Kersey Graves

“ True religion sees God in every thing, reads his scriptures on every page of Nature's open Bible, and feels him in the inspiration of the soul. It calls God father, not king; Christ a brother, not a redeemer. It loves all men, but fears no God. Its God is not a tyrant, but a loving father. It looks upon Jesus Christ as a truly good man, but not a God; as a noble, loving, benevolent being, but endowed with human frailties. ”

“ Think of this, reader! and think of the eternal Creator, the infinite Deity, the omnipotent Jehovah, the Maker of worlds as numberless as the sands upon the sea-shore for multitude, fainting, bleeding, dying, and pouring out his own blood to appease his own wrath; dying an ignominious death to satisfy an implacable revenge! Away with such insulting mockery, such blasphemous flummery! It can only find place in the dark chambers of an unenlightened mind. ”

“ But rejoice, O ye lovers of and laborers for truth and science! the dark clouds of our gloomy theology are rapidly receding before the sunlight of our modern civilization, and will soon leave a clear and cloudless sky! And all will rejoice in having learned and practically experienced the glorious truth, that true religion is not incorporated in Bibles, or inscribed on the pages of any book, and cannot be found therein, but is a natural and spontaneous outgrowth of man's moral and religious nature, and is "the most beautiful flower of the soul." ”

“ We want a religion which will estimate men and women for what they are, and not for what they believe,—a religion that does not measure their moral worth by their creeds, but by their practical lives. We want a religion that will banish all creeds and mind-enslaving dogmas from the earth, and substitute in their place brotherly love and goodness. We want a religion that will do away with ignorance and poverty, that will labor to prevent any one from suffering for the needful things of life, and that will bind all together in the ties of universal brotherhood. ”

“ At his birth a marvelous light illumined the earth. His followers baptised, and performed miraculous cures. And he, when a child, attracted attention by his miracles. While attending the herds with his foster-father a great serpent poisoned the river, which caused the death of cows and shepherd-boys when they drank of it, whom Chrishna restored to life by a look of divine power. His life was devoted to mercy and charity. He left paradise from pure compassion, to die for suffering sinners. He sought to lead men to better paths and lives of virtue and rectitude. ”

“ Conscience without science or philosophy is a lamp without oil, which consequently, being without light, is more likely to lead us astray than to guide us to the temple of truth. Science is the pilot-lamp by which we discern our way on the pilgrim-voyage of life; while religion is the feeling, the motive-power, which impels us onward. ”

“ Who can believe that a God, from off the throne of heaven, could make his appearance on earth, and while performing the most astounding miracles ever recorded in any history, or that ever excited the credulity of any people, and be finally publicly crucified in the vicinity of a great city, and yet all the histories written in those times, both sacred and profane, pass over with entire silence the slightest notice of any of these extraordinary events. ”

“ This is an age of steam and electricity; and every thing has to move with velocity. We cherish no unkindly feelings toward any church or people; but we must rejoice that the strongholds of orthodoxy are being shaken, and error exposed, and that creeds are loosening their iron grasp upon the immortal mind Old, long-cherished dogmas, myths, and blinding superstitions are passing away, to make room for something better.
Yes, the signs of the times indicate the dawning of a brighter day upon the world,—a day which shall be illuminated by the rays of reason and science. ”

“ It is as if one should imagine the whole world not only represented upon, but also contained in, one of our own artificial globes, or the body of the sun enveloped in a cloud as big as a man's hand, all of which would be looked upon as astonishing impossibilities, and yet is as short of the other as the finite is of the infinite, between which the disparity is immeasurable. ”

“ Seventh, Neither moths nor mice can destroy this glorious Bible. Fire can not consume it, nor water wash it away. It is imperishable and eternal. It is a Bible into which no errors have ever crept, either by printers, transcribers, or translators. And (soul-cheering thought!) it is a Bible which contains all the important doctrines, principles, and precepts which can be found in any perishable paper-and-ink Bible, and all the grand truths that God ever vouchsafed to man. They can all be found in this golden-leaved Bible, this eternal, soul-saving revelation of God. ”

“ We cherish no such conception. We cannot for a moment harbor a blasphemous doctrine, which represents the Universal Father as being a bloody-minded and murderous being, instead of a being of infinite love, infinite wisdom, and infinite in all the moral virtues. Such a character would be a deep-dyed stigma upon any human being. And no person actuated by a strict sense of justice would accept salvation upon any such terms as that prescribed by the Christian atonement. ”

