THIRD DISCOURSE OF THE BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH. CHRISTIANITY AND FAITH.

On Thursday evening, March 30th, 1871, the nave of the Cathedral, Norwich, was much crowded with the citizens of all classes, to hear the third sermon of the Bishop of Peterborough, on “Christianity and Faith.” Before the sermon the Bishop prayed specially for the conversion of the infidels present. He selected his text from the Gospel according to St. John, xx. 29,

“Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

His Lordship said:

Last night, I endeavoured to show you what scepticism is, and what it leads to. We saw that scepticism is not simply doubt, but that it is doubt of a particular kind. It is that state of doubt which arises from insisting on referring every question for solution to one part, and one only, of our nature, to the sceptical understanding. It is that state of doubt which arises from refusing to believe until it has been made scientifically and mathematically impossible to doubt. And we saw what this leads to; we saw that it necessarily leads to the destruction of all belief properly so-called, to the destruction of every kind of assent, except assent to scientific and demonstrated facts; that it puts an end to all belief which rests upon moral certainty, as distinguished from scientific certainty, and therefore it puts an end to all belief that appeals to any part of our nature except the understanding; all belief with which the heart and spirit of man have anything to do; all belief of the higher and nobler kind; all belief that arises out of the higher and nobler part of our nature; all belief that is in character and essence moral, and all the higher and nobler life which arises out of such belief. We saw that scepticism was essentially fatal to morality; that there is no scientific demonstration of morality, and that in order to be moral it is necessary to exercise an act of faith; that morality cannot justify itself to the sceptical understanding; as we saw that as religion is not capable of scientific demonstration, as it does appeal to something else than the logical faculty, as it does appeal to man’s heart and spirit, it cannot justify itself to the sceptical intellect; and that scepticism is necessarily as fatal to religion as it is to morality, and to all belief except scientific belief.

I hope you saw what a waste of time it is to endeavour to satisfy the consistent sceptic; we have absolutely nothing in common. It is impossible that religion can silence scepticism, unless it ceases to be religion. It is just as absurd to object to religion that it is not science, as to object to science that it is not religion. It is the wisest course we can take in dealing with sceptics to begin, and for the most part to end the discussion, by asking this plain question: You tell us that you are sceptical, and you demand all your doubts to be satisfied before you believe; we ask you, Do you believe in anything, and if so, what do you believe in the proper sense of the word? Do you assent to anything on trust? Do you believe in anything you cannot demonstrate? If so, you have no right to say to us that we should not believe a religion. If you say, I believe in nothing but what can be demonstrated, then we have nothing to answer, we must leave you to be refuted by the common sense of mankind, and by every act of your daily life which is based on trust. It would save a vast deal of wasted time were we to take this course. Let me advise all Christians; before you allow a sceptic to put you to the proof, ask, What is it you believe? Do you believe anything in the matter of religion? and if so, remember you should not bring any objection against our faith which applies equally to yours. We cannot allow of faith for all the difficulties of your belief, while you ask demonstration for all the difficulties of our belief. Faith for both, or faith for neither; but not faith for one and demonstration for the other. We seek not to get a logical victory over our opponents; that is the poorest of all ambitions; but we recommend such a course for this reason, that you may see that the very same objections which are brought against our belief, lie against any belief, and all belief, and so be strengthened in your faith; for after all man must believe something. There is a necessity of belief in the soul of man. We ask for the sake of our opponents, if we throw them back upon considering the basis of their own belief, and ask them if they are not unconsciously to themselves in some degree believers while they call themselves sceptics?

And now, while I have endeavoured thus clearly to show you that religion, like morality, has no answer, properly speaking, to scepticism—but that it rests upon an act of faith in answer to what is ever saying, How, what, and why?—let us come back then to that point at which we left it last night. That is the point at which we saw, that in order to be moral, and to believe in morality, we must exercise an act of faith, we must trust in ourselves, in our own higher and better nature. It must be an act of faith which never can justify itself to the understanding. Submit the understanding to the soul, elevate the conscience above the merely logical and questioning faculty; say by the exercise of a higher faculty, say by the power of that instinct of faith, which is given us for the very purpose that we may rise above the instinct of doubt—say, I know that this is right and this is true, while I have a soul. There is in the heart of every human being an eternal opposition between the merely sceptical understanding and the spiritual faculty, between that which demonstrates and that which believes, between the mind which we share with the animal, and the soul which we Christians believe we specially derive from God; and these two are opposite the one to the other. That in us which says, This must be so, this shall be so so, is a higher faculty than that which in us inquires, Why is it so, how can this be so? And that act of faith in us on which our morality, our religion, and our higher forms of being rest, is that by which we assert the supremacy of the one above the other. We are not always conscious, nor often conscious, of this contradiction in our innermost nature, of the opposition between the spiritual part of our nature and the mere fleshly man. There are times, however, when we feel conscious of it. There are times when to each one of us comes some dire and deadly temptation, when we find ourselves in the presence of some coveted object, when the animal craves for its gratification, and the spirit trembles at the thought of the unlawful thing; and then we find the serpent intellect pleading in an ingenious way that there is no law against it. I say, there is not in this church a single man or woman who has not felt the eternal opposition between the spirit and the flesh; who has not felt that his deliverance from temptation, the mastery over the evil thing that was leading him on to evil, lies not in any logic or demonstration, but in the submission of the logical faculty to the spiritual, in saying to the animal part of our nature, Be silent, submit, I will be righteous, I will not sin. I say, in that moment we do become conscious of the opposition that exists between the intellectual and spiritual part of our nature. It is then that the great billows of our souls are ebbing and flowing in the agony of our temptation. It is at that time we feel the innermost parts of our being, the fountains of the great deep broken up; and then the spirit says, I will be righteous. And though we are not conscious of it, though the animal has been accustomed to obey the man, there is this secret opposition between the two. It is in the nature of what oculists tell us. They tell us, that the image of an object is inverted on the retina of the eye, and that it is only by constant habit of correction of the impression that we see things truly. So there is the natural inversion of the nature of the man; the animal gets the upper hand in the man, and it is only by the unconscious training of the man in Christian society that the supremacy of the moral part of the man is strongly established; and we are not conscious of the act of faith, but still that act of faith underlies all morality, and it is true in morality as in religion, “The just shall live by faith.” There is no righteous deed that any one of us has done that we did not do by virtue of this act of faith; “The just shall live by faith.”

