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Do not deface books by marks and writing. Cornell University Library arV13663 3 1924 031 250 867 olin.anx The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031250867 HOW SHALL THE EICH ESCAPE 1 BT dk. f. s. billings TOUNDEE AND LATE DIKECTOE OP THE PATHO^BIOLOGICAl IjABORATOEY OT THE STATE CNrVEBSITY OF NEUBASKA. f ttMished ia* the ^.nfhov. (> BOsi-ON I- [ PRINTED BY TKeY ARENA PUBLISHING COMPANY CoPiJiT Squabb 1894 % COPTEIGHTBD, 1894, BY AKENA PUBLISHING COMPANY Mi rights reserved, Arena Press DEDICATION. To a Friend without whose assistance this book could not have been published, and whose years of untiring sympathy can only be expressed by the words of the Hitopadesa : " By whom was constructed this jewel of a word, that monosyllable Friend ; that dispeller of fear, that harbinger of grief, and the confidential repository of all joys ? " " A friend, who is so by nature, is the gift of Providence. Such unfeigned friendship is not extinguished, even in misfortunes." " Men have not that confidence even in their mothers, in their wives, sisters, brothers, nor in their own offspring, as in one who is a friend in principle." The Author. CONTENTS. PAQE PROLOGUE 9 GOD OR NO GOD 17 Immortality 33 God a Fetich 37 Christianity 40 Jesusism 41 Evolution and Christianity 49 Brotherhood of Man 51 Love One Another 57 The Church 59 RELIGION 67 The less Theology the more Religion 71 Pure Religion and Undefiled 79 What is a Materialist 83 The Definition of Religion 85 The Recognition of Natural Law the Spirit of True Re- ligion 88 THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENCE 93 Egoism is the Consciousness of Self -Power 95 Environment 102 Individualism 113 The Love of God which passeth Understanding 116 Bred to Win 120 Brains Win 134 Self-made Man's Fetich 139 Gflnius Inspired by God 133 Arrogance of Self-made Men 135 SOCIALISM 189 Justice to Each Part is Necessary to the Solidarity of the Whole 141 Socialism and Self-made Men 144 Jay Gould the Money King 145 Individualistic Socialism 147 The Might to Can 150 6 CONTENTS. PAGE EVOLUTION OF ETHICS 157 " Truth is the Mightiest of AU Things " 159 Professor Huxley's Recantation 160 The Primary Bioplasmatic law 164 The Moral Law of Self-Protection 169 Altruistic Anarchy 1T3 A War for the Extermination of Natural Ability 1~3 " The Uses of Rich Men in the RepubUc " 175 " The Vengeance of Despair " 1T6 " The Divine Right of Kings " 177 Causes of Social Misery 181 Conscience 188 The Gross Immortality in Christianity 189 Christianity the Gospel of Inability 193 The Beatitudes 193 The Christian System by a Christian 194 The Road to Anarchy 203 The Theological Sand-Bag 204 The Chiuroh upholds Inability 206 Brokers of Celestial Dividends 308 Christianity not a Religion 209 An Altruistic Editorial Sand-Bagger 212 " No PubUc Bequests " 213 State Communism — Anarchistic Robbery 316 Margins on Post-Mortal Dividends 317 The Individual Owes nothing to Society 218 State Robbery of the Dead 323 The State owes nothing to the Individual 227 "Flags at Half -Mast" 329 Heredity and Moral Responsibility 230 RIGHT AND RIGHTS 241 Right must become Might ere it can be Jlighty 343 Might is Right 247 Natural Rights 247 The Socialist's Vow 249 Virtue in Suicide 250 When is Infanticide Justifiable 252 The Rights of the Wage-Earner 256 Socialism not Partial Paternalism 359 THE NATIONALIZATION OF LAND 263 The World belongs to him who has the Might to Obtain and Maintain his Right 265 The Social Quagmire and the Way Out 266 The Natural Right to Land 283 " Increase of Tenant Farmers in the West 392 A Christian Rumseller 395 CONTENTS. 7 PAGE THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES 305 Every one is made Man before born a Citizen 307 Monarchlalism vs. Republicanism 315 The Declaration of Independence 319 Government of the United States a Farce 319 National Friendship 323 The Pursuit of Happiness 839 Machine Politics 330 A Democracy cannot be a Party 337 Interest Representation 339 False Americanism 344 " Against America's Children " 350 Protection of the Foreigner before the American 357 The Democracy 361 The Constitution Fetich 365 Free Trade vs. Protection 369 Law of Self -Protection vs. a Protective Tariff 374 Supposed Benefits of Protection 381 Protection and Patent-Rights Identical 382 The Coin-Money Fetich 383 Law of Self-Protection vs. Coin-Money 388 WOMAN 397 " Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, com- mitteth adultery with her " 399 Dogma and the Social Evil 405 Theology and Divorce 412 Money makes Virtue 414 The Emancipation of Woman 418 Marriage 421 Law of Sexual Morality 423 Marriage really a Humbug 426 The Science of Parentage 436 Every Child should be Well Born 440 Socialism Demands It 441 SOCIALISM AND EDUCATION 447 As " God only helps those who help themselves,'' it is the Duty of Socialism to itself to teach each Indivi- dual the Principles of Self -Protection 449 The EvU of Altruism 451 The Roads to Success 453 The Law of Use 458 The Law of Use and Individualism '. 459 The Law of Use and Socialism 462 Honor thy Father and thy Mother 464 The Only Way Out of the Social Quagmire 469 No God, no Country, one Hmnanity 471 PROLOGUE. NOTHING IS SO SENSATIONAL AS THE TRUTH. PROLOGUE. Nothing is so sensational as the truth. It can be said with equal truth, that there is nothing so dangerous. In the following pages it has been the endeavor to demon- strate the truth with regard to the majority of things in which humanity is, at present, bound by the falsehoods of, and its adherence to, traditional superstition and igno- rance. Many critics will affirm that this is an iconoclastic work. They will be mistaken ! "While, in nearly all in- stances, it is based on the popularization of scientific knowledge, of established facts, and is as much as pos- sible free from hypothesis, at all times the analytical method has been followed ; and only after arriving at the bottom fact (the Law of Self- Protection), as the funda- mental moral principle by which all social customs and institutions must be judged, has the synthetical or con- structive method been applied. Thoroughness in syn- thesis is not the purpose of this book. On the other hand, by a rather critical adherence to the analytical method, by which social institutions have been freed from their traditional falsehood, the ground has been left so clear of the weeds of superstition that he who can read the book of nature and think for himself and appreciate the funda- mental Law of Self-Protection, can apply it to every human institution. The assertion may be egotistical, but it seems to me that the builders of our social institutions have continually passed by the corner-stone and fallen down before some " Theory " which had no foundation, and that in proclaiming the practically accepted fact that " man's first duty is to look out for himself," under the name of the Law of Self-Protection, the " Stone of the Wise," for which so many have thrown away their lives, has been brought to plain view. No discovery has been made ! On the other hand, a well-known principle has 12 PROLOGUE. been brought forward, for the first time at its true value. Dating back before Christianity, even so far as historical records extend, man has been face to face with misery. In his ignorance he has followed false Gods. He has endeavored to overcome the miseries of life by an apolo- getic method, instead of applying the axe of intelligence to the root of the tree of ignorance. He has taught himself (no other expression will do), and even made himself be- lieve that the Law of Nature was false ; that he must com- bat nature, instead of discover her methods and work with her. The ideal of human virtue has been self-sacri- fice instead of self-protection. It is taught in all our schools, churches and families. A great master of educa- tion writes thus : "Let the boy learn the material forces of nature and how he can best make use of them, for the good of his fellow-men and his own uplifting." Any one who studies social questions, and can read for himself, must admit that the few who do succeed in the world do so because their natural individualism is so great that the altruistic ignorance and false sentiments of thou- sands of years has been unable to ruin them. The purpose of this book is to expose the truth. That done, the ways are open. The reader has only to follow the broad and crooked way of traditional ignorance or to come out in the straight and narrow path which leads to the salvation of the race from its eternal miseries. He or she can choose for himself or herself. THE IMMORTAL WAY. The four great truths are these : Law, Cause, Thought, Action. In so far as the human microcosm has to do with the manifestations of the infinite cosmos, these form that which we call Life. They have never been more truly portrayed than in Mr. Arnold's poem which has been used so freely in these pages : What hinders ! Children ? the Darkness hinders ! which breeds Ignorance, mazed whereby ye take these " Theories" For true, and thirst to have ; and, having, cling To lusts which v^ork your woes. PROLOGUE. 13 Ye that will tread the Narrow-Road, whose course Bright Reason traces and pure Knowledge smooths ; Ye who will take the high ReUgious-way List, the Four Immortal Truths. The first great truth is the Law. Walk In fear of the Law, shunning all offence ; In heed of the Law, which doth make man's fate ; In Lordship over sense. The next great Truth is Cause. Be not mocked I Life which ye prize is long-drawn agony : Only its pains abide ; its pleasures are As birds which light and fly. Ache of birth, ache of the helpless days, Ache of hot youth, and ache of manhood's prime ; Ache of the chill gray years and choking death These fill your piteous time. Sweet is fond love, but funeral flames must kiss The breasts which pillow and the Ups which cling. Gallant is war-like Might, but vnltxires pick The joints of chief and king. Beauteous is Earth, but all its forest broods Plot mutual slaughter, hungering to live ; Of sapphire are the skies, but when men cry. Famished, no drops they give. Ask of the sick, the mourners ask of him Who tottereth on his staff, lone and forlorn, "Liketh thee life?" The third Truth is Right-Thought. What misery Springs of itself and springs not direct from Cause ? Senses and things perceived mingle, and light Passion's quick spark of fire : So flameth Ignorance, lust and thirst of things. Eager ye cleave to shadows, dote on fond Theories ; A false idea of Self in the Unknown ye plant, and make A world around which seems ; Dead to the light within, deaf to the sound Of sweet truths breathed from far jjast sky, . Dumb to the summons of the true life kept For him who false puts by. 14 14 PROLOGUE. The fourth Truth is Right- Action. This is peace, To conquer love of Self and lust of life, To tear deep-rooted Ignorance from the mind To still the inward strife ; For love to clasp the great Eternal close ; For glory to be Lord of Self, for pleasure To live beyond all " Theory " • for countless wealth To lay up lasting treasure Of wondrous service rendered, duties done, In wisdom, soft speech, and stainless days, These riches shall not fade away in life Nor, even death dispraise. Then, Misery ends, for Life and Death have ceased; How should lamps flicker when their oil is spent? The old sad count is clear, the new is clean ; Thus hath a man content. Manifold tracks lead by the crystal peak, Around which curl antiquated superstitions By steep and rugged ways the climber comes Where breaks the Truth above traditions. Strong minds wUl dare the boisterous road which storms, Soaring and perilous, the mountain's breast ; The weak must fall from ledge to ledge, With ne'er a place to rest. One road there surely is. Only that brain May follow it which is done with superstitious things. One Law, Manifold Cause ; Right Seeing ; Right Thought ; Right Action. Spread no visions For Heavenward flight, thou man with untrained brains. Sweet is the lower air and safe and known The material levels : strong ones alone leave The nest their mothers made their own. Dear is the love, I know, of wife and child ; Pleasant the friends and pastimes of our years ; Fruitful of good Life's gentle charities ; False, though firm-set, its (traditional) fears. Live — ye who must, such hves as live on these ; Make ideal stairways of your weaknesses ; rise By daily sojourn with your phantasies, To self -deceptive vanities. PROLOGUE. 15 So shall ye pass to clearer heights and find Easier ascents and lighter loads of sins, And larger Will, to burst the bonds of ignorance. Entering the Path. Who wins ? To such commencement bath pure Reason touched, He sees the noble Truths and straightway Road ; By few or many steps such shall attain Pure Reason's blest abode. As one who stands on Himala's snowy horn. Having naught o'er him but the boundless blue, So, traditions being slain, the Man is come Wisdom's verge unto. Him, the Priests envy from their lower seats ; Him, the Theologies to ruin cannot shake ; AU life is lived for him, all deaths are dead. Ignorance wiU no more make New homes. Seeking Truth, he gaineth all ; Comprehending Self, the Universe is "I." If any teach Reason is to ceaSe, Say unto such, they lie. If any teach Reason is not the Law, Say unto such they err ; not knowing this. Nor what light shmes beyond their untrimmed lamps, Nor lifeless, timeless dreams. Enter the Path. Pure Reason controls Fate ! No pains like passions ; no deceit like ignorance 1 Enter the Path ! for hath he gone whose foot Treads down that great oflfence— (God). GOD OR NO GOD? 19 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? " CANST THOU BY SEARCHING FIND OUT GOD ? " The burning question to-day is not so much who or what is God, but is there or is there not a God? Was creation due to an anthropomorphic man-God, or to the individualization of any one specific creative force ? But few, if any, exact scientists the world over have an iota of belief in either of the above hypotheses. A recent writer 'says: "All religion primarily devoted to the ' Glory of God ' has left one long, hideous trail of suffer- ing, of torture, and of blood." That is a mistake. He should have said all theologies, as he should have also in the following : " The old religions (theologies) are crum- bling. Everything crumbles which is not true. Never was there so little theology, never so much true religion, as at the present day. Never have men attended church so little ; never have they attended hospital and asylum meetings so assiduously. Christianity is going down. Jesus is rising higher and higher." The idea of a God has no evolution. It is unscientific and contrary to the spirit of evolution. It is evolution standing still. A con- tradiction. Professor Drummond, in his recent Boston lectures, said, "Evolution is a process." The Professor evidently has no true conception of evolution, as was apparent all through his lectures. Evolution is not a pro- cess. Evolution is a series of interminable conditions, each one lapsing or extending into the other, the results 1 Louis E. Ehricli, on Keligion for all time. — Arena, March, 1893. 20 BOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f of a series of processes of the same general character. Evolution is a result, or better, a series of results, in which development has proceeded continuously from the most homogeneous forms with the simplest action to the great- est heterogeneity of structure and corresponding com- plexity in action. Evolution is a general name, or term, expressing the manner in which all the phenomena of the structural world have presented themselves until they have arrived at the condition in which we find them. It is a continuous development from the simple to the com- plex. The God idea, on the contrary, takes exactly the opposite course. Instead of developing from a simple, easily comprehended unit, the mother-God of liberal Christianity, it begins with a complexity of Gods, and a terribly incomprehensible heterogeneity, and simplifies and becomes homogeneous with the evolution of man's intellectual developmeiit. No one at all acquainted with the march of human history can deny this fact. Its truthfulness is all the proof necessary as to the errone- ousness of the conception of any idea of a God, or the necessity of any such in the march of development. No one will deny that the greatest of all social evils is ignorance. In the same spirit I assert that the quin- tessence of ignorance is a belief in, or the assumption of, a God as a necessary factor in creation. Job said, " Canst thou by searching find out God?" The modern theo- logian goes back entirely on his own authority and knows all about him, what he does, and what he looks like. In the " North American Review " for January, 1893, was pub- lished an audacious article by the Bishop of New Jersey, on " the limits of religious discussion." The author placed the limits in Christianity, but unfortunately failed to tell which of the many " anities " we may rely on. The Presbyterian Synod sitting in Cincinnati declared Pro- fessor Smith guilty of heresy, while a similar body sitting in New York at nearly the same time declared Professor Briggs guiltless of the same charge under similar condi- tions. And now the Washington Conference has decided that he is both an infidel and a heretic, and no one knows where to seek salvation. Dr. Lorimer ^ well says : 1 Arena, April, 1893. now SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 21 " Why not leave these teachers alone ? Why not permit them to freely set forth their views •* for, if we eoulil only believe it, error cannot proceed far without feeling the keen edge of truth, and the conflict between them will never and can never be decided by presby- tery, synod, convention, or ecclesiastical council, but by the honest battle of argument, and the test of practical utility in the broad, un- trammeled arena of actual life." He also says : " The trial of eminent professors will always seem farcical to the common-sense public, until the highest tribunals have decided what heresy is, and insist on inferior courts upholding and enforcing the standard." The question is, what is heresy ? Who shall decide ? Experience extending over ages has well shown that no court on earth can decide. Our Jlethodist friends might consider it heresy if we did not take our theology with a " band-wagon " accompaniment. The Baptists insist that we must " be washed to be clean." Others tell that we must be " bathed in the blood of the Lamb " to be saved. Suppose we refuse either kind of a bath, are we heretics ? The Bisiiop of New Jersey would undoubtedly assert that we must take the Episcopalian theological tea in strong doses, and refuse to accept the wishy-washy and undift'er- entiationable dilutions of the Unitarians. The Roman Catholics tell us that all the above is pure heresy, that the " word of God " of itself, or the teachings of Jesus, are not for us poor mortals to comprehend, unless they receive their own peculiar dispensation. Verily this is a tough question for the unfortunate, outside the circumscribed limits of the Church. It is no wonder the "heathen" fail to comprehend the virtues of the salvation-medicine sent to them when the doctors themselves all give them con- tradictory prescriptions. As to the authority of the Bible, the Presbyterians at their Washington meeting, June, 1893, declared : " It is an impossibility for God to lie. The word of God is the truth from the beginning ; " but Dr. Lyman Abbott, of Brooklyn, answers these very good Christians by saying : " The Bible is not the word of God. And repeating almost the words, and certainly the sentiment, of Dr. Horton, who lectured last year before the students of the Union Theological Seminary, I charge 22 SOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f any man who calls the Bible the word of God to find that phrase, ' the word of God,' ever employed in the Bible to designate the Bible, or even employed in one part of the Bible to designate any other part. "When a man takes the book, that is, what men have written, puis it up and says, ' You must hear the word of God,' you must hear only the echo of that word. I don't wonder that misplaced indigna- tion goes out against the book which the would-be defenders are mis- using." So, after all, we heretics who trust to our own intelli- gence are the only ones on safe ground. Theology is not of to-day. Theology is ever " looking backward." Mr. Bellamy will please pardon that inadvert- ent allusion to his suggestive book, which does indeed look forward to the days when theology shall be driven back to the dajkness of its moldy tombs. Theology is based on ignorance. It is founded on superstition. Lippert says : " In the culture-historical sense we have every rea- son to designate that as superstition ^ which in a rudi- mentary manner has extended from one period of ethno- logical development into another, and continues to be be- lieved though in direct contradiction to the evidences of the later period." Tliat is a good statement of theology which I have elsewhere defined as the endeavor of ignorance to define the Unknown by falling back on the traditions of a period of still greater ignorance as author- itative. Theology relies on tradition. It denies reason. Were God anything he should be the incarnation of the highest reason. To deny reason should be to deny God. Other- wise, the whole fabric is wrong, and " God did not make man in his own image." The theologians are the true in- fidels. They refuse to believe the results of their own reason. They deny their own reason as the only trust- worthy guide man has ever had. To me this seems the same thing as for them to deny their God. But do they deny their own reason ? They do it, and very liberal men also among them, with the same imbecility as the Roman Church denies to man any right to use his reason in things theological. Let us hear Dr. Lorimer on this question.^ " As in the Commonwealth siTpreme authority rests in the people, ' Kulturgeschichte, Vol. I., p. 95. 2 ^rena, loc. cii HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f 23 so in Christianity it resides wliolly in tlie Lord Jesus Clirist. He, alone, claims it, and to him alone it is ascribed in the New Testa- ment. The Bible never assumes it ; the church as therein described never pretends to it, and reason is never recognized as qualified or empowered to exercise it. " The New Testament sustains to him (Jesus) the relation of a legislature ; it records his decisions and formulates his ideas and re- quirements. Reason is the Judiciary — I mean reason illuminated by the Spirit of God. " Were reason the supreme authority it would inevitably reject the Scriptures altogether, and if the Scriptures are entitled to this dig- nity, exclusively, they would constantly antagonize both the church and reason." What sense is there in all that ? First we are told that " reason is never recognized or qualified to exercise " judgment, and in the next passage that " reason is the judiciary " to which, to be sure, is added the meaningless words, " I mean reason illuminated by the Spirit of God." After all, then. Dr. Lorimer does use such reason as he has just as the rest of us poor mortals have to. Did he not he would be an infidel to himself. On the other hand he is not a heretic (in his own church !), for he accepts its traditional version of the, so-called, sacred documents of the church as trustworthy, but then only according to his reason. Did he not do this he would be an imbecile and unfit to be allowed free among men. All juen believe according to such reason as they have. That they do not think with heretics (we refuse to be called infidels) is no more their fault than it is that heretics do not think with them. The trouble with all persons who believe in the traditional doctrines of the church is that they really do what Dr. Lorimer in the first quotation claims : they fail to recognize that their ontogenetic, or individual, reason is the only guide they can follow. A close study of the human race shows the cause of all this and inspires one with unbounded charity for such unfortunate mortals, though their beliefs are the chief vehicles of obstruction to human progress. In a scientific sense these men have no ontogenetic or individual reason whatever. They do not and cannot think for themselves. They have phylogenetic or hereditary intellects. Their intellects are antique re- flectors in new cases. That is all they are. They think with their ancestors. They live in the past and not the present. They cannot help it. The poor things were born 24 SOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? SO. They have plenty of company. The majority of the race is with them. Thankfully, more and more people are breaking the intellectual umbilicus and using their own brains. Men are finally being born in the image of the Biblical God. That is, if he ever possessed reason. Men are fast losing their reverence for traditional superstition and gaining respect for their own individual ability. God suffers thereby. Robert IngersoU has truly said, that "An honest God is the noblest work of man." The idea of Grod has been growing more divinely human with the evolution of man's intelligence, until it has been brought to that ideal of perfected humanity, a true mother. The advanced church now tells us that " God is love." Can there be any truer description of that most idealistic of all human creations, a mother ? Is she not the embodiment of self-sacrificing love ? The Gospels say that " Xo man can do more than give his life for another." How many heathen mothers, who never knew Jesus, have more than equaled him in this most divine of all attributes ? Christ- ian mothers have been no grander if more enlightened. It is a natural instinct. The tigress shares it. But what is God? He cannot be reason, for we have seen the Church universal denies him that attribute. They tell us " God is a spirit." What is that ? That which we have no conception of has no existence to an intelligent person. It may be my misfortune, but I must admit that any abil- ity on my part to comprehend " a spirit " is as impos- sible as to comprehend a vacuum. The fetich wor- shiper believes his God to be a spirit, only he is better off than the Christian, for he has " spirits " at command, and by what may be termed " inspiritation " imagines one spirit animating one object and another another, to suit his whims. In another way he also has the advantage of the Christian : he can behead his spirits, or punish them, by knocking over or smashing to pieces the inspirited object if events do not transpire to suit him. The only respectable, or better, respect-commanding theological system was, and still is, old-fashioned Cahinism, with its terror of a God — who, even when he appeared on earth and sacrificed himself in the more lovable mythology of the Christ, could not do better than give predestinated children " the easiest room in hell." We can readily conceive of BOW SUALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 25 such a monster, but I will defy any one who can see and speak the truth to see any manifestation in the