M. M. Mangasarian

“ Inured to suffering,—to the lash, to oppression's crushing heel,—he dare not dream of a painless future, of a quiet, peaceful sleep at life's end, nor has he the divine audacity to invent a new world wherein the misery and slavery of his present existence will be impossible,—where all his tyrants will be dead, where he shall taste of sweet freedom and become himself a god. In his timidity and shrinking submission, with the spring of his heart broken, his spirit crushed, all independence strangled in his soul,—he puts in the biggest corner of his heaven even,—a hell! ”

“ In the alembic of this glorious truth all the terrors of the Jewish-Christian religion dissolve into nothingness. A word from Shakespeare, and the nightmares of the past are no more. Love!—attachment, devotion, friendship, behold the cradle in which conscience was born! Fear is a tomb—it lives upon hell. Love is a cradle, nursing into being and maturity all that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful. ”

“ The glorious reign of Science has begun. Thought like a fruit on the tree of evolution has at last ripened. The glow of the sun, and the tints of the sky are upon her. The countries which were the first to replace faith by knowledge have invariably been the first also in civilization. While Palestine remained a desert, Greece became the garden of the world. Whatever of beauty there is in our lives today, we owe it to the immortal Greeks. Truth and goodness flourish in all their glory only among a free and intelligent people. ”

“ By the help of the moon and the stars of that night in May, fourteen hundred thirty-one, I traced my way to the imposing Cathedral of St. Ouen, standing like a towering shadow in the cold light of the night, and close to which lived the Bishop of Beauvais.
I knocked upon the Bishop's door. "Open, open," I cried, as in the dead of night I kept pounding upon the door. "I wish to come in," I cried. "I wish to save the Church from an indelible stain, I wish to protect the honor of humanity." ”

“ It brings tears into my eyes to think of Europe and America upon their knees, with blanched cheeks and trembling lips, before such a text. Why retain so unjust and tyrannical a commandment in a book which the people are asked to love and obey? And why translate such evil words into all the tongues of man? What has happened to the European races—to the descendants of the glorious Greeks and the proud Romans—that they can fawn over a book that commands a mother to kill her child for not believing as she does? ”

“ To answer that one must accept the doctrine before one can understand it would be like asking a man to see before he opens his eyes, or to think after he has made up his mind. It is just as useless to try to understand Christian Science after it has been accepted as true as it would be for a judge to examine the evidence after a verdict has been pronounced. And if Christian Scientists can understand the beliefs which they reject, why may not other people have intelligence and honesty enough to understand Christian Science without believing in it? ”

“ Nothing is so certain and so effective in Shakespeare as his criticism of the ways of Providence. When Othello, for instance, awakens to a sense of his irreparable loss—when the pity of Desdemona's death, like the incoming tide of the sea, sweeps over him and takes his breath away, he gasps out these significant words with his eyes searching the abysses of space over his head: "Methinks there should now be a huge eclipse of sun and moon, and the affrighted earth should yawn at altercation." ”

“ You love your country and you are willing to defend its institutions, if need be, with your life, but is it because your country is immortal? Is America going to live forever? Is it going to have a future existence? And yet Washington and his soldiers loved it dearly and risked their lives for it. Were the ancient Greeks and Romans, to whom patriotism was a religion, and who loved and fought for their country—fools, because they did not first make sure that their country was going to live forever? You are devoted to art, you have built palaces for the treasures of the brush and the chisel. ”

“ Far be it from us to withhold from Jesus, if he really suffered as the gospels report, one iota of the love and sympathy he deserves, but why convert the whole world into a black canvas upon which to throw the sole figure of Jesus? Which of us, poor, weak, sinful though we are, would not be glad to give his life, if thereby he could save a world? Do you think we would mourn and groan and weep tears of blood, or collapse, just when we should be the bravest, if we thought that by our death we would become the divine Savior of all mankind? ”