Now let us pass on to another question, for if the whole moral and religious life is based upon the act of faith, there doubtless must be a good reason for it. We Christians believe that God made us so for a good reason. Can we see any reason why we should live our moral life by faith? That faith is not a mere assent to propositions, it is trust in a person, in a nature, a belief that we are better, nobler, than our understanding would persuade us we are. Every time this opposition which I have described arises within a man, he is given a choice; he has to pass through a probation, or a test as to whether he will or will not believe in his better self, whether he will rise up to the idea of his spiritual nature, or sink down to the depths of his animal nature. There is a trial for him, and a discipline in the trial, and a culture and a growth of his moral nature if he stands firm in the trial. We cannot believe, in such a moment of trial, in our nobler and better selves, without becoming in the very act of believing, nobler and better out of such strife; and the man comes out stronger every time he wrestles with his baser self; his purer and nobler self comes out of the trial nobler and purer.

There is a deep meaning in the temptation of our Saviour, when he is said to have been with the wild beasts, in that hour when the man is wrestling with the wild beasts, or the brute part of his nature, and his spiritual nature comes strong out of the struggle; just as the waving of the branches of the trees in the wind, makes the sap circulate to the tiniest leaflet, and brings the life-blood of the plant to every part. This is the use and object of the act of faith; to train, discipline, and elevate the man. Further, I have said, in every case in which a man believes in his better self, he becomes better; but we have to deal not only with our better selves, we have to come constantly in contact with other natures and other personalities than our own. Now, what happens when we encounter a higher or more moral nature than our own? Just the very same trial and discipline; because if a man comes to deal with a higher and better nature than his own, there is always a trial to the lower nature. If a higher nature could be easily understood by a lower nature, then the two natures would be equal. It is the very essence of a higher and purer nature to be something of a mystery to a lower nature. Some of the sayings or the doings of that higher nature, will always appear strange and puzzling to the lower nature, just because it is a lower nature. There is always the possibility of the lower nature saying of the higher nature, This nature is no better than mine, I do not believe in its higher or greater goodness. But are these cynical, worldly-wise men who disparage others, generally speaking, the most improving and valuable of our acquaintances? Do we not generally find these cynical, bitter, disparaging men to be men of low tone? They have lowered their moral nature in the hour of probation and trial; they have sunk lower than themselves, because they have refused to believe in something higher and better than themselves. If these men could have risen to the higher natures they had to deal with, then in that very hour, their own nature would have grown purer, nobler, and higher. So we see again, the act of faith would be an act of probation, an act of discipline, an act of moral culture and growth. Therefore we say it is true, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

But now let us go one step further. We have seen that in all morality there is an act of faith, and we believe in our own higher nature and the higher nature of others, and in so doing we ourselves grow better; but is there not something better still? We that believe in higher natures than our own, is there not in our hearts an instinctive belief that there must be somewhere perfect righteousness, perfect truth, perfect holiness? We seek for it, believe in it; do we ever find it? The more we know of men, though we may know more of their excellencies, we are compelled to know something more too of their imperfections. The result of this discovery is that one of two things happens, according as we listen to our understanding or our will. The sceptical understanding says, There is no such thing as perfection anywhere. That answer is unanswerable if we look only to experience. Is that the answer of the soul and heart of man? No, the soul and the heart rebel against this cheerless teaching. The soul has ever been uttering its protest against this despairing creed, ever speaking its belief in the reality of a perfect righteousness, a perfect truth, a perfect holiness; but can never attain to it. It may be a dream, but it is a dream that has haunted humanity from the first hour of its existence. We thus have faith in humanity, and the value of this faith is that it elevates the soul which believes in it; a faith which cannot justify itself to the understanding, a faith as deep as the human heart, and as old as the hills.

There is in very deed, in a very true sense, although it may be a low sense comparatively, a religion of humanity; a creed and an act of faith; and that religion has for its creed these articles: man is pure; he is not a bundle of passions merely; man is responsible, he has to answer for his beliefs; man may yet be perfect. There is no article in this creed that can be justified to the sceptical intellect, and yet there is not a single article in it that the loving heart of man, and that his soul in his highest and best moments, does not cling to as the very life of its life. The heart of man believes in the perfectibility of humanity, in spite of sin and misery and oppression. The long litany of man’s [imperfections?] comes down with a wail of despairing denial of the possibility of perfection. Remedy after remedy has been tried, scheme after scheme has been invented, and have been borne away like the bubbles on the wave; but still the heart of man clings to the belief that there is a perfect goodness somewhere, even when civilisation fails to produce it, even in spite of what we have seen in the last three months when the most civilised nations of Europe have banded themselves together for mutual destruction; in spite of all this disproof of perfection, the heart of man clings to it still. We do have faith in humanity, and the value of the faith is that it elevates the soul which believes in it. This belief in the possibility of perfection, in the possibility of delivering men from sin and sorrow, this is not merely the dream of the poet, it is not merely the Utopia of the philosopher, but it is the instinctive might in the heart of the earnest worker, that gives strength to him who does his duty amid the haunts of sin and sorrow; it is this that sends the Christian worker into the back streets and lanes of our great cities; it is this that sends the Christian minister to the bedside of the dying; it is this that makes men toil and suffer for their fellow men, like him whom we worship, who saw in his dying hour of the travail of his soul and was satisfied.

