as elsewhere, tired of the disputes of
rival theologies, for Jesuits and Jansenists had fought as bitterly
in France as Catholics and Protestants did in England.

     Moreover, the French have a nimble wit and a quick sense of
humor. Why quibble about doctrines when the clergy themselves, as
well as the Court, were flagrantly immoral? Some religious writers
talk of Voltaire's love-affairs as if they discredited his
skepticism. These people do not seem to know that bishops and
cardinals down to the time of the Revolution had their mistresses;
that Jesuit priests murdered the frail consciences of the kings and
their concubines without a murmur for several generations; that the
nunneries of Paris were the classic homes of assignations, and the
name abbe (cleric) was a title of gallantry. Moliere, the great
French comedian, was a Rationalist.

     Voltaire, as is known, learned Deism in England. But the
labored treatises of the English philosophers on the naturalness of
the moral law, and their somewhat heavy criticism of errors and
absurdities in the Old Testament, now assumed a new form. Voltaire
made biblical criticism sparkle. He sprinkled his pages with
epigram, wit and naughtiness until ladies of the court and liberal
clerics, as well as merchants, doctors and lawyers, found
themselves shaking with laughter over stories and statements which
had been deemed sacred.

     His greai contemporary, Jean Jacques Rousseau, also a Deist,
appealed to a different temperament. He was serious, emotional,
idealistic. He preached a sentimental regard for Christ as a man,
and stripped him of the halo of divinity. Voltaire, a most generous



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man in personal affairs, a man with a passion to attack injustice,
was the embodiment of all the sunshine, gaiety, license and charm
of the French character.

     Deism had hitherto been a sober draught, for the sober few. It
was now champagne. Men clamored for it, in spite of priests and
police, all over France. They demanded it in Italy and Spain and
Germany and large groups of Voltaireans appeared in every city of
Europe. The ponderous answers of the clergy only aroused, by
comparison, further laughter. The only priests and prelates who,
like Bishop Talleyrand, could have met rapier with rapier, were
themselves skeptics. Voltaire's quips and jokes about religion
trickled down amongst the uneducated people. Valets and hostlers
shouted them in the streets. Never hitherto in the history of the
world had one writer had so mighty an influence. Voltaire was read
in the Courts of Lisbon and Madrid, Naples and Vienna, England and
Sweden, and not a class of society lay entirely beyond the range of
his caustic wit.

     Thus was modern skepticism established. The English Deists
gave it a solid foundation of learning, as learning then went.
Voltaire popularized it, and won the hearts of men for it. Clerics
thought that Anti-Christ had appeared and the end of the world was
at hand. Skepticism was world-wide. But it was skepticism about
revealed religion, not about God, and we must now see how the
spirit of criticism passed on to the most fundamental of religious
beliefs.

              THE BATTLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

     At the close of the period of Deism which I have described
there occurred one of the greatest events of all history, the
French Revolution.

     France, economically and politically, was in a scandalous
condition. The mass of the people were horribly poor, and they were
burdened with the most terrible taxes to support a frivolous Court
and a corrupt Church. The result was a blaze of national
indignation which lit up the whole world. Naturally, when Napoleon
conquered the Revolution, and he in turn was conquered by the
English and the Germans, there was a very stern reaction, and, as
skepticism was blamed for the Revolution and all its horrors, there
was a drastic effort all over Europe to check the growth of
skepticism by political coercion and to restore the power of
Christianity.

     A special chapter will later be devoted to this question of
skepticism and the French Revolution. Popular ideas on the subject,
especially sermons and religious writings, are entirely wrong. The
very common story, for instance, about a prostitute being enthroned
as the goddess of Reason in the cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris is
untrue. Skepticism had a great deal to do with the best features of
the Revolution and nothing to do with the worst. But we must
postpone that question. For the moment we have to note only that
the check of the revolt against the churches at the beginning of
the nineteenth century was a political check, not a spontaneous
return to belief. The skeptical movement went on, and it became 
deeper and more iconoclastic than ever.

