The Martyrdom of Man - Winwood Reade (golden son ebook txt) 📗
- Author: Winwood Reade
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observed. Those who overthrow an established system are
compelled to attack its founders, and to show that their method
was unsound, that their reasoning was fallacious, that their
experiments were incomplete. And yet the men who create the
revolution are made in the likeness of the men whose doctrines
they subvert. The system of Ptolemy was supplanted by the
system of Copernicus, yet Copernicus was the Ptolemy of the
sixteenth century. In the same manner, we who assail the
Christian faith are the true successors of the early
Christians, above whom we are raised by the progress, of
eighteen hundred years. As they preached against gods that were
made of stone, so we preach against gods that are made of
ideas. As they were called atheists and blasphemers so are we.
And is our task more difficult than theirs? We have not, it is
true, the same stimulants to offer. We cannot threaten that the
world is about to be destroyed; we cannot bribe our converts
with a heaven, we cannot make them tremble with a hell. But
though our religion appears too pure, too unselfish for
mankind, it is not really so, for we live in a noble and
enlightened age. At the time of the Romans and the Greeks the
Christian faith was the highest to which the common people
could attain. A faith such as that of the Stoics and the
Sadducees could only be embraced by cultivated minds, and
culture was then confined to a chosen few. But now knowledge,
freedom, and prosperity are covering the earth; for three
centuries past, human virtue has been steadily increasing, and
mankind is prepared to receive a higher faith. But in order to
build we must first destroy. Not only the Syrian superstition
must be attacked, but also the belief in a personal God, which
engenders a slavish and oriental condition of the mind; and the
belief in a posthumous reward which engenders a selfish and
solitary condition of the heart. These beliefs are, therefore,
injurious to human nature. They lower its dignity; they arrest
its development; they isolate its affections.
We shall not deny that many beautiful sentiments are often mingled with
the faith in a personal Deity, and with the hopes of happiness in a
future state; yet we maintain that, however refined they may
appear, they are selfish at the core, and that if removed they
will be replaced by sentiments of a nobler and a purer kind.
They cannot be removed without some disturbance and distress;
yet the sorrows thus caused are salutary and sublime. The
supreme and mysterious Power by whom the universe has been
created, and by whom it has been appointed to run its course
under fixed and invariable law; that awful One to whom it is
profanity to pray, of whom it is idle and irreverent to argue
and debate, of whom we should never presume to think save with
humility and awe; that Unknown God has ordained that mankind
should be elevated by misfortune, and that happiness should
grow out of misery and pain.
I give to universal history a strange but true title—The Martyrdom of Man.
In each generation the human race has been tortured that their children
might profit by their woes. Our own prosperity is founded on
the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust that we also
should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come? Famine,
pestilence, and war are no longer essential for the advancement
of the human race. But a season of mental anguish is at hand,
and through this we must pass in order that our posterity may
rise. The soul must be sacrificed; the hope in immortality must
die. A sweet and charming illusion must be taken from the human
race, as youth and beauty vanish never to return.
THE END
In 1872
The slave trade in Cuba was abolished by law in 1886.
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