And now we take one step further. We have seen that there is a faith which underlies all morality as well as religion, and that this faith is the discipline of the soul, and without it the soul cannot grow in morality or religion. Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, let us suppose that for this yearning of the soul after an infinite perfection, there is a corresponding reality—an absolutely perfect, a supremely righteous and true and holy Being. And let us suppose that it pleased him to make a revelation of himself to man; what should we expect beforehand respecting that revelation? Should we not expect that it would follow the analogy of all other revelations to the higher and better part of man’s nature, and that inasmuch as morality needs faith, so this manifestation of the Perfect One would come in some way or other so as to call out the act of faith? Should we not expect that if this were the only absolutely perfect nature, it would appear to our lower and inferior nature in some respects unintelligible, in some respects mysterious, in some respects contradictory? For all mysteries, everything we cannot understand, must come to our understanding in the shape of contradictory propositions. We must expect that this higher nature, this perfect nature, should try our faith. If it would be unreasonable to suppose that an inferior man to himself should understand a man, so also it would be unreasonable to suppose that our nature should not find some difficulty in perfectly appreciating and understanding the absolutely perfect nature of a supremely perfect Being. Should we not expect from analogy that we should have some more difficulty in understanding God, than we have in understanding man? We must expect the same trial of our faith, the same probation and discipline of our spiritual nature, when it is brought into contemplation of this perfect nature. Surely we should beforehand expect that this would be the case; surely we might say that the God who was perfectly understood could not be the true God. When a man says, I want a God that is not a mystery; I ask, Do you know a man who is without a mystery? Are you not a mystery yourself? Is there one fellow being whom you understand? And yet you say, I have not faith in a God whom I cannot understand. Who can comprehend him who dwells in ineffable light, in whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning? If there be revelation from God at all, it must try the faith of man. In the next place, we should expect that it would be a revelation of a righteous person; because we know that the highest tendencies of our nature at their best moments are ever to find a righteous person, and our faith that has been cultivated in our brother man naturally looks for a person. Faith has ever been trusting in a person, in a nature, and therefore we should expect beforehand that if there came a revelation of this God, it would not come in the shape of a revelation of doctrines or creeds, but that it would be a revelation of a person. We Christians say there is made to us a revelation of the working of the Divine Will, and the purpose of the Divine Designer, in the works of his hands. We say the invisible things of God are revealed by the things that are made. There is that in the world which testifies to a creator and designer. This we believe because there is that in us which instinctively, when it finds a work of art, supposes an artist; and finding a work requiring design, has belief in a designer. We say, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handy work.”

But this revelation must follow the law of all other manifestations. There must be a possibility of denying it; a discipline here, as in the other case, in which faith is called into play; and therefore, though the world reveals its maker, it does not demonstrate its maker. “Day unto day is uttering speech, and night unto night showeth forth knowledge;” but the speech is like the speech for things spiritual, the utterance is for all who choose to believe it. If men will, they may put it aside; and some deny it in the face of the world. God has willed that there shall be nothing in this world to demonstrate his existence; but it is now as of old, inasmuch as men did not choose to retain God in their knowledge, he gave them over to a reprobate mind. There is a possibility, there is a necessity, in the manifestation of God, that it should try the faith of man. Once more, we Christians believe not only that God has revealed himself in his works, but also in his word, in his Incarnate Word; that, in answer to the craving desire of the soul of man to look upon human perfection, this earth has once been walked upon by a perfect man; that in the story of the Gospels we possess that which no imperfect souls could ever have imagined, the lineaments of a perfect being. I am not saying that it is so, but it is our belief. But before we opened the Gospels, we should expect according to the analogy of all other holy and righteous lives that we know of, that it should not demonstrate itself, should not make itself an impossibility to the sceptical mind to find fault with it, and should reveal itself to those whose lives were like it, so that wisdom should justify herself by her children. We should not expect, judging from analogy of what we see in the world, that this life should in all respects silence all opposition, and be understood by every mind that it came in contact with. We should expect to hear that he was despised and rejected of men, and some people besought him to depart from their coasts. If the revelation of a divine and perfect nature is to follow the analogy of all revelations of a lower degree of perfection, and all manifestations of inferior natures, then we must expect the same law will govern this case as all others; there will be a possibility of doubt, and a trial of faith, and to those who conquer the doubt and exercise the faith, will the promise be realised, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Ah, it was not with faith in a series of propositions only, nor in a set of dogmas—though we believe the propositions and hold the dogmas, but in the light of faith in this person—that the disciples of the Perfect One went out to convert the world. They did not preach Christ’s teaching, but Christ.

Did it ever occur to you to read the Acts of the Apostles? if so, you will have seen how little of the words of Christ, how little of the teachings of Christ, appears there. When we read in the Acts, how the Apostles went out to preach Christ, do we read that they gathered the multitude in the forum? Did they say, Listen to the morality of the Gospels? You will not find a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount. What did they do? They gathered the multitude together, and preached not the words of Christ, but Christ. They said, Come and believe in this man; it was the personality, it was the life and death, and resurrection and ascension of him, that they preached. It was a person in whom they asked the people to believe; and the result is this extraordinary and singular fact, that Christ is the only teacher among men whose life is greater than his teaching. All other teachers have faded into insignificance in comparison with their teaching. Who cares about the life of Euclid? but everybody believes in his teaching. Men are fond of comparing Christ with Socrates. Let us take it so. Did any man ever hear a person say, I am dead with Socrates; I am buried with Socrates; the life that I live is by faith in Socrates? Were such words ever heard of any heathen teacher? How comes it that men said this of Christ? The faith of the soul went out to the nature and work of Christ. The faith of man triumphed in the discovery of the perfect man.