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     Thomas Paine, Rousseau and Voltaire, the three most powerful
skeptical writers of the time, were Deists. All three firmly
believed in a personal god, though in the case of Voltaire,
perhaps, we can trace an occasional weakening of the belief. But
before the Revolution occurred in France there arose a new
generation of skeptics who doubted or denied the existence of God.
Atheism (or what we now call Agnosticism) and Materialism appeared,
and they had brilliant and learned defenders. I am not just now
writing the history of this development and so I will merely say
that such men as Diderot, Holbach, Condorcet and Helvetius headed
the new movement. They were known as "the Philosophers" or (because
they chiefly set forth their opinions in the first great
encyclopedia) the Encyclopedists."

     At present we want merely to trace in outline the steady
growth of the modern revolt against religion, not to study the
details of it. We want to understand that it is a normal and vital
part of the modern immense extension of knowledge, not a passing
fashion or phase. Even a writer like Professor Osborn, a scientific
man who ought to know better, has joined with religious writers in
representing the revolt as an outcome of the "materialism" of
science in the last generation, and has said that this "wave of
materialism" is over and we may look forward to a new growth of
religion. Such statements are false in every syllable.

     The deeper skepticism of the French "Philosophers" (who were
not philosophers at all, because philosophy is an abstract science
which they despised) was certainly tinged by science. An earlier
French mathematician, the famous Descartes, had said that there was
no such thing as a soul or vital principle in the animal. Even the
body of an ape or an eagle was merely a machine. As one of the
witty orthodox ladies of the time said: "According to M. Descartes,
you put together a machine called a dog and a machine called a
bitch, and you get a little machine called a puppy."

     This was the origin of what is now called the mechanical
theory or philosophy of life and the universe, of Materialism. The
French Encyclopedists said: It is true of man just as well as of
the dog. One of them wrote a famous work called "Man a Machine."
Descartes had also given the world a theory of the evolution of
stars and planets out of cosmic dust (or nebulae, as we now say).
He had found the germ of this theory in ancient Greek thinkers, and
his own theory was borrowed by Swedenborg (and called a revelation)
and was improved by the German philosopher Kant and the great
French naturalist Button. Such theories seemed to dispense with the
idea of a creator of the universe.

     Thus science had some influence on the growth of skepticism
before the era of the eighteenth century. But this influence was
very limited, and few people then took any interest in science. The
general skeptical movement in Europe and America was Deistic. It
praised the old pagan civilizations and it heavily criticized the
Bible. It was a literary and historical movement.

     So far it had been generally a superficial movement. It
required no great penetration or learning to discover
contradictions in the Bible and to ridicule the stories of Noah and


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Jonah, and so on. Toward the close of the eighteenth century it
became more scientific, in the general sense of the word. Biblical
criticism became a science, a very careful study and analysis of
the Hebrew text. This led at once to the discovery that the Hebrew
text of the Old Testament is a compilation of fragments of books of
very different ages, all put together, and very considerably
altered, by the Jewish priests a few centuries before Christ.

     This is what is called the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Just
as we can easily tell the English of the tenth century from that of
the fifteenth or the nineteenth, so we can recognize different
centuries in the Hebrew text of the Bible or the Talmud. It is a
very solid science, especially when it is joined with the knowledge
we now have of the ancient empires. This is one of the very
important points overlooked by the Fundamentalists. The authority
of the Bible, as they conceive it, goes to pieces without any
assistance from evolution. Genesis is the most vulnerable book in
the whole Bible, quite apart from what science says.

     At the same time history was becoming scientific. The great
English historians Hume and Gibbon were giving to the world volumes
of history which made all earlier "histories" seem childish. They
taught men, almost for the first time, to be critical about the
authorities they quoted.

     In particular, Gibbon's magnificent work, "The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire," one section of which described the rise
of Christianity, had a powerful influence on the spread of
skepticism. For the first time the story of man was being written
without fables, and it was seen to be a purely natural sequence of
events without any supernatural interference. Gibbon himself, who
began as a Deist, seems to have ended as an Agnostic. He found no
more trace of the finger of God in history than Laplace, the great
astronomer, found in the heavens.