tortures and sufferings of life that " God is love." What is love ? Let us be brief ! That impulse which leads one to self-sacrifice (as it is called) for cause. That definition is explicit enough, is it not ? Can we see any such mani- festation in the cruel realities of nature ? " Our father which art in Heaven ! " What mockery ! Is this an exemplification of a true father's love ? " Then midway in the road Slow tottering, from the liovel wliere he hid, Came fortli a wretch in rags, haggard and foul. An old, old man, whose shriveled skin, sun-tanned. Clung like a beast's hide to his fleshless bones. Bent was his back witli load of many years, His eye-pits red with rust of ancient tears, His dim orbs blear with rheum, his toothless jaws Wagging with palsy and the fright to see So many and such joy. One skinny hand Clutched a worn staff to prop his quivering limbs, And one was pressed upon the ridge of ribs. Whence came in gasps the heavy painful breath. ' Alms ! ' moaned the wretch, ' give, good people, for I die To-morrow or the next day ! ' then the cough Choked him, but still he stretched his palm and stood Blinking and groaning 'mid his spasms — ' Alms ' " Have those lines described a man ? Is that that self- proud creature who of himself wrote, " In the image of God was I created " ? Suppose we ask that loving father, "Can that be true?" "By his works shall ye know God ! " What answer do Ave receive, when we ask, " What thing is this wlio seems a m»n. Yet surely only seems, being so bowed. So miserable, so horrible, so sad '? Are men born sometimes thus ? What meaneth he, Moaning, ' To-morrow or next day I die ' ? Finds he no food that so his bones jut forth ? What woe has happened to this piteous one ? " The loving answer God's work gives us is : " This is no other than an aged man. Some fourscore years ago his back was straight. His eye bright, and his body goodly : now The thievish years have sucked his sap away, 26 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE 9 Pillaged his strength and filched lils will and wit, His lamp has lost its oil, the wick burns black. What life he keeps is one poor lingering spark Which flickers for tlie finish. Sucli is age. Which comes to all of us." Is there fatherly love in such an ending as that ? Surely the " Song of the Winds " to Buddha more faithfully depicted that the truth of life and living be not a dream : " We are the voices of the wandering wind. Which moan for rest and rest can never find ; Lo ! as the wind is, so is mortal life, A moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife. " O Maya's son ! because we roam the earth. Moan we upon these strings ; we make no mirth. So many woes we see in many lands. So many streaming eyes and wringing hands. " Tet mock me while we wail, for, could they know This life they cling to is but empty show : 'Twere all as well to bid a cloud to stand, Or hold a running river with the hand." Aye ! could we but comprehend in babyhood as we do in mature life the cruelties of the same, no power could prevent us all from committing suicide at our mother's breast. " they say the babe is wise That weepeth being born." Is love demonstrated in the consumptive sick child ? in the syphilitic victim of unsatiated lust ? in the deaf, dumb, blind or idiotic cripple, following scarlet fever? in the agonies of cholera ? in the pains of childbirth ? in death itself, and the agony of leaving loved ones at the mercy of this world as it is, even with all the so-called " good " there is in it ? Does the Father demonstrate his undying love when we meet some poor wretch crying in the agony of disease " ' Help, masters ! lift me to my feet : oh God, help ! Or I shall die before I reach my house.' ' Who said that ? ' ' What is the matter ? ' Only some wretch stricken with the cholera whose quivering frame. Caught by the deadly plague lays in the dust. Writhing with agony ; HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 27 The chill sweat headed on his hrow, his mouth Dragged awry with twitchings of sore pain Eyes wild with inward agony. Gasping, he clutches the grass to rise, and rose Halfway, then sank with quaking feeble limbs And screams of terror, crying, ' Ah the pain I Good Father, help!'" ? Does that Father help ? Do not the records of the suffer- ing ages tell us to " Ask naught from helpless Gods by gift or prayer. Nor bribe with food nor feed with fruit and cakes — Within oureelves deliverance must be sought Each man his prison makes " ? Do not those records tells us that " This man is smitten with some pest : his elements Are all confounded ; in his veins the blood, Which ran a wholesome river, leaps and boils, A fiery flood ; his heart which kept good time Beats like an ill-playccl drum-stick, quick and slow ; His sinews slacken like a bowstring slipped ; The strength is gone from ham, and loin, and neck, And all the grace and joy of manhood fled : This is a side man with tlio fit upon him. See ! how he plucks and plucks to seize his grief, And rolls his bloodshot orbs, and grinds his teeth, And draws his breath as if 'twere choking smoke. Lo ! now he would be dead, but shall not die Until the loving God hath done his work in him, Killing the nerves which die before the life : Then when his strings have cracked in agony And all his bones are empty of the sense To ache, the plague will quit him and light elsewhere " ? With awful dread we stand before such a scene and with the trust of our childhood's teachings still upper- most in our minds ask some theologian, some self-con- stituted agent of the great Unknown, " And are there others, are there many thus ? Or might it be to me as now with him ? " What answer do we receive? Is it not the merciless and savage truth ? Is it not in words and deeds so utterly foreign to our conceptions of a loving Father that we must either dethrone such a superstition or admit Reason has never been enthroned in us ? Do not the records heed- lessly say : 28 HOW SHALL THE BICH ESCAPE? " this comes In many forms to all men ; griefs and wounds, Sickness and tetters, palsies, leprosies, Hot fevers, watery wastings, issues, blains. Befall all flesh and enter everywhere" ? And when we ask, " Dear Lord, good Father, come such ills unobserved ? " is not the encouraging answer, " ' Yes, my darling child. Like the sly snake they come. That stings unseen ; like the striped murderer. Who waits to spring from the wayside bush, Hiding beside the shaded path ; or like The lightning, striking these and sparing those, As chance may send ' " ? ' Then all men must fear God ? ' " To which the priest answers — " ' Aye, my child, all men live in fear.' ' And none receive this boasted love ? ' ' Ah! Yes, my child,' says the priest, ' but You cannot comprehend the loving wisdom of the Father, Who has ordained that.' ' None can say, " I sleep Happy and whole to-night, and so shall wake ? " But if they wake and cannot bear their agonies, Or if they will not bear and seek to die, Or if they bear and be Too weak except for groans, and so still live, And growing old, grow old, then what end, dear God ?' ' Death, my child.' ' That is the end that comes to all Whose remnants are so petty that the crows Caw hungrily, then quit the fruitless feast. All once ate, drank, laughed, loved and lived, and liked life well, Then comes, — who knows ? some gust of chilly wind, A stumble on the path, a taint in the water-tank, A snake's nip, half a span of angry steel, A chill, a fish-bone, or a falling brick And life is o'er: the man is dead. Those whom he loved Wail desolate, for even that must go. The body, which was lamp unto the life. Or, worms will have a horrid feast of it. Here is the common destiny of men. The high and low, the good and bad must die.' ' How can it be then, that God, Would make a world and make it miserable. Since, if all-powerful, if he loves it, and yet leaves it so HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE r 29 He is not good, and if not good and all-powerful He is not God ? ' Aye, my fellow sufferers — Know ye not ? There is no God ! Ho ! ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels, None other holds ye that ye live and die! Ignorance swells our debts to pay, Knowledge delivers and acquits, Shun superstition, follow the law; hold sway O'er thyself. That is the way.' " What sense is there in the following words from a modern Unitarian ? "Ignoring the various more or less incredible defini- tions of God given by the different religious sects, let us define Deity as the wise and good Power manifested in nature. This definition, it will be observed, consists of three propositions, viz. — " 1. God is Power. " 2. God is Wisdom. " 3. God is Goodness." " God is wisdom." In that his supremacy is mythologi- cally, at least, disputed by the Serpent. In the same sense the latter seems to have thus far had the best of the argument. " God is power." " God is goodness." What do those adjectives mean ? What comprehension have we of wisdom, power, or goodness, in this sense intellect- ual properties, except as human attributes ? Summing up all three of these attributes, and using them intelli- gently are they not embraced in the word " love " ? But, as we comprehend that verb, what evidence have we in the miseries and dangers of life that such an all-purveyor of love exists ? It may be said that this is a one-sided and altogether too " cold-blooded " manner of looking at things. It may be asked does not God make the trees to grow, the fruits to ripen ? Has he not given us food and raiment? To which I answer, that that is a baseless assumption, a superstition.. Where is the evidence that he has ? Where is the evidence that man, himself, has not gradually appropriated all these things from nature and adapted them to his use ? Nothing was made for man. Man has adapted everything to himself. Man was not made per fiat act. No one but an ignoramus or a fool thinks so. Man is a result, a development, even 30 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? as evolution itself is. It seems now as if he was a final result, but if evolution be a fact, if the past be true, the perfection possible to man is only indicated in the most advanced among the species. It must be remembered that the stimulus which has forced man to make himself what he is has been the struggle for existence, the neces- sity to meet and overcome the difQculties of his environ- ment. That environment whicli has done the most to develop man intellectually has been man himself, the struggle between the individual man and those surround- ing him. To those who ignorantly believe that God " made man in his own image " and then put him on the earth after he had made everything ready for him, I would say, that God's task would have been as hopeless and his abilities as powerless as those of the rich man of to-day who, in his sublime vanity, assumes that he can prepare the road of safety for the comfort and supremacy of his descendants for eternity. It cannot be done. Let such people be instructed, and if they have brains so free from supersti- tion, so free from that reverence for the past, which is the mill-stone hanging on the race to-day and strangling its advancement, that they can think for themselves they will at once learn that the preparations of God or nature, as you will, were originally utterly inadequate to the demands of any such population as man has ignorantly burdened himself with to-day. Let them study the development of our food- vegetation. The natural potato is a poisonous root, so of the parsnip- and some other vegetables, and never grew in any such profusion as our necessities require. The wild apple is unfit to eat and so of many other fruits. The grains were not the natural food of man, who originally was a carnivora. As far as the animals are concerned compare the fox- like eo-hippus with any of the useful forms of the horse to- day ; the dwarfed wild cattle with the beef and milk- producing breeds ; and so on with the sheep, the hog, and even the dog. While man has adapted and slowly made these things conformable to his demands and, so far as it has been done, benefited himself, and is therefore the only example of " goodness " or wisdom that we have, still it cannot be claimed that man as man has sow SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 31 developed to that degree of perfection to be actually "good" to himself. He is still semi-savage. As to "Power," what greater conception can we have of " power " than man himself. He has approximately sub- dued all the world but himself. When our own Franklin first "caught," as it were, the mystic electric fluid, he laid the foundation of that science with which man will eventually do more to control the forces of nature to his own benefit than any other. Jenner, Pasteur, and Koch, and others, in the line of preventive medicine have done more to protect our race from the ravages of disease than this hypothetical God, even though he be assumed to be the impersonation of wisdom, goodness and power. They have done more to save men from their ignorance than even the immaculate Christ. Where is the manifestation of the wisdom of God ? What has he ever taught us ? What does a child know? Does not every one of us acquire what we know individually ? If God made us in his own image and is all wisdom, we should all be born wise. There should have been no evolution, no advance. The bushman should be as wise as Darwin. Theologically, the only way out of this slough of incon- sistency is to adopt Calvinism. The Gods have all been men, and the wisest of the Gods have been such great masters as Aristotle, Hippocrates, the Stoics, Galileo, Copernicus, Linnaeus, Newton, Harvey, Vesalius, Haller, Agassiz, Gray, Virchow, Bichat, Pas- teur, Koch, Huxley, Spencer, Lyle, Mtlller, Haeckel, Helm- holtz, etc., and even the great priests and reformers, like Calvin, Luther, Wilberforce, Parker, Garrison, Phillips, Thomas Paine, "Washington, Bismarck and such men. The supreme God thus far in man's history has been Charles Darwin, for no other one man, nor all men unitedly, has done so much to stimulate research and advance knowledge. " God is power, wisdom and goodness ; " in other words, love. Reader, have you ever prayed ? Have you ever studied yourself while praying, even though believing with childish reverence that the " religion of my fathers is good enough for me " ? Few humans have done that ! Few are so born that they can do it. In but few has reverence become developed from a superstition into 32 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? that more sublime and rational condition of the intellect which can be called " respect." Thousands assert, super- stitiously, that their " prayers have been answered." How many such have that intellectual ability, and beyond that have had that training which enables them logically to trace the connection between cause and effect ? The majority have not brains enough to realize that they are self-deceivers. Have you ever been a " sinner " and turned to the " religion of your mother," and prayed as your mother taught you and found strength ? Have you gone into your closet and prayed in secret to that Father who, you have been taught, " answers all such prayers " ? Doubt- less many have. Doubtless some even who read these lines have believed those prayers have been veritably answered. Reader, though you may doubt it, the writer has been through the same experience. The prayers have done good, for even superstition has its place in the evolution of man. But, have you then subjected yourself to a critical mental analysis ? Have you picked your emotions to pieces ? I have ! What did I find ? That it was all in and of myself. That " Idid it all ! " That the " good " in us comes from following our natural instinct to do right, to be " good " if you will. That the good in us is inherited as a characteristic from our parents ; that the superstitions bred and educated into us do harm, and were and are a source of weakness, hard to overcome, until the lamp of knowledge is lighted in us by an innate desire to know all we can discover. This " lamp of knowledge," or hunger to know nature, is inbred in us. It is not an ac- quired post-natal attribute. All we can do is, by diligence, to constantly replenish the lamp with fresh oil dug from the granaries of nature. I once knew a man, a lawyer by profession — it is to be hoped he may stumble on these lines — a father, a noble, earnest man. I met him in the smoking car of a train, and in the still hours of the night he and I sat up and talked earnestly over these matters so potent with the fate of humanity. Priests may hear the superstitious " confessions " of ignorant devotees, but I doubt if many men ever heard such a confession as I received that night. Like myself that man was a descendant of the iron-clad Puritans. He had been rigidly brought up in the faith of HOIV SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 33 the Sadducees of Boston. As his father had done before him, he " worshiped " at "Brimstone Corner." His parents had listened at the feet of the elder Beecher, and he had taken his earliest theological milk from the same source. A beautiful girl, who developed into a noble woman and brought up in the same faith, worshiping at the same altar, became this man's wife. Few such people grace this world. The man prospered. Beautiful children were born to them. They moved to Brooklyn. They worshipped with the greater Beecher. They believed as their fathers did after the most strict manner of the faith they had been brought up in. The devoted wife, the loving mother, was " stricken by the hand " of that loving God and died. The man believed. Ah ! how that man did believe ! Never was there more faith, " no, not in Israel." He " believed in God, in the eflQcacy of prayer, and that that loving father who gave him that blessed wife would answer his prayers." " Did not, does not Jesus tell us so ? " He left his business and gave his attention to God and the stricken one. At that suffering bedside, calling his children around him, he prayed for that life. He called on God, on Jesus, to keep their promises given him in their " holy word." Even when the mother died he prayed, for he believed truly " that God would, that God must, answer such prayers," and restore in her full vitality his beloved. So great was that man's blind faith, that the experiences of the ages, the obser- vations of his own life, were as naught. " Has not God promised to answer such prayers ? Did not Jesus call forth the dead Lazarus. Did not Jesus again rise from the dead ? " he reasoned to himself in his really sublime but superstitious insanity. He kept that body, like a recluse before a Mad6nna, until it could be kept no longer. Were his prayers answered ? Let the man an- swer. " There is no God ! The Bible and Jesus are liars." IMMOKTALITY. There are those, and many, who will now say " that that man's faith was all wrong ; that that is not what God promises ; that that man interpreted the promises incor- 3 34 SOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? rectly ; that God simply promises to return the dead or unite the dead on earth in heaven ; that it is the souls only which are united in the resurrection." Pray tell me what is the soul ? German psychologists have retained the inexcusable and abominable practices of an antiquated theological period in the expression, " Seelen Thatigkeiten " (the activities of the soul), but they have no such idea in their minds and simply mean the intellectual faculties. Where is the soul ? Somewhere I have read an Indian legend where a mythological king died and an equally mythological attendant caught the man's soul between his thumbs and carried it away as it escaped from the man's mouth. Then, regretting his act, returned, pressed open the mouth of the dead king, and putting the soul momentarily into his own mouth, blew it into the mouth of the dead king, who immediately revived and became still more of a God among his people. Who believes that " yarn," beautiful as is the legend ? Yet, it has as much fact to stand upon as man's belief in the immortality of the soul. No one but a decided ignoramus — and in that class the majority of the world must be at present ranked — believes that there is anything in or of a man except what he receives from his parents. What is that ? Material structure and its action according to innate laws ! Two decidedly material objects, which can be seen with a microscope, but having possibilities which no man can see, nor microscope reveal, the ovulum and spermatozoa come together, apart they are useless, and a " man-child " develops and is born. In the union of these two objects is comprehended the nucleus or begin- ning of every element of the body, muscles, bones, blood, lungs, heart, brain, skin, teeth, hair, eyes, etc., and in a certain sense each of these organs have the same structure, in that, in their primary structural sense, they all are derivatives of cells and are made up of cells, and in the earliest stage of the fructification of the ovulum, before the differentiation of the germinal plates, no man can tell one cell from another, a brain cell from a muscle cell, a kidney cell from a liver cell, a spleen cell from a cell that may be the matricial unit for the development of the generative organs, from which either male or female units — cells — may again be developed as the sex may result. now SHALL rujc men escape? 35 Where in all these cells is the soul situated ? So-called " barbarians " have located it in the abdominal cavity, others in the chest, and goodness knows where it has not been located. Again basing our opinions on the only rational basis, the biological, material structure and action, and know- ing that every attribute of any living thing, inclusive of man, is and can only be based on material structure, it must be accepted that every animal, from Araphioxus hinceolatus to man, rats, mice, cats, dogs, hens, chickens, mules, horses, elephants, tigers, doves and hawks, must liave the same kind of a soul, for their structure is ele- mentarily exactly alike, and so of their manner of devel- opment. If man has an immortal soul, so has everything living. If anything can be called " the soul," it must be that known but unperceivable and vital force, life, the energy which lies at the bottom of all material develop- ment, and which is part and parcel of and innate to the primary cellular units. Materialism is wise. It studies material and its actions and knows much about them, but it refuses to speak where it knows nothing. In a practical sense it knows much about living and how it is continued. In a scien- tific sense it knows nothing about the inner essence of life. Theology, on the contrary, knowing nothing, founded on traditional and antiquated superstition, knows every- thing. Theology is the only known case of something pretending to emanate from nothing. The insolence of ignorance is superb. All intelligent men know that in death all action ceases so far as tliat which we call life is concerned. We know that nothing has gone in or out of the person at such a time. Action has simply stopped, in a certain sense from various ascertainable causes, in the most exact sense from an unknown cause. Theology tells us "'the soul' has departed to its Maker." But, where, how, ^vhat kind of a thing has departed, it tells us not. Men of common sense and education are not satisfied with that kind of an answer. It is singular that many- men who have most decided " common sense " in all busi- ness relations have none in this matter. They really are actually indifferent to the whole question. They do not care an iota. They pay their dues in church, and blindly 36 now SUALL TUE RICH ESCAPE? accept the traditional ignorance and superstitions of their fatliers " as good enough for them," and with equal ab- surdity allow themselves " to be bled," to keep the super- stitions hanging around the neck of our lace. Between a really intelligent and fairly well educated theologian of to-day and the educated materialist there is but one strik- ing and inseparable difference. Tlie one knows it all and can define it all, by falling back on tradition. The other knows that which he does not know and admits it. The theologian knows all about tlie Unknown and gives it all the characteristics of an ideal man. These characteris- tics have changed with the ages. In the days of tribal savagery the Gods were savage. In the days of Calvin- istic ignorance they were " holy terrors." In these days they vary from brutes to an indescrilDable vacuity. h\ other words, they are IngersoU's God : " the noblest wcjrk of man is a noble Trod." Once, man made a God of that which he feared most, or gave it those characteristics, and the basely ignorant do the same now. The most refined Christian gives to his God the characteristics of a perfect Motherhood — or that which is bis best idea of tlie ex- emplification of Love. The theologian has not yet de- veloped to be honest to himself. When that day comes God and theologians will be among the lost traditions. The materialist recognizes the Unknown and says so, but fails to admit the limits of the knowable. I can form no comprehension of any such immaterial factors which can pass off from tlie body into eternity and be " cLid in dazzling raiment and sit at the feet of God?" " Spirits " have been a troublesome hypothesis so long as we have historic records. This belief in the " immortality of the soul " is simply the result of a " fond wish." If anything demonstrates the futility of life, the mercilessness of God, the accursedness of ignorance, it is this superstition. It is beyond eoinprehension, out of the limits of reason and with that I leave it. Where knowledge ceases belief ends with mtelligent people. There is where faith begins with the unintelligent and uneducated. "Faith" in the theological sense is but transmitted superstition, ilost people are still hugging the spokes of the wheel of transmitted superstition for dear life. They have yet to learn that. J70H- SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f 37 " Tlie books tesich Darkness was. at first of all, And Oo<]. iKjip meditatin'^ in tyiat Xight ; Look not for God and the B^inning tbere ! Xor him, nor any light. " Pray not '. the Darkness will not brighten ! Ask Naught from God. for he cannot s|>^k! Vex not your mournful minds with pious pains ! Ah, Brothers, .Sisters: seek "Jfanght from a helpless God by prayer and hymn, Uor trust the priesthoo*! with its myths and wakes; Within ourselves deliverance must be sought: Each one his prison makes. " Ear-h hath such lordship as the loftiest one? • Nay ! for with powers atxive, below, behind. As with all flesh and wliatsoever lives. Act maketh joy or woe." GOD A FETICH. What is a fetich ? The assumption of the actual exist- ence of a thing M'hich in reality has no existence. All reverence, all undue idealization of an actual object, is more or less fetich woisliip. Romance is fetich. The idealization of husbands by wives, or dee versfi, in which their attributes are raised to a degree of perfection not at all in conformity with actuality is in that degree fetich worship. The stem realities of experience