“ Why, that man is a progressive being; that the tendency of the human mind is onward and upward; and that it will not always consent to be bound down in ignorance and superstition. And, thanks to the genius of the age, it is the prophecy of the glorious reformation and regeneration of society,—an index of a happier era in the history of the human race. Old institutions are crumbling, and tumbling to the ground. The iron bands of creeds and dogmas, with which the people have been so long bound down, are bursting asunder, and permitting them to walk upright, and do their own thinking. ”

“ Will you not, then, give it up that your religion is merely a human production, reconstructed from heathen materials—from oriental systems several thousand years older than yours—or will you continue, in spite of the unanimous and unalterable verdict of history, science, facts and logic, to proclaim to the world the now historically demonstrated error which you have so long preached, that God is the author of your religion, and Jesus Christ a Deity-begotten Messiah? ”

“ The orthodox clergy tell the most vile and debauched villain and bloody assassin, after he has inhumanly butchered and murdered his innocent and virtuous wife, can, by an act of repentance and forgiveness, swing from the end of the hangman's rope directly into a heaven of pure and unalloyed bliss, and, with his fingers all dripping with human blood, join the white-robed saints in shouting, "Glory hallelujah to the Lord God and the Lamb for ever and ever!" ”

“ Christ and Chrishna both taught the equality of man. Prayers addressed to Chrishna were after this fashion: 'O thou Supreme One! thy essence is inscrutable. Thou art all in all. The understanding of man cannot reach thy Almighty Power. I, who know nothing, fly to thee for protection. Show mercy unto me, and enable me to see and know thee.' Chrishna replies, 'Have faith in me. No one who worships me can perish. Address thyself to me as the only asylum. I will deliver thee from sin. I am animated with equal benevolence toward all beings. ”

“ True religion does not regard God as a personal monarch, governing the universe by the caprices of an angry and fickle mind, but as the living, moving, all-pervading, self-sustaining, energizing, vivifying power which moves and sustains the machinery of the whole universe, and controls, by a concatenation of laws, the myriads of worlds which move in majestic grandeur through infinite space, and causes them to act in concert and harmony without a discordant jar. ”

“ Christians tell us that the human and the divine were united in "the man Christ Jesus." But this is a monstrous absurdity, which no truly rational and unbiased mind can accept for an instant—that of hitching, splicing, tying, or dovetailing together finite man with the infinite Jehovah, that of amalgamating and commingling human foibles with divine perfection. Think of wedding mortal weakness to omnipotent power, local man with the omnipresent Deity! Think of compounding the creature and the Creator in one and the same being! ”

“ It does not write its inspiration and revelation in a dead language or unintelligible Hebrew, but in living characters, which all can read and understand. It indulges in no spirit of bigotry, consigns no man or woman to endless torment, never talks of total depravity or original sin. It is a natural and godlike religion, calculated to satisfy the deep, unutterable longings of the soul, and bring blessings and happiness to all who live up to its requirements. It is a tree bearing the fruit of practical righteousness. It does not teach that all of God's truth is shut up in a printed book. ”

“ Though you may have heretofore honestly believed these doctrines to be true, you can now no longer plead ignorance as an excuse for propagating such gigantic and serious errors, as they are now overwhelmingly demonstrated by a thousand facts of history to be untrue. You must abandon such exalted claims for your religion, or posterity will mark you as being "blind leaders of the blind." They will heap upon your honored names their unmitigated ridicule and condemnation. They will charge you as being either deplorably ignorant, or disloyal to the cause of truth. ”

“ We believe that only a life of virtue is productive of real happiness. Let the wrongdoer be taught this moral lesson; and let him be also taught that every humane and virtuous act of this life will expand his soul, and elevate him to a higher plane of happiness, and bring him one step nearer the door of the heavenly kingdom. Let the world of mankind all be taught these beautiful and soul-elevating doctrines, which many now know by experience to be golden truths; and we will soon witness a great moral revolution and renovation in society by the propagation of these doctrines. ”