     History, therefore, was from the start more important as a
foundation of skepticism than science was, and it is equally
important today. To me science and history are one. What we call
"history" is only the continuation of the story of man with which
"science" crowns its description of the procession of life through
the gloom of the remote past. But the latter part of the story, or
history proper, is just as skeptical in its tendency as the former.
Why does the anti-evolutionist quarrel with evolution? Mainly
because it dispenses with a creator. Exactly in the same way modern
history cuts out the miraculous from every page of the human record
and depicts the onward march, or stumbling and tottering, of man as
a pitilessly human and natural event.

     Moreover, this new science of history soon found, in the
nineteenth century, a most formidable auxiliary. One of the
untruthful and unsound effects of the Reformation had been a
contempt of all "pagan" nations. The myth began that all the
nations lay in darkness and the shadow of death until Christ came
on the earth, and this myth got so deeply rooted in the modern mind
that even so un-Christian a writer as Mr. H.G. Wells has more or
less embodied it in his "Outline of History." We shall see in later
chapters that Mr. Wells has been very seriously unjust to the great
pagan nations of antiquity.

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     I call this myth an outcome of the Reformation, though
Catholics in recent times use it as freely as Protestants, because
it really began, as a universal belief, with Martin Luther and the
Reformers. Before that time there had been plenty of Christian
scholars who recognized the greatness of ancient Greece and Rome.
Dante, in his wonderful Christian epic, actually chooses the pagan
poet Virgil as his guide, and, in defiance of his Church, refuses
to put the great Romans and Greeks in hell. This reverence for
Greece and Rome was naturally exaggerated at the Renaissance,
especially in Rome (where many popes were more pagan than
Christian), and the Reformers, just as naturally, went to the
opposite extreme.

     Modern history restores the balance. In one of my debates with
Dr. Riley I was astonished to hear that fanatical leader of the
Fundamentalists urge that we are no greater today than the Greeks
and Romans of two thousand years ago! Where, I asked, is the result
of two thousand years of Christian influence? Riley was right, and
wrong. By the middle of the nineteenth century Europe had only just
climbed once more to the level of ancient Greece and Rome, but
since then -- while religious influence has sunk -- we have passed
it.

     The great moralists of Greece and Rome were fully vindicated
by the new history. It was shown that every fine sentiment in the
New Testament has a parallel in the words of Plato or the Stoics.
It was another arm for skepticism. The world had been (and still
largely is) deceived. But a more picturesque and more effective
weapon was next found.

     Napoleon's dreams of world-conquest had taken him to Egypt
and, in his grand manner, he had taken scholars with him. The
English followed the French, stole their finest discoveries --
which was considered a quite legitimate piece of enterprise in
those pious days -- and in turn began to study Egypt. The key to
the ancient Egyptian writing was discovered and soon the world was
astonished to learn that the old "pagan" kingdom had been
profoundly religious and moral. Egypt had even got as far as the
worship of one eternal spiritual god before the days of Tut-ankh-
amen.

     It was next the turn of ancient Babylon, and the revelations
made here by the spade of the archaeologist were even more
astounding. The world had been completely deceived for two thousand
years as to the character of the Babylonians. We found an immense
literature and the clue to the language. We found even the
Babylonian's code of laws. Babylon a sink of iniquity! Why, we
found, they drowned people in the river for adultery and burned men
alive for rape.

     We recovered the record of their speculations about the origin
of the universe and of man, and no man can read them and fail to
recognize that Genesis is just a compilation -- altered into
monotheistic language -- of stories which we can trace back for
five or six thousand years. The story of creation, of the first
human pair, of the garden and the fall, and of the deluge,
correspond perfectly with the stories reproduced in Genesis. The 


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world was astonished at this revelation, which was spread over the
nineteenth century. Once more a literal faith in Genesis was
demolished, quite apart from any conflict with modern geology.

     There is hardly any educational need so acute in the United
States just now (1929) as the spread of this information. Not one
single leader of the Fundamentalists has the dimmest notion of what
scholars have known for fifty years or more about the Babylonian
stories in Genesis. All of them speak about "the Word of God" as if
the ruins of ancient Babylon still lay undisturbed in Mesopotamia,
and nobody had ever even suggested that the stories of creation,
fall and deluge were familiar ancient legends. It would be a
revelation to the millions of American Fundamentalists merely to
read a literal translation of the tablets which we have found in
the ruins of Mesopotamian cities which were destroyed ages before
the Hebrews could write.