Now we have reached the last point to which I have desired to bring you in this series of sermons. We have reached the historical fact, as to which others will follow me who will take up the subject, and who will show the evidence arising from history and prophecy. My task ends in removing the stumbling-blocks which would prevent your coming to hear them. It has been my part to lead you to the steps, to the threshold of the temple. We have found difficulties that have kept many away from the entrance to the temple. The first is the belief that Christianity is opposed to Freethought. And I have endeavoured to show you that Christianity does not deny it, but asserts it; that where Christianity does deny it, law and society deny it. The second difficulty is that of scepticism. We have seen that it is fatal to morality, and to all the higher forms of human life, and that the sceptical understanding should submit to the soul. Christianity only requires what morality has done. I have answered the objection that Christianity must appeal to faith, and must do so because it cannot find demonstration. Our answer is that it has all the demonstration that is possible for the supernatural or for history. Christianity does make demands on faith, but it acts in accordance with the analogy of human life; and Christianity in claiming faith justifies its claim to be a religion.

Now the time comes to close this discourse, in which from my inmost soul I have set the truth before you. I will ask you in all sincerity, Why do you suppose I am here? Some may say because we are priests and bigots. To me, if I must put it so, it makes no difference whether I come here or not. Why do I come here? Do you really, honestly believe, that I have come here to deceive you? Will you not give me credit, that to the best of my ability and in all earnestness and honesty, I have endeavoured to put before you the reasons that seem to me sufficient for my belief? Hear us, then, for this reason if for no other, that we desire your souls for our Lord and Master, that it is in his name we come among you, and because we believe that Jesus is the Son of God and came down from heaven to save men. It is for this reason, and this only, that we are here to speak to you, that we may with the help of God deepen your faith or shake your unbelief. We come with his word, that calls on you to follow the higher and not the lower part of your nature. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and ye shall be saved.” There are some who don’t believe in the first part of this message, there are few who do not believe that men need to be saved, saved in this world, and saved in the next, saved from some of the sin and misery in this world. I ask, is there no need of faith, is there no desire for the objects of faith? Among men have we not some need of faith? The world is growing old and sick at heart. All the remedies that have been tried for the evils of society, have been tried in vain. Idol after idol has been set up, has been rocked on its basis, and shivered. The gods of mankind have been taken away, and the cry of despondency has been raised, We have no humanity. Is there any evidence that there shall be a perfection of humanity? Is it from faith in men of science? Did science ever comfort the afflicted, or allay human sorrows? Faith in civilisation? Can it remedy the evils that are conquering society? Civilisation now means the gathering of men in great masses, to live the luxurious, the voluptuous life of great towns; it means the weary, toilful, haggard life of others in these same towns; it means the rich growing richer, and the poor growing poorer every day. Civilisation throws its dark shadows in its track. Civilisation and science, have they arrested war, or softened the heart of humanity, or prevented strife between nations? Civilisation, science and art have invented mitrailleuses, and invented destructive methods of wholesale murder. Where will you find in all these things a substitute for faith? Some speak of the millennium, and of the natural state of man being remedied in this world. We believe in the final perfection of man, but not in this world. We believe in the reign of righteousness, but it is in the eternal world. It is in that faith that we gain courage to look on the scenes and sorrows that afflict humanity. It is in the strength of that faith that we look down on the graves of the departed, and believe all is not dust of the earth; but we take up the song of Christian triumph over death, and thank God for the message “Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.”

THIRD REPLY OF MR. C. BRADLAUGH. CHRISTIANITY AND FAITH.

On Wednesday evening, April 5th, Mr. Bradlaugh delivered his third lecture on “Christianity and Faith,” before an audience which crowded every corner of the Free Library, Norwich. He said: In delivering the last of this course of lectures, permit me to commence by expressing my regret, that those who differ from me consider it necessary to show their disagreement in the manner in which it was expressed last night, on my leaving this room. If it had been the conduct of some ignorant young persons only, I should not have deemed it right to waste one moment in bringing the matter before you, but there were full-grown and decently dressed persons, who were distributing religious tracts, who encouraged others in following me, and using foul language. I could not help feeling how strong was the cause which I advocate, and how wretchedly weak the cause of my opponents, when such weapons were resorted to in lieu of fair reply.

