SECTARIAN NEGATIONS OF DEITY.

ever changing, ever adapting itself to wants of humanity, but this unhappy subject!-selected for death, to be coffined down to mummydom, kept in glass cases for show, not to be handled, not to be roughly breathed upon, not to be vulgarly discussed, never to be proved, never to be tried, never to be made robust by vigorous exercise, but always to go hopping on crutches, propped in go-carts, perambulated along in bath chairs by doctors of theology, proctors, scribes, and expounders of traditional shasters,-who cannot see wood for trees, who know so much theology that they cannot perceive rational truth when presented to them, who are ever losing general and enlarged views in particular methods, and labouring to give mathematical definitions to immaterial assumptions, dogmatizing when uncertain, and shuffling whenever detected, unceasingly labouring in the Sisyphus-like task of localizing, and circumbscribing the Infinite and Absolute; losing broad principles in trumpery details of rites and formulas, and practically making the Omnipresent Deity who fills the mighty expanse of the infinite universe, a local, partial, sectarian, national, finite, and narrow-minded being like themselves, so that men came to quarrel with such a Deity as this, to take him to task for not listening to prayers for miraculous interpositions. They argue, that he does not reward and punish effectually, that his dealings are as unjust as they are inexpliciable, that they never get the blessings of health and untold wealth that they work so hard for. Their grape vines are miserable trees, and the fruit that their forefathers had eaten so patiently is susceptible of much improvement, indeed not to shape the point of complaint too fine for comprehension, the grapes are positively sour, and, as a necessary consequence, the teeth of the present generation are set on edge.

As it was in time bygone when over Palestine's then flowering and fertile land, Pontius Pilate was Rome's commissioned ruler, when cowardly, despotic, and bigoted priests trembled for their sway, their church, their perquisites, and their pay, so now in these last days, the self-same abomination lifts high in air its proud and domineering head; but let us

hope and pray that, after this final and fast-coming desperate struggle for supremacy it may sink and rise again no more.

What sacerdotal theologians and traditional Bible interpreters did in the way of smothering the truths of eternal peace, and Deity's relation to, and treatment of his creatures, when this Pilate was made Jesus' executioner by the alarmed and exasperated Jewish priests, the same class of men is still engaged in doing, as indeed they have been employed in achieving since Jesus' death, and that is, misinterpreting by the dim and religious glow of the farthing rushlight of human and fallible tradition, the plain truths of rational faith, erecting unsurmountable barriers between their system of biblical sacerdotalism, and the plainest and most readily to be comprehended phenomena of natural processes. Thus they make the revelation of truth in the ancient Hebrew, as well as later Greek scriptures, and the principles of rational belief, with real science, radically, and irreconcilably opposed. Their creeds, based upon contranaturalism, are necessarily opposed to all rational belief, because they ask for subjection of mind to what it cannot know, and because their faith is the acceptance of what is antagonist to all sensible perception of natural phenomena. It is not extension of natural sense, nor even a forestalling of what may be coming in the future, and not yet developed,—but such faith is actually a belief in the practicability of magical performances, and thus its Deity, or Deities, are contranatural beings, sacerdotalism is fetichism; its prayer is incantation, and its devotion is blind and haphazard neglect of self-reliant action. The priests are magicians and the worst foes that science has ever known; its votaries are gamblers upon lucky and unlucky chances of miracles and omens. Sacerdotalism and cosmism are now, as they have ever been, sworn foes; the struggle between them resembles Palafox, and the defenders of Saragossa's resistance to French invasion-" War to the knife." The faith, or trust of natural pietists, is the childlike trust in the unalterable and inherently necessary love of a paternal power in the universe, who has said for their guidance, and consolation—“ Man

ATHEISM OF PROFESSING CHRISTIANS.

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"shall not live by (perishable) bread alone, but every word "that proceeds from the mouth of God."

Where is the brave and reliant faith that the Sons of God display in the present state of money-worshipping Christendom?-where their self-denying vow of poverty, or obedience ?-where obedience like Noah's; calm trust like Daniel's, or patient submission to inevitable misfortune like Job's? There is no such belief in a Father's care as this, for conventional faith is the mere metaphysical acceptation of certain theological or ethical doctrines, which the more they are opposed to common and healthy sense, are regarded as higher proofs of what is called faith, because it is antagonistic to rational belief and knowledge, and for no other intelligible reason.