     But, still without referring to what is popularly called
"science," we are not yet at the end of the influences which
brought about in the nineteenth century the great revolt against
religion. The next influence was philosophy. It would be useless
here to attempt to describe what philosophy is. Let it suffice to
say that it is (or was at first) a study of our very power of
thinking and of our most profound reflections on reality. Beginning
with Kant in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century,
a long and brilliant line of philosophers, or metaphysicians,
succeeded each other in Germany, England, France, Italy and,
ultimately, America.

     How could these abstruse thinkers influence the popular mind
and encourage skepticism? It was quite easy. As the Deistic
movement had shaken belief in revelation, there was an intense
effort to prove by means of human reason the existence of God and
the immortality of the soul. Every theologian, in fact, now
recognizes, every reasonable man must recognize, that these things
must be proved by the use of reason before we can appeal to
revelation at all. We must first know of the existence of the
revealer. Well, to cut short a long story, it was the business of
the philosophers to study these "reasons" or "evidences," and the
vast majority pronounced them invalid. Faith received another and
more terrible blow, for the philosophers are the deepest thinkers
of all culture.

     Finally, the movement for social reform in the nineteenth
century fostered the revolt against religion. Very few people,
unfortunately, now know the history of the mighty struggle in the
first half of the nineteenth century for the rights of man. In
America this is, in a sense, easily understood. The American
Constitution was, mainly by Rationalists, inspired with a just
sense of human rights, and the industrial conditions in America
were better than in Europe. The United States had not to witness
the same fearful struggle for justice as Europe. But if any man
desires to understand fully the anti-clerical movement of modern
times, he must know something about this struggle, and we will tell
the story later.




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     Briefly, when the feudal monarchs of Europe were restored
after the fall of Napoleon, the churches were their strongest
allies in every country. They formed together what is known in
history as the Holy Alliance or the White Terror. Rebels, either
against State or Church, were mercilessly punished. Every reform
was refused, and the clergy were almost unanimous in the refusal.
It was mainly a band of Freethinkers in every country who fought
for the rights of man. Until the middle of the nineteenth century
not a single well-known clergyman fought with them. The churches
were either indifferent or hostile to the most urgent of human
reforms education, industrial betterment, child labor, political
rights, the rights of women, prison reform, and so on.

     This glaring contrast between the supposed ethic of
Christianity and the actual conduct of the churches stung the
democracies of Europe, and the intellectual criticism of religion
which was contained in the other influences we have described was
now reinforced by the passionate appeal of human rights and wrongs.
The heart rebelled with the head. From the educated wealthy and
middle class the revolt spread to the millions, and the extension
of education and cheapening of books completed the revolt of the
masses.

                          ENTER SCIENCE

     So far I have hardly said a word about science, as the word is
generally understood. It is most important to study the revolt
gainst religion in this way. Evolution, even science in general, is
only one element in the revolt. Nothing could be more erroneous
than the widespread belief that, if evolution can be excluded from
schools, the revolt will be checked and Christianity saved.

     In the course of one of our debates Dr. Riley challenged me,
as an honorable man," to tell our audience whether in my conviction
evolution led to skepticism. The Fundamentalist leader glowed with
triumph when I boldly answered: "Yes," but the glow quickly faded
when I added: "So does all knowledge."

     Yet it is science that has captured the imagination and become
the symbol of the modern conflict of new truth and old tradition.
That is easily understood. Science brought such fascinating
revelations about the stars and flowers, the rocks and animals, the
organs of the body and the atoms of matter, that the whole world
listened and applauded. Science proved the truth of its revelations
by building upon them such wonderful feats of engineering and
chemistry that no one could doubt the soundness of the scientific
principles. Science represents the greatest triumph of the human
mind ever recorded in history. So when the scientist entered the
arena against religion, he attracted far more attention than the
historian or the philosopher.