I now address myself to the last sermon of the Bishop of Peterborough, entitled “Christianity and Faith.” The first portion of this was a recapitulation of the principal arguments of the two previous sermons, and then he made a statement utterly opposed to the whole purpose of his sermons. I will deal with the exact purport, if I do not read to you the precise words he uttered. He said, It is a waste of time to endeavour to satisfy the consistent sceptic. He said, We Christians, have absolutely nothing in common with the consistent sceptic. If that be true, why did the Bishop come to preach the course of sermons to win back sceptics to the Church? Why did the Dean and Chapter inaugurate the course of sermons, if it was, in their opinion, impossible to satisfy the sceptic? Why did the Bishop say it was not only to strengthen the faith of those in the church, but to win back those who had left it? If it be not possible to win them back, then the whole course of sermons was a mere pretence, and I put it that the Bishop was, either consciously or unconsciously, misleading his hearers as to his real views, or that he did not know what he was talking about. The Bishop offered some advice to Christians for dealing with sceptics. He said, Before you allow a sceptic to put your belief to the proof, ask him what is it that he believes. That is what you have no right to do. The sceptic does not come to you at all to force his opinions on you. You come to him when he is in the cradle, and by aid of early habit and repetition of phrases in lieu of thoughts, you put your religion into him, you train him to accept your religion in school, you fashion his brain-power before it has stability for resistance. He has a right to express his disbelief in your religion, and you have no right to pretend to answer him with a mere What do you believe? There is no equality in the two positions; religion is law-protected, scepticism is law-condemned; and the Bishop has no right to take such ground: a sceptic’s ignorance would be no evidence of a believer’s knowledge. But give the Bishop the full benefit of the ground, and what does it amount to except that, after the Dean and Chapter had made a parade of their desire to answer infidelity, declaring that they would have the most competent man, this most competent man is obliged to say, The only way I advise you to meet modern infidelity is by admitting in effect, that you can do no more for your faith than to ask the infidel, What do you believe? I dismiss this; it is of so trifling a character that if it had not formed a prominent part of the Bishop’s sermon, it would not have been worth noticing. The Bishop, in dealing with Christianity and Faith, said that morality is built on faith, and that in order to be moral and have a code of morality, we must exercise an act of faith, and believe in our higher and better nature. What is our better nature, judging by the Churchman’s standard? The Articles of the Church of England declare that our nature is always lusting to do evil. The Litany says that each man is always trying to do wickedly, and entreats the Lord to deliver us from the lusts of the flesh. How then can we be asked to trust in a higher or better nature, which the Church declares is a nature fallen, depraved, and constantly tending to evil? The doctrine of the Bible is that there is none who does good, that man’s thoughts are evil continually. It is sufficient for me to quote the Litany in which the Bishop took part before his sermon, which said that we are all miserable sinners, and prayed God to be merciful to us. How can we rise to our higher and better nature, if the existence of that higher and better nature be authoritatively denied? The Bishop says there is an eternal opposition in our nature, between what he calls the sceptical understanding and the spiritual faculty, between the mind which we share with the animal and “the soul, which we Christians believe we specially derive from God.”

Let us clear away a little difficulty here. By mind I mean the totality of cerebral ability and its results in activity, and I deny that we share mind with any other animal at all. Each animal has the mind special and peculiar to its own organisation; and diverse races of men have diverse characters and degrees of mind, limited by, and resulting from, their organisation and its development. But it is the Bible, and not the sceptic, that says the mind of man and the minds of all other animals are on a level. The Bishop says that the sceptic would degrade man to the level of the beast. You have only to take the Bible and you will read:

“I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them . . . so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast.”

If the doctrine is degrading, it is the Bible that teaches the doctrine, and not the sceptic. Freethinkers never contend for anything of the kind. On the contrary, we say that the superiority of the intellect is distinctly marked in its development, that not only are men mentally superior to all other animals, but that some races of men are vastly superior to others. What does the Bishop mean by opposition between mind and soul? He did not trouble to give any evidence of the existence of what he calls soul as apart from mind. I challenge any one who may follow me to give me any evidence of any sort of existence apart from mind, that we can call soul. The Bishop said that there is a constant opposition between the intellectual faculty, the mind which we share in common with the beast, and the spiritual soul. I deny that the Bishop advanced the slightest proof of—or gave any clue to—any such soul. I deny that it is possible for any man to conceive the existence of two separate existences in man: one, mind; the other, soul. As to the opposition between them, the Bishop says that God created man’s intellectual faculties, and that he also endowed man with a soul; and that the soul is hostile to the mind; and that the mind is low and grovelling, always in hostility to the soul. He thus makes God put into man a degrading nature, always hostile to religion, and in a constant struggle with the soul. No more degrading supposition can be made respecting God, who is thus pictured as a malicious fiend; and if the Bishop had intended to make infidels, he could not have contrived more effectual means than the preaching this doctrine.

The Bishop, after dealing with the manner in which the spiritual part of our nature overcomes what he calls the animal, the intellectual or mental part of our nature—for he used all these words to describe the natural man at war with the spiritual man—says that the manner in which the spiritual conquers the other, is only by the unconscious training of the man in Christian society. The Bishop says that God has made many millions of men, and given them minds in opposition to their souls, that these minds are strong enough to lead men to evil, and they cannot be brought to God, unless in Christian society; so that the Buddhists, the Brahmins, the Mohammedans, and men of all other persuasions must necessarily be damned, because, having no Christian society, there is not amongst them the means of overcoming this natural mind. This is a pretty specimen of Christian teaching. But the Bishop is not even content with this. Having told us that Christianity is founded on an act of faith, and that faith is trust, he tells us that he believes that we are better, nobler, than our understanding would persuade us we are. Having told us that we have a wicked nature, a depraved mind in conflict with the spirit, he says that our morality is also to be founded on an act of faith, that we are really better and nobler that we suppose. Where do we find the evidence to justify this act of faith? We are, according to the Bishop and his Church, all miserable sinners, nor can we do good without the help of God. There is that subtle serpent the devil constantly working in us, and our nature is in league against God. The Bishop says the only way to overcome this horrid nature is by the training of man in Christian society, and yet two minutes after, he tries to persuade us that we are better, nobler than he and his church say we are. He says, in fact, we are all very wicked. Adam ate an apple 6,000 years ago, and we are, in consequence, all degraded and depraved; yet we are really nothing of the kind. The Bishop stated that the effect of belief in our nobler, better nature is the improvement of our character, and it is by believing in what is better and nobler, and in the possibility of being better and nobler, that we grow better. Ergo, so long as men believe they are born in a state of natural depravity, and that of themselves they cannot do good, so long as the mass of men believe that those are depraved to damnation who cannot get trained in Christian society, so long as they believe that millions of men will be lost because they live without even hearing of Christ at all, so long they must be degraded by that belief. They must believe that God made the majority of mankind for damnation and the minority for salvation; their faith must make themselves into the incarnations of vileness and God into an almighty fiend.

