Arthur B. Moss

“ All actions either have an evil or a good result. Every deed leaves its indelible impress on the book of Nature, from which no leaves can be torn and nothing can be expunged. And remember, too, that the man who makes his fellow-creatures happy cannot displease a god who is good; and a god who is not good is neither deserving of admiration nor service.
An infinite and all-powerful god cannot need the assistance of man; but man needs the assistance of his brothers and sisters to diffuse the glorious light of knowledge through the world ”

“ She is not, nor ever has been, worthy of worship. She destroys every being that lives once, and sometimes by the most painful process it is possible to conceive. How many thousands she has starved with hunger, frozen with cold, poisoned, drowned, or swept away by earthquakes or other frightful calamities, mankind will never know. All we can know is that thousands have been thus sacrificed, and that in proportion as man used one force of nature to counteract the effect of another he has advanced.
When the sceptical man had a chance of life, his advance towards civilisation was rapid. ”

“ The man who has a strong constitution may struggle successfully in the world; the man with great affluence may win an easy victory over his fellows; the man who has plenty of "influential friends" has good prospects; but the poor, the weakly, the ignorant, what hope have they—they have to suffer and toil, and toil and suffer from the cradle to the tomb.
How is it, then, you may ask, if man has received no assistance from without, either from Nature or the gods, that he has achieved such splendid results in the world? ”

“ Man has discovered that he can trust it; that he can use it; that he can assist himself and others by the employment of it. In other words, he can do his own thinking, reason out his own principles, act his own life. He can be a man. And it is better for an individual to be a bad original than a good copy of somebody else. Man is civilised to-day. He has fought a good fight, he has conquered a foe; but better than all, he has converted an enemy into a friend.
What is man's future policy? Is there not still plenty of labor for him to perform? ”

“ But these gods were of no more service to man than those that preceded them. If man advanced it was by his own effort, by virtue of using his intelligence, by strife, warfare, and by suffering.
Neither Nature nor the gods taught man to be truthful, honest, just, nor even to be clean. No god came to tell him that he must not lie, nor steal, nor murder.. All virtues are acquired, all are the result of education. ”

“ Theological faith is sightless. It allures you to the brink of a precipice and precipitates you to the earth beneath. It is a ship without a rudder; the tempestuous waves toss it about recklessly, the wind drives it savagely against the rocks, and to-day this ship called "Theological Faith" is a dreary wreck. ”

“ Necessity forced all but a small minority into the labor market. And after years of labor the earth was converted from a howling wilderness into a home fit for habitation. Here let me distinctly affirm that all that is admirable in civilised life—the comfort of home, the pleasure of education, the fascination of the drama, the beauty of painting or sculpture, the usefulness of scientific acquirements—owe their value to the secular labor of mankind.
Theology deserves no credit in respect to these things. ”

“ And I say that the world is indebted far more to those who built houses, made clothes, navigated ships, made machinery, wrote books, than to all the gods and their clerical representatives the world has ever known. Belief in god never helped a man to supersede the sailing vessel by the steamship, the old coach by the railroad, the scythe by the reaping machine, nor the fastest locomotion by the telegraph wires. ”

“ Surely an infinite fiend could not do worse; and if I thought that Nature were intelligent, that Nature knew of the suffering she inflicted on all kinds of living beings and had the power to prevent it, but would not, I would curse Nature even though the curse involved for me a sudden and painful death. ”

“ For centuries man groped about in the dark. Nature was deaf to his appeals and blind to his sufferings, and her daily performances frightened and bewildered him. And yet he did his best to ascertain the causes of the phænomena of the universe. ”

“ When it is remembered, however, that if man is indebted in any way to Jahveh for his existence, he owes him only the exact equivalent of the benefits he has received, I think it will be seen that on the whole man's indebtedness to this deity is very small indeed.
Was Adam indebted to Jahveh for the imperfect nature which compelled him to commit the so-called sin which imperilled the future destiny of human race? Were all the "miserable sinners"—the descendants of the first pair—indebted to Jahveh for their "corrupt" natures? ”

“ Through the world diffuse the glorious light of knowledge, let men learn that all crime is a mistake, that effects always follow causes, and that a good effect never follows from a bad cause in a nation that is governed on the principles of truth and justice. ”

“ And so it must now be said that man is master of Nature, and he finds that she is just as good as a servant as she was bad as a master.
But the earth is not yet a Paradise. Theology is not yet entirely banished; the debris of the decayed beliefs still cumber our path and impede our progress. There is even now much that remains to be done. Plenty of labor to be performed. Ignorance, poverty, and crime and misery still exist and exert their evil influence in the world. The philanthropist and the reformer have still their work to do. ”

“ Yet theologians call this splendid attribute carnal reason, and declare that it is no safe guide to man. It has been man's only guide; and when he has trusted it he has been more often in the right than otherwise. Even his errors have assisted hint in future labors. Faith he has had, but it has always been secular faith. Experience has been his guide, science a lamp unto his feet. Even when he has walked down the wrong path he has done so with his eyes open. ”

“ The design argument therefore is purely an argument drawn from experience. But what experience has man of god? Speaking for myself I can say that I have absolutely no experience of him at all, and I am not acquainted with anybody who has. Man does not know god as a designer or constructor; he neither knows of his capabilities, nor his existence; and he therefore cannot reasonably say that god is the designer of anything.
The human eye is very often adduced by the Theist as an illustration of design. Now nobody can deny that the eye is a delicate, complicated, and beautiful structure ”