     "Yes," the Fundamentalists say, "we admit it. We recognize
that true science is a mighty power." Well, who is to say when
science is true," and when it is not? When the entire body of
scientific experts in the world -- more than a hundred thousand --
are unanimously agreed that evolution is "true science," who is
going to have the courage to say that he knows better?


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     Scientific men are not agreed about the particular process or
mode of evolution. They are not agreed as to the value of all the
arguments that are used for evolution. But they -- all the
university professors in the world in seven or eight sciences
concerned with evolution -- are unanimously agreed that evolution
is certain, and they are unanimously agreed that certain lines of
argument for it are "true" science.

     The dramatic struggle of science and religion began with
Charles Darwin's publication of the "Origin of Species."
Incidentally, let me point out that the full title of the book, the
real definition of "Darwinism," is "The Origin of Species by Means
of Natural Selection." Darwinism is not the same thing as
evolution. It is a special theory of the machinery of evolution,
and it is disputed. But every writer and preacher who confuses
Darwinism and evolution, who represents that they are the same
thing, who quotes scientific men opposed to Darwinism as if they
were opposed to evolution, is throwing dust in the eyes of his
followers.

     Darwin's great merit in science, and his great offense to the
churches, is that he first put forward the theory of evolution in
a form, and on a basis of fact, that commanded general attention.
The theory was well known to scholars before his time, but earlier
versions of it had been mere "hypotheses," as a Fundamentalist
would say, without any large basis of fact. Darwin, by thirty years
of patient labor, provided that basis. The world fell to discussing
evolution, and the great conflict opened.

     There had, of course, been earlier skirmishes between
scientists and theologists. The Bible plainly teaches that man is
only a little over six thousand years old. Those who lightly say
that the Old Testament does not do this have never added together
the ages assigned to the patriarchs. These figures, added together,
take us back to about 4000 B.C. for the creation of Adam, though we
may quite admit that the English bishop who gave the very date and
hour of the creation was gifted with more imagination than English
bishops usually are! In any case, long before the time of Darwin,
men of science began to find prehistoric stone weapons, going back
certainly tens of thousands of years, and there was a conflict over
"the antiquity of man."

     There was another struggle or skirmish around the tower of
Babel and the confusion of tongues. One of the earliest branches of
science in the nineteenth century was the science of languages,
philology. Scientists found that the languages of widely different
nations -- say, most of the Europeans, the Hindus and the Persians
-- were closely related to each other. In short, long before it was
known that species had evolved, it was clear that languages had
evolved, and the tower of Babel story was rejected.

     There was also a science of comparative religion, which was by
no means favorable to the unique distinction claimed by
Christianity. There was a science of geology, and long before
Darwin's time it rejected the story of the deluge and taught that
the crust of the earth had been formed gradually during millions of
years. There was, in a word, a good deal of conflict before 


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Darwin's time, but it did not attract anything like the attention
that Darwin did, and it did not lead to such fundamental skepticism
as philosophy and history did.

     The fight over evolution fired the imagination of the world.
We must remember that, as I said, the world had been prepared for
it by one hundred and fifty years of Rationalism, and that the
extension of education, the cheapening of literature, and the
greater leisure and higher wages won for the workers in the course
of the nineteenth century had created a vast new public. There was
a new intellectual curiosity in the race. There were splendid
popular exponents of science. There was a readiness to hear the
clergy smitten on account of their social record. Huxley in
England, Haeckel in Germany, boldly took up the hesitating thesis
of the gentle Darwin and applied it to man. The world was in an
uproar.

     I repeat that there was nothing in all this more damaging to
the Bible than the archeological discoveries of Babylonian legends,
which are not "mere hypotheses," yet the Fundamentalist seems never
to have heard of them. But the implications of the doctrine of
evolution were more serious. If man has evolved from a lower form,
there is not much room for a soul. If the development of life has
been so slow and stumbling and bloody, the mind is disposed to
exclude God from it. Huxley, disliking the word Atheism, which is
generally supposed to mean a dogmatic denial of the existence of
God -- and one cannot prove a negative -- coined the name
"Agnostic": a man who "does not know" if there is a God, or thinks
it not proved. Educated people in all ages had shrunk  from the
word Atheist. They now quite commonly adopted Agnosticism. Haeckel
in Germany coined the word Monist, and millions adopted it.