The Bishop, not content with such subtle logic, goes on to illustrations drawn from the Bible, and speaks of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. He said there is a moral to be drawn from this temptation story, because Jesus is said to have been with the wild beasts, and there was a deep meaning in this saying. I do read the Gospels sometimes, and therefore puzzled myself about these wild beasts, not having read much of them. I remembered the Jesus-God being taken up a high mountain and shown all the kingdoms of the earth, as a possible bribe if he would worship his own creature the devil. I remembered his being taken up to a pinnacle of the temple and invited to cast himself down; but I did not remember, nor do I now remember, anything about wild beasts, save a few words in the Gospel of Mark, and it is not even there shown that these wild beasts had anything to do with the Lord’s temptation. Whether the Bishop has a special version of his own I do not know.

Another point of the Bishop was, that when lower natures have to contemplate higher natures, there is some mystery or contradiction to the lower natures. The man who tries to predetermine your decision on an alleged matter of fact, by declaring that it is too mysterious for you to understand, and that being mysterious, you must accept it as he explains it, is a juggler with his intellect, and takes a position to which he has no right. The Bishop was good enough to talk of our degrading creed. Let him talk of his own degrading creed. Our creed has not invented a bottomless pit filled to its brink with brimstone for everlasting torture, nor has it manufactured a devil more mighty than God to destroy God’s work. Our degrading creed, at any rate, does not despair of human kind, nor tell us that we should be poor here in order to be rich hereafter, and be miserable here that we may be happy bye and bye, when the life-ability for happiness is entirely gone. We don’t despair of human kind, we assert the improvability of the human race and we say if we make this life as good as we can, we shall not be affrighted from our task by any declaration that we may be unhappy hereafter.

But the Bishop went further, and carrying the war into our camp, he declared that it was in consequence of faith in Christ that men did Christian work, and he spoke of men doing good work among the sick, and poor, and ignorant, and wretched, day by day because they were Christians. Does he mean to say that Mohammedans, and Buddhists, and Brahmins have amongst them no kindly work for one another? Does he mean to say that men cannot be human unless they have the special Christian’s creed? But this Christian work has been going on for 1800 years, so at least the Bishop says. Let us turn the pages of its history over and read what it has really done. When Christianity was cradled in the world, Italy and Greece had their poets, painters, sculptors, men of literary fame, orators, comedians, and tragedians. Wait for a century or two till your much-vaunted Christianity has, by the aid of forgery, fraud, and manufactured miracle, acquired some force. Wait till the priests, crushing out all other learning, have become the sole literary power in Europe. Did they teach the people? No, they kept the people ignorant. (A voice, “No.”) If any one says no, I will show century after century what Christianity has been. Your first century I will not trouble with until you show me its actual pages; your second and third centuries are crowded with the fabrication of forged evidences, the canonisation of pretended saints; your fourth century shows the same work, and marks also the quarrels commencing amongst yourselves for the spoils now large enough to excite good Christians against each other; in the fifth century Salvian one of your own presbyters, said the Christian Church had become such a sink of vice, that it was a species of sanctity for any one to be a little less vicious than the others. He says of his fellow Christians that they lie and cheat, are adulterers and murderers; that it is easier to find a Christian guilty of all these crimes than one guilty of none. Take the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries of Christianity, when infidelity was almost powerless, before Voltaire lived, before Spinosa wrote, before Bruno trod Europe round, and you have in these centuries, when Christianity was the most powerful, the dark ages of this European world, when all literature was stopped, all philosophy was hindered, all science manacled by the Church. What was the Christian work in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, when Christians marched to the Holy Land? Let the plundered and miserable countries tell; let burned villages and ravished women show the way in which the soldiers of the Cross manifested their religion even to their fellow Christians. Let these pages of blood and rapine be read for Christian work. Where then was liberty or popular rights? When the king, the barons, and the priests were in power, did Christianity help the people to get liberty? It is only within the last 300 years, since the rise of heresy in Europe, that the people have gained any freedom. The Church of England may say, This is not our work; but it is a branch of the Church of Rome, and ought not to repudiate the trunk it grew from. Nay, it has not even the same right to plead to us as the Church of Rome. The Church of Rome is consistent, and says to its followers, You on religion are unable to think, we will and we do think for you. The Church of England says, You have a right to think for yourselves, but damns you if you think differently from the Church. You say that hospitals are the fruits of Christianity. Where, save in the monasteries, were the hospitals for 1500 years? You boast of schools. Where were these at all for 1500 years? There were even in this country none worthy of the name for little children till Robert Owen set his example at New Lanark. You talk of going into the back streets, but is it not true that squalor, misery, and vice, crowd the back streets because the Bishops and the English Church have taken so much from the people, and have so hindered the populace from self-improvement, that they have only back streets themselves to live in, while they build palaces for the king, and magnificent structures for the Church? I attack the Church of England because the Church has challenged me. I attack it as a leech that for centuries has sucked the life-blood out of the people, and which, with the power to aid and help civilisation, has done nothing but retard it.

