“ The fact that well-dressed congregations do not laugh sacerdotalists to scorn shows how safe it is to rely upon the credulity and indifference of those who have been taught mere myths as real history from early childhood. The day will come when even children will laugh in the faces of priests when they seriously speak of the fall of Adam and Eve as a matter of actual occurrence. The great curse of true religion to-day is literalism, enforced by priestcraft, in regard to what relates to our most sacred concerns. ”

“ There cannot be a watch or other complex machine without an inventor and artisan. The universe is the sublimest of all poems, and Cicero well said that it would be easier to conceive that Homer’s Iliad came from the chance shaking together of the letters of the alphabet than that the atoms should have produced the cosmos without a marshalling agency. The visible and palpable compel us to acknowledge their counterpart in the invisible and intangible, and we cannot rationally account for the origin of man without postulating the existence of an Intelligence and Power greater than humanity. ”

“ When men talk of the eternity of matter we do not even profess to understand them. The most advanced scientists do not attempt to explain one of a thousand mysteries in which the phenomena of the material world is enshrouded. Why, then, should we be expected to explain where and how and when God came into existence, or how he could have had an eternal existence or be self-existent? We affirm no more of God than materialists imply of matter, and we endow him with no attributes that they do not virtually ascribe to matter. So far as assumption is concerned, both stand on the same ground. ”

“ It was emphatically the religion of sorrow, the religion not only of anti-naturalism, but of unnaturalism. It virtually said: “Whatever is natural is wrong; whatever you desire is wrong. To do what is painful is right, while to do what you want to do is certain ruin. Life must be one incessant wail of suffering if it is to be followed with eternal blessedness. The body is the enemy of the soul, and the world the enemy of God. ”

“ Then it is well known that the stream of human history has never run in an unbroken channel. Our race has ever had its “ups and downs,” and, comparatively speaking, mankind has had many falls and ascents, while the general or ultimate tendency and result have been ascending higher and higher. Moreover, the golden age of Adam in Eden must have been very short, according to the fable of Genesis, as the fall occurred before he had any children. What a pity that Adam and Eve could not have maintained their innocence by blind obedience until at least a son and daughter could have been born to them! ”

“ The Jews learned most of their faith and fables from the great peoples of the East; especially did they get the two cosmogonies, and that solar fable, mixed with truth, of a serpent tempting a woman with the fruit of a tree, of course in the fading or autumnal equinox, when only fruit exists and all creation tries to save itself by shielding all the stores of nature from the fierce onslaughts of angry Typhon when entering on his dreary winter. ”

“ For what could be more shocking to any sense really religious than the belief that the very God himself had descended on earth as an embryo in a virgin’s womb, to run the risk of abortion and universal miscarriage during nine months in utero, and then dying on a cross to save his own created world or a portion of its people from eternal perdition? The opponents of the latest superstition were too intelligent to accept a dying deity.... ”

“ It was natural for the contemplative and devout to come to regard the sun as the best emblem of the creating, animating, fecundating spirit of the universe, while the ignorant multitude may never have looked beyond the material object. Those who have read the history of the sun-worshippers of Mexico and Peru, detailed in the great works of Prescott, must have been impressed by the fact that these nations enjoyed a higher prosperity and a purer public morality when they were worshippers of the sun than they have ever enjoyed since under the Roman Catholic religion called Christian. ”

“ Charities would not cease if all creeds should be abandoned or should be so revised as not to be recognized by the disciples of Calvin and Wesley, and if every priest in the land should henceforth give up the mummeries and puerilities of the Dark Ages.
Religion, as the “enthusiasm of humanity,” the cultivation of all the virtues, and the practice of the highest morality growing out of the inalienable rights of man in all the relations of life, is a fixed fact. It is a natural endowment, coeval with humanity in its development and progress, and is as absolutely indestructible as manhood itself. ”

“ We leave altogether out of view the logical conclusion that if the blood shed by Jesus was the blood of a man, it could have had no more efficacy than the blood of any other human being, and that if the blood shed was the blood of a God, the very mention of the thought is absurd and blasphemous in the extreme. It is nonsense to say that it was the union of the divine with the human nature that gave the blood of Christ its peculiar efficacy—that the altar sanctifies the gift for if the blood was changed by the man being united with the God, it was not human blood, but the blood of a divine man. ”

“ To imitate the example of the early Christian Fathers in fraud, falsehood, and forgery for the promotion of religion is a policy that is too shocking to the moral sense of civilized men everywhere to be tolerated. To withhold or suppress the truth is a crime against humanity and contrary to the spirit of this age; and those who do it are the enemies of progress and unworthy to be recognized as the authoritative teachers of the world. ”

“ Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonize impossibilities; whose life has been wasted in the attempt to force the generous new wine of science into the old bottles of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong party? It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologies lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules ”

“ We use the word religion as it was used by Cicero, in the sense of scruple, implying the consciousness of a natural obligation wholly irrespective of what one may believe concerning the gods. Religion in its true meaning is the great fact of duty, of oughtness, consisting in an honest and persistent effort to realize ideal excellence and to transform it into actual character and practical life. Religion as a spirit and a life is objected to by none, but is admired and commended by all. It is superstition, bigotry, credulity, and dogma that are detestable. ”