t<^)o often as remorselessly shatter and depose these social "graven images " as the Hottentot knocks over and smashes the stone or stump in which he has momentarily as -umed some especial spirit to abide. We are approaching a day of realism, and are slowly bej^nning to pull the scales of superstition and reverence from our eyes. It is time we looked at ourselves and each other as we are, and not as we wish we or they were. In reality there is no material difference between tlie reverence of the Hottentot for the supposed spirit in his block of wood and that of the Christian in his worship of the body and blood of Christ in the sacramental bread and wine. Both are alike twwing down before an object which in reality has no existence. Xo better illustration of fetich- ism can be given than in Genesis ii., verse 7 : " And 38 BOW SBALL THE BICH ESCAPE f the Lord formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man be- came a living soul." There we have the inspiritation of an object, "the dust of the ground," with the "breath (spirit) of life." In exactly the same manner a Bushman or Hottentot sets up his wooden or stone fetich and im- agines therein the spirit of good or bad, the rain spirit, or what-not genius he thinks necessary to his welfare or to the injury of his enemies. Is it not the same thing ex- actly as the worship of some image of the Virgin Mary, or the sacrament ? Let us be honest with ourselves ! There is no sacrilege, no infidelity, in being honest to one's self. There may be heresy towards traditional supersti- tion. The passage quoted from Genesis is, however, worthy of more consideration. As a matter of chronolog- ical fact it must be much older th:ui verse 27 of the pre- ceding chapter, where it says, " God created man in his own image," etc. Man had then acquired quite a con- quest over nature, and become very much " stuck on himself," as ordinary people say. The previous passage is to my mind one of the most profoundly religious (religion will be defined later on) in the entire literary history of our race, ilistaken though it is in fact, it is also one of the most profoundly philosophical passages. Whoever enunciated it deserves our respect as one of the first scientists of whom we have any record, as one of the world's great thinkers. AVhile I have heard many ser- mons from that text I have never seen the theologian who could touch the skirts of the garment of truth in that wonderful passage. Let us endeavor to go back to the period wlien that man lived. It is not difficult. We have all passed through the childhood of the human race in our own brief existence. This man knew nothing of the law of evolution, of bacteria, of fungi, of the ovulum and spermatozoa, of the wonderful processes of fcetal evolution, of the formation of the germ-plates and their eventual placement in permanent tissues. He knew nothing of " omnis ovum ex ovum" (all life finds its be- ginning in an egg), nor of that more profound axiom, " omnis cellula ex cellula," nor had he heard of the nebula theory ; but one thing his keen observation had taught him, and which it is evident he knew fully as well as a HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 39 Darwin or a Yirchow, and tbat was that "like begets like." He knew that man begat man, cattle — cattle, fowls — fowls, and like vegetation in the same manner ; and one thing more he knew (which we know also, but which trouVjles us no more because we know it is the end of all things), which is the wonderful part in the legend, and that is that when all these things perished, they disinte- grated into dust. Now comes the philosophy of this man, sublime even in its error. How did he know all ended in dust ? By observation, by seeing dead bodies, dead trees, dead animals disintegrate, and he saw they all had a common termination ; but that which struck him most of all was that man, the creature made " in the image of God," also has the same end. " This cannot be the beginning. There is something wanting liere," our investigator must have said to himself. " Even though I know that 'like begets like,' all along the line of life, I also know that ' dust of the ground ' cannot beget itself." " That I know because I have never seen it," must have been the next thought. Nevertheless, the idea that " like begets like " could not be removed from his mind. The next trouble was the vitalizing spirit. Then came the fetichism ; the assumption of an all-pervading creative spirit capable of vitalizing all living or growing objects. The translator has called it God, " the Lord." Thus " the dust of the ground" became molded into man and the fetich "spirit of life " became God. Truly the theologians can find something yet to study in the traditions if they can drive superstition from their minds and see through the glass of history clearly and not " darkly " as they do now. The same is true of the most advanced of theological Christians. It is nothing but fetich worship when they believe and sing "God is wisdom, God is love.' They worship and reverence an ideal man, a creation of their own disordered or untrained minds which in reality has no existence. It is a singular thing in the develop- ment of theology that with the more perfect evolution of the race, and the unevolutional hypothesis of one spirit or God for many, that men and nations began to go into bitter 40 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? wars about him. So long as Gods were plenty and could be had at command, the ideas of men were so wanting in concentration, and they were also so busily employed in struggling for themselves individually, they were appar- ently satisfied with them. But, when one nation, from entirely different causes, began to develop beyond another, then it assumed to itself a special God, and to build tem- ples rich with the offerings of plunder to him. It is a question if the earlier semi-theological wars were not fully as much to rob the temples of the Gods as anything else. The history of the early Catholic Church on this continent proves that to be the case for that body. More actual plunder and rapine have been done in the name of the Christian God than in all the wars of national rivalry since the world has historical record. CHEISTIAXITY. The number of men and women who now think that " Christianity is going down " is by no means small and constantly increasing day by day. Tliereis the same dis- agreement as to what Christianity is among the theologians, as there is as to what>God is. The majority of them even refuse to accept the written word for it. The world is rebelling against them, and, as Ehrich says,' " Jesus is rising," that is, man, or, which is the same thing, human- ity itself. The assumption by certain persons, that there are 40,000,000 Christians in this country who were opposed to opening the World's Fair on Sunday, is as groundless as anything can be. Go to the churches and use your own eyes, and then say what percentage of the population is in them? I will venture the assertion that there are not 100,000 people in this United States who can give a philosophical reason why they are Christians that would be accepted in any court in Christendom as legal evi- dence ; or who can give a definition of Christianity, or any other reason why they are Christians, than that their fathers were, and " all good people are." I will go further ' Arena, loc. cit. EOW SHALL THE BICH ESCAPE? 41 and assert that no two laymen or women, and scarcely any two theologians, can give the same definition of Christian- ity, though professing tlie same faith, if asked their own thoughts and restricted from repeating the priest's written creed. They will probably all agree to this: Christianity is a (or the) belief in God the Father and his sou Jesus, the Christ. Beyond that it is war, dispute and contradiction. We need not bother ourselves about it, for, like " Kilkenny cats," the creeds are gradually killing each otlier out, and the truth is sprcjuting into a growing tree of knowl- edge above and beyond them. Xo sane person, nor one not filled to a surfeit with the reverence of ignorance for traditional superstition, and above all no educated person, believes in that mythological tale of the miraculous con- ception or in that imbecilic narration of the resurrection. Nothing was ever made that way, and the verdict, " to dust shalt thou return," has never yet been changed, nor have the portals of the grave ever opened to the dead, and the same body returned to life. — " Jesus is rising." JESUSISM. The writer ■\-\ho, with prophetic wisdom, profoundly proclaimed that "Jesus is rising," correctly diagnosticated the grip which the prevailing epidemic of the "brother- hood of man" has upon a certain form of evolutionized society. Unfortunately, however, his diagnosis bears the same character as that too frequently enunciated by the regular physicians who mistake La Grippe for a more fundamental disturbance, or entirely overlook the pos- sibility or existence of dangerous complications. He is not, individually, to blame for this. As with physicians, generally, his reverence for past traditions, and the ata- vistic in his nature, binds him still with the bonds of traditional superstition, though they have lost their " orthodox " covei-ing. He accepts the Gospels and prob- ably the Epistles in toto as the trustworthy " revela- tion" of what he is pleased to term "Jesus rising." Authoritatively, he accepts them, even as the church does. He does not even select out that which suits him, but accepts all as suitable. He swallows the whole without 42 BOW SHALL THE RICE: ESCAPE? any attempt at intellectual digestion. The church per- forms the first part of the act even as he does. It then changes its anutomic physiological characteristics. Unlike our author, it becomes converted to another persuasion. It joins the ruminants. It selects its own " cuds," and remasticates them to suit the sub-runiinantic theological divisions. The rest it casts away as i-efuse. In the con- sideration of historic Christianity the analytical " Truth- Seeker " must use his own reason and pass by that of his ancestors. If he studies hard and does this, he will be forced to the following differentiation : 1. Jesusism, which is Communism, and not Christianity at all as the world accepts it. 2. j\Iessiahism, or Christianity, based on traditional Judaism, plus the Gospel and Epistle additions to the same. 3. Theological Christianity, which is a diversified eclectic adaptation of all three according to theological prejudices. 4. Ideal Christianity, or the rationalized Christ. That is, each individual (or community) assumes it sees its own reflection of what it considers an ideal man, or con- dition, portrayed in the Xew Testament, utterly regard- less of the traditional facts, or the actual words as they would treat them if found in any work of so-called "profane literature." Among this class are those who assume that " Jesus is rising." In this work we shall consider Jesusism, or the Christianity of the Gospels, which we think can be attributed directly to the teachings of Jesus the Nazarene. We shall endeavor to differentiate the man Jesus and his teachings from " Christ the Messiah," and the traditional literature and its influences, though in a cursory manner, leaving the more profound consideration to a later work. What we shall say, however, will stand the test of histor- ical criticism in the future. The differentiation, on a general principle, is not a difQcult task, if one approaches the question on an analytical basis, and free from tradi- tional influences. There is but one standard to follow ; that is, the utterances directly attributed to Jesus, par- ticularly the celebrated " Sermon on the Mount." Any unbiased student of ethnology in its broadest sense must unhesitatingly admit that, taken on that basis, the Jesus HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPEf 43 of the Gospels is a most exclusive communist, and that the Christianity of Jesusism is unadulterated communism, with a most destructive anarchistic tendency. We shall show, what has otherwise been freely enough taught by the Church universal, but without a particle of intelli- ence however, that the "brotherhood" of Jesus was indeed " the Gospel for the poor : " that it inculcated the demoralizing doctrine, that everything is "God's will, and that ' He' who takes care of the sparrows and lilies of the valley" would provide for his children without the necessity of self-labor. That Jesus condemned any individual endeavors look- ing towards taking care of self in his brotherhood, accept- ing the idea, which many who have since followed him have foolishly accepted, that the "end of the world was nigh at hand ; " that he held those who did take care of themselves, the rich and prosperous, up to the ridicule and hatred of the despicable rabble of inability and vice which had attached itself to him, is self-evident to any one who can read words "as they are writ." We shall show that the same spirit of condemnation of natural ability, up- holding inability, in the name of its special creator, " God the Father," runs through the Epistles. Whatever has not this communistic, anarchistic tone is not of Jesus, and must be attributed to the influence of the traditional Jewish Messiah who was expected to come. That Jesus' followers, being Jews, may have really imagined that he was "he who should come," and that tlie idea has had some post-Jesus contagiousness is admitted; ns well as that he may have also imagined that he ^\•as "The Christ," after having been repeatedly called "Lord, Lord," by his followers. We have innumerable examples of the same thing among the ignorant and superstitions to-day. The " Minister Worship " among our, so-called, " best people," in which they assume their favorite pastor is the especial " called " and " chosen one of the Loixl," is but a repetition of traditional superstition. " The Messiah still cometh," even at the end of the nineteenth century. Yes! "he cometh;" but he fails to mate- rialize according to tradition. Jesus is indeed " rising." It will be the final ascension of the Balloon of Christianity ! It is at its zenith. The final rent of the lance of cold 44 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? facts in the fatal hands of honest and unprejudiced materialism is now in dangerous proximity. The collapse is so threatening, that it may be expected at any mo- ment. It will be gradual, however. It began long ago. The amount of accumulated gas is so immense, that, like a skillful surgeon, materialism must let it out slowly, by repeated and small punctures, so as not to too seriously injure the innocent in the perforated basket underneath. Materialism produces no cataclysms. It is evolutionary. A materialistic revolution is impossible. Its weapons are continual investigation, profound thought. Individual freedom under the laws of the cosmos. Jesusism is anticos- mostic. In my views on this subject I am certain to find far less sympathy than in anything else I may write. Neverthe- less, I know I speak the truth, that what I shall say is in the fullest accord with science, evolution and common sense. In considering these questions we must drop all reverence for the past, and sympathy with things be- cause they have done good or may still be beneficial, and, with Thomas Paine, drop all tradition, "go back to nature and think as if we were the first men who ever thought." Those few words should immortalize Paine beyond almost any other thinker. They express most exactly the true method of study, the method of precise observation, probably better than any other man has ever done. Great indeed was Thomas Paine ! Jesusism consists essentially of three hypotheses or as- sumptions. 1. God the Father. 2. We his children. 3. Love one another, or the communal " Brotherhood of Man." Let it be at once understood that I chiefly differ- entiate between the Brotherhood of the ideal Church Christianity and that of the Jesus of the Gospels. It is also not an easy task to differentiate between what is Jesusism and what Messiahism. It has been frequently asserted that the idea of " God as a father" was original with Jesus, and while, for the sake of argument, I will admit that stated in that way the idea is surely original in the Gospels, I think any unprej- udiced person must admit that such an idea is and was now SHALL TUE BICH ESCAPE? 45 but the natural outcome, with more enlightenment and equally more national depression, of the Jews' pet hobby that they were the " Chosen children," " the Children of Israel," as they are called, of their special God. It seems to me no other result of their idiosyncratic theology is possible. The same is true of tlie idea of the Christ as God's special messenger to lead his chosen ones into a more happy condition. Both God and the Christ are fetich. But how about " the Father " ? That is fetich too ; an incomprehensible idea ; a superstition which has worked incalculable injury to the world ; however much comfort individual weakness may have drawn from it. It is fetich because not true. A baseless assumption local- ized in the great nowhere. The Jove of the earlier days of the chosen people exactly corresponded to their then con- dition and aspirations. From a tribe of slaves they started out on a warlike tour of conquest and subjection. They needed a war-leader. They made him. Jove was such. But, when the surrounding world organized against them, when the glory of the House of David began to set behind the horizon of hope, and their local supremacy finally yielded entirely to that of Rome, they became despondent. They no longer sought an earthly leader. Their hope was buried in the tomb of David. Their glory had departed to be only a fond dream. A memory to be hugged as a delusion only for the future. Jove had deserted them. They needed a comforter. Jove the spirit warrior changed to God the Father who would watch over his children. This was supported by the tradition that the glory of the House of David should come again which naturally ended in the " only begotten Son of the Father," who was to be of the House of David, coming to lead them — where ? Earthly success seemed impossible. That all the glory of Israel should be gone forever could not be ; hence, their record was to be in an immortal glory in the home of that Father, and not on earth. The rest was easy to manufacture. Ancient history is full of the traditions of similar fetich reverence and superstitious hopes which have never been fulfilled. No man, no nation, has ever succeeded in anything when it got beyond the period that it depended on its own exertions. It is singular that the strong have made the 46 BOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? Gods. The poor only have depended, on them. The Gods have all been gross self-deceptions. . This " God the Father " hypothesis has indeed been a bad and malicious God. So long as he was single and controlled by the Roman hierarchy he did no great harm except to people worshiping other Gods. But being a fetich, being in reality a tradition and not a fact, man soon began to be doubtful as to his attributes, and disputes arose as to this and that, causing divisions in the church. So long as these divisions were more or less individual and un- organized they were correspondingly of easy subjugation by the church, but when each peculiar interpretation of " the father " began to crystallize around a center and grow by collective adhesions, the churches developed, which unitedly were too much even for Rome and the superstitious Royalty, which had been dependent on her ; for Rome once made and unmade kings as the vice-gereut of God. Then came the Babel-like tower of the disputing theologies, now crumbling to pieces. But the safety of humanity and its peace and comfort have for a long time been dependent on the confusion among the theological pillars which still support the tower. Were there but one central pillar, as of old, and that the center of theo- logical despotism, and " primarily devoted to the Glory of God," we should still see the " trail of suffering, of tortures and of blood " polluting the surface of the earth. Free expression of thought would be suppressed. The strength of the truth lies in tlie discord of the theologies. That the fatherhood of God is a traditional fetich, bearing no correspondence to the real qualities of an ideal father or the actual father of a family, has been previously shown. Nothing but the superstition of profound ignorance could or can possibly lead any person to believe in any such supreme nonsense. Practical experience in endeavors to ease the miseries of humanity has shown me time and again that it is one of the most demoralizing influences with which we have to deal. It kills that self-reliance on which self-preservation depends. It is absolutely con- tradictory to nature. It finds no support in evolution. That savage and indomitable law " the survival of the fittest," contradicts it at every point. The law, of adap- BOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 47 tation to environment, by which evolution has been worked out, shows its fetich-like and deceptive character. The miseries of the human race, disease, death, all and in all de- monstrate its utter absurdity. Let me quote one of many actual cases which have come to my personal knowledge which illustrates its terribly demoralizing and disorganiz- ing effects. A girl beautiful to look upon, but with very little individualism, and a Madonna-like face, and a char- acter which under more favorable conditions would have been pronounced ideally Christian, and was really so con- sidered, married a man who imagined he loved, but after wards deserted her, leaving her with two children. Sui- fering and privation followed. In the same city lives a woman illustrating another phase in intellectual evolution. A woman struggling in the stormy sea of Common-sense tossed by the waves of traditional superstition. In other words, a brave strong woman, a fighter for her rights, a fighter for other women ; limited only by a strong reverence for things once held sacred from seeing the true " light of the world " ; com- mon-sensed in all things save her theological superstition. This woman is a great friend of the writer, and is only pained at her vain endeavors to " bring him back into the fold " of superstition and traditional darkness. Meeting her casually one day during her trips among the poor and needy, she said, in her abrupt way, " Jump into the coupe with me. I want to show you a case of Christian faith which I am sure will convince you." During the ride she told me the details of the story above related, of the squalor and misery in which she had found " her saint " ; of " her great Christian faith," which found constant expression in the words, " I knew the Lord would provide for us." I immediately confused my good friend by quoting that peculiarly illogical and inconsistent remark of Christians, " The Lord helps those who help themselves," which at once admits the absolute impotency of the Lord, and the fallacy of any dependence on him, though it is a true and sharp expression of a natural fact. There human nature rises above its own theological and traditional superstition and speaks the truth in spite of itself. How- ever, my friend soon collected herself and said, " Wait and 48 JWW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? see when we come to the house." She had removed the woman to a nice flat in a respectable neighborhood, furnished it, clad her and the children, and interested friends to send her work. On entering, 11 a.m., the good Christian was sitting neatly dressed in a rocking-chair, Avith two children in their night-gowns, unwashed, around the room and a general untidiness prevailing. The saint was reading the Episcopal prayer-book ! On greeting her, Mrs. asked, " Well, did you finish those children's dresses last evening ? " The answer, in the sweetest of drawls, was, " No, we went to the mission last evening." After some conversation between the women, I said to the suiferer, — she was bloomingly healthy, — " You ought to be very thankful that Mrs. found you and has helped you so much. " Oh, sir, I knew the Load would provide for us," was the answer. I thought I did not blame the husband so much after all, for certainly his Madonna never provided a good meal or a cleanly home for him. To shorten : we left, and I told my friend my exact opinion of her indolent saint. I met her again two weeks later (not the saint, but the worldly energetic woman), and she said, " Confound that woman ! she has about convinced me you ai-e right. All she can do is to pray and weep, and I am just discouraged ; she is so beautiful and sweet I do want to help her, but it's no use ; what shall I do ? " I admitted I was also at my " wits' end," but sug- gested putting the children in some home, and getting the saint a position to read the Bible and prayer-book to dying sinners in some hospital as the only road to sal- vation for my friend. Whether she acted on the sug- gestion or not I do not know, as I have not seen her since, but every practical helper of human misery knows that the above is one of the evil results of the " Fatherhood of God," and no uncommon one either. It kills self-depend- ence and detracts from the truth. If, instead of it, we preached, from babyhood up, that self-reliance is the only road to material salvation, and left the traditional to take care of itself, we should not have so many elegant misera- bles in the world. HO IT SHALL THE SICH ESCAPE f 49 EVOLUTION -VXD CtOSPEL CHRISTIANITY. Is Christianity Evolution? Professor Dnimmond, in his late Boston lectures, says : ' "Christianity and evolution, cannot be reconciled, because they are one and the same thing. What is evolution ? It is a process. What is its object ? To make more jierfect human beings. What is t'hristianity ? A process. Wliat is its object ? To make more perfect human beings. Christianity took all the natural foundations and added the finishing touches There is nothing in Christianity that has not a germ in nature, and no man can follow up evolution aud not come to Clmstianity. Christianity is the further evolution. It is a self-sacrificing love, seen in nature first in the division of the cell, whereby each part is Ijetter able to get food. This division is the self-sacrifice of the individual." Such reasoning as the above is so illogical and so tele- ological as to be a disoraee to intellectual evolution. Natural evolution is a series of purposeless results follow- ing the action of material laws. Is that Christianity ? Man has "perfected" hiiuself because he had to. The " Brotherhood of man "' has plaj^ed the role it has because it appeared to be a self-protective neeessitj-. In that way, and that way only, does Christianity have any re- lation to evolution. Human perfection is not even inten- tional with man, as a natural phenomenon. It has been so as a superstition. The last partof this quotation is absolute and supreme nonsense. All proliflcation is the result of the law of self-protection, as will be shown elsewhere. There is no self-sacrifice in it. To repeat : Evolution is not a process. It is a series of conditions lapsmg more or less, or continuing into one another through unlimited (to our knowledge) ages, and due to a series of processes of most variable nature. Evolution is a fact and not a theory. The theories of evolution are our endeavor to explain how its phenomena, facts, have occurred. Evo- lution is, again, the reaction of morphological living mate- rial to its surrounding environment. It is the develop- ment from primary and simple conditions to the com- plex ones by which we are surrounded. It has not been 1 Newspaper clipping. 