     Meantime evolution spread over the entire universe. As the
science of astronomy advanced, it made clearer than ever the truth
of the evolution of worlds. The science of prehistoric man had
thousands of votaries raking the earth in all countries, and soon
there was a mass of evidence covering the evolution of man for
hundreds of thousands of years. Geology filled up many of the gaps
in the record of life. Museums were established in every large town
to exhibit these things to the public, and when you wander through
the galleries of a large museum, it seems to you ironical to call
evolution a "mere theory." It is stamped on every object in the
museum.

     Sociologists began to work out the evolution of social and
political institutions. Experts on the science of comparative
religion arranged all the religions of the world, including
Christianity, in an evolutionary series. Moral ideas were
discovered to be the outcome of evolution, and their origin and
development were traced. Everything known to the mind of man, in
fact, was proved to be a product of evolution and to be in a state
of evolution today.







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                     THE VOICE OF THE HEART

     There are said to be about five thousand scientists -- that is
to say, teachers of science in universities and higher colleges and
institutions -- in the United States. In view of the threat to
exclude evolution from the schools because it disturbs religion, a
number of these have signed and issued a public declaration that
science is quite consistent with religion. These men are less than
a score out of the five thousand. The silence of the others is
eloquent, for we may be sure that at least all the more
distinguished men of science were asked to sign it.

     The Fundamentalist despises this manifesto, and in a sense he
is right. What is the good of assuring the Fundamentalist that
science is consistent with religion when you mean a totally
different religion from his? No scientist in the world would admit
that science is consistent with a literal belief in Genesis. Yet
the document is interesting. It means that Christianity is
prepared, or believes that it is prepared, to adjust its teaching
to science.

     What precise religion these American men of science meant no
one knows. Professor Osborn says that he is a Christian, and
Professor Pupin even says that he adheres to the Serb Orthodox
Church. Does this mean that they accept the miraculous birth, the
atoning death, and the resurrection of Christ? They certainly do
not.

     And what is the use of solemnly assuring people that science
is consistent with the ethics of Christ? Naturally, science has
nothing to do with it. The Fundamentalist suspects that these men
are virtually trying to deceive him; that they really mean that
they are Christians only in the ethical sense, but would like
people to suppose that they are Christians in a doctrinal sense. I
am not sure that the Fundamentalist is wrong.

     No one is a Christian because he accepts the ethics of Christ,
for this simple reason that, as we shall see, there is no ethic
which is peculiar to Christ. But this sketch of the coming of
skepticism and the passing of Christianity would not be complete
unless we noticed the attempt to adjust Christian doctrine to the
new thought. Will this Modernism, as it is called, save
Christianity? Is there a possibility of getting the millions back
to church by permitting them to read a new sense into the creeds?

     We must judge this in the light of all that has preceded.
Modernism takes the Bible as an "inspired book" or a "revelation"
only in a new meaning of the words. It admits that the early
chapters of the Old Testament mainly consist of legends borrowed,
directly or indirectly, from the Babylonians. It admits that the
supposed history of Deuteronomy, Kings, Judges, etc., is full of
errors. The Bible, it says, was not meant to teach science and
history. It admits that the Old Testament as we have it was put
together and largely helped out with fiction, a few centuries
before the birth of Christ. It says that the prophecies were not
prophecies, the miracles were not miracles, and it confesses that
the New Testament, as we have it, was written so many decades after
the death of Christ that an historian would not regard it as a
reliable biography.
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     Now, if you say all this in plain English, as some do, you
certainly escape the pressure of many of the anti-Christian
influences we have described. But you cannot fool this generation
of ours. We want plain English, especially from the men who profess
to teach us to be honest. You surrender Adam and Eve, the garden of
Eden, the fall, the flood. Very good, but then tell us in plain
English what you mean by original sin and the atonement. If all men
did not die in Adam, all men were not redeemed by Christ. If the
New testament was written decades after the death of Christ, we
have no firm ground for belief in the resurrection.