“ It is high time that men should see that dogma is not religion; that blind faith is more to be feared than rational skepticism and scientific investigation; that whatever is opposed to reason and science in theology can be spared, not only without any loss, but greatly to the advantage of true religion and sound morality. All the religion that is worth having is natural and rational, and corresponds with the facts of the universe as they are demonstrated by the crucibles of science and the inductions of a sound philosophy. ”

“ It is impossible to compress the largest brains of the nineteenth century into the smallest skulls of the twelfth century. The true friend of religion is the fearless man who dares attempt to rescue it from the accretions and perversions of the Dark Ages, and to establish its eternal principles of truth and righteousness in the very nature of man, in the elevation of moral character, in strict agreement with the demonstrated facts of the present, as opposed to the bigoted and degrading fancies of the past. ”

“ If we search for Jesus at Nazareth in Galilee, we shall not find a footprint. If, however, we look for him in the testimonies of the Nazarim and Essenes as the personification of their school of philosophic thought, thus representing in concept the emanation of God and the evolution of man as a spiritual being, we shall see him as he is. Hence to surrender the popular notion of a literal man as an infallible teacher and exemplar is not to renounce anything that is vital in truth. We will only dispense with the paganism and raan-worship. ”

“ Can we with any proper sense of propriety and right connive at falsehood and uphold and strengthen it by our silence and cowardly negligence in failing to expose it? Are not all delusions debasing and opposed to the progress of truth and the elevation of mankind? In all the departments of human knowledge religion and morality are most imperative in their demands for pure and unadulterated truth ”

“ It would be easy to show that unity is impossible so long as it is sought to found it on the claims of a person to that position, since the mysterious irrationality of such an office must keep the speculative faculties of mankind in ceaseless self-contradiction and strife. It would be easy to show that this claim of Jesus has been the perpetual root of dogmatic warfare—that all barbarism of the Christian Church in past ages has come of jealousy about the honor due the person of the Christ. ”

“ The existence of no individual of the human race that was real and positive was ever by a like conflict of jarring evidence rendered equivocal and uncertain. Nothing, however, is more common than for some persons to assume an air of contempt, and to cry out that those who deny that such a person as Jesus of Nazareth ever existed are utterly unworthy of being answered. It is, truly, very convenient for them thus to shelter themselves by assuming his existence as incontrovertible, instead of fairly meeting historical facts which, to say the least, render his existence very problemetical. ”

“ Let us hope that the time will soon come when men will be honest enough and brave enough to follow the truth wherever it may lead. Let there be perfect veracity above all things, more especially in matters of religion. It is not a question of courtesies which deceive no one. To profess what is not believed is immoral. Immorality and untruth can never lead to morality and virtue; all language which conveys untruth, either in substance or appearance, should be amended so that words can be understood in their recognized meanings, without equivocal explanations or affirmations. ”

“ How, then, could he have written that Jesus was the Christ? Such an admission would have proved him to be a Christian himself, in which case the passage under consideration, too long for a Jew, would have been far too short for a believer in the new religion; and thus the passage stands forth, like an ill-set jewel, contrasting most inharmoniously with everything around it. If it had been genuine, we might be sure that Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Chrysostom would have quoted it in their controversies with the Jews, and that Origen or Photius would have mentioned it. ”

“ Why are the teeming millions of the children of Adam held virtually responsible for this single trivial act of disobedience by an unknown remote ancestor myriads of ages ago? How could all men sin in him and fall with him in the first transgression? How could the guilt of Adam’s sin be imputed to his children? ”

“ The unwearied effort of the most highly-developed men to reach a higher perfection and a more exalted excellence is evidence that Nature is true to herself, and that man will not be blotted out of conscious existence just as he first clearly perceives the essential difference between good and evil. Having tasted the fruit of the tree of life, he is destined to live for ever. ”

“ Starveling ministers become broken in spirit, fawning, and crouching, and they generally have an unconscious expression of appeal for help, of importunity and expectancy, stamped upon their faces. The millstone of pecuniary dependence hangs so heavily about their necks that they seldom hold up their heads like men, and they can never utter a new truth or a startling sentiment without pausing to consider what effect it may have on the bread and butter of a dependent and generally numerous family. ”

“ So a time comes when every religion that centres in an individual's prerogative of divinity falls under criticism, and is, so far, referred to temporary causes. Christianity cannot escape this law. As a distinct religion it is but Christism, and passes away, like Jehovism, before a broader faith. Whether what succeeds it be called Theism or Pantheism, this terminology of systems fails to express its scope. It is free worship of the one infinite and eternal life of the spiritual, moral, and physical universe.... ”

“ Renan also writes thus: “All the symbols which serve to give shape to the religious sentiment are imperfect, and their fate is to be one after another rejected. But nothing is more remote from the truth than the dream of those who seek to imagine a perfected humanity without religion.”... “Devotion is as natural as egoism to a true-born man. The organization of devotion is religion. Let no one hope, therefore, to dispense with religion or religious associations. Each progression of modern society will render this want more imperious.” ”