50 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? steady in all places and at all times. ISTumerous cata- clysms have taken place. It expresses a general result only. The impulse to it has been the self-protection necessary to overcome an ever augmentingly severe en- vironment. Man will continue to advance intellectually and morally just so long as his endeavors to overcome his environment are self -protective. When the environ- ment becomes persistently and discouragingly resistant he will retrograde, and if our reading of nature be true, eventually in the dim by and by, die out, unless he ac- quires sense and courage enough to stop breeding and kill himself off before that time arrives. That environment is not necessarily the stimulus for good is.shown by the fact that both individuals and nations succumb to an environment their energies are unequal to. For all living things the environment most obstructive to their energies is not, except in localities out of which many cannot move, — what we call inanimate nature, but the living environment and most frequently the individ- uals of their own species. This is especially true of the human race. The once glorious Babylons are no more. Jerusalem is a wreck ; Greece and Rome, Egypt and an- cient India, have sunk in their glory, through this struggle with an adverse human environment. Because man there lost his enei'gy even aiature has returned to a condition unfavorable to the best advancement of the in- habitants. Men especially and even animals have the ability to migrate from unfavorable to more favorable natural environments. We see that in the migrations of wild horses and other animals. It is strikingly illus- trated in the settlement of this country. But all through we see the severe illustration of the survival of the fittest only in the vicissitudes of a severe environment. Do not forget that in so-called civilized countries the severest environment is man himself. The fetich of the " father- hood of God " leads to the production of thousands on thousands totally unfit to survive in the struggle which are supported by those other fetiches, " the Brotherhood of Man " and the " Immortality of the Soul." Christianity may be a process. It is surely a traditional superstition ; it may be a step in evolution, and probably is, but is not in accordance with the true course that has thus far taken HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 51 place in evolution, if we accept Professor Drummond's idea that evolution is ever onward and upward. It is ret- rograding now. As Ehrich well says, " Christianity is going down ! " ^ On the other hand, if it is true that there are retrograde or disintegrating movements (Involution) in Evolution, Christianity is simply an exemplification of such. It has played its part. It was of man, and man dro[)s all useless or encumbering things of his own crea- tion as soon as he becomes aware of the fact. It occupies a marked place on the road from traditional and supersti- tious ignorance to the land where blooms the unrestricted tree of knowledge. It has become a barrier to the ad- vancement of the race. Commerce, human intercourse and the gradual discovery of the fact that all savagery, all factors supporting crude or inciting brutal individual- ism, are at enmity with individual self-protection in the best sense, have been the greatest forces in the better or more humanizing development of the race ; in other words, mutual self-interest, and the fact that that is better preserved by mutual and kindly intercourse than any other factor known to man. The more it becomes evident that individuals and nations are mutually dependent on one another for self-protection and comfort, the more rapidly will savagery, crude individualism, disappear from among men. Taken as a whole, then, while Christi- anity must be considered in connection with evolution, I think it evident that it can be no longer considered a useful factor. The very fact that its essentials have been and still are constantly in dispute and causing hatred and discord proves this. When thinking men admit that " Jesus is rising higher and higher," they sim- ply mean that Christianity is crumbling to pieces and that man himself is rising above traditional superstition. Tlie Jesusism of such men, so strongly represented by the general communications in the " Arena " is " THE BEOTHEEHOOD OF MAN." To dispute or attack that idea as another fetich, a traditional superstition, as absolutely unevolutional, as 1 Arena, loc. cit. 52 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? unnatural, as, in fact, in the way of human progress, is to face the verdict of having one's sanity brought in ques- tion. Nevertheless, the truth, as I see it, drives me on even if the road lead to social destruction. It must be admitted that no more beautiful and ideally enchanting sentiment, taken by itself, has ever been promulgated. But sentiment is often a very dangerous stimulus to fol- low. It may be defined as the immediate shock which cer- tain phenomena give to the intellect. It may as often lead to what is called wrong as right if immediately acted on. It is simply the first irritation, the effect of which should be to call mature reflection into action in all educated be- ings. The "brotherhood " sentiment cannot, however, be a fact, for it is contradicted entirely in the absence of God the Father. The one is the necessary corollary of the others. If the one is a fetich the other must be. All nature contradicts it. Individualism shows it to be a mere superstition. The struggle for existence denies it. Ignorance and superstition alone keep it alive. The his- tory of human evolution shows its actual absurdity. Nevertheless, it has done, and is still doing, some good. Error of conception is by no means always followed by equally evil results. On the other hand, it is doing much evil which will continually increase. Let us see if this brotherhood idea is not also a fetich, a superstition, a hypothetical something wliich in reality has no existence? Does the gospel Jesus in reality teach imiversal " brotherly " love as is now being assumed by his self -con- stituted followers ? On the contrary does he not teach the most limited communism ? Was not the " love one an- other " which he inculcated limited to his peculiar fol- lowers only ? The clever author of " The Ancient Lowly " endeavors to show that the gospel Jesus led what he pleases to call a labor uprising. While I would not give to the Galilean movement that dignity and look on it more as one of those fanatical theological crazes of which we have occasional experiences to-day, still there is no doubt that it acquired such extent as to arouse the nervous and jealous alarm of the Roman governor, and found no sympathy with the prosperous class of Jews, who, it is self-evident, desired to " stand in " with their HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f 53 conquerors, as is always the case with that class, and nat- urally, for it is the only way open for the conquered to save themselves. It may be truer, that Pilate killed Jesus — if he did — merely to please the respectable Jews who looked on him somewhat as we do anarchists, and rightly. Now, if that Jesus did really inculcate the principles of universal " love one another " which are ascribed to him, we ought not to find any evidence to the contrary in what are accepted as reliable reports by his followers. On the contrary, do we not find the strongest evidence that that Jesus uttered the most bitter denunciations, seasoned with anything but brotherly love against all the prosper- ous classes in his own nation? Do we not find him extremely careful not to excite the jealousy of the foreign government ? Does he not caution his followers on the necessity of paying taxes and rendering "unto Csesar the things which are CEesar's " ? The Chicago anarchists were hung, but I defy any modern judge, any theologian, to find any more, or as bitter, invective in their words, any such revolutionary language, as that credited to this Jesus when speaking of the fortunate Jewish classes out- side of his own people. " Scribes, Pharisees, Hypocrites," are the " loving " names lie applies to them. Let us change the words and apply them to the rich men, the same class, in the Christian world of to-day. " Woe unto you. Priests, Lawyers, Bankers, Hypocrites ! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men, for •ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in. " Woe unto you. Priests, Lawyers, Bankers, Hypocrites ! for ye devour widows' homes, and for a pretense make long prayers, therefore you shall receive the greater dam- nation." (Did the Chicago anarchists utter any more dangerous sentences than the above ? ) " Woe unto you. Priests, Lawyers, Bankers, Hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte ; and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of Hell than yourselves." Suppose any man to-day should go out on the street corners of any city hi Christendom and continually howl forth such terrible denunciations of the prosperous classes 54 MOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? as the above, how long would it be permitted ? And yet Jesus is reported to have done it, and, strange to say, the majority of the above class and two-thirds of the people not only believe he did it, but blindly assert that he taught universal " brotherly love " in doing so. If that is not worshiping and following a fetich I must say that I do not know what is. It will probably be ad- mitted that the writer has the command of rather strong language, but he admits his inability to equal the above even in the denunciation of the most atrocious villainy. The man who would publicly utter such language to- day and collect a following about him would be surely incarcerated, if not incinerated. If there ever wns an anarchist on earth the gospel Jesus ■was one. Like tlie misled anarchists of to-day, he taught "brotherly love" within the " commune," and the most intense hatred of all those outside of it who enjoyed prosperity. But — and do not lose this point — this gospel Jesus was a coward in comparison to the anarchists in Chicago. They defied all government; they would do away with all government as a useless and embarrassing encumbrance. They would not even pay taxes to Caesar ? They were bold, earnest, yet mistaken men. They were willing to die for what they termed " their principles," and did. But this Jesus was entirely wanting in the one great characteristic which makes a man. He lacked " courage." He would create hatred and do all he could to the injury of his more fortu- nate countrymen, -but he would save his own neck and those of his followei-s by " paying tithes to Caesar." If that is "brotherly love," then I admit my inabihty to comprehend the practical meaning of that most express- ive of all verbs — " to love." How sane and educated people can follow this fetich of the gospels in this day and generation is to me incom- prehensible ? The teachings of that Jesus are so contrary to nature that, if followed out, the human race would know nothing but misery and squalor universal. Success would be impossible. How collected and strong business men can go to church and calmly listen to themselves being " damned to perdition," as it were, and only saved by theological legerdemain is to me a mystery. Did that BOW SHALL THE RICH ESC APE 9 55 Jesus teach " love one another," or destruction of property, when he endeavored to incite his followers against riches, if not their possessors, by telling the rich, " Verily, I say unto you that a rich man shall hardly enter the kingdom of Heaven." " Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell ? " (that was said of the " Scribes, Pharisees, Hypocrites," but they were the rich countrymen of Jesus at that time). " It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." " Woe unto you who are rich, for ye have received your consolation." Heaps of " brotherly love " in that language, is there not ? Does any level-headed man believe that stuff ? See the terrible work of reverence for " what was good enough for mother and father is good enough for me ! " See the degrading influence of reverence for traditional super- stition ! The strong among us bow down in worship be- fore such a fetich. There is some sense in reverence for a golden calf, but none for a " lamb," of this sort. We have fetich- worshiping Hottentots still with us. Verily ! the African specimen is the most to be respected. He, at least, is honest. The schooled (it is hard to find the right word : intelligent or educated will not do) Christian is in reality worse than the hypocrites so classically de- scribed in the gospels. He is an infidel of infidels. He denies his own reason — if he has any ? The question is. Has he ? Which one of them would follow Jesus' advice to the rich young man, " Go sell that thou hast and give to the poor " ? Any man who did that to-day would be called " a fool." The writer has done so and been called " a fool " for doing it. In fact, both men and women have had guardians appointed by the courts, or been placed in asylums, for practicing that same precept. The Hon. Mr. Hawley, of Connecticut, asserted that there are 40,000,000 Christians in this country who wanted the World's Fair to be closed on Sunday ! Put them to the above test, unless they are insane, and I will venture that there is not a Christian in the United States, and place Senator Hawley as the king heretic of the lot. Test the people of the United States, or any other Christian country, by the teachings of Jesus, in the same manner we would as to 56 HOW SHALL THE SICH ESCAPE? their sanity on any otlier subject, and I assert that there is not a Christian on earth, unless he he a fool. Jesusism contradicts the law of self-preservation. It is a fetich. It is beneath any idolatry of the uncivilized people, because proclaimed by people claiming to be intelligent and con- tradicted by their actions of necessity. When the gospel Jesus told the rich young man to " sell all he had and give to the poor," he undoubtedly had the necessities of him- self and his followers in his mind, utterly regardless of the welfare of the young man. Schweinfurth, the Farm- ers' Alliance Socialist, and other such frauds are the literal and direct products of this gospel Jesus. They try to play the same tricks, and often succeed on rich " fool " converts. The " young man " of the gospel had more sense. He turned away and saved his money. That the Gospels do teach hatred of the rich, and make assertions which the poor and unfortunate as well as the discontented can use in support of anarchistic ideas ; that the teachings of Jesus did have such an effect on the earlier Christians, is easily to be seen in the follow- ing quotations from the Epistle of James : " Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Tour gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be witnesses against you, and shall eat your flesh as if it were fire. Ye liave heaped treasures together for the last days. Be- hold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped your fields, which you have kept back by fraud." It is to me a most singular phenomenon that while all intelligent people condemn such utterances as revolution- ary and destructive when coming from the lips of a Johann Most or Lucy Parsons, that they unintelligently accept them as divinely true, as " inspired," when found in the Bible. These words are not traditional. That they were spoken or written and were the opinion of the early Christians there is no doubt. That they show that that movement was communistic, and generated hatred for those about them who were more prosperous is self- evident. It is also self-evident that anarchy and com- munism find as strong support in the teachings of the HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 57 Gospel Jesus as in the columns of the " Freiheit " or any such revolutionary sheet of to-day. " LOVE ONE ANOTHER." A FETICH. Let us look at this question in a physiological sense ! To do so Ave must turn our intellect most directly on itself, and at once plunge into, the sea of traditional superstition . Let me say that the expression " greater love hath no man for another, than that he give his life for his friend" is a pure sentimental fetich. The real fact is this, the most sublime insanity is that peculiar unnatural devotion which finds its indulgence in giving one's life for others regardless of self. That most pro- found of natural loves. Motherhood in ideal perfection, is that self-love which has become gradually sublimated from the maternal instinct. No wife, no husband, no child, lovesintelligently, simply because they have never stopped to think that like the darkey songster m all reality after loving everything else, " They love themselves the best." All this " love " business is fetich because it unintelli- gently places the love in the object loved, instead of the object from which it emanates. " Mutual love " is simply the fact that two persons find an equal satisfaction of their self-love in each other. It is like two electric discharges from two opposing batteries, one against the other. When the sliocks unite, tliey double the power. Of this subject more will be said in discussing the ques- tion of marriage. Suffice it now to emphasize the fact that all love is of self, and from self, and for self. What we call selfishness is only that form of self-love which is not of any advantage to anybody else. The highest virtue, the most noble devotion, in the most aesthetical or ethical sense, is simply that refinement of human perfection which is in reality that self-love which only finds gratifi- cation in devotion to others directly, or some object the accomplishment of which promises to produce a general benefit to the human race. The ignorance of the race has caused it to kill most of its Saviours. Even in this 58 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? Christian country, the men who are striving to do the most for their kind can find nothhigbut persecution and no place to lay their heads. Americans really have not intelligence enough to love themselves intelligently. The fetiches " immortality of the Soul " and " God tlie Father," ruling in some traditional nowhere, have led to that fetich " self-love " which finds its expression in the modern and practical application of the " brotherhood of man." It can be expressed in this way : " Be kind and charitable and love one another on earth, that your account may be balanced on the books of the ' recording angel,' when your soul arrives before Peter at the im- mortal gates, and the Father shall welcome it with ' Well done, good and faithful servant.' That is not ' love the other fellow.' That is a system of post-mortal self-love of the all-for-self sort." That is good Unitarianism. It is called "philanthro- py." It is all fetich ! It is all fetich, because not a word or sentiment of it is in correspondence with natural facts. It is even "fetich" in those highly evolved ones who have dropped all of the theological traditional super- stition and discarded God, the Christ, the Soul and im- mortality, but who have still retained that last vestige of traditional fetichism, the " brotherhood of man," and are desperately trying to " love one another." These are the ones who admit that " Christianity is going down," but still cling to the fetich that "Jesus is rising higher and higher." I will pay my respects to that class of thinkers again, but wish to give a little more attention to those who believe in fixing up their accounts in " nowhere " by doing for the poor and unfortunate here on earth. It is the motive I am after, and not the act. Under existing conditions it is well that we have this fetich among us, for unless we did, it would not be very safe living on this mundane sphere. In many respects, however, it is a cowardly superstition, this " giving to the Lord " in order to get a mortgage on his supposed good-will, or to bribe him, and thus secure a foreclosure on immortality. With the majority of rich men, this " giving in charity " is an odd mixture of vanity, to be seen of men, and cowardly and superstitious fear. The vanity is the child of the supersti- tion. The poor can be thankful. They " fear the Lord will HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f 59 not let them in," and as the Roman pays for masses to get the departed soul in, they give "incliarity" to "fix it" with the Lord, as they do to the porter of a Pullman- sleeper, to fix the conductor, or build or endow some hos- pital, church or school, in order to keep their names before the people, fully conscious that no other act of theirs will survive their burial and the settlement of their estate. The first is the cowardice of superstition. The second, that of vanity. Tlie one is a superstitious regard for the fetich of ignorance, the other for the fetich of egotism. The only fact in the whole parody on nature is that it is a semi-savage indulgence of self-love. Behind all this fetich worship, beneath all this traditional superstition, is a natural fact, the law or prhiciple of self-preservation, The superstition hiding it from self-appreciation is the belief in God and immortality. The "good" is done in order to have the road clear for a supposed supra or extra natural conception for which no educated and free intelli- gence can find a particle of evidence in all natural phe- nomena. Hence, the whole thing is a fetich. Reverence for an assumed thing whicii in reality has no existence. Before going further it may be well that I make my posi- tion plain as to THE CHURCH. The Church Universal is a fetich, and each individual church is as much a duplication or multiplication of fe- tich spirits as the numei'ous fetiches of the Hotten- tot or Bushman. The church spire points upward ; the finger of the images and painting of the saints points upward; the worshipper looks upward! Why? Simply because there is space, or unobstructing ether above us, and the solid earth, with its centre full of cavities and molten fluid beneath. For this and no other reason is the heaven of God and the abode of the innnortal Soul placed upwards " beyond the skies." Is that not fetich ? Does it not contradict the word which says " God is everywhere." "The heavens declare his glory, the firmament showeth his handiwork." Then why may not heaven be in the depths of the earth as well as " in the blue ethereal space " ? Why is hell put beneath us and 60 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? likened to the heated lava and hot cinders of the volcano? According to the Scriptures, God is as likely to be there as anywhere. Is it not simply because that from practi- cal experience we place what we term goodness as above evil in value to society? Then, if the good are superior in value (to us) they must go up, and the bad, if ill to us, must go down, into hell. Good reasoning enough and logical enough as illustrating our condemnation of evil and appreciation of good to us, but beyond that it is all fetich. An idea without a natural fact to support it, a traditional superstition contradicted by "the word" it- self, which abundantly declareth that "God is every- where." "Even though I make my bed in hell, thou art there." Miiny who may read this book will doubtless say that the writer is a " bigot." That I deny. " A bigot " is one who refuses absolutely to see good in the opinions of otliers. Tliat is not my position. I am earnestly seek- ing the truth. Then I am a "fanatic." True! "A crank ! " Yes ! But what is a " fanatic " ? Is he not simply one who is in dead earnestinhis endeavor to carry out an idea, or defend an opinion? If that opinion is based on good and sufficient reasons and those reasons are founded on natural facts, then no one should be classed as a bigot. It is true that theology is based on a natural fact, but it refuses to rely on that fact for its sup- port, though almost unconsciously it draws much so- called inspiration from nature. That fact is, cause in nature. Of that later on. On the contrary, theology re- lies for its support on superannuated and unnatural tradition, for which it demands superstitious reverence. The Bible is its record of sacred tradition. It refuses to exercise reason based on actual knowledge in its con- sideration of the record. It applies the name of heretic or infidel to every man who exercises his only " divine right" and uses his own reason instead of imbecilically accept- ing ancient traditions on no other grounds than that "they have been good enough for father and mother and the world before us, therefore they are good enough for us." It denies the riglit to every man to exercise the one faculty on which self -protection depends, and wliich it allows him to use freely in every other direction. It is HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 61 shocking to common sense to see otherwise well-educated and seemingly intelligent men bow down to this fetich of superstitional-traditional authority. It is with wis- dom, on its part, that the Roman Church so strongly for- bids its blind adherents to interpret the Bible them- selves. The "orthodox" churches are in reality no better. Tliey take a different method, that is all. The Inquisition still exists. The actual fagots and fire only are wanting. Proof? The Briggs trial! The social fagots still supply the material of ostracism wherever orthodoxy can stir up the necessary ignorance. Infidels are still metaphorically burnt in our churches and homes. Social ostracism is still the punishment of the man who dares speak as he thinks, if he thinks different than the masses. Thankfully, even ignorance itself has largely lost its venomous sting in indifference. Ignorance and its traditional agent, the church, are fast losing their grip before the advancing development of the tree of knowl- edge. "All things are possible with God," says the church, the moment it is brought face to face with a fact absolutely contradicting every tradition of ti'aditional theology. It is wonderful that a man or woman with any claims to education can be found to believe in such un- natural traditions as the immaculate conception or the resurrection of the Christ. When called in question the only answer they can give is, " Why, God says it ; it is in the Bible " — and the tlieologian supports them in it. The Roman Church has the most logic and common sense. It allows its people to read the Bible (why they should object to the King James' edition is more than I can see), but tells them they must only read the words, and allow the church to tell them what they mean. That is making idiots out of people. Theology is in reality a "Punch and Judy " show. The orthodox church tells the people it can read also, but that they must believe every word from Genesis to Revelation. " The word of God cannot lie," says the Presbyterian conference. It utterly ignores the most exact and plainly evident facts of scientific investigation, and says " so much the worse for them " unless they correspond with the traditional word. That is fetich worship. When asked to explain contradic- tions in the traditional though " written word," it points 62 BOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? to the " word " and shouts, " heretic, infidel." Let us talte them at their word in only one or two instances. In Genesis i. 27-28, " the Word " says : " So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them." "And God blessed them and said unto them, be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth." In the first place that is scien- tifically and unequivocally false. Man is a development, and in the earlier stages of development was a bi-sexed, or hermaphroditic organism, as is proven by every foetus passing through that condition in all the mammalia. But, from the theologian's standpoint, everything in the Bible occurred exactly in the chronological order it is printed. That being so, then man and woman were both created at one and the same time, and both were made "in the image of God." (The women should take some comfort in that fact, which the theologians seem to have suc- cessfully kept from them thus far.) In Genesis, ii. 7, God takes quite a complicated course to make man, but this time he only makes the male ani- mal. " And the Lord formed man out of the dust of the ground." " And the Lord took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden " (ii. 15), and though the Lord had already, according to the previous record, at one stroke, made them male and female, the same " infallible word " now tells us that theLord said, "it is not good that man should be alone." Next the Loi'd becomes a surgeon of the most highly accepted modern type (the first on record), he hypnotized Adam, " and caused a deep sleep to fall" on him, and he (the Lord) "took one of his ribs and closed up the fiesh instead thereof." " And the rib which the Lord had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man." Here are two decidedly contradictory "yarns." But what is of more importance to \A'oman is, that when " the Lord" made man and woman at once, he immediately commanded them to " multiply and replenish the earth " (which according to practical experience would be the first thing they would try to, there being fortunately no prude like Rev. Dr. Parkhurst around at that time), but in the second creation no such command was given, and the " Devil " got into the woman and caused her to lead JIOW SHALL THE JRICH ESCAPE? 