The faith described and acted on by Jesus of Nazareth, and other children of the primary paternal Deity in the universe, is that of subordinating, and neglecting care for the wants and luxuries of civilization, as constituting nursery pap for sucking infants; and seeking for, and relying upon the support of that vital pulsation of electric force that is the bread of the true sons of the Eternal Father.

True faith, like a ship's anchor and cable, is unsafe until it has been tried; men call themselves christians because they inherited certain opinions, just as they by entail come into possession of real property. But had they been in Japan, they would infallibly have been Buddhists; if reared in Turkey, they would have been Mahommedans; if in Africa, fetichers, and votaries of Mumbo Jumbo; or if natives of Australia, they would have been intuitively convinced of the omnipotence of debil, debil.

Mankind are as truly and thoroughly idolaters in these so called christian nations of Europe, as ever they are known now to have been when they kotoued to Nebuchadnezzar's Idol of Gold.

Idolatry, as defined in the Bible, means worship, or service of selfishness, or self-will. This self-will is politely termed free will in modern theologies, and freedom from the obedience to conditional arrangements necessitated in the

universe, is the instinct of prayer to idols, for antagonism of the self-will to the demanded sacrifice of self on the altar of dutiful submission to the eternal prepurposer is praying to idols. Emerson says, very pertinently, that "prayer is a "disease of the will." Mankind naturally shrink from the pain of self sacrifice, and pray for special interpositions to help them to avoid unpleasant duties attended with pain or evil.

Baron Bunsen in his work, "The Signs of the Times," says:

"Everything human is subject to conditions, nay divine "truth itself, when applied to definite human relations, is "only true under conditions, and within the limits which

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they draw around it, but man by reason of his egotism is "ever striving to get free of all conditions. Even the greatest and most glorious human energy and might are "forfeit to fate as conditioned, and go to destruction "when they try to become absolute, and as such think and "act. Thus the instinctive striving after unconditioned expansion has its source, not in the God-appointed destiny "of humanity itself, but in the blindness of the selfish "element in our nature which desires to make the "ME" (egomet ?) into the centre of all things, and inasmuch as the "natural self makes its own specific existence a centre, it "foolishly attempts to make that into an ultimate end which "is its true existence only in its conformity with the "collective arrangements of the universe.

"The principle of intolerance is latent in every existing religion, and in every religious body, by virtue of the self"seeking principle in the natural man, but the divine deed "of redemption from selfishness is meant to set man free from "the rule of this principle in his nature.

"To appropriate what belongs to God is the very essence "of all selfishness, and the true fall of man, who would fain "be master of goodness, of truth, and not their voluntary "servant.

Nothing dies except from the absence of inward vital energy, and everything perishes by reason of itself, namely,

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BARON BUNSEN ON IDOLATRY.

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by its own principle of self-seeking, which oversteps the "conditions of its existence through criminal arrogance, and "blind folly. There is nothing which has been created, and "subsists as an end in itself for its own sake, but every single "thing lives in relation to the whole, but that whole subsists "only by the free surrender of the individual for the com"mon good."

Here Bunsen points to human self-will as the antagonist or Satan of the Eternal Pre-purposer, and the Bible says the same, namely that the imperfection and selfishness of the human mind, in its fœtal stage of growth, is at enmity with, or opposed to, the will of the Almighty; consequently, Satan is the self, or freewill of man, striving for absolute and unconditioned existence as a God in itself, not dependent upon, but a rebel against, the inter-dependent arrangements of the universe.

The symbolical picture of Satan painted in the Revelation of St. John, is that of a scarlet, or blood-clothed harlot, typical of the mind, seated upon the seven cervical vertebræ or neckbones of a beast, or the animal man, which is said to be ten powered, that is, ten membered, or fingered, and that the whole creature, mind and body, constitute one for everlasting annihilation. In another version of the same enigma, it is plainly enough stated that the number of this beast is the number of man, or 666. This is not the particular number of any specialized individual, but the generalized one, as naturalists might number a particular species in one of their catalogues. Thus, if the mammalian type be included in the numbers running from one to 666, then man is the highest in their list, or else the mammalian class is exhausted at 665, and man is the initial type of another species commencing at 666.

To limit or specialize this enigmatical number to Papal Rome, is to stultify one's common sense, for it is said that the idolatry of selfishness, or self-will, called free will by modern theologians, is extended as the dominant power of an ambitious queen over the extreme length and breadth of the earth. It is a very far fetched