The Bishop said, Let us suppose the existence of a supremely righteous, true, and holy being; let us suppose a revelation from such a being; what do you suppose such a revelation should be like? and he urged that the Christian possessed such a revelation as groundwork for his faith. I hold the supposed revelation in my hand. What does it reveal? That God made man and woman in the same day, but that he made them separately, the man long before the woman. That God gave them the fruit of every tree for food, but prohibited them from eating the fruit of one tree, and never intended that of another to be eaten by them; that he placed the man and woman in a garden within reach of the tree whose fruit they were forbidden to eat on pain of death, but the fruit of which was made good for food and pleasant to the eyes; that God made a serpent more subtle than all the beasts of the field; that this serpent tempted Eve, and she ate the forbidden fruit, and gave to the man who ate also, and thus both fell; that God, who had foreseen and predestined all this terrible farce, cursed for Adam’s sake all human kind, millions being thus involved in Adam’s ruin. That all this was the work of an all-wise and all-good God, with whom is no variableness nor shadow of turning. This God, who is not a man that he can repent, afterwards repented that he had made man, and, although not subject to passions, it grieved him at his heart, and he resolved to destroy all mankind. That, man’s thoughts being wicked, this God of love and forgiveness, of long suffering and loving kindness, destroyed not only the full-grown man and woman, but also the little child as yet without thought. Man’s thoughts being wicked, God drowned the whole world, including bird, beast, and creeping thing. Did you ever picture to yourselves this story of the flood? Just paint in imagination a mother with her child in her arms, wearily toiling up some hill, slippery with the falling waters. See her fleeing from the waves coming swift behind, like ravenous wolves, with gaping mouths greedy for her life. Imagine her cry to heaven for mercy, not for herself alone, not so much for herself, but for her child, a child, which sucking at her breast, as yet knows no sin. Then picture your all-loving and merciful God shutting his ears to her wild shrieks for mercy, and drowning her and her babe in the flood.

Did you ever picture to yourselves the scene when, the world being again peopled, its inhabitants intended to build a tower that would reach to heaven, and God, the all-wise, hearing of it in heaven, where he then resided, came down to earth to see whether the rumour was true, and finding that it was, confounded the language of men? Do you recollect how God chose Abraham—and I don’t deny that he was worth choosing, a man who was just 75 years old when he had lived 135 years—how God, the infinite and omnipresent, came down from heaven and told Abraham that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed; and that Abraham, though so old that his body was “as good as dead,” should have a son in his old age? Have you read how God, who cannot lie, with a covenant and an oath promised a certain land to Abraham, and how he never gave him “so much as to set his foot on?” Have you read how Sarah, it having ceased to be with her after the manner of women, laughed when God made the promise of a son; how God asked why she laughed; and how Sarah, whose faith is praised, denied to God’s very face that she had laughed at all? Have you read that God said, I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob; that Jacob proved to be a knave and a liar; that Jacob made a conditional bargain with the Almighty God, that if the Lord would do certain things for him, then the Lord should be his God? Have you read how God promised to protect Abraham’s children, and how they became slaves in Egypt, and how he left them to be oppressed? Have you read how, hearing their cries, God took them out of Egypt, amongst a number of nations who had committed no crime against the Jews, but were created by God to be destroyed by his chosen people? Have you traced the track of blood and murder from Egypt to Palestine? Have you read how God gave the Israelites the right to make war on any city, and if the inhabitants made peace, then they were tributaries, but if not “I, the Lord God, will deliver them into thy hands; thou shalt smite them utterly, and leave alive nothing that breatheth?”

I say that this is not a revelation of love; it is the revelation, the outgrowth of the instincts, of a barbarous and brutal people. My Lord Bishop, not content with relying on this revelation, after telling us that the existence of a Deity cannot be demonstrated, seeks to supply us with a demonstration by a vague reference to the argument from design. He says that there are in the universe evidences of a designer. This argument from design is a most dangerous one, for the existence of stings and fangs may be evidences of a designing malevolence; but permit me to dismiss the argument with a quotation from Sir William Hamilton. He says:

“We are utterly unable to conceive that it is possible for the complement of existence to have been either increased or diminished. We cannot, on the one hand, conceive of nothing becoming something, or on the other hand, of something becoming nothing.”