63 the poor, weak man astray, to do the very thing the Lord had already commanded them both to do in the first crea- tion. Theologians have mistakenly caused women to suf- fer ever since history began for thus obeying the Lord's first command. Why he contradicted himself and told her not to eat apples in the second instance is not clear. Seemingly intelligent men and women accept this stuff of traditional theology as true. If that is not worship- ping a fetich I do not know what is. Were that the best we can say of the church, inclusive of the theologians, it would be best to advocate its immediate suppression. Hut the church has done good and is still doing good. Though the result of, founded on and dedicated to fe- tich worship, the church is of man (not God), created by him for his own good. That is why it has been, and is still, beneficial to man. The history of the church, going back to its real beginning, is the history of the evolution of the intelligence of man from the simplicity of igno- rance and a fetich for everything (unevolutional) to the complex profundity of the highest knowledge of to-day (evolutional) and the gradual disappearance of all fetich- germs in that indescribable and fast disappearing reflec- tion of an ideal woman, "God is love " (unevolutional). In other words, every idiosyncrasy of theology around which human intelligence has temporarily crystallized, beginning with the church having the most fetiches, the Roman with its Pope, Saints, Relics, etc., to the most advanced Unitarian, represents the advancement of the human mind from gross ignorance and blind superstition to that intelligence which finally finds itself free from tradition, free from superstition, without a fetich or God, the sacred book of which is that of nature itself. Science is the reading of the book. Every church meets a human necessity. Every church is a safety-valve which prevents ignorance from becoming dangerous. There is but one way to suppress ignorance. When vicious, chain it. When not actually dangerous, confine it by the chains of superstition in the hands of a clever priesthood. The Roman clergy generally know this. The Protestants will not admit it. The fires of a traditional hell are still necessary and a vicarious priesthood still valuable to keep ignorance within the bounds of comfort to the body 64 sow SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f politic. As intelligence increases it itself shuts the flues and banks the fires of its previous ignorance until they are replaced by the fruit-bringing rays of the Sun of Knowledge. It is quite the thing among a certain class of ignorant alarmists to " howl," at present, against the encroacliing dangers of the Roman Church. No " free- thinker" who is acquainted with the evolution of man gives a moment's thought to such an idea. The activity of the Roman Church, strong as it outwardly looks, is the best evidence of its self-conscious weakness, and the howls of orthodoxy equally tell the inroads which the free education of the dailies and better class of period- icals, and science in particular, are making on their fetiches. It will take centuries, but among the most advanced of the Caucasian races, the fetich God and the whole paraphernalia of theological and traditional super- stition is as certainly doomed to oblivion as that the sun rises and sets in its daily course and each passing day is marked by the addition of some germ of truth to the tree of knowledge by some diligent, scientific and non-fetich reverencing investigator. In that mutual battle-field which the churches are waging in their discouraging struggle for survival, the tree of exact science is quietly and peacefully sending out its rootlets in every direction. The church is a coward. Science is free and fears neither church nor fetich, be its " Bull's head " branded Roman or Presbyterian, Baptist or Unitarian. The creature is chained and will never break loose again. Its bellowings indicate the " death-rattle." Its wind is broken. It gasps only. Man may still wage wars for dollars, but the last fight in the cause of the fetich-God has been waged among the so-called civilized nations. Give the churches the freest field. The only danger to humanity existed when one overpowered the others. Before the existing Babel of theological discord the tower of God is crumbling to pieces. Fetich-worship finds its final end in Jesusism. All the advocates of untrammelled observation, thought and expression need do is to keep at work. The whole parched and dried-up intelligence of the world is stretch- ing out its aching arms for the waters of truth. Let us be diligent in season and out. Social inquisition is still HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f 65 somewhat at the command of the church, but there are enough of us now, men and women, to make a very select company. The " top " is no longer so vacant as to be lonely. The peak of the mountain of Evolution blooms with the ripest and richest fruits of human development. 5 RELIGION— WHAT IS IT? DOUBT IS THE KEY TO VERITY. "Religion is essential to humanity. It is not a some- thing or a somewhat external to man which has been im- posed on him by priest or hierarch here or anywhere. It is not a fungus growth that does not belong to his nature. The power, the baneful power of superstition lies in the very fact that man is religious, and that his religious nature, inherent in him, has been too often played upon for base or selfish purposes. But this does not countervail the truth that religion itself is an essen- tial and integral part of man's nature. Religion is the mother of all religions, not the child." Such were the words spoken by the Rev. Lyman Abbott at the " World's Parliament " at Chicago. In everything but the last sentence, I fully agree with the Brooklyn preacher, and think that even he would accept my amendment, that " religion is the mother of all the theologies, not the child." Further than that, it is to be expected the reverend doctor would be like the woman who had inscribed on her husband's gravestone, " I fol- lowed you faithfully thus far, but the Lord only knows whether I want to follow you farther or not." The Rev. Mr. Savage says: "Materialism, atheism, is out of court." Mr. Savage will find that materialism is still about the liveliest corpse that ignorance, as repre- sented by theology, ever had anything to do with. Mr. Savage certainly has no acquaintance with the genius of undeflled materialism. The word " genius " is used with intent, spirits being something so abhorrent to the writer's nature that it is impossible to comprehend that anything but the worst, the most destructible and evil in- fluences can be apprehended from them. Materialism is the positivism of knowledge. Atheism is the negation of ignorance, only excelled in absurdity by theology or the discord of uncertainty. At the "World's Parlia- 1 " The Irrepressible Conflict.'' 69 70 SOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? ment " of theologians the Right. Rev. Mr. Keane said : " Cicero has truly said that there never was a race of athe- ists. Cesare Bibba has noted with equal truth that there never has been a race of deists." With equally unan- swerable logic, Plato, Buddha, Confucius, might have said, " There never has been a race of Christians ; ergo, there never will be." Had they thus spoken, they would have uttered a prophetic truth. There is no race of Christians to-day. There is not a universal Christian nation. One might as well say " that there never has been a race of Bishop Keanes." Judging only from the tenor of his utterances at Chicago, the world would be far nearer the universal religion than it is now were that only so. There has never been one single family in which parents and children all had the intellectual abilities of this Romanist who was so catholic in his public remarks at the parliament meetings. An unbiased study of the remarks of the undoubtedly earnest body of men who met at Chicago demonstrates one thing, and that is, that they all desired that unity of " religious " purpose among the nations which the meeting purported to illustrate. The very fact that such a parliament did take place with- out jar or rivalry shows that the influences of commercial intercourse have done much to break down the austere barriers of the creeds. All the theologies express are those differences of ignorance which prevents men from uniting in one self-protective endeavor and studj'' of the best means to overcome social misery and the dangers pertaining thereto. As a study of the same questions, from a materialistic standpoint, these pages have been written. Before, however, placing religion before the reader, it may be well to call attention to the fact that no unity of purpose can be expected from the theo- logians for an indefinite period. It may be well also to call attention to the fact that while science has not been without its heated personalities, it has never been disgraced by the barbarities and " unbrotherly " actions, hatreds and crimes which have sullied the crown of the church. Scientists have never yet fallen to the level of brutal savagery which has so often been demonstrated by theologians. The saint-like " fold- ing " at Chicago was made possible only by the under- HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f 71 mining which the sappers and miners of science and com- merce iiave made on the crumbling walls of theology. It was more a question how shall we resist the inroads of science and save ourselves than any other which made that meeting possible and so lamb-like. The leopard could not change his spots so rapidly unless there was great and vital cause. That cause is the spread of materialistic and rational views over the world in spite of the most desperate endeavors of theology universal. The contradictions of the doctors have never been so well placed before the world as in the published proceedings of that parliament. That they will open the eyes of the nations to the futility of seeking salvation in such a pool of discord is self-evident. That they will have exactly the contrary effect to that hoped for is plain. Material- ism, not theology, will be the gainer tliereby. Theology offers humanity the indigestible stone of discord and fogs of uncertainty. Materialism offers man the ripe fruits of the tree of exact knowledge. Theology is the murky canal of uncertainty through which man has to wade to the clear stream of materialistic religion which is offered undeflled and pure to the suffering millions. Materialism is founded in light. Its vestal lamps are always trimmed. No foolish virgins attend at her altars. THE LESS THEOLOGY THE MORE RELIGION. Theology is founded on darkness and ignorance. It is unevolutional and contradicted by every phenomenon in nature. It starts complex, with a multitude of gods, and simplifies itself to one God, which becomes so diluted that Job's assertion is still moi-e true : " Can ye by searching find out God?" Theology has the audacity to assume that all men are fools ; that science amounts to nothing ; that the laws of nature are changeable ; that ignorance is preferable to intelligence. Its audacious impudence in pushing its ignorance before the world can find no lan- guage fit to describe it. Read the utterances of a bishop of the Methodist Church late preached in a sermon in Boston. " God in his infinite power and wisdom created this endless system of worlds. 72 HOW SHALL THE BICH ESCAPE f " God fills space and this world does not fill one little comer of It. Tet when God came to this world as man he laid aside for the time heing the exercise of his creative power and the sceptre of dominion. He governed all things prior to that, but he laid aside the govern- ment. More than that, he separated himself from the love and com- panionship and the service of the angels. He was born and lived in utter helpless poverty." Suppose any scientist should utter such indescribable insanity as that, what would the world say of him ? Yet two-thirds of the so-called Christian world sits in its fetich temples on Sundays and with intelligence asleep listens to such idiot drivellings and goes home mutually congratu- lating itself on " the wonderful sermon our dear pastor preached." I have no patience with such stuff any more than I would have with a maniac. A people willing to patiently listen to such nonsense is a great trial to one's credulity of human nature. No really intelligent person believes a word of it. It is not even used symbolically. We are told that " creation ceased," to abbreviate the passage ; that tlie work of nature stopped for the years God was roaming around Galilee in the person of a man, though at all other times " he fills space and this world does not fill one .little corner of it." But when on earth " he laid aside for the time being the exercise of his crea- tive power and the sceptre of his dominion ! " Stop a little, ye fetich worshippers, and think what those words would mean had they any meaning ? God fills space and is (generally) everywhere, what was the rest of creation doing all that time ? Growth is a system of creation and re-creation, of development continuous ! Did the trees stop, did the human race stop developing, did the stars stop in their course, did anything stop during the time the Master-spirit is said to have " quit his job ? " Squarely, fairly, without an iota of reserve, such stuff as that Bishop preached is blasphemy, it is a lie against nature. If there were only a God such as these people assume how many hundreds of them would have been stricken dead in the pulpits for defamation of character ? Call that stuff religion ? It is below the fetichism of the undeveloped Hottentot! Call it enlightenment ? It is the quintessence of darkness ! Call it worship ? It is the blindest of idolatry before the fetich of traditional and ignorant superstition ! HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 73 Massachusetts, politically, bowed down to the same fetich at Chicago on Sunday, ilay 28, '93, when her repre- sentative insulted the intelligence of the State by posting on her building at the Fair grounds — " By order of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts this building is closed on the Lord's day. E. C. Hovev, " Executive Commissioner." The above should have had the following heading: " The Politicians of the Great and General Court Bow down before the Great Fetich and humbly supplicate for the Votes of the ignorant, the superstitious and irrespon- sibles in the State." Why have lunatic and imbecile asy- lums when the legislatures and churches are full to re- pletion? "Scribes, Pharisees, Hypocrites," who shall warn ye of the wrath to come ? The people of Massachusetts, to a very large majority, even though a minority of them may have given an hour or so to fetich-worship on that Sunday, show they had in part broken from traditional superstition by being in the woods, on the roads and drives. Over one-halt of Boston and every other city went out to enjoy the " won- drous works of nature." The electrics were crowded, and every attainable vehicle in livery stables was in use. Mothers wheeled their babes that they might enjoy the re- freshing sweetness of blossoming spring and behold the "lilies of the valley which toil not, neither do they spin," though clad in raiment more beauteous than the fabled Solomon's. Did mothers stop being mothers, did the human heart stop, did man stop thinking while this fetich God deserted his labors and came on earth to visit a few thousand people, and an insignificant portion of " creation " ? Talk about infidels ! I would like to see the man who can find such manifest and insulting infi- delity to the truth in the lines of Paine, Voltaire or any of the great saviours of humanity. Talk about evolution and theology being identical ! You might as well say light and darkness were, or that some imbecile in an asy- lum was the same man that a Darwin, a Virchow, an Agassiz, a Newton, or Spencer is ? The idiots are in the churches ; the imbeciles may be in the asylums. That is, those apparently having no mmds at all are in the 74 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? churches, while we confine the weak-minded in the asy- lums. " Turn about would be fair play " so far as the ad- vancement of the world is concerned. We might improve the weak-minded, while the idiot is beyond salvation. Theology has profaned the Bible, which is a grand book. It is the history of a race, perhaps the most wonderful of all the races of men. The Bible itself, the Old Testament, is grand in its struggles with its environment and in its magnificent portrayal of nature. Even its interpretation of cause is grand. It is grand in its limitations to one cause, Jehovah. It is grand in its delineation of the wonders of nature. " The Heavens declare the Glory of God The firmament showeth his handiwork." We all understand that. The weakness of the Bible is that it failed to recognize Law. It records man falling, not man rising. Theology records man falUng until dead intellectually. The Bible is founded on tradition. It is " looking backwards." The emancipated Jew of to-day is not only looking forward, but setting the light by which others may see the ■nay. Xo other race has so many and such true torch-bearers. With the puritans they have the credit of being the nucleus of nearly all that is grand- est and best in the onward movement of humanity on this continent. Outside of the Aryo-germanic races the Jew and the Chinaman, among the new-comers, are the bulwark which freedom has to stand behind and push forward in its battle against theological superstition among us. Better the cholera and the Russian Jews than the extension of the theological pestilence among us by igno- rant Italians and such like. Romanism however, saves us from a worse theological despotism by keeping the balance of the watch-dogs of ignorance busy watching her. Science is steadily marching on in the meantime. Theology is not religion. Theology looks back thousands of years and, like Joshua's sun, has stopped and stood still ever since. It even exceeds its God in its ability to stand still. He only stopped " marching on " while perambu- lating this earth in false clothes. Theology generally stopped where it began and has not since changed its HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE t 75 clothes. Where it has gone on it is disappearing by self-dilution. Unlike the homeopathic fetich, the more you shake it the more it loses in potency. One likes to shake the theological devil up as little as a terrier does a rat. The only difference is that the dog has something tangible to grasp hold of. Theology, like every other error of similar nature has a " sketch " of fact to stand on. That fact is that there is a cause for things. When it limited and defined cause, however, it left the ground of fact to support itself on traditional superstition. Its position absolutely denies the possi- bility of man's advancing in the knowledge of nature. The facts as dogmatically contradict it. Man has practi- cally demonstrated the absurdity of his theology in his every act since he began the great conflict. The fetich- ism of the Bushman recognizing an individual fetich (cause) for nearly every natural phenomena, is infinitely more in accordance with the facts than the one God of theology in any of its forms. The trinity is more tnie to Evolution than the unity of God. The more theology becomes rationalized the more is the way prepared for the truth to enter the befogged intellects of hei- adher- ents. No one can comprehend the potency of truth developing in a backward direction which would be the fact if theology were true. But, what is religion ? The Jesus of the Gospels when asked by the rich young man " what he should do to enter eternal life " did not tell him to believe in anything except to sell what he had and give it to the poor. It has already been pointed out that Jesus had no very exalted opinion of rich people. The apostle known as St. James, who is always looked upoil as the preceptor of practical Christianity, does not say much about faith, but does say that "pure religion, and undeflled before God the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and keep himself unspotted from the world." He also has no partiality for rich people. The above is the "salvation by works," doctrines so strongly advocated by the Unitarians and those modern followers of Ancient Christ, who claim that Jesus is rising higher and higher. If, however, their hap- piness and a future life depend in carrying out the above 76 SOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE t principle, nine-tenths of professional Christians will be found wanting at the judgment day. That kind of Christianity is absolutely contradicted by the first law of nature, "look out for self." From my experience the majority of those called infidels, would have the best chance if a verdict according to the " word " were to be given, taking the Gospels and not the theologians as authority. Millions of Christians may have " the faith " required by the theologians, but if the Christ is to be judge, mighty few of them would be called at the general resurrection. A few definitions of religion follow, from recent writings, without mentioning the authors. " Religion is an inner life of righteousness." The above contradicts that, for it says it is an outer life of works. " Religion is the state of a man's soul, it is disposition and conduct." Religion was in the hearts of men before it went into books. The first I cannot comprehend, and the second is like unto it. All this talk about " religion of the heart," " giving the heart to God " is pure meta- phorical rubbish, but I find there are many people so igno- rant as to believe it and not to know that the heart is nothing but a muscular blood-pump and that a " good- hearted " person is one who has a vigorous circulation. So grand and complete is our boasted public-school ■ system that even though physiology is pretended to be studied, the majority of students graduate with no better idea of the circulation of the blood than the ancients who thought the liver the center of the circulation, that the heart pumped cold air into the lungs to cool off the blood, and that the arteries carried the air. Whatever of religion or theology we may have in us is from the brain and not the heart. Good, sound, logical education in our public schools, with the absolute abolition of all things theological, Bible and hymn-books, will do more to remove the fetiches of superstition from our children and correct the injurious influences of the church than all else. Here is another nonsensical definition of religion, from one who imagines himself philosophical. " I believe, with Kant, that outside of moral conduct everything that men ofter to God with the hope of pleas- HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 77 ing him, is mere superstition. I'know no rational man, who has been touched by the essence of Christianity, who does not hold this opinion. Personal righteousness is the supreme test of the value of religion. The only final value of religion is its power to create character." The error in the above lies in its utter ignorance of the psychic phenomenon to which the word " religion " is alone applicable. The orthodox schools may not find much enjoyment in having a heretic endorse their asser- tion that they are right when they assert that " Salvation by works," or moral character has little if any direct relation to religion. " Salvation by faith," in the or- thodox sense, has no nearer relation, however. Religion is not a scheme or plan in any sense of the word. " Religion is the faculty of realizing the infinite." " Religion is the union of man with God." " Religion is primarily our relation to the Supreme, to God himself." " The underlying element of all religions, without which there can be no spiritual worship, is the belief that the human worshipper is somehow made in the likeness of the divine." " The religion of a nation is its sacred impulse towards an ideal." " Religion may be defined, as that special determination of human nature which causes man to seek, above all contingent things, union with a sovereign and mysterious Power, at