“ To every observant and unbiased mind a strange contrast must be visible in the practical life of Jesus Christ when viewed in his twofold capacity of a man and a priest. While standing upon the broad plane of humanity, with his deep sympathetic nature directed toward the poor, the unfortunate, and the downtrodden, there often gushed forth from his impassioned bosom the most sublime expressions of pity, and the strongest outburst of commiseration for wrongs and sufferings, and his noble goodness and tender love yearned with a throbbing heart to relieve them. ”

“ It is the free agency of orthodoxy illustrated, and applied to practice. Free agency coupled with a penalty is moral slavery and moral tyranny. There is no moral freedom about it. You are simply free to take your choice between two systems of slavery and two systems of punishment or suffering. A hare pursued by a hound enjoys a similar kind of freedom,—the freedom to stand and be caught, or the freedom to run. Of all the absurdities that ever entered the brain of a human being, that of setting God and the Devil both after man, as orthodoxy does, and then call him a free agent, is not excelled. ”

“ Can we then believe, or dare we believe, a doctrine so atheistical in its tendencies as that the Infinite Diety was incorporated in the person of the meek and lowly Jesus, when it would thus set at naught, violate, prostrate, and utterly cancel from the world one of God's own fundamental laws, and one of the essential principles of natural science, and banish forever the co-ordinate harmony of the universe, and thus inaugurate a state of universal disorder, incertitude, anarchy, and misrule into the otherwise beautifully law-governed, well-regulated domain of nature? ”

“ It seems strange that the striking absurdity of such an assumption has not struck every mind possessing the power to reflect or investigate. The thought of his looking after the affairs and happiness of fourteen hundred millions of human beings at a time, besides running several thousand millions of worlds, far excels any of the astounding feats of the evil genii of Gulliver. In the sublimity of its absurdity and impossibility, it stands without a rival. It expands beyond the utmost stretch of human credulity. ”

“ When the evidence lies all around us as thick as the fallen leaves of autumn, clustering on the pages of history, and proclaimed by every principle of mental science, that what is called conversion is nothing but a mental and temperamental or nervous phenomenon—a psychological process—how can we rank those amongst intelligent people who still claim it to be "the power of God operating upon the soul of the sinner"? Ignorance is the only plea that can acquit them of the charge of imbecility. ”

“ Now, of all the blood-dyed mandates that ever issued from human lips, or was heard on the plains of human butchery, none ever excelled it in cruelty and malignant barbarity, claimed as coming from the mouth of a God of infinite justice and infinite benevolence. Think of the murder, in cold blood, of thousands of little innocent, prattling babies, who never lisped an evil word, or conceived an evil thought, in their lives! ”

“ Then say not that "the man Christ Jesus," though standing at the top of the ladder of moral manhood, and high above the common plane of humanity, was yet a God—"the Infinite Ruler of the infinite universe." Who can believe that that Being, whose existence stretches to an eternity beyond human conception, yea, whom "the heaven of heavens cannot contain," was ever cooped up in a human body, reduced so near to nothing in dimensions as to be susceptible (as was Jesus) of being weighed in scales, and measured with a yardstick? ”

“ The sword of the Church was unsheathed, and plunged with a fierce and relentless ferocity into the bosoms and bowels of their neighbors and fellow-Christian professors, whose only offense was that of believing and worshiping God according to the dictates of their consciences. With a burning hatred for heretics, stimulated by reading the Bible injunction to put them to death in a cruel manner, they leaped upon them with the ferocity of tigers, and tortured them to death with every species of cruelty their ingenuity could invent. ”

“ Every Christian professor of much intelligence makes some improvement in his creed in the course of his life. Hence it is impossible for him to know what he will believe to-morrow, or how much more of an infidel he will be than he is to-day. One change makes way for another. The wheels of progress move steadily onward: they never stop, and never run backward. It is impossible, after you have made the slightest change and improvement in your religious belief, which is a step in the direction of infidelity, to know how many steps you will take in the future. ”

“ The true signification of the word evil, in a moral sense, can be expressed in a few words. It is only another name for imperfection or negation.
It is the negative pole of the great moral battery; and without it the battery could not be run. And without it there could be no morality, no moral principle or accountability, while man exists upon the present animal plane. In fact, morality without evil would be an unmeaning word. Evil is a state of imperfection running through every vein of nature, from the igneous rock to the brain of man. ”

