William Stewart Ross

“ These are new worlds thrown off from the sun, in gaseous form, travelling through space for millions of ages before assuming a solid form or producing vegetation; and this was the process our earth had to pass through. In gazing beyond the planets we behold millions of stars, all worlds, many of far greater magnitude than ours, while far beyond these and Neptune are other solar systems of worlds stretching out through illimitable space.
You "created" not these, O God; but we created you. You are made in the image of man; in the image of man are you made. ”

“ I have no quarrel with those quaint old relics, per se; but when I find that the world would still lean upon them after all these long and weary centuries, in the interests of the human race I do my best to dash the relics to splinters. It is not the Book and the God, in themselves, that provoke my enmity; it is the pretensions put forward on their behalf by an interested priesthood. These pretensions must excite in every man who is a patriot and a friend of his race feelings of repugnance and aversion. ”

“ Is it the favourite recreation of a God to place two weak, silly creatures in a garden, when, in that garden, he has placed a damnation-trap and baited it with an apple, knowing well that his two poor children would munch at the apple, and thereby spring the damnation-trap, letting its terrible teeth cut through their flesh and rasp upon their bones, and upon the bones of generations yet unborn? ”

“ They were created by men, and, like men, they must pass away. The deities of one age are the byewords of the next. The religion of our day and country is no more exempt from the sneer of the future than the others have been. When India was supreme, Brahma sat upon the world's throne. When the sceptre passed to Egypt, Isis and Osiris received the homage of mankind. Greece, with her fierce valour, swept to empire, and Zeus put on the purple of authority. The earth trembled with the tread of Rome's intrepid sons, and Jove grasped with mailed hand the thunderbolts of heaven. ”

“ Come, now; you do not mean to tell me that, when you wrote your Book, you knew you had "created" the utterly incalculable myriads of living organisms that inhabit even a cubic foot of the world's many cubic miles of water? When your son cursed the fig-tree was he aware that every leaf which he shrivelled up and withered was a densely-peopled world, and that, by drying up the sap of that tree, he destroyed more of your creatures than there were of men, women, and children on the face of the earth? ”

“ There lies an awe under our levity and a solemnity under our ridicule. We have tender reminiscences of the days when the world was young, of the dim and stormy flight of ages stretching between Abraham and Ur of the Chaldees and the day that Columba founded you a Church on Iona's lonely isle. You have waded with our fathers through rivers of blood and lakes of fire when, on the pillars of carnage, rested the thrones of the world. ”

“ A pretty language Hebrew was, to be sure, to be used by Almighty God in the revealing of his will to men. He used, it seems, a language which had twenty-two consonants and no vowels, thereby leaving his meaning utterly unfixed and uncertain, and yet making the comprehension of his book so obligatory that on it hung the destiny for beatitude or malediction of the human race. Let my reader picture to himself a language so rude and primitive that it bungled away with its twenty-two consonants, and without a single vowel, and he will have some idea of how clearly intelligible God made himself! ”

“ I assert, without fear of contradiction, that no English author has ever ventured to put into a book a tenth part of the filth that is to be found passing throughout the Old Testament. In schools where the Bible is read and learnt it is a well-known fact that idle and prurient-minded boys spend a considerable portion of their time in looking up and gloating over all those filthy stories with which the Old Testament teems. ”

“ It is easier to reproduce a lost book for "the God of Heaven" than some seem disposed to think. God does not approve of able writing; he prefers the "babe and suckling" style. He is not at all particular as to facts; and he cares not a jot for dates. With him one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. All he required of Ezra and his five assistants was that they should have a good running hand, only a very few brains, some inventive faculty, and that they should be liars. ”

“ One indispensable in Bible-writing is ambiguity; and, in the vague, equivocal, and obscure, Ezra was a perfect master. In writing a human book it is necessary to make it convey some specific meaning; but, in writing a divine book, care has to be taken to give it no meaning in particular: make it mean anything or nothing, and always leave a loophole through which the apologist can slip out and explain away whatever may oppose the particular position for which he contends. ”

“ We are, of course, stiff necked; we have gone away backward, and have all deserved "God's wrath and curse, both in this life and that which is to come." But a really effective gospel-grinder, standing up on his hind-legs in a ranting-box well-varnished, and telling us forever and forever how Jehovah kicked Adam out of Paradise for eating an apple, and how Jehovah's son, who was at the same time Jehovah's self, got nailed to a stick, is sufficient to keep us pure and holy and divorced from the world, the flesh, and the devil. ”

“ Science often alters its tune, and I am prepared to back thee against Science any day. Let Science contradict thee as it may: that, to minds that have widely envisaged the problem of Being, is a small matter. But the worst of it is, O Lord, thou contradictest thyself, and this many times and oft. Thou beginnest thy book with self-contradictions, and, that thou mayest be consistent, thou carriest these self-contradictions right through, from Genesis to Revelation. ”