once attractive and formidable, and impels him to reahze this union by acts in keeping with his idea of that power." It is evident from the few quotations given that if there had been an iota of endeavor, or even the most " spirit- ualized " suspicion that any attempt was to be made at the Chicago "parliament" towards a "universal religion," that the theological bulls would have at once broken loose and got on the rampage. The last quotations in- dicate that their authors assume religion to be the search after an ideal on the part of man, and that the ideal is a God-man. In the section on " the evolution of ethics " the only possible ideal to which man can attain — man univer- sal by the path of man individual — will be detailed. The ideal is entirely from within. It derives no inspiration 78 HOW SHALL THE MICH ESCAPE f from without. It is of, man, by man and for man. But the theological ideal is different. It demands that man shall form a union with that which the prophet well said cannot be discovered — God ! " Can you, by searching, find out God i"' Humanity demands something more tangible than the Infinite Vacuity of its own ignorance. Myste- rious individualized potentialized forces have had their day, so far as the intelligence of mankind is concerned. It will be seen that the position of theology is incom- prehensible though I understand what the theologian's words are meant to convey from his mind to mine. With Job, I cannot comprehend God. Why, will appear later. Incomprehensible as the theological idea is in its ultimate essentials and much of its framework, it is still, so far as words go, comprehensive wisdom in comparison to the meaningless vapories of the so-called monistic school as represented by the following: " Which conception of God is adopted by the religion of science ? " The religion of science is not Atheistic, but Theistic. " Monotheism, as it is commonly held, is the belief in a single God. In this sense monotheism is actually a poly- theism that has reduced its gods to one in number. Yet (3od is neither one single individual God nor many gods. Number does not apply to him. God is one not in the sense that there is one kind of Godhood. There is not one God-being ; but there is divinity. God is one in the same sense that there is but one reason and but one truth. " The religion of science rejects Authropotheism and also Deism, which is only a peculiar kind of Authropo- theism. " The God of the religion of science is not a person. However, he is not less than a person, but infinitely more than a person. The authority for conduct which the religion of science teaches is divine and holy. We should neither call God personal nor impersonal, but super-per- sonal. "Our soul consists of our impulses, dispositions, and ideas. I am a living, willing and thinking J)eing." "Our soul is partly inherited from our ancestors, (our dispositions) partly planted in us by education (our ideas) partly ac4uired by imitation (our habits) partly HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 79 formed under the impression of our individual experience, (our convictions) and partly worked out through reflection (our theories). Our soul has a long history, which neither begins with our birth, nor ends with our death. " We have great trouble not so much in understand- ing, but in feeling that our soul is not our individual self, but God in us." " We have to give up the idea that our real self belongs to ourselves. Our soul is not our own but mankind's ; and mankind in its turn is not its own ; the soul of man- kind is from God, it develops in^ God, and all its aspira- tions and yearnings are to God." The most serious objection to be raised against the above is that there is nothing in it. It lacks positivism. It has not a single virtue of any of the theologies. It borrows words such as Soul, God, which convey a dis- tinct meaning confirmed and rendered absolute by the sanctity of historical usage, and gives them meanings whicii no one in the world, either deist, theist, atheist, spiritualist, or materialist would for one moment accept. They beautifully illustrate the absurdity' of agnosticism. " If 'tis, 'tis and can't be no 'tiser ; if 'taint, 'taint and can't be no tainter," said the negro philosopher with far more wisdom than the agnostic. Who will accept the statement that the " soul " is the In- telligence pure and simple ? That God is " our impulses, dispositions, ideas " ? That is more atheistic than materi- alism. It is pure nothing. It is neither half-man nor half-god. Who can comprehend the meaning of such words as " that our Soul (really meaning our intelligence, brain action) is not our individual self but God in us," when compared with " we should neither call God per- sonal, nor impersonal, but super-personal ? " What is he then ? I must say that I can comprehend what a theolo- gian means to convey to me by " soul " and " God " but what the above words mean is more incomprehensible than the endeavors of my pet dog to convey something to my mind by whines. " PUEE KBLIGION AND UNDBFrLED." One of the speakers at the " Parliament of Religions " 80 BOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? gave direct utterance to the true purposes of that gather- ing, as previously intimated, when he said: " This parUament is unparalleled in its purpose not to array sect against sect, or exalt one form of religion at the cost of aU other forms, but to unite all religion against all irreligion — " It is evident that the writer is as combative an example of the " irreligion" meant as can be found. The real question is, is not the religion so positively asserted the actual irreligion which is destructive to the solidarity of the human race ? Another speaker at the same parliament would seem to be of that opinion when he says : " The great obstacle to the religious unification of the race is the irreligious always associated and often identified with the religious." Dr. Abbott's (Brooklyn) assertion that " Religion is the mother of all religions " infers the answer to the ques- tion. There is no such thing as " All religions." There is no such thiag as a " dead " or a " new " religion. With Mohammed (with a change of words and genius) we may say, "there is but one religion and Humanity is its prophet." With Monte-Cristo, materialism may say — "religion is mine." None other has found it. The parlia- ment softened down the rough surface of the theologies. It magnified the solidarity of the humanities. As the universaUsm of man becomes apparent the diversionism of the theologies disappears. But the parUament adjourned without even seeking the " Pearl of Price." It dared not attempt it. To discover it, it must have lost its God and found man. That would be to discover the universal relig- ion. That would be to reveal that unit on and around which the humanities could buUd their solid column in re- membrance of the parliament. As such a column must be of material, so in and out of and by materialism must the religious unit be formed and developed. The theologies have had their day, for intermraable ages, and found nothing. Materialism wants but to touch the human mind with the wand of unprejudiced and unbound intelli- gence, and lo ! the springs of truth will burst open and drop the precious and long-sought jewel at our feet. But, how can so unsentimental, so dry a thing as materialism do this which sentimental philosophy has HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 81 vainly searched for through countless ages ? It will be remembered that the Rev. Minot J. Savage declares " Materialism and atheism to be out of court." That is simply an opinion without evidence. It is proof sufficient to convict Mr. Savage in any court that he knows nothing about materialism. It ia well enough known that ninety- nine on e-hundredths of the so-called Christian world would not accept Mr. Savage's definition of Christianity any more than he would theirs. He would have been fully as much "out of court" at the World's Parliament as the materialism he condemns. In the broadest sense, to avoid all chances of dispute ; deism is the belief in the individualization of Cause, as a creative and intelligent force, existing outside of that which is generally termed nature and yet controlling it. Speaking of religion in China, a delegate said: "Thus Tien Chu (Lord of Heaven) will ever stand in Chinese as a protest against nature- worship and significant of the true God." I think that the mass of the so-called religionists be- lieve God to be an extra-natural spirit, absurd as that idea really is. Materialism is exactly the contrary. Materialism is Nature. Its religion is Nature. Its religion is ever present, eternal, unchangeable. It requires no defini- tion ; no special manifestation. It manifests itself. The heavens declare its glory ; the firmament is its handi- work : day unto day speaketh its language and night unto night manifesteth it to knowledge. Materialism recognizes cause everywhere. It refuses to individualize it, or describe it, save as it manifests itself as effect. Materialism refuses to separate, or cannot con- ceive of cause being independent of nature. It admits its own fallibility and that beyond an effect ; while it can hypothecate cause, it cannot define it. It accepts Job's dictum " can ye by searching find out," cause, meaning thereby the last cause — or first cause, as you will. Theo- logy discusses the absurd position of separating and in- dividualizing First-cause from matter. Bishop Keene has told us that a nation of atheists or deists has never ex- isted. How about Buddhism? Thatcomes as near national atheism in many lands as Christianity does to theism hi others. But by « deist " the bishop means a believer in 6 82 HOfV SHALL TEE RICH ESCAPE? God without the theological machinery of Christianity. As to the existence of a God, an individualized, all-ruling, all-pervading, creative Intelligence, millions on millions are agreed — while those who agree in any one of the " anities " or theologies, scarcely hundreds or even individuals are fully in accord, when such have any actual intelligent in- dividualism. It has been said that " Atheism is the nega- tion of ignorance." Savage is right as to atheism. It is out of court among intelligent beings. Atheism denied cause altogether either in or out of material. Abiogenesis, or spontaneous generation, was all the idea it had of cause. With theology it assumed that something could come out of nothing. It only differed by negating the theological Nothing. Materialism is the very foundation of knowl- edge. The irritation of the action of one material on another (see section on evolution of intelligence), follow- ing the fundamental physical law of action and reaction gives rise to intelligence. If any kind of a soul finds its origin in that way those who think it is an immortal in- dividualization of spirit are welcome to that belief. It is no wonder that materalists, or individualistic thinkers, are as rare as they are. The conditions necessary to their birth are equally rare. They are born. They are not made to order. No power of education can make or unmake them being once born. Most people are simply hatched out of the ancestral intellectual mold as chickens out of eggs. — The differentiation is external and morphological, not in- ternal and psychical. Under the conditions which have thus far prevailed, in which the breeding of the human race has been left to God and to accident, instead of directed by the selective intelligence of an advanced humanity, it has been seldom that the phylogenic prepotencies have by heredity become ontogentically potent to produce that marked individualism which stands free and acts for itself as if it were alone in the world. In that way only can the materiaUst, or any special ability, be produced. WHAT IS A MATERIALIST ? A materialist is an individual with such a degree of in- dividualization that when he has arrived at intellectual and physical puberty the historical-ancestral umbilical HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 83 cord which bound hira to the human race is cut forever. Be it male or female, the character is best expressed by the old saying " A man is born : " meaning thereby, an individual capable of standing alone without the shaky props of the past being placed behind his intellectual " back- bone." Such an individual has no reverence. He respects truth as he sees it. He detests antiques of all kinds, and will have no " old furniture " of any kind around him, merely because it has been. " Post hoc ergo propter hoc," is un- known to him. He respects the personal individuality of others, however much may be his contempt for their in- tellectual atrophy. With Thomas Paine, he discards precedents of all kinds. He is his own God. He knows no authority but himself. His text book is the Revela- tions of the Eternal Cosmos, written in indelible words on mountain, valley, river, sea ; on bush and forest mon- arch ; in the fish of the sea and birds of the air and all that inhabiteth the earth, in man and last and first of all in himself. To this book he turns. From this book he reads. Within himself, of himself and for himself he thinks as if the world was in him and he the world. There is nothing sacred to him except the truth. What is truth to him ? A cosmic fact. His interpretation of it is also his truth, subject to change if the types of the cosmos imprint other views in his mind. The traditions of his ancestors he throws ruthlessly " to the dogs " which, with good sense, generally spurn them, being too musty. A creature without attachments to anything but him- self and that which benefits himself in the broadest sense — a utilitarian of utilitarians. An acknowledger of cause everywhere — but not a deflner of the Unknown. He despises ancestor-worship in any form. Sufficient unto himself, he leaves the dead past to bury its dead. He lives in and for the present. He knows that if every man was as he is there would be no poverty in the world. He is the foe of misery in every form, because it is his own worst enemy. He is of nature and walks in her paths. He finds his oneness in the twitter of the birds and rum- bling of the brooks ; in the cooing of the babe and the roar- ing of the storm. He feels himself part and parcel of the infinite and eternal cosmos. He walks erect confi- dent in the immutability of the law. He worships not 84 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? himself, neither boweth he before any image whether graven in marble or on the pages of hymnal, or as a tra- ditionary legend in the minds of others. His church is the "blue-ethereal sky" limited only by the boundless horizon. Such is a materialist ! Is he such a lost, " God-forsaken wretch ; " such " an object of holy-terror ; " such " a moral leper " as the theologians have generally taught ? It must be evident from reading the records of the " Parlia- ment of Religions," that no one there thought it possible that a definition of religion could be given capable of universal adoption. A definition of religion to reach that end must be absolutely free from all irreligious ele- ment, which, as openly admitted consist of the creeds, or theologies. It must be so axiomatic as to be impossible of dispute. Strange as it may appear without mature reflection, the true definitions of religion is godless. It is godless, because it does not define anything whatever. It is godless because limitless. The trouble with most definitions is that they define too much. They include effects, which are themselves causes in the primary effect which is of itself cause. A good example of this evil is to be seen in Webster's definition : " Religion. The recognition of God as an object of worship, love, obedience, or right feeling towards God as rightly apprehended." The fact is, that religion is none of the above things. It requires no argument, for it is axiomatic that there is some one idiosyncratic psychic phenomenon manifest in man under all conditions and at all times, which war- rants the assertion of Dr. Abbott, as was apparent in the congress of the representatives of all the chief nations of the earth, that " religion is essential to humanity." Materialist though I am, let me enter a pro- test in the name of humanity, that Dr. Abbott's expression is but a half-truth. It does not express the fact as it is. Religion is inseparable from humanity. More ! Relig- ion is evolutional. As a perception of bioplasm, relig- ion is inseparable from matter. Religion is recognized in the following from the Imperial Chinese representative of Confucianism, though the majority of Christians would utter an indignant denial : BOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f 85 " What the Confucianists call things spiritual, is nothing more than the law of action and reaction, which operates upon matter without suffering loss." Changing the final word "civilization" to religion, the following words, from the same source, are directly applicable to the case in point "As long as the system of learning was corrupt, the system of administration was corrupt, so the learning of the different schools, by reason of its resting on no solid foundation, could contribute noth- ing to the advancement of civilization (religion)." The " system of learning is corrupt " in theology, and hence it has been and is obstructive to the advancement of civilization. Another expression should be cut in adamantine letters over the door of every temple dedicated to that relic of intellectual bondage, " the unknown God." They should be over the head of every legislative pre- siding officer in the world. They were also uttered by Pung Kwang Yu, the Chinese representative whose contri- bution is in all respect the most instructive of the entire mass of suggestive papers in the report of the parliament. In closing, this genuine statesman said : "I have a favor to ask of all the religious people in America, and that is, that they will hereafter treat all my countrymen just as they have treated me." To the honor of the theologians it may be said, that they have generally always insisted on fair treatment of the Chinese. The spirit of their religion, however, is not that of the politicians and the people. True religion inspires all. It is the beginning of all. It has not the evils of the theological article such as, " religion is at the outset al- ways exclusive and isolating." On the contrary, it is as broad as humanity. It cannot be said of it that a " relig- ion which teaches error precipitates a crisis." Natural religion does nothing of the kind. We now venture to define it. THE DEFINITION OP RELIGION. If true, the definition must stand the test of evolution in the most severe sense of the term. It must be of man and from man. It must include God the terror, God the mother, and all the Gods. It must embrace fetichism in 86 BOW SB ALL THE BICB ESCAPE t all its forms. It must be equal to the necessities of man in every stage of development. It shall be. Here it is. Religion is a psychical phenomenon. It is the result of the action of any environment on the brain of man which causes an intellectual shock and inspires it to seek the cause thereof. In other words, religion is that effect, on the mind of man, tutored or savage, of natural pheno- mena which instigates him to recognize cause in nature. It may be intra-human or extra-human conditions ; it matters not. The recognition of cause in nature is all there is to religion. How simple ! " The recognition of cause ! " Religion is a fact ! It is not " a spirit." It demands no worship. It is a truth. Religion, as cause, leads to science. Science is the search for cause ! Nothing more ! Science is pure religion. It seeks only cause. Some ignorant, half-fledged theological " scientist " has said, " Scientific thought, as scientific thought, can neither be religious nor irreligious." That is blasphemy! That person's science resembles the early opinions as to Darwin's prehis- toric man, half monkey, half ape and t'other half ques- tionable. Another would-be scientist of the same "descent" asserts " there can be no reconciliation between science and religion." The man is pardonable. He is a shining light of occultism, which, being interpreted, meaneth, hidden in the dark. Pie should come out into the light of knowledge. He would then learn that that psychic phenomenon to which the name religion can alone be given, is the direct psychic cause of that other psychic phenom- enon to which alone the name Science is applicable. To repeat : Religion is the recognition cause. Science is the search after cause. Theology alone is in conflict with religion. Science cannot be. The child fights not its mother. Theology is religious in so far as it recognizes cause. The moment it begins to define the Unknown it may not become atheistic, but it becomes most decidedly irreligious. It has not that respect for its own ignorance which is becoming to any knowledge whatever, nor does it respect what little knowledge it may have. It limits cause to one thing and one definition. Christian theology denies HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 87 to people born out of "wedlock" with the church, even the ability to see cause. It denies them religion and yet the more causes a man recognizes in nature the more must he be filled with the true religious spirit. Polytheism is more truly religious than monotheism. Leaving theologians out of consideration entirely for a moment, there is really but one main difference between the intel- ligent deist and the advanced materialist. The first de- fines cause from the influences of tradition, or he limits it; he insists there must have been a Creator, even though he does not insist that all creation was the re- sult of daily proclamations for six days and that the Promulgator rested on the seventh. He cannot free God from himself, or himself from God. His God is a reflection of his best, or ideal self. Cause is limited to one liypothetic body of which in reality he knows nothing. The mater- ialist, on the other hand, recognizes not only cause, but causes, and he knows that as every effect may of itself be a cause, and that all effects are of a material nature and can- not comprehend any other, he assumes that, as every last moment he comes to is an effect, and that as he has tried these eft'ects as causes and causes as effects back to a point where he can go no further, he rightly assumes that all causes in the Unknown must also be bound on material and act according to fixed laws, themselves inseparable from material. He is not such a conceited ass as to at- tempt to define the Unknown by a word photograph of himself made by himself. His Unknown is unknown. It is not an anthropomorphic mist of indefiniteness. It is an unknown yet actual something. Many " Unknowns " have been demonstrated. Instead of being dispelled and driven farther off they became nearer and nearer. The materialist lives in the light of the ever rising sun of knowledge and not in the darkness of tradi- tional superstition. He does not follow the theologians and believe " The books (which) teach Darkness was, at first of all, And God sole meditating in that night," on the contrary he " Looks not for God and the Beginning there ! Nor Him, nor any Light." 88 SOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f As to the revelation of the Last Cause to him, he cares not, but patientlj' works, reflects, and works again to be lost in that pure religious thought which daily recognizes that the true scientific position always is and must ever be: " Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes, Or any searcher know by mortal mind ? Veil after veil will lift, but there must be Veil upon veil behind." He longs to be one of the veil lifters. He believes in Law, in, and of, and inseparable from all material in him, . of him, and with him also as a part of this Universe. No man has more beautifully portrayed the materialist's position and the spirit of true religion, the recognition of Cause in nature as the manifestation of the law, than Edwin Arnold in his "Light of Asia," which should have been more truly styled the " Light of the World," and that other poem " The Ignis-fatuus, of Jerusalem." THE EBCOGNITION OF THE LAW THE SPIEIT OP TRUE RELIGION " Before beginning and without an end, As space eternal and as surety sure Is fixed a Power eternal which moves the world. Only its laws endure. " This is its touch upon the blossomed rose, The fashion of its hand-shaped lotus leaves ; In dark soil and the silence of the seeds The robe of Spring it weaves ; " That is its painting on the glorious clouds, And these its emeralds on the peacock's train; It hath its station in the stars ; its slaves In lightning, wind, and rain. " Out of the dark it wrought the heart of man, Out of dull shells the pheasant's pencilled neck; Ever at toil, it brings to loveliness All ancient wrath and wreck. " The gray eggs in the golden sun-bird's nest Its treasures are; the bees six-sided cell Its honey pot: the ant wots of its ways. The white dove knows them well. BOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f 89 " It spreadeth forth for flight the eagle's wings What time she beareth home her prey: it sends The she- wolf to her cubs ; for unloved things, It findeth food and friends. " It is not marred nor stayed in any use, All liketh it; the sweet white milk it brings To mothers' breasts ; it brings the white drops too Wherewith the young snake stings. " This is its work upon the things ye see. The unseen things are more; men's hearts and minds. The thoughts of people and their ways and wills, These too, the great Law binds." Buddha is the only true I'eligious founder who has yet graced this earth, irrespective of the traditional absurd- ities he introduced as necessary formalities in a life of self-abnegation. The modern theosophist no more com- prehends Buddhism than he does what religion is. As I read Buddism it is absolutely Godless and free from fetichism in the etiological sense. It recognizes cause and causes everywhere, and that these are but evidences of the workings of the great laws of nature. Nowhere does Buddah define cause. I am no worshipper of Buddha, but I do think him the only one of the so-called founders of a system called religious who was inspired by a correct idea of man's relation to nature. His very ideal, that all life is useless, and that to add to the misery by creating new life is the crime of all crimes, conforms entirely with ideas I have arrived at through contact with the world and self-study. But, of that later. I wish now to demon- strate beyond the possibility of contradiction the exact correspondence of the definition given of Religion to the conditions of evolution in other respects. The first excitation to seek cause in nature experienced by primeval man must have been a shock of that nature to cause fear.* And among the first have been death, then thunder and lightning. The first fetiches created by man were spirits supposed to control these powers. The things for which theologians tell us we should be grateful, and which are in reality of far more benefit, the * In the above I have followed the best authorities, but have re- cently seen cause to change my mind, of which in a later work now iu preparation. 