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become blind devotees, fanatical, bigoted, and irrational; conformed to a groove in which they have
been educated, and from which they have not broken loose simply because they have not dared to think.
It would be hard for man to devise a means of cramping the mind and dwarfing the spirit more complete
than this persuading a man that he must not think about matters of religion. It is one which paralyses all
freedom of thought, and renders it almost impossible for the soul to rise. The spirit is condemned to a
hereditary religion, whether suited or not to its wants. It is absolutely without choice as to that which is
the food of its real life. That which may have suited a far-off ancestor may be quite unsuited to a
struggling spirit that lives in other times from those in which such ideas had force and vitality. And so the
spirit s vital nourishment is made a question of birth and locality. It is a matter over which they can
exercise no personal control, whether they are to be Christian, Mahommedan, or, as you say, heathen;
whether their God is to be the Great Spirit of the Red Indian, or the fetish of the savage; whether his
prophet be Christ, or Mahomet, or Confucius, in short, whether their notion of religion be that prevalent
in east, west, north, or south; for in all quarters they have evolved for themselves a theology which they
teach their children as of binding force, as supremely necessary for salvation.
It is important that you ponder well this matter. The assumption that any one religion, which may
command itself to any one race, in any portion of your globe, has a monopoly of Divine Truth, is a
human fiction, born of man s vanity and pride. There is no such monopoly of truth in any system of
theology which flourishes or has flourished among men. Each is, in its degree, imperfect; each has its
points of truth adapted to the wants of those to whom it was given, or by whom it was evolved. Each
has its errors: and none can be commended to those whose habits of thought and whose spiritual
necessities are different, as being the spiritual food which God has given to man. It is but human frailty to
fancy such a thing. Man likes to believe that he is the exclusive possessor of some germ of truth. We
smile as we see him hugging himself in the delusion, congratulating himself on the fancied possession, and
persuading himself that it is necessary for him to send missionaries far and wide, to bear his nostrum to
other lands and other peoples, who do but laugh at his pretensions and deride his claims.
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SECTION XVI
It is, indeed, supremely marvellous to us that your wise men have been and are unable to see that the ray
of truth which has shone even unto them, and which they have done their best to obscure, is but one out
of many which have been shed by the Sun of Truth on your world. Divine Truth is too clear a light to be
tolerated by human eyes. It must be tempered by an earthly medium, conveyed through a human vehicle,
and darkened somewhat lest it blind the unaccustomed eye. Only when the body of earth is cast aside,
and the spirit soars to higher planes, can it afford to dispense with the interposing medium which has
dulled the brightness of the heavenly light.
All races of men have had a beam of this light amongst them. They have received it as best they might,
have fostered it or dimmed it according to their development, and have in the end adapted to their
different wants that which they were able to receive. None has reason to vaunt itself in exclusive
possession, or to make futile efforts to force on others its own view of truth. So long as your world has
endured, so long has it been true that the Brahmin, the Mahommedan, the Jew, and the Christian, has
had his peculiar light, which he has considered to be his special heritage from heaven. And, as if to make
the fallacy more conspicuous, that Church which claims to itself an exclusive possession of Divine Truth,
and deems it right to carry the lamp throughout all lands, is most conspicuous for its own manifold
divisions. Christendom s divisions, the incoherent fragments into which the Church of Christ is rent, the
frenzied bitterness with which each assails other for the pure love of God; these are the best answers to
the foolish pretension that Christianity possesses a monopoly of Divine Truth.
But the days are approaching when a new ray of light shall be shed on this mist of human ignorance. This
geographical sectarianism shall give place before the enlightenment caused by the spread of the New
Revelation, for which mankind is riper than you think. They shall be made to see that each system of
religion is a ray of truth from the Central Sun, dimmed, indeed, by man s ignorance, but having withing it
a germ of vital truth. Each must see the truth in his neighbour s belief, and learn that best lessons, to
dwell on the good rather than on the evil; to recognise the Divine even through human error, and to
acknowledge the godlike even in that which has not commended itself to his own wants hitherto. The
time draws nigh when the sublime truths which we are commissioned to proclaim, rational and noble as
they are, when viewed from the standpoint of reason, shall wipe away from the face of God s earth the
sectarian jealousy and theological bitterness, the anger and ill-will, the rancour and Pharisaic pride which
have disgraced the name of religion, and have rendered theology a byeword amongst men. Alas! alas! [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]