UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?
There is this passage in the Christian Scriptures: ‘Those who obey not
God, and believe not the Gospel of his Son, shall be punished with
everlasting destruction.’ This is the pivot upon which all religions
turn:—they all assume that it is in our power to believe or not to
believe; whereas the mind can only believe that which it thinks true. A
human being can only be supposed accountable for those actions which are
influenced by his will. But belief is utterly distinct from and
unconnected with volition: it is the apprehension of the agreement or
disagreement of the ideas that compose any preposition. Belief is a
passion, or involuntary operation of the mind, and, like other passions,
its intensity is precisely proportionate to the degrees of excitement.
Volition is essential to merit or demerit. But the Christian religion
attaches the highest possible degrees of merit and demerit to that which
is worthy of neither, and which is totally unconnected with the peculiar
faculty of the mind, whose presence is essential to their being.
Christianity was intended to reform the world: had an all-wise Being
planned it, nothing is more improbable than that it should have failed:
omniscience would infallibly have foreseen the inutility of a scheme
which experience demonstrates, to this age, to have been utterly
unsuccessful.
Christianity inculcates the necessity of supplicating the Deity. Prayer
may be considered under two points of view;—as an endeavour to change
the intentions of God, or as a formal testimony of our obedience. But
the former case supposes that the caprices of a limited intelligence can
occasionally instruct the Creator of the world how to regulate the
universe; and the latter, a certain degree of servility analogous to the
loyalty demanded by earthly tyrants. Obedience indeed is only the
pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something
better than reason.
Christianity, like all other religions, rests upon miracles, prophecies,
and martyrdoms. No religion ever existed which had not its prophets, its
attested miracles, and, above all, crowds of devotees who would bear
patiently the most horrible tortures to prove its authenticity. It
should appear that in no case can a discriminating mind subscribe to the
genuineness of a miracle. A miracle is an infraction of nature’s law, by
a supernatural cause; by a cause acting beyond that eternal circle
within which all things are included. God breaks through the law of
nature, that He may convince mankind of the truth of that revelation
which, in spite of His precautions, has been, since its introduction,
the subject of unceasing schism and cavil.
Miracles resolve themselves into the following question (See Hume’s
Essay, volume 2 page 121.):—Whether it is more probable the laws of
nature, hitherto so immutably harmonious, should have undergone
violation, or that a man should have told a lie? Whether it is more
probable that we are ignorant of the natural cause of an event, or that
we know the supernatural one? That, in old times, when the powers of
nature were less known than at present, a certain set of men were
themselves deceived, or had some hidden motive for deceiving others; or
that God begat a Son, who, in His legislation, measuring merit by
belief, evidenced Himself to be totally ignorant of the powers of the
human mind—of what is voluntary, and what is the contrary?
We have many instances of men telling lies;—none of an infraction of
nature’s laws, those laws of whose government alone we have any
knowledge or experience. The records of all nations afford innumerable
instances of men deceiving others either from vanity or interest, or
themselves being deceived by the limitedness of their views and their
ignorance of natural causes: but where is the accredited case of God
having come upon earth, to give the lie to His own creations? There
would be something truly wonderful in the appearance of a ghost; but the
assertion of a child that he saw one as he passed through the churchyard
is universally admitted to be less miraculous.
But even supposing that a man should raise a dead body to life before
our eyes, and on this fact rest his claim to being considered the son of
God;—the Humane Society restores drowned persons, and because it makes
no mystery of the method it employs, its members are not mistaken for
the sons of God. All that we have a right to infer from our ignorance of
the cause of any event is that we do not know it: had the Mexicans
attended to this simple rule when they heard the cannon of the
Spaniards, they would not have considered them as gods: the experiments
of modern chemistry would have defied the wisest philosophers of ancient
Greece and Rome to have accounted for them on natural principles. An
author of strong common sense has observed that ‘a miracle is no miracle
at second-hand’; he might have added that a miracle is no miracle in any
case; for until we are acquainted with all natural causes, we have no
reason to imagine others.
There remains to be considered another proof of Christianity—Prophecy.
A book is written before a certain event, in which this event is
foretold; how could the prophet have foreknown it without inspiration?
how could he have been inspired without God? The greatest stress is laid
on the prophecies of Moses and Hosea on the dispersion of the Jews, and
that of Isaiah concerning the coming of the Messiah. The prophecy of
Moses is a collection of every possible cursing and blessing; and it is
so far from being marvellous that the one of dispersion should have been
fulfilled, that it would have been more surprising if, out of all these,
none should have taken effect. In Deuteronomy, chapter 28, verse 64,
where Moses explicitly foretells the dispersion, he states that they
shall there serve gods of wood and stone: ‘And the Lord shall scatter
thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even to the other;