“ What is called the "evolution theory" is generally acknowledged to be removed from the region of hypothesis to that of fact.
But it is not my purpose further to pursue the subject of man's origin, which, while it is confessedly a most interesting question, is one upon which no man who is not a skilled scientist can write or speak with authority. I can only deal with probabilities. Nobody, so far as we know, was present to witness the first man spring into existence. Indeed, we do not know that there was a first man! ”

“ It is the same in Nature. You can go back, and back, and back through successive causes and effects, but you will never come to a "first cause"; you will not be able to say "here is the end of Nature, and here the beginning of something else." There is no brick wall to mark the boundary line of Nature. You cannot "look through Nature up to Nature's God,"—the poet Pope notwithstanding—for Nature seems endless, and you can neither penetrate her heights nor fathom her depths. And I have one other word to say in reference to this à priori method, before finally disposing of it. ”

“ Beautiful it is to see and understand that no worth, or known or unknown, can die even on this earth. The work an unknown good man has done is like a hidden vein of water flowing underground, secretly making the ground green. ”

“ Men having given up the worship of Nature, began to study her; they found that by diligent investigation, and the application of their augmented knowledge, they were able to beautify the world, and render their lives happy. Then we began to have great scientific discoveries. Navigation, steam-power, telegraphy, electricity; by a knowledge of the use of these powers man has been able to conquer the destructive character of many natural forces, and to transfer a world of misery into a home of comparative comfort. ”

“ It is no flight of the imagination to say that there exist the clearest proofs that man many ages ago lived in "holes in the earth," and went in constant fear of animals who sought him as their prey. Sometimes he would have to scramble up trees to elude the vigilance of these sagacious beasts; sometimes the tree would form no place of safety, and he would have to run for dear life or become a living sacrifice to these savage beings. ”

“ Some said that god's existence was self-evident to every intelligent mind; others that Nature and men could not have come by "chance"; that they must have had a cause; some said that the harmony existing in the universe proved god's existence; others that everybody except fools "felt in their hearts" that there was a god. But these imaginary proofs did not always convince. At last there came forth philosophers who said that there was a mode of reasoning, the adoption of which "leads irresistibly up to the belief in god," and that that mode was called the mode à priori. ”

“ Even now the rich own all the land, and many poor have not where to lay their head. Even now all men are not equal in the sight of the law; and one man gets pensioned for work for which another is incarcerated in gaol. Even now our sisters are outraged and turned adrift upon the world to be the playthings of vicious men for evermore. Even now our workhouses are filled with men and women who are able to work for an honest living—if they could get it—but cannot because labor is cheap, and there are too many waiting to perform it. ”

“ Now in Nature there is a permanent and a changeable-element, but man only takes cognisance of the changeable or phenomenal element; of the substratum underlying phenomena he knows and can know nothing whatever; that is, man does not know what matter and force are in themselves in the abstract, he only knows them in the concrete, as they affect him through the medium of his senses.
Now I allege that nearly all the mistakes of theology have arisen from the ignorance of man in regard to Nature and her mode of operation. Let us consider for a moment a few facts in reference to man. ”

“ In a short time the struggle for existence was manifestly keener than it had ever been before; the rich became richer and richer, while among the poor the tendency was to get poorer and more poor. Uncomplainingly the people devoted themselves to the labor of each day. Theology they set aside for six days of the week, and concerned themselves about the gods on Sunday. Though they did not often say so, the majority of men thought it was far better for them to be diligent workmen, performing all the secular duties of daily life—building houses, making clothes, machinery, writing books ”

“ He was neither all-wise, nor all-good, nor all-powerful, and he was only a finite being. And how can it be pretended by sensible persons that a finite man living on the earth, born of a woman, and dying like any other ordinary being, could possibly be the infinite god of the Universe? ”

“ Now if we would study the progress of the human race to any advantage, we must study it apart from all prejudice, and not allow religious or superstitious notions concerning the superiority of one class of people to warp our minds and prevent us from understanding the important part played by savage peoples in the battle of life. ”

“ In fact he advanced in the road of civilisation only in proportion as he offered ceaseless war against the hurtful forces of nature, using one force to counteract the destructive character of another. Think what the earth must have been without a solitary house upon it, without a man who yet knew how to till the soil! ”

“ Or, on the other hand, if he were evolved from some lower creature it does not follow that he was conscious of the evolution. But at least we can be sure that history speaks with no uncertain sound concerning man's progress in the world and the means by which it was achieved. As a civilised creature man is not many centuries old. Even now we find many savage races existing on the earth, and in type so low in the scale are they that they more nearly resemble the brute beasts, both in intellect and in physique, than the higher forms of men. ”

“ But Nature heareth not man's protests or appeals—she is blind to his sufferings and deaf to his prayers.
Oh, but it's said: "See what harmony there is in the Universe:" per se there is neither harmony nor chaos in Nature; we call that harmony which pleasantly affects us, and that chaos which does the reverse. Some Theist may say: "Suppose that I grant that I cannot prove that god exists, what then? You cannot prove your own existence, and yet you believe that you exist." I am well aware that I cannot prove my own existence ”

“ The evolution theory accounts for the facts as they are observed in life—facts which upon any other theory are quite inexplicable. And it must not be supposed that because the theory does not give a complete explanation to all the phenomena that it therefore is not reliable. Haeckel says ("Pedigree of Man," p. 36) : "If we can only prove the general truth of the Darwinian theory, our idea of the origin of man from lower vertebrata follows of necessity, and we are not obliged to give a special proof as to this latter view if the general proposition is well established." ”