90 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE 9 sun, the moon and rain were taken by this matter-of-fact animal as he took sleep and waking, as of no account. They did him no harm and he was totally unaware of the benefits he derived though their action. Cause was simple yet multiple at first. It was as simple as the mind of man whose intellectual perceptions scarcely extended to the limit of his most superficial environment. But, as the severity of environment increased, and to overcome it man's intelligence correspondingly developed so has his knowledge of nature augmented, and as he has demon- strated an effect here and another there, so have the causes multiplied, and in the spirit of true religion there are now as many unknown Gods — causes — as man has effects for which he is at present unable to define the cause. Could he, he would have as many more or less perfectly elucidated effects with as many unknown causes still behind it. In one thing only would he be content, and that would be that all was according to the laws of nature, which are as eternal as material, and more unchangeable than any he has any conception of. The laws are few, the elements few ; but their manifesta- tion in different combinations seems to be as endless as eternity itself. How true it is : " Veil after veil will lift, But there must be veil on veil behind "? Truly the Jewish psalmist says (I change the wording a little) : The heavens declare thy glory-law. The firmament showeth thy handiwork Day unto day uttereth thy speech, Night unto night showeth thy knowledge, There is no speech nor language where the Law is not manifested. In this idea of religion we have no limitations, no superstition. It is of all and in all. It is common to all peoples. It is of them as a part of nature and has been developed by them and will continue to develop with them. It requires neither worship, nor reverence. It commands respect. It is not an intelligence of itself, and yet it is the prime cause in the evolution of intelli- gence. It is the result of matter' acting on matter, and BOW SHALL THE MICH ESCAPE f 91 corresponds in every way to the evolution of intelligence of which we shall soon try to treat very briefly. It is not morality, and yet it is the foundation of all morality, even as man is subject to the action of the same great laws working in him as in all else that lives. It is not righteousness, and yet a full understanding of the laws is the very foundation of all that is conducive to peace on earth and good-will to men. The laws are all and in all, of and in material and inseparable from it. The Gods are dethroned. Respect the Law. Respect Self — Follow the Law ; that is the way. " Enter the Path. There is no curse like ignorance; No pain lilte superstition, no deceit like tradition. Enter the Path, for hath he gone whose mind Treads down that great offense: God ! " Enter the Path. There spring the healing streams, Quenching all thirst I there bloom immortal flowers, Carpeting the way with joy I Enter the Pathl Eeason alone is God." THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENCE. EGOISM IS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF- POWER. A LEARNED Hindoo says: It cannot be proved that thought has been moulded out of matter ? — Let us see if it cannot be proven that it has. There can certainly be no dispute as to intelligence be- ing a result of the action of something. There should be no dispute that all things which act are of a material nature, though the elements of many of them, gases, are of so microscopic a character that our means of or for differentiating the individual atoms or molecules are totally inadequate, even as they are to individualize the atomic and molecular structure of those primary elements, cells, of which we at present know very much. Intelli- gence is of material origin. We call it an energy to give it a name. Though manifested in another direction it is physiologically of the same nature as muscle energy, or any other physiological result, and is dependent on two sub-energies, the catabolic and anabolic. The thing, unit, on which these energies are bound, of which they form an integral part, is the cell. All visible living material is of a cellular nature or origin in a general sense, though a more subtle differentiation is now necessary, and we say that all living material is primarily of a nuclear origin. What can be said to be essential of living material? Life must be continuous. It must then be capable of self-nutrition, and self-reproduction ; in other words self- protection. This implies action. Action implies the capability of being acted upon and reacting in a corre- sponding degree and direction. This attribute of action, common to all living material, is, in fact, that which makes it so to our senses. It is innate to and inseparable from it. We cannot conceive of life without action. But this does not mean action in a sense always open to our senses in its most delicate manifestations. We see it in a general way. This action pre-supposes another innate and inseparable quality to living material, which is known 95 96 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? as irritability. It is this irritability of bioplasm (living material) which renders it capable of acting and being acted upon. Evolutionally speaking, this bioplasmitic irritability is the fundamental physiological nucleus of intelligence, though in general we do not speak of intel- ligence in that manner. This statement, however, cor- responds with the facts of evolution. A development from the simplest of homogeneous structure, with corre- sponding simplicity and directness in physiological action to great heterogeneity of structure and corresponding complexity of action. All the organic functions of the most complicated mam- malian machinery (man or dog, horse or mouse) have passed through all the stages of development embraced in the one word, evolution. Let us try to get at a simpler manner of stating the question. Evolution is the develop- ment from a simple to a complicated machine, like that of a woolen factory from the ordinary spinning wheel and frame- weaver of a century or more ago, through machinery run by a wind-mill, then by water, then steam, and finally by electricity. The machinery becomes more complicated all the time, and its functions or actions more manifold and more delicate. "While in one respect the same act is per- formed, spinning and weaving, there is only an indefinite comparison between the methods and results : the frames are incomparably more intricate and the results more complicated. It is a comparison between the rag-carpet of discarded homespun and the most velvet-like Brussels ; of a fish-net with the most delicate lace. The evolution of intelligence has followed the same course ; so has the general evolution of what we know as society. This is not theory. It is a simple statement of a fact as it has occurred in nature to which the name evolution has been given. As to how it has occurred, that is or has been theoretical. In other words, theory is our reading of the facts of the book of nature. If the reading be correct, then theory disappears, and our interpretation is as much a fact as those effects of observation on which our thoughts are based. No one denies that the grass grows from well- known seeds, that the mammalia develops also from " seeds," though of a different kind ; but if we try to ex- plain how, the processes of cell-segmentation and mul- EOW SHALL THE MICH ESCAPE? 97 tiplication in each case, to the ordinary reader, and tell him how much the one resembles the other in general detail, he will simply laugh at us, because he is so ignorant that " he can't see it." Suppose I now say tLat that irri- tability of the grass-seed which leads it to spring forth into life and develop into grass, when acted on by moist- ure, heat and favorable food, is evolutionary and physio- logically the same thing, though in minor degree, from a physical point of view, as the human intelligence. I sup- pose it will be generally doubted by all but most excep- tional readers. It is true, however. Intelligence is but an out-folding, development, of the same attribute (irrita- bility) of bioplasm (protoplasm) due to the necessity of organic life continually having been forced to differenti- ate itself more and more into greater complexity of struc- ture in order to arrive at that degree of multiplicity of functions necessary to continued existence in a more and more heterogeneous environment. Let us now try to make this as clear as possible by turning at once to the great book of nature and starting with a fact. Before doing so let us again call to mind our evolutional develop- ment of intelligence, leaving out of thought all ideas of animal intelligence. Intelligence is that condition of living matter by which it evidences irritability : that is, is capable of being acted upon and reacting. Nothing more ! To be able to read and write, or make a million does not make a man in the highest and best sense to-day. Money does not make the man, but the man the money. The majority of people in Christian nations still believe in that fetich (thanks to the theologians who live in and thrive by ignorance and its natural copartner supersti- tion), that the Lord pushed all the living things into this earth with one almighty shove on the appropriate day, each coming to existence like Jack out of a spring-box, when the Lord God touched the imperial button ; the last touch producing man, the first man knowing it all, being wiser, better, nobler than all others since, having come from the loins of God in the first instance, and made out of " mud and sot up agin the fence to dry," in the second (the darkey preacher's explanation is fully as logical as the original, for he could no more comprehend " how de dus' 7 98 SOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? stick togedder," than the ancient writer how sand could be made into a living man without spiritual and God-like agency). All educated men know every word of the his- tory of creation to be traditional myth from beginning to end. Up to the beginning of the 17th century the whole learned world did not know much better than the " learned priesthood " and its ignorant followers do to-day, though, to the honor of Greek " heathenism," when the gods were men and tlie best men became gods — ^when dead and use- less — Aristotle did tell us, 400 b. c, more about the de- velopment of the chick witliin the egg tl:an was known until Harvey, the father of experimental physiology, again cracked the shell of ignorance and let in the light. Har- vey then taught tliat the unit of all life was an egg, and that all living things took their primary development from such an object, and enunciated an expression which ruled for two hundred years as axiomatically (and was far nearer the truth) as the " Word of God," has for 2000, "omnis ovum ex evum." This idea became more and more confirmed wlien an ^'■e.gg'''' was found to be the nucleus of life in women and mamnaalia towards the end of tlie last century ; and diligent investigators, then bound by the trammels of theological superstition, busied them- selves in calculating how great the population of the world was to be, and, if my memory serves me right (an error of a few millions amounts to nothing), calculated that good Mother Eve — Satan's daughter tlieologically — had, locked up in her body, 250,000,000 such ova (eggs), and that each daughter of Eve in succession that was born had one egg less, and that when the supply was used up the human race would end. (Tlie women should not forget that those wonderful mathematicians did not take into account tlie fact that " a man cliild," might be born occasionally, or that he was of much account in any direc- tion, so far as the record shows. The hunger of man for knowledge — thanks to Mother Eve — seems to liave always been insatiable, and, like Artemas Ward's 'coon, he has ever been a "koorus kind of a kuss," prying into the "ways of the Lord," in every way his ingenuity could suggest, and so it went on until 1838, when a botanist, Schleidel, the microscope having been perfected to the necessary degree, demonstrated that all vegetable tissue HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 99 had a cellular structure, and in the next year Schwann opened the way for the same idea regarding animal life. These very clever observers, and many others were still held to some degree, by the theological apron-strings ; and, therefore, assumed that these cells were created by some- thing else, or grew out of nothing— spontaneous genera- tion. This idea prevailed for a few years even among the " doctors," until Virchow took hold of the apron of the church and shattered her strings forever, by the dem- onstration that one cell developed from another cell, and that the theological fetich of something out of nothing — the Biblical creation — was as empty a superstition as the miraculous conception which from now on was also re- legated to the home of departed saints. Virchow for- mulated the law of vital development, animal as well as vegetable, as " omnis cellula e cellula," the primary unit of all life is a cell and by the multiplication and functional differentiation of such units the most complex organisms have been developed. For about twenty years this idea held supremacy, but at the same time it stimulated man's hunger to know more, and the Darwinian announcement also excited scien- tific men to make investigations in all directions in search for more knowledge as to the most simple and primary forms of life, the microscope being improved constantly, and more and more adapted to revealing a knowledge of things long locked up in the deep vaults of nature. The discovery of the analine dyes also did as much for the development of biological science as it has for the arts and manufactures, in that their experimental use has, with the aid of the highest amplifying powers, enabled investigators to dif- ferentiate the cells and monor-celled lowest organisms into sharply distinguishable parts, and thus, fragment by fragment, has the skeleton of evolutional biology been put together until, although many links are still wanting, we have now a sufEiciently perfected structure to read the whol« story with comparative exactness, the missing links being of such a microscopic character, that the theoretic connection between the groups can be very readily supplied. The phylogenic tree of development from the primary morpho-biological unit and the onto- genetic development of the hidividual units of the most 100 BOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? complex units (man) is far more exactly understood than is the evolution of the species themselves. This is apparent at once, when it is known that the evolution of any mam- malian individual or any vegetahle from primary seed to mature development — the ontogenesis — is but a com- pendial repetition of the development (evolution) of life from its primary unit, the cell, to the beginning of the higher forms — phylogenesis. All this study, however, has led to the establishment of the fact that the cell itself is not the primary unit of bioplasmatic life, and that the final axiom of development is at present " omni nuclei e nuclei," or visible life begins with the nucleus and multiplication of nuclei from nuclei. If we examine a single cell of the body before disintegration begins, or a monad, like an amoeba, according to the best modern technique, we always find it differentiated into two chemically different pai'ts, a nucleus, or central por- tion, coloring intensely, and retaining its color under treat- ment which entirely removes the color from the body of the cell, or protoplasm, which in no case colors as dis- tinctly and most frequently not at all, if a properly-selected nucleus tinction is used. The discovery of the bacteria, microbes or germs, as they are called, and much experi- mentation has demonstrated that the most indestructible and resistant of these objects, and the spores of those which develop such still more, are comprised of a sub- stance having exactly the same chemical reactions to the same coloring material as the nucleus of the cells and monad organisms. This substance is called nuclein, and I have no doubt that in those micro-organisms which are made so entirely of this stuff that we, at present, can dif- ferentiate no other, and still more in that condition which we call spores, we have approached quite close to the first, and lowest individualization of bioplasm into form, the first and primordial ancestor of all living higher organisms, whether vegetable or animal, for nothing else that lives is known which has the power of survival under adverse circumstances which " spores " have, and the purely nu- clein germs have almost the same degree of resistance. In a very brief manner we have thus traced evolution back to its beginning. It is not necessary to develop it up again morphologically. Those who desire to do that are BOW SHALL TnM Bicn ESCAPE? 101 referred to the text-books of comparative biology, embry- ology and zoology. We had to go back to the beginning, however, in order to get at that biological point from which to develop our intelligence and to demonstrate the cor- rectness of our statement, " Intelligence is that condition of living matter by which it evidences irritability; that is, is capable of being acted upon and reacting." If our definition be true, it must be self-evident to all who read our explanations, that it is as applicable to the microbe unit of life as to man, the only difference being that between simplicity of structure and action and the utmost complexity of structure and corresponding man- ifoldness in action. Without thought, and perhaps also without any exact knowledge of the evolution of life, the reader may be in- clined to doubt that statement and to assume that thought is absolutely necessary to intelligence. But, I say to him that such a definition of intelligence is not correct, be- cause it would have no evolutional beginning; it would be a fetich brought into the world as a ready-made suit of clothes is handed you by a salesman. In the same way Biblical creation occurred. (The suit does have an evolu- tion, however.) The average reader would probably be inclined to embrace Descarte's definition. " I think, there- fore, I am," which in reality is not philosophical from the modern stand-point. It should be " I react, therefore I am." Now we come to it ! This reaction of the biolo- gical unit, which we know as its irritability, may be for convenience (to adopt for a moment a more easily under- stood term) called its "nervosity," is the one essential attribute on which life depends. It is life, so far as it is in the power of man to express it. Life is one thing. Liv- ing is another. Living implies the means by which life is preserved and continued. A thing may still have life in its parts and still not be a living whole, as is the case in man when just dead and in all slaughtered animals. Naturally this condition is not of long duration; you can- not separate this irritability of bioplasm from life and living,both being but the manifestations of it — and depend- ent on its continued existence. The moment bioplasm begins to lose its irritability its life is threatened— it is in danger of losing its self-protective equilibrium — the 102 BOW SBALL THE RICE ESCAPE9 moment it is lost it is dead. The result of this primary vital intelligent function of bioplasm is self-protection, self-preservation, self-continuance, that is, the preserva- tion and continuance of the species. If it does that, and every well-read person knows that statement to be true of all the primary units of life, then it fulfills all the essential functions of the higher-developed and more manifold intelligence of man. With all our brains we can do no more than that for ourselves. That completes our work ! That being so, then the innate irritability of the monadic bioplasmatic unit must be the evolutional unit of intelligence in life. Let us state the natural results of this primary intelligence, this bioplasm-irritability. 1st. Self-nutrition. 2. Vicarious nutrition, or taking up a surplus of food sufficient to produce offspring. 3. Multiplication, production of offspring — like out of like. That certainly should be plain enough to any one. Can man do an iota more when his " life-work," is before him ? The only difference is that the more complicated the organism — exactly in comparison to our modern woolen- mill and the tools of the first weavers — the more " fuss " does it make in doing the work, as a modern Atlantic liner, with all her parts and paraphernalia, does in com- parison to the steamboat of Robert Fulton, or even a naphtha launch. Here is another very essential point : If all this is due to the normal irritability of bioplasm, and that infers that something must have acted upon it, what is that some- thing? THE ENVIEONMENT. What is that ? Everything surrounding the bioplasmatic unit, the monad, or germ ? In this case it is a fluid in which nutrient material is in solution, or suspended. This food is the substance acting, the irritans. How does the environment act in this case ? By the chemical affinity between the bioplasm of the cell and the food in its envi- ronment. Hunger ! " The cells know it is hungry," we can say. The cells of our body know they are hungry in the same way, but it requires incomparably more BOW SBALL THE RICB ESCAPE? 103 machinery to satisfy them, but when all is done, what more have they done than : (1) fed themselves, (2) taken up enough surplus of food to (3) multiply and keep up their kind. What more can we do, only it takes two to do it ? but the two are one by law (?) than (1) feed ourselves, (2) provide a surplus to (3) feed our babes when born. Are we not then right in speaking of the irritability of the nucleoid unit of bioplasm as the primary origin of all in- telligence, as the intelligence of protoplasm? The sim- plest known form in which bioplasm presents itself to us is in certain germs which chemically are made up essen- tially of nuclein and correspond in this direction with the nuclei of the next higher evolved organisms, the cells. The monad cells are closely related to embryonic cells in the still more highly evolved species. A cell may be said to form a unit of nuclein (comparable to certain bacilli) surrounded by protoplasm. Where did "the pro- toplasm come from ? Is this another abiogenetic species created for itself in the same manner as the creation in the traditional word ? No ! The protoplasm embracing the nucleus is a product of that nucleus, and indicates to us the adaptation of the same to a more exacting environ- ment (regarding food) than that in which a simply nuclein body could survive. The action of an unsuitable environment on the irritability (intelligence) of a simple mass of nuclein, bioplasm has been such, that it produced from itself an intermediate substance, protoplasm, which again has a portion of the irritability of its parent sub- stance, and this stuff forms an intermediate laboratory which prepares the food for the nucleus and itself. It is the intermediate cook between the environment and the nucleus. Here we have a slight degree of heterogeneity of structure with an equal degree of complexity in action. More intelligence, a compound irritability of the whole cell (two substances, nucleus and protoplasm), is now necessary to do the work which the nucleus alone did be- fore. We have two varieties of irritability instead of one. It takes double the intelligence for the preservation of the cell and continuance of species that it did in a sim- ple nucleous organism. Evolution, when properly understood, is nothing more 104 BOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? nor less than the statement of the plain fact that develop- ment has taken a direct course, tlirough manifold forms and varied ways from simplicity to complexity. The foi'ce which has caused this can he formulated into another law, which by no means has been sufficiently appreciated as yet, that of the Law of Self-Protection, which is the final result following logically on the Darwinian statement of " the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence." In nature everything is the result of tiie action of the law that action and reaction are equal but opposite in direc- tion. It is all physics and chemistry. The irritability of bioplasm to the environmental irritans determines the degree of action in both directions. The inability to react in any one of the three natural directions by living bioplasm to a full degree has a corresponding influence on the life of individuals and eventually on a species. Changes in environment cause gradual changes in the reactive irritability of bioplasm, and those organisms react- ing most favorably to themselves in the directions of self- nutrition, vicarious nutrition and reproduction are the ones which survive and in a corresponding degree. Fit- ness to survive is a qualitative, compaiative statement of a fact. It is law as to final results occurring in long periods, though often applicable momentarily to individuals. The evolution from simplicity to complexity in structure and action has all been the result of the relation between the natural irritability of bioplasm (its intelligence) and its environment. An augmentation in the severity of the environment has invariably resulted in calling forth all the intelligence, irritability, present in the strongest of ex- isting species, and invariably preceded the evolution of a higher order of intelligence, dependent on greater com- plexity of structure and more heterogeneity in irritability. This evolution of intelligence in such as have mounted on the crest of the waves of success and overcome their environment has been a constant menace, creating a still more persistently unovercomable environment to those already degradating, through inability to keep up the struggle, and has even its generally advantageous effects on them also if they can withstand the environment and live. That is the exact status of the social conflict to-day. The individualistic survivors of the past have created now SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE i 105 such an exacting environment that its natural sifting ]jiocess will surely catch and enf^ilf every weakling of their own production, and the stronger of another stratum will manifest themselves. There are no "elect" in natural selection. Only those "bred to win" survive. The scientific question is to "rob nature of the sting" and mitigate the struggle by only breeding those who can win. On this physiological irritability of matter depends all life ; but to live it is equally essential that the individual possesses the might to ':aii over every obstacle. If he has not this individualistic " mij^ht to can " over all the ob- stacles of environment, he either perishes at once or grad- ually. What is true of individuals in a species is equally so of a species as a whole. The " mights to