     As we are speculating on the passing of Christianity, let us
understand clearly where we are. A few preachers say that they
surrender all these things. They have a painful way, when they are
called to account for it by bishops and conventions, of retiring
behind a smoke-screen of obscure words. That is only a temporary
little piece of strategy, they nervously assure us. Diplomacy is
the middle stage between feudalism and freedom. Soon we will be
quite free to say these things, and Christianity is saved.

     Let us look at this Christianity, without hell or heaven,
without atonement or resurrection, without virgin birth or
miracles, without a divinity of Christ. It is an Ethical Culture
Society with an oil-painting of Christ on the altar and God
somewhere in the background.

     That looks very like the passing of Christianity. But we will
not quibble. There remain a moral code, God and a prophet, and as
the prophet is Christ, not Buddha, one may call it Christianity.
But are you now on firm ground? I am not thinking of future
possibilities on the part of this restless and wicked race of ours.
I am thinking of the actual teaching of science, history, sociology
and philosophy; of things accepted by the majority of scholars.

     Every line, every syllable, of the new Christianity is as much
disputed as the old. The ethical code is disputed. To begin with,
it is shorn by these Modernists of practically all that seems to be
originally and peculiarly Christian: I say "seems," because, as we
shall see, even the counsels of turning the other cheek to the
smiter, loving your enemies, and giving your goods to the poor, are
not peculiarly Christian. The rest plainly has nothing
distinctively Christian about it.

     Moreover, much of it never has been, and never will be,
generally accepted. Up to the present people have pretended to
accept the Christian code of sexual sin. It was heresy not to do it
lip-service. It is now openly challenged by at least one-half the
most influential writers and artists of our time, and it will never
again be generally accepted, and every Modernist knows it.

     Then there is the prophet, Christ. The doubt spreads in modern
literature whether there ever was such a person. I believe that
there probably was, but it is just a broad historical conclusion.
No one can prove it.





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     In any case, why should we of the twentieth century listen to
Galilean oracles of two thousand years ago? Why should we, who 
believe that two hundred million years of planetary life lie before
us, look for social guidance to a prophet who thought that the end
of the world was at hand? That is what our generation asks. The
next will not ask it; the language will be less polite. A very
frail foundation, this, on which to rest the large hope that
Christianity will reconquer the world.

     The third and chief element of the new Christianity is God,
and it is the most disputed and disputable of the three. Pray, do
not take this as a piece of dogmatism. I am merely surveying the
modern world and setting down on paper its ideas and sentiments, so
that we may see what hope even the most liberal Christianity has of
surviving in it. God is the most disputed element of all religion.
Philosophers, the men who ought to know most about it, are
hopelessly divided as to what kind of a God we may believe in and
the reasons why we should believe. The majority of them refuse to
believe in a personal God.

     Moreover, you get right here the full pressure of the facts of
science and history.

     Note carefully that I do not say, "the full pressure of
science and history." It is not the business of either science or
history to talk about God. Many scientific men throw as much dust
in the eyes of people as Fundamentalist preachers do. "Science is
not opposed to religion," they say, pompously. Sometimes they add
that it is merely the popularizers and camp-followers of science
who say so. But the good men have no more right to talk about
religion than the preacher has to talk about science. They have
studied religion as little as the preacher has studied science.
They have as much right as anybody to say that they are religious,
but the fact is not interesting, as they give no evidence of having
studied it. When they go on to say that every other thoughtful
person is, or ought to be, religious, they are merely impertinent.

     When these men say that science is not opposed to religion,
they mislead, because all that they, as scientists, can say is that
science as such does not touch religion, yet they convey the
impression that the facts brought to light by science are
consistent with religious beliefs. On that they have no authority
whatever.

     We all know that science as such is not concerned with God and
immortality. The question for serious people is whether the
evolution of life and man (history included), as we know it, is
consistent with such beliefs. The great majority of our scientists
think not. But it is a question that each person must settle for
himself. I say here only that in view of the ghastly, brutal,
blundering blood and tear-stained record of life and man the belief
in God is far more controversial than the belief in the virgin
birth, and that modern philosophy generally denies the validity of
the grounds on which nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a
thousand believe in God.




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