“ Such an assumption sweeps away the last vestige of free agency and moral accountability. Some Christian professors accept the doctrine of free agency to escape the dreaded alternative of assuming man to be a mere machine, which they call fatality. But here you have fatality to repletion. If to place man between two all-powerful beings, and have them both trying to direct his actions at once, don't make him a machine, then we have no use for the word. It is strange that Christian professors have never discovered that, according to the teachings of the Bible, God himself is not a free agent. ”

“ In every department of science, in every arena of human thought and every theater of human action, we see a progressive spirit, we behold a disposition to lay aside the traditions and superstitions of the past, and grasp the living facts of the age. We everywhere see a disposition to abandon the defective institutions, political and religious, which were gotten up in the childhood of human experience, and supplant them with those better adapted to the wants of the age. ”

“ As the Jews are reputedly "the chosen people of God,"—chosen by him out of all the nations of the earth to be the special recipients of his favors,—the chosen instruments through which to communicate his will and his laws to the whole human race, and chosen to be a moral example for all mankind, for that age, and for all future generations,—it becomes a matter of great importance to know their real character for morality, for intelligence, for honesty, and for reliability. ”

“ Let us be independent moralists and philanthropists, rather than slaves to Bibles and creeds. "Every book," says a writer, "has a spirit which it breathes into the minds of its readers;" and, if it contains bad morals or bad language, the habitual reading of it will gradually reconcile the mind to those immoral lessons, and finally cause them to be looked upon as God-given truths. Such is the omnipotent force of habit. And we appeal to all Bible readers to testify if this has not been their experience. ”

“ Every preacher and teacher simply makes known his ignorance whenever he assumes to know what the Bible teaches; and yet i is called "a perfect revelation of God's will." It is an assumption that makes God an ignoramus and a tyrant to suppose he would give forth a perfect revelation to the world, and require us to accept it as such on pain of endless damnation, and yet leave it in such a jumbled, bungling, and unintelligent condition that it is impossible to understand it. Such an assumption certainly borders on blasphemy. ”

“ We hold that every wrong act we commit, if it does not destroy our happiness at the time, and operate as a barbed arrow sticking in the soul, will at least weaken our capacity for happiness in the future, weaken our moral strength and resolution to abstain from crime, weaken our natural detestation of crime, and weaken our moral ability to resist the temptation to commit the same and other crimes in the future, and finally destroy our moral manhood and true dignity. ”

“ You are teaching and preaching an old, worn-out, bloody, heathen doctrine that never did and never can save a single soul."—"Now, look here," cries the Orthodox Quaker, "the Bible declares, 'There is no other name given under Heaven whereby men can be saved than that of Jesus Christ;' and you are blaspheming his name by denying the efficacy of his death and sufferings. Therefore your chance for salvation is a hopeless one. ”

“ But he who can believe an error or absurdity, or, rather, profess to believe it because he is afraid to disbelieve it, has not a soul big enough to be saved, and will be certain to miss it; or, if he could be saved, no man of sense would want to live in a heaven made up of such moral cowards and moral dwarfs. And, besides, the only way to make a safe thing of being saved on this ground, is to swallow all the two thousand systems of religion in the world,—six hundred Christian creeds, and fourteen hundred heathen traditions ”

“ The God of nature has endowed every human being with two sensations,—one of pleasure, and the other of pain,—which serve as guides in all his actions, both physical and moral. They stand as sentinels at the door of his soul to warn him of the approach of evil of every kind. The moment their kingdom is invaded, they raise an alarm, which he soon learns he must heed or suffer a penalty. ”

“ Read, then, and study well, this open and widespread Bible which infolds the universe. All the Bibles and religions of the past claim to have been authorized by a direct revelation or inspiration from God. But we are satisfied that no such revelation has ever been given forth to any nation in any age of the world. For inspiration is now known to be a universal law of the natural mind; an inborn principle of the human soul, which all ages and nations, and every human being, have possessed a greater or less share of. ”

“ The hideous and devouring earthquake; the heaving and overflowing volcano, burying whole cities beneath its deep and merciless waves of running fire; the roaring and furious tornado, destroying hundreds of dwellings, and dooming the inmates to a terrible death; and the swift-sped lightning, which, with no note of warning, strikes down hundreds of people every year,—all these violent operations of nature are the manifestation of evil, and a proof that imperfection exists everywhere. And man is the last and least manifestation of this multifarious destructive outburst of nature ”