can." 1st. The might to snatch and hold all the necessary food, sheltei-, etc., from surroundings ; 2d. The might to snatch a surplus of the same ; 3d. The might to reproduce self and protect self until the second self should be able to do likewise. That is all there is in it. The amoeba possess tliese at- tributes, these "mights to can " in their one-celled organ- isms, and we have no more in our incomparably more highly evolved and diiferentiated bodies. "Protection" is a natural attribute. Protection is a result of the action of environment on those who, from their being " bred to win," possess the "might to can" (bioplasmatic irritability, or intelligence), and do protect themselves. Xature is not an intelligence, and is void of sentiment as we understand that word. lie who succeeds does so because " bred to win," because he possesses the might to can. Let us ascend a step above the amoeba on the ladder of evolution, limiting ourselves to the animal world. While in the pi'otozoa we find this attribute dispersed over their entire bodies producing the three essential functions of hfeasaunit; as soon as we ascend to the infusoria, which live in almost the same manner, we find the actual differ- entiation of a protective intelligence has led to the develop- 106 now SHALL THS men ESCAPE f ment, not only of special organs, but that these organs are those of active motion as well. The protozoa have no active motion in the sense which the infusoria have. Here also we find the first differentiation of a nervous system. This is well to remember. In the first differen- tiation of a nervous system that system is equally the first organ of motion by which the animal is enabled to flee from danger or seek food. This motor-intelligent system consists of an innumerable number of most delicate hairs all over the body, which by an innate nervosity keep up a continuous motion propelling the animal through the water with astonishing rapidity and, by touch only, keep- ing it away from dangers. Higher up the animal kingdom we find still further differentiation into a sort of central nervous system with terminations in the external surface of the body, but we still find this external ciliary guardian or protective, nervous arrangements quite well along the animal kingdom, for it is in the embryo flukes, an interest- ing liver parasite causing the so-called rot in sheep, where it, singular to say, also plays essentially the same sen- sitive protective, and in part motor role, as in the infuso- ria ; and more singular still we find this ciliated arrange- ment of the exterior as an organ of protection in the embryo of Amphioxus lanceolatus, one of the most interest- ing objects in the animal kingdom — a worm with a back- bone, which is assumed to form the connecting link between those animals having a backbone and those not. The mature amphioxus, however, loses these superficial, terminal, nervous appendages (probably they are but terminations of sensitive organs still present in the out- side, cuticle) and has a central nervous system which con- nects directly with these exterior telegraph stations, nerve terminations, to warn it of danger. Thus far in the animal kingdom the work of a nervous system (organization of protective intelligence) has been only to ward oft' danger when its superficial terminations come in contact with the threatening object, or near enough to it to feel its approach, and the body has become dift'erentiated into a body cavity and a cfentral nervous system ; the whole is entirely composed either of cells or their products, and the personal of each cell still re- tains its natural nervosity (irritability) by which it nour- BOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f 107 ishes and reproduces itself ; but those cells which have developed to specific functions, like muscle cells now re- ceive their incentive to action in a much more complicated way, more nearly approaching our own ideas of the action of nervous irritability which we connect directly with the word intelligence. We have now three telegraph stations, the superficial, or minor, but most important in the pro- tective sense, which feel the approach of danger, and by means of nerve fibres transmit a sensation or irritation, to what is known as the central or thoracic ganglion (which here represents the brain), which may be called the central intelligence station, and which again over nerve-wires transmits the same irritation to the minor centi-es in the muscle-cells, whicli contract at once and the animal moves out of the way. Now what more does a horse or a man do except in de- gree. As with the protozoic unit of plasma, these much higher evolutionized animals can only — 1. Eat to protect their lives, and appetite is the result of the irritability of the cells of the organism caused by hunger. 2. They eat more than they need for themselves so as to supply material to 3. Reproduce themselves. But as the environment becomes more exacting and the difficulties to sustain life harder to overcome, we find them met by more heterogeneity of structure, greater differentiation of organs and multiplicity of functions. We find this complexity of evolutional development all along the line of zoological species. The two sets of or- gans in which these conditions are most manifest are, however, those of intelligence (nervous irritability) and motion, though the others follow suit in corresponding ratio. We find the nervous organization differentiated into a head centre of reception, reflection and initiation of energies, the brain, and into a continued centre of inter- mediate dispatch and reception, the spinal chord, which sends out its nervous cables to every part of the system, consisting of two kinds of wires, nerve fibrils centrifugal, or those which take messages from the brain especially to the organs of motion the muscles, and centripetal, which take the messages of felt dangers from the external 108 BOW SHALL THE mCH ESCAPE f parts to the cord, from which they And their way to the brain, which again sends its centrifugal messages to the muscles, that the individual may be moved away from the threatening, painful or unpleasant environment. We find limbs with strong bones, elastic muscles under the control of this nervous intelligence, a complicated, respir- atory circulation and digestive apparatus and a no less complicated organization for the continuation of the species, merely because the new individual must be more complicatedly developed ere ushered into these more exacting environments. We find a complicated muscular system ; a respiratory and circulatory system ; we find that instead of the early protozoic system of reproduction by simple and moment- ary fission, that while this process is still present instead of taking place on one cell, it takes place on thousands, and that these cells differentiate into the oigans of the body, each with its specific work to do, and one finds that it takes weeks or months for the organism to reach maturity, but heterogeneous as its structure, complex as its functions, they are no more and no less when summed up than those of the simple protozoon; it takes infinitely more machinery to do the work, that is all. The most accomplished man can only : Work to sup- port, feed and protect himself against the vicissitudes of his environment. He can only reproduce his kind and care for them until they can take care of themselves. He must work for them and himself too. The protozoon does all that, and in a much simpler manner. Let me interpolate here that all the above is in- dividualism, and that individualism is the natural result of the action of untrammeled laws of nature. Bear that in mind for a time ! Though many connecting links had to be necessarily left out, enough have been brought to light to show the relation between tlie intelligence and motor systems, and that their entire place in the animal economy is self-pro- tection. In this very cursory way I have simply indicated the general course which the coequal evolution of irritability, complexity of structure and variation of intelligence has HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? 109 taken. The degree indicated, liowever, is only that of the thoroughly wild man, and but little superior to that of other wild mammalia. It is not necessary to develop the the subject farther. Every one at all conversant with the work in science to-day can do it for himself. As indicat- ed above, so far as man is concerned, each preceding gen- eration makes an environment more severe for the coming one, or in truth has made it thus far in the world's his- tory. Man is now pretty well master of what we may call the available or useful natural environments. At present, however, he has not even attempted to overcome the most severe of all, the environment of man by man. " While monarch of all he surveys " in a very large sense, man is still a slave to ignorance regarding himself. The most severe environment now to be overcome by the human race is that fetich known as God and the whole of that unnatural machinery known as the superstition of theo- logical tradition. There can be no freedom to the human race until it has freed itself from its most oppressive fe- tich God, and recognized the fact that man is God and God is man, but being that, that the most divine act he is capable of is absolute but intellectual self-subjugation to the laws of nature so far as they pertain to himself, even as he has largely learned to subject nature to his own use (animal and vegetable) according to her own laws, and im- prove on the results, by an intellectual artificial selection. In this regard man's intellect is the environment which has worked the completion or extra-natural perfection, which makes such products so highly useful to himself. The influence of the environment on living material has not only been the chief factor in unfolding or develop- ing the intelligence of man, but in causing morphological changes in species by which it is almost impossible for the uneducated man to realize the connection between the in- dividuals now extant and the remains of individuals of the same species found in geological strata. Changes in environment due to cataclysms in nature have so altered the geographical and botanical conditions that many species have been unable to adapt themselves to them and have become extinct, as shown somewhat in the dis- coveries made in mining or digging beneath the earth's surface ; but more particularly in the natural strata in 110 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? mountains and valleys. Such remains are sometimes exposed by natural convulsions. The most striking ex- ample of the influences of chang-es in environment on the form, size and shape of animals known to us at present is in connection with the horse. The earliest and simplest animal related to the present horse is a small, fox-like ob- ject, with three digits or toes found in a very remote zoo- logical period and known as the Eo-hippus. The only reliable data which these remains give to the paeleontolo- gist is to be sought in the teeth. Slowly but surely the remains of the solipeds have been traced up, gradually in- creasing in size, and eventually losing the median and lateral toes, until in the horse of to-day we have only the two " splint " bones as useless reminders of those early conditions. Atavism, or breeding back even now occurs, and in circuses we now and again see three-hoofed horses, sometimes on one leg, sometimes on two. Those specimens which I have seen have always been on the fore feet. Changes in environments have caused these changes in the horse. But, the horse thus evolved bore no relation to the magnificent thorough-bred, the flying trotter, the noble draft-horse of to-day, any more than wild cattle, wild hogs, or wild goats bear anything but a morphological and physiological resemblance to the grand beef-breeds, the Short-horn, Hereford, or Angus, or the wild hog to the Berkshire, Poland, China, Essex or other famous breeds, or the wild sheep to the Merino and other breeds ; or the wild cattle in docility and milk-producing qualities to the Jersey, the Guernsey or the Dutch cattle. These wonderful changes from wild forms and conditions have been the work of an extra natural environment, the intelligence of man, who, by artificial selection has forced the animals to become adapted to conditions and produced changes suitable even to his changing whims and fancies. It is a law of nature, that while environ- ment has been the stimulus to and means by which change of characteristics suitable to survival in changed conditions has been brought about, that heredity has been the means of giving them a certain degree of fixity of character so long as the environment remains unchanged. Under natural conditions such changes take place very slowly, requiring ages for their completion, but under arti- HOW SHALL THE BICH ESCAPE f 111 ficial conditions and with a rigid regard for selecting what comes nearest to his desires, man often works very marlced changes in a comparatively short time. How many of those who visited the Chicago Fair and saw there the Bushmen, Hottentots or Dahomians, or whatever unfortunate barlaarians were there on exhibition, thought for a moment that in the dim and misty past they too descended from similar ancestors? If so told they would probably deny it as much as they resent the Dar- winian idea that man has ascended from some ape-like ancestor. Probably the phylogenetic relation of the " wild-man " of to-day to the higher apes is no more dis- tant than is that of our most highly evolved men to the Hottentots and other living wild human species. That which stands in the way of man's comprehending the truth, of his aversion to knowing it, is that theological fetich which the majority still believe in, that man was created at the fiat of God, a perfect man, and through the connivance of unfortunate woman, has been falling and deteriorating ever since. The superstition al reverence for theological tradition which two-thirds of the so-called civilized races still believes, the scale which must be re- moved from their intellects and which binds them in the chains of a benighted slavery. The environment of prehistoric man was of the simplest kind, and his intellect of the same nature. He cultivated nothing: scarcely realized what life and death were: had no conception of the struggle for existence. His life was simple and without care. The old saying has truth: "Ignorance is bliss; 'tis folly to be wise." Wis- dom brings trouble. The greater the development of the intelligence, the more solemn does life become, and the more do we become aware of its perils and responsibil- ities. It is admitted by all scientists without dispute, that the individual life — ontogenesis — of any of the higher animals, inclusive of man, that is, from the first moment of development in the ovum to the completion of the foetus, is but the compendial repetition of the history of life, — from its lowest forms to the highest and most complicated— phylogenesis. The babe of to-day, at a few years old, is in about the same condition, intellectually, as our pre-historic ancestors. It knows nothing; it com- 112 EOW SHALL THE BICH ESCAPE 9 prebends not the perils of life or dangers of death. It has no individual responsibility. It is free from care. We see this again in the lowest grades of society among us, and suffer ourselves from it. They have little or no self- responsibility. It's all "good God, good Devil," with them. The higher developed man becomes, the more does he feel the responsibilities of life. We see the fact again in the remorseless production of children among the poor and uneducated in comparison to the more intelligent in life. The greater the appreciation of life's responsibilities the greater the endeavor to provide against and meet them. Gradually but slowly this fact is impressing itself on all classes of humanity in civilized countries ; but in direct ratio to the development of their intelligence. The concurrence of human environment is now the chief cause in the development of a broader and more complicated intelligence in man. Each advancing age demands that man knows more in order to successfully survive in this great individual struggle, which, of itself, practically con- tradicts the fatherhood of God, and emphasizes the con- tradiction that " the Lord takes care of those who take care of themselves." INDIVIDUALISM. In the march of human evolution we find two factors or forces constantly standing in opposition to each other. They are both in and of man. The one is known as indi- vidualism, the other as socialism. The chief trouble has been that man has not fully comprehended the part either one of these factors is unconsciously playing with what we may call his fate. The so-called individualists do not seem to comprehend the real essentials of socialism, nor do the socialists appreciate the true value of individualism. They stand as opposing forces over against one another. Social scientists do not comprehend that they must really look to individualism for the key-notes by which to mutually adjust the affairs of man to his improvement. While both are tlie result of the action of natural forces in man, individualism may be claimed to be a purely natural result, while socialism is more of an artificial one. Individualism may be termed the reaction of man in relation to his environment. Socialism constitutes the i/Oir SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE f 113 human essentials of that environment. It is men against man. Individualism, again, is that general characteristic of man which enables him to adapt himself to, and make himself equal to the emergencies of his environment. Socialism should be the same thing as regards man as a man. We speak of a man having a great deal of indi- viduality, or of lacking in it, in accordance with his dis- play of those characteristics which cause him to succeed in the struggle for existence. It is a general physical law that action and reaction are equal, but opposite in direction. It is a social law that when the reaction of the individual is not equal to that of his environment on him, that he succeeds or fails in a corresponding degree. This is why the "survival of the fittest" is a comparative law and not a cast-iron and exact one. There are different degrees of fitness, as there are varying conditions of survi- val. The chief obstacle to so-called Christian nations, at least, comprehending these two forces at their true value has been the untoward influence of the theological fetich which extends its discouraging tendrils into all human affairs. It may be said to be the chief cause of all the errors and misunderstandings of socialism. As has been repeatedly said, altruism is contradicted by all natural phenomena in relation to life, more especially human. The history of creation as published in the Bible is a most wonderful attempt to explain the inequalities in human beings if correctly appreciated. Leaving entirely out of consideration the allegation that " the Lord created man out of the dust of the ground," we have in the first chapter, the statement, that God created man and woman equally at the same flat, and at once ordered them " to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." In that no difference was seen between man and woman. But time, probably ages, elapsed, and man had become ac- quainted with the evils and vicissitudes of life and living. While, as we do, he recognized that the outward appear- ances of nature are not only beautiful, but eminently adapted to the uses of man, when he is able to make use of them ; he also found that life was no play, that it was a most serious game, interrupted by disease, pestilence, wars, cruelties, famine, earthquakes, floods, storms and other cataclysms of nature. 114 now SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? This conditioa of things was and still is the chief cause of the birth, or development, and continuance of theology by the race. Some explanation had to be found for them. Then grew up the tradition, which soon became a super- stition, that God created man first " and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress and to keep it." Just how this idea came about it is difQcult now to understand, unless it be that thus early in human history it had been ob- served that " man alone" was a useless factor in the ful- filment of that earlier command to " multiply and re- plenish the earth." For, the records tell us, that the Lord soon found that " it is not good that man should be alone," and soon afterward made woman from the rib of man, thus riveting the chains of a slavery which has no equal in human history. Just why woman should bear all the blame for destroying the domestic peace of the garden is not so evident, for . even in this case she must have been produced to carry out the letter of the first fiat " to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." The only grounds for this condemnation of woman must be sought in the fact that in performing her part in the fiat she is the chief factor in the continuance of the species, and not daring to blame their chief fetich (God) the early theologians put all the blame on poor woman for all " the ills human flesh is heir to." A beastly, cowardly proceeding ! Theology has really never recognized individualism in either man or woman, but particularly has it endeavored to stifle and stamp out every individualistic characteristic of woman ; founding itself on that soured brute, Paul of Tarsus, and really denying, like Peter, the nobler spirit of the gospels. The- ology creates all men equal, but not women equal to men : in fact, it has done its utmost to keep woman strangled in the bonds of its iniquitous superstition. The strength of theology is the ignorant subjection of woman to its superstitions. The emancipation of woman will be the death of the church. Man has only been " too glad " to pay tribute to the theological Csesar so long as he kept woman the willing and obedient minister to his pleasures and comforts. Theology to the contrary, " all men " were not at the outset and never have been " created equal." This inequality has been the rock of dispute on HOW SHALL THE BICH ESCAPE? 115 which theology has been largely shattering itself to pieces in its vain endeavors to explain its own inconsistencies. It has tried, in desperation, to explain why some were so created as to be " masters of all creation " and others to suffer the miseries of life. It has vainly tried to explain why some died young and others lived to " a green old age " and were always prosperous. Theology was thus struggling with the devil of its own creation, the founda- tion stone on which its rotten superstructure rests, ignor- ance. The endeavor to satisfactorily explain these differ- ent conditions, even in members of the same family, has been the cause of the differentiation of the churches. The theologians have been constantly busy in endeav- oring to account to the people for the inconsistent vagaries of that fetich whom they call " God the Father." The inquisition, and all later institutions of a similar though less active fiery character, was the attempt of the Roman church to stamp out every other fetich save the one it claimed to have a mortgage on. Protestantism was the endeavor of a lot of rebellious and more rational fetich worshippers for an equal possession of the throne of tradi- tional grace and earthly emoluments. No more desperate endeavor to account for the inequalities of men in all directions, for the early death of children, and the miseries of life, has ever been attempted than that of Calvin and orthodoxy in general. Their efforts would have reacted on their originators but for the lucky existence of another fetich, ready-made and to hand from Jewish mythology, the vicarious atonement of the chief fetich, God, for the weaknesses and miseries of his own creation through the person of himself,in "his beloved Son the Lord Jesus Christ." The earnestness with which the theolo- gians of the 17th and 18th centuries struggled with their own ignorance is most commendable. They were human as we are. Their reason rebelled, even as ours does, against the cruelties of the fetich whom they ignorantly and superstitiously served. They loved their children, their wives, their friends, as we do. The rationalist of to- day can scarcely comprehend the absolute necessity the fetich Christ the Saviour was to these men. It was the only ray of the sun of intelligence which relieved the terrible darkness of their ignorance and superstition 116 HOW SHALL THE RICH ESCAPE? But, even then, they almost doubted the power of God and Jesus combined to save the dead in immortality. The grave never entirely lost its sting to them. Reason constantly rebelled, to be crushed by theological supersti- tion. " The sting of death is sin," and_the grave always had the victory. They never could comprehend how even God could remove the soul entirely from all the miseries of earth. Reader, I suppose you doubt this. Listen to a refrain from the 17th century.* It is a poetical descrip- tion of " infant damnation," and the survival of " the elect." THE LOVE OF GOD WHICH PASSETH UNDERSTANDING. " Then to the bar, all they drew near who died in infancy, And never had of good or bad effected pers'nally, But from the womb unto the tomb were straightway carried. Or, at the last, e'er they trangrest wlio thus began to plead : If for our own transgressions, or disobedience We here did stand at thy left hand, just were the recompense, But Adam's guilt our souls hath spilt, his fault is charged on us : And that alone hath overthrown, and utterly undone us. Not we, but he, ate of the tree, whose fi'uit is interdicted : Yet on us all of his sad fall, the punisliment's inflicted. How could we sin that had not been, or how is his sin our. Without consent, which to prevent we never had a power ? O Great Creator, why was our nater depraved and forlorn ? Why so defll'd, and made so viri, at the same age: as- suaiins: that they hare been handled in as nearly as pos- sible the same manner and also by the same men ; and also that Athol had a record of 2:20 and Worth the same at two years old, to what must we attribute the fact that they each have not equaled their illustrious brother and sister ? I say brains ! That the di-iTing and controlling power IS greater and better adjaste>i in the latter than the iormer animals. Education will do much, as we see in the cases of Jay-eye-see and Direct, who both exceeded their trotting re::r'is, the 2:10 of the former at a trot being 2;0>>J at a pace, Direct's trotting record being 2:l>i. while at the pace he went in ±0-;4-. Again, I say the quality, ctaracier of the brains made this wonderfiil change p :ss;i.le. Xcc only must the indi- viduals have brf'.iiiS to drive the machine, but in order to perform phenomenal work, the quality must be such as to control every energy during the entire moments of severe action. All does not depend on the driver by any means. The conditioning does. But the ability not to over- trot and stay there at extreme sn-eed is in the brains of th.e p