“ If the only way we can appreciate our own morality is by defaming the majority of humanity, how contemptible must our morality he? When we sing that all the Hindoos, the Chinese, the Japanese and the rest of the non-Christian world are "vile,"—that there is no love, no devotion, no patriotism, no honesty, no friendship, no temperance, no philanthropy, no chastity, no truthfulness, no mercy and no honor, in these heathen lands—when we deny that in these parts of the world any virtue can exist, are we not bearing false witness against our neighbors? ”

“ And why was it necessary to rain for forty days, to drown a world which it took him about six days to create out of nothing? But we are reasoning, and in religion, reason is taboo.
How different is science! The bible is a book of puzzles; science is common sense. The bible treats of forms and ceremonies—of holy water, holy oils, holy wafers and of forbidden trees and animals. Science, on the other hand, explains the inexorable laws of nature, a knowledge of which, and obedience to which, makes for life and happiness. Let us rejoice that science has broken for us the spell of superstition. ”

“ Speak, then, of the good the church has done, and say nothing of her persecutions and superstitions, and we will all be of one accord and of one mind." But would such a compromise, though baptised with the high-sounding name of unity, help the cause of progress? Is not progress a dearer word than unity? Is not freedom more precious than peace? Let us have unity if we can, but we must grow, and we must be free. Shall we sell the truth that we may have money to be charitable with? Is it right to sacrifice speech to silence, for the sake of harmony? ”

“ With my eyes closed, I fancied I saw the throngs marching through the streets—consisting of peasants, of merchants, of priests, of princes—to see a girl of nineteen burned in the fire, and in all that throng there was not one who had either a kind word or thought for her—her who had given them a country to live in. Abandoned, hated and spat upon, she was left to suffer the cruelest punishment that human inhumanity could devise, or the most perverse imagination invent. ”

“ Jesus' company made the thief on the cross contemptible; Shakespeare's touch made Othello divine. As he is about to leap into the arms of death, Othello is not thinking of his soul, or of his future; his one and only thought is of his victim. He does not whine in the ears of heaven, nor does he beg to be saved from the punishment he deserves. He is no coward trying to sneak into heaven while his Desdemona lies in her blood at his feet. ”

“ Is God only a spectacular being? Is all he can do to thunder in the clouds and dazzle with his lightning? Where is the God of help? Is he real? Does he exist?
To make effective this indifference or helplessness of the gods, Shakespeare contrasts their stolid unconcern with human sympathy. Emelia, the wife of the man who poisoned Othello's mind, breaks into a heart-rending lamentation when she learns of the death of her innocent mistress, which shames the silent and tearless gods:
I'll kill myself for grief,
she sobs as she sees stretched at her feet the victim of human folly and crime. ”

“ Let them, I say, work in such an environment to show what Christian Science can do. But to operate in Europe and America—where science, like a watch dog, is guarding the health of the people, inventing a thousand devices for the comfort and security of life, hurrying to the aid of the injured almost with the alacrity of thought, building hospitals equipped with all the weapons which disease dreads, and training men and women to march at any moment in full phalanx and armed to the teeth against the first plague germ that lands on our shores from foreign lands—is nothing to boast of. ”

“ To make an idol of his Jesus he takes a sponge, and without a twinge of conscience, wipes out all the beauty and grandeur of the ancient world. Has this gentleman never heard of Greece? During a short existence, in only two centuries and a half, that little land of Greece achieved triumphs in the life of the mind so unparalleled as to bring all the subsequent centuries upon their knees before it. In philosophy, in poetry,—lyrical, epical, dramatic,—in sculpture, in statesmanship, in ethics, in literature, in civilization,—where is there another Greece? ”

“ The health of the body is cultivated for its own beautiful sake. Health is joy, it is power, it is beauty, it is strength. Are not these enough to make it sacred to all men? But if the health of the body does not need the prop of future rewards to commend itself to us, what good reason have we to think that morality, which is the health of the mind, is a wretched investment if there be no other life? Morality is temperance. How can our ideas about the unseen world change the nature of temperance so that instead of being a virtue it would become a stupid and irksome restraint? ”