“ This contention, of course, implies that the Holy Ghost produced some writings and shook them up in a sack with the writings of mere mortals, and set mankind to a desperate effort of eclecticism, the determining which are the writings of God and which are the writings of patristic forgers. Man cannot have been made so much lower than the angels after all, if he can write so alarmingly like God that even the learned have not been able to agree as to how much of the Holy Scriptures have been written by Jehovah of Heaven, and how much by John Smith of Earth. ”

“ Something stronger than Death and strong as God has told me I will return. When the solemn fir strikes his roots into my grave and the rank hemlock through the decayed coffin boards has absorbed my blood, I shall have returned to that home where my babe was held aloft among the roses, and where my wife sobbed "Farewell!" I fear not misery nor dread extinction. ”

“ The blood that runs in our veins is drawn from those who lie under the ancient and broken gravestones that call you God. And the wedded love of the mothers of our race for more than a thousand years has been, in your name, consecrated at the altar, and the fruits of their love in baptism offered to you. ”

“ Clothe yourself with prejudice as with a garment, and array yourself in bigotry as with raiment, and obstinately refuse to investigate and to judge, and you may be able to believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God. ”

“ In old churchyards, and in churchyards which the dead never enter now, but which are streets over which the feet and wheels of commerce clash and whirl, there are memories and relics of you. We dig down to the broken marbles and the ancient graves, and we find references to your Book and you mixed up with the epitaphs of our ephemeral and our immortal dead. ”

“ Having known Abraham, he could possibly tell me the year in which that patriarch was born, and how he contrived to lose the 60 years out of his life and managed to be only 75 when he should have been 135 years old. This Melchisedek had no genealogical tree. Be where he may, no portraits of his ancestors adorn the walls of his dining room. He had neither father nor mother. Some people manage to do with little or no father; your own son, for instance, had only a ghost for a father, and the fathers of some others I wot of are exceedingly hazy and dubious. ”

“ When any ordinary mortal writes a book he takes some pains to give all the world an opportunity of reading it. When a god writes a book it is far otherwise. The Lord commanded his book to be put inside the ark, and ordered that the ark be kept in the most holy inner recess of the tabernacle or temple—a recess to which the high priest alone had access. ”

“ He may make himself sociable; but he has no time to be frivolous. Now, if these be the characteristics of a writer born to lead the straggling files of human opinion, it must be admitted that Jehovah had few or none of them, unless his biographer, the Ghost, has done him grievous injustice. He is jealous, ignorant, and narrow, and quite lacking in that literary turn of the wrist, unteachable, untaught, which distinguishes him who, by an inexorable law of heredity, was born a writer from him who was made a writer, on the principle that you can make a silken purse out of a sow's ear. ”

“ You are not framed, O Jehovah, for the age when the steam-engine rushes through the glens and crashes through the bowels of the everlasting hills; when, on the wings of the lightning, we speed our messages over the nations of the continents and under the billows of the oceans; and when the press lays at the feet of the humblest the mind-wealth of the world. ”

“ If you are writing a Bible and find yourself degenerating into anything like explicable common sense, it is incumbent on you to mix your sentence up with candlesticks and wheat, and beasts and chariots, and horns, and souls of men, and trumpets and millstones, and dragons and stars, and phials and earthquakes, till no sane person would write such a passage and no sane person would read it ”

“ In the vast cemetery, called the Past, are most of the religions of men, and there, too, are nearly all their gods. The sacred temples of India were ruins long ago. Over column and cornice, over the painted and pictured walls, cling and creep the trailing vines. Brahma, the golden: Vishnu, the sombre, the punisher of the wicked with his three eyes, his crescent, and his necklace of skulls; Siva, the destroyer, red with seas of blood; Kali, the goddess; Draupadi, the white-armed, and Chrishna the Christ, all passed away and left the thrones of heaven desolate. ”

“ If you sin against the Holy Ghost, you cannot "be forgiven, neither in this world nor the world to come." I fear that most of us will never be forgiven; for who among us has not grossly insulted the Ghost by attributing certain of his writings to a poor scribbling worm of the dust, and vice versa? Not only do we frequently fail to distinguish the Ghost's work from Smith's work in the Authorised Version, but there are a number of books which some allege to be the Ghost's and some allege to be Smith's, which are excluded from the Authorised Version altogether. ”

“ You must have set your feet wide to steady yourself, and, then taking him in your hands, as a maidservant does a hearth-rug, have given him a shaking that set the world's windows chattering and shook the foundations of the earth. Certainly a strange person must have been this Abraham with the bosom! A man who had managed to be only 75 years of age, when everybody else born in the same year was 135 years of age, is a man worth going all the way to heaven to see. ”

“ Tarquin, from his throne, could scan the globe from horizon to horizon, and see Phrynne amid red wine and lawless orgie, and find Lucretia nowhere but in the grave. But blessed be God that he has dowered us with a huge bundle of inspired contradictions which has purified the world. ”

“ The sacred fanes are lost in desert sands; the dusty mummies are still waiting for the resurrection promised by the priests, and the old beliefs, wrought in curiously-sculptured stone, sleep in the mystery of a language lost and dead. ”