I challenge the Lord Bishop to show that it is possible to imagine any time when the whole of the universe did not exist. Creation! who is it that really believes in creation? Do any of you? Let us fathom the depths of the past as far back as we will, there is still the great impenetrable beyond. No man, even in thought, can annihilate existence, or bring to light a first evolution of nature, and say, Here the universe began. There can be no origination of the universe conceivable by the human mind. But suppose you could in thought annihilate the universe. You say that God is unchangeable. Was there a moment when he began to create? Then is not that an assumption of an act of change? I will not stop to argue on this point. The bishop did not on this head condescend to argue at all. His third sermon was only a torrent of ably delivered words, and however fitting it might be for those whose faith was firm, it was useless for drawing to the Church those without faith. The Bishop says, Our faith in Christ is confirmed by the story of his life as recorded by his disciples. He says that whether the Gospel of John is true or untrue, it contains the delineation of a perfect being. He spoke of Christ as being better than any man the world has yet seen, as the only teacher whose life was better than his teaching. What is the history of his life? Jesus was born without a father. His mother’s husband had two fathers. Jesus was descended from David, through Joseph, who was not his father. He was born in the reign of Herod, but was not born till after the death of Herod. Jesus passed his early life in Egypt, but he was during the same time in Judæa. He was baptised by John, who knew him before the baptism, but who did not know him till he had been baptised. Jesus was taken into the wilderness, where he fasted forty days, but he was during part of the same time at a marriage feast in Cana of Galilee. During the forty days’ fasting, the devil took Jesus to the top of a high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and said, All these will I give thee, it thou wilt fall down and worship me. Yet this Jesus was, as the Bishop teaches, very God of very God; and if so, could not be tempted with an offer of his own creation by his own creature; and the temptation must have been a sham. Jesus is said to have worked miracles, but the people who had the opportunity of seeing them never believed in them or him. He fed 5,000 persons with five loaves and a few fishes, and yet his own disciples—who, he promised, should sit on twelve thrones, judging the tribes of Israel—when many persons had to be fed at another time, wondered how it was to be done. Jesus was betrayed by Judas with a kiss; but he was not so betrayed, for when the armed men came to Jesus he asked them, Whom seek ye? and they answered, Jesus of Nazareth; he said, I am he. Jesus was crucified early in the morning, and yet at noon he was still on his trial. Jesus was three days and three nights in the grave; but he was crucified on Friday, his body was taken down from the cross on Friday evening, and it must have been late on Friday evening when he was put into the sepulchre; the first people who looked into it on Saturday night, as it began to dawn towards Sunday morning, found that the body was gone; so that from Friday night till Sunday morning, made three days and three nights! Jesus appeared to two of his disciples, and they did not know him; he walked with them till the evening, and then they knew him. When it was daylight they did not know him, but when it was dark then they knew him. While they could see him, they did not know him; when they knew him, they could not see him. Such is the story of Jesus. It is not true that his life was better than that of any other man.

I will take a noble life, and put it against the life of Jesus, the life of the Infidel Bruno against the life of your God Jesus. Bruno was born near Naples, and trained as a monk. Leaving his ministry, to teach people in their vulgar tongue, he was driven out of Italy. Going to Switzerland, bigotry was too strong, and he was driven thence. At Paris he debated with the doctors of the Sorbonne, until arguments failing them, they drove him away with threats of the faggot. From Paris he went to England, there debating at Oxford and Cambridge; thence to Germany; and thence back to Italy, where a prison awaited him, as a full refutation of his heresies, where he was confined in a dungeon for eleven years, where the rack was the answer to his arguments, and where he at last died, a gallant martyr at the stake. He died fearlessly confronting his enemies, having truly told them that they had more fear in condemning him to be burned alive, than he had in being condemned.

Jesus was God, and could not die; but if your Bible be true, his last words were a despairing cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Compare these two men in their lives and their deaths, and see which was the nobler and the braver. Jesus did not come to save the world. He said, I am sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Jesus told his disciples not to go to the Gentiles, be forbade them even to visit the Samaritans, and it was not till after his resurrection that he said, Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. I have spoken in language which you may think unfitting for such a theme. Do you believe the Bishop, that Jesus died to save all mankind? Do you believe the doctrine, that only those who have faith in Jesus can be saved? What is to become of those who have never heard his name? Do you believe that all the Chinese will be damned? If you believe this, what must you think of God? If you believe that the Chinese will be pardoned, because they cannot be expected to believe in Jesus of whom they have not heard, how can you be so wicked as to send them Bibles and missionaries, which may bring them to damnation? I plead here for what some call infidelity, for what some call heresy. I plead for the rights of humanity. I plead against a system which, to my mind, has greatly hindered the education of the world, and impeded its improvement; and if you tell me that my language is coarse and blasphemous, I will ask you in what language do your missionaries describe the Mohammedan and his Koran, the Brahmin and his Vedas? You call me an Infidel; what are you? You disbelieve all the religions of the world save one, I disbelieve that one also; my disbelief is but one degree greater than yours.

A Bishop comes now in the nave of the Cathedral, to answer modern Infidelity. Why does modern Infidelity exist? Why has Infidelity grown? It has grown because the Church has grown fat and the people lean. It has grown because Convocation quibbles over rites and formularies, instead of devising schemes for the redemption of mankind from ignorance; because the Church said nothing while back streets were built for the poor, and grand abbeys and cathedrals for the priest. The rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer, while the Church pretends to regard as a blessing the poverty she carefully avoids. The Church pretends to have the authority to speak in the name of God, and the Bishop, on that last evening, prayed for my conversion. You see the effect of that prayer in these lectures. Clergymen threw down the gauntlet, and it has been taken up. We have been attacked, and we will compel the Church to afford us a hearing. You have now no right to say that we are too insignificant, after you have yourselves challenged us to the fray. You must not pretend that modern Infidelity is too blasphemous; you have undertaken to confute it by competent persons. I appeal to Christians of every sect for one thing only; I don’t ask you to give me your faith, but to remember that amid the hundreds of religions with innumerable antagonistic Churches and Chapels, that amid the multiplicity of error, you may be wrong. We do not pretend to be perfect thinkers, nor thinkers free from error; we claim only to be earnest thinkers, desiring to be set right where wrong. I deny the right of any Church to pretend to be the only true Church. I take the right to utter my thoughts. The Church of England is a rotten Church, a falling Church, a Church divided against itself, a Church with Colensos and Voyseys, as against Puseys and Mackonochies, a Church which by the admission of her own divines is illogical, which cannot defend her Thirty-nine Articles, nor her Athanasian Creed.

I have finished these lectures, and I ask those who intend to follow me to remember that Freethought has done something since the days of Spinoza, Carapanella, and Bruno. It is only since Freethinkers began to fight against the Church that there has been any real popular progress made by you Liberals. The Church has not helped you at all. It has by its bench of bishops hindered your reforms as long as it could, and maintained tithes and exactions and bad laws till humanity rebelled against the obstruction. Whether right or wrong, we have at least done something to make the world better worth living in. (Applause.)

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