“ Is it not absurd for a potter to worship his own pot? In view, therefore, of the undeniable fact that man makes the gods he worships, how pitiable to observe the servility and stupidity with which he plays the sycophant before the images of his own hand or head!
Notwithstanding this self-evident truth that all religions are human in origin, every one of them has claimed to be from above. Like puffed-up or ungrateful children, the religions of the world have denied their real, though humble parentage, and have laid claim to a celestial birth. ”

“ I despair of man. I would cry my heart out if I permitted myself to dwell upon the folly and stupidity and slavery of which man voluntarily makes himself the victim. Think of it! A man and a woman, nobody knows where or when, are supposed to have tasted of the fruit of a tree; the Oriental mind, with its crouching imagination, pounces upon this flimsy, fanciful tale with the appetite of a carrion crow, and exalts it to the dignity of an excuse for the eternal damnation of a whole world. ”

“ If the Gentile will not take the Jew into his club, the Jew shuts his home to the Gentile. But why should not a Jew marry a Gentile? Moses and Ezra will not allow it? And why should the twentieth century be bound by Moses and Ezra? How can God be a universal father, and all peoples his children, if it is a crime deserving of death, as the bible plainly announces in many places, for one of his children to love another not of the same faith? This is the negation of brotherhood in the holiest sense of the word. ”

“ If the heathen, so called by Christians, can be as moral as ourselves, then Christianity can not claim to be the only divine faith, but if it is, as the preachers claim, the only power that can save, then think of the gloom and the despair which must be the portion of every sensitive soul who realizes the hopelessness of the situation! For thousands of years our humanity was denied the Christian religion, and even now, twenty centuries after the birth of Jesus, only a handful, compared with the earth's population, have accepted the only true religion. ”

“ To bring a church full of people together—tired, busy, perplexed, hungering for ideas, for truth, for beauty—only to tell them that the tares must not be touched or separated even from the wheat until some day in the future, some judgment day in the clouds, when the Lord of the harvest shall gather up the tares to be burned, and the wheat to be deposited in his chests! ”

“ We believe that all religious persecutions, all sectarian wars, hatreds and intolerance, which still cramp and embitter our humanity, would be replaced by love and brotherhood, if the sects could be made to see that the God-Jesus they are quarreling over is a myth, a shadow to which credulity alone gives substance. Like people who have been fighting in the dark, fearing some danger, the sects, once relieved of the thraldom of a tradition which has been handed down to them by a childish age and country, will turn around and embrace one another. ”

“ It may sound strange, but religion aroused human curiosity, which again discovered science. The time came when man was not satisfied with information only about the next world, about spirits and demons, about mysteries and divine attributes; he asked also information about this world, about man, the past history of the earth and so forth. Just as by seeking the philosopher's stone men discovered chemistry, and by the way of astrology they came to the science of astronomy, and by the way of sorcery and magic to the knowledge of medicine,—so did theology develop into philosophy. ”

“ It is in the very nature of a revelation to deny man the right to be himself. But that is the very negation of morality. "You must obey," says the bible; "never mind whether you understand the commandments, or whether you approve of them or not." Is that morality? And the bible can not treat you as its equal, else what will become of its infallibility? In other words, the bible wants slaves who will do its bidding without protest or question. Under slavery there can be no self-development; that is to say, slaves can not be moral. ”

“ I am a man of compassion. I can forgive the murderer. I can pardon and pity the meanest wretch and take him into my arms, but I confess that even if I had a heart as big as the ocean, I could not, I would not, forgive the creed that can be guilty of such inhumanity against you,—dear, innocent ones, who were born to breathe but for a moment the harsh air of this world! When such gloom overpowers me and wrings from my lips such hard words, I find some little respite in contemplating the old Pagan world in its best days. ”

“ Does the bible throw any more light on what are called the mysteries of religion than any other book? Before the bible, men speculated about the hereafter; has the bible changed speculation into knowledge? Before the bible, men believed or doubted the gods; has the bible changed faith, or doubt, into certainty? Which unsolved problem concerning the origin of the universe, or of man, has the bible illuminated? The bible has added to the number of sects and creeds, but has it removed even one theological tenet from the field of controversy and uncertainty? ”