* The only proper definition of this word is—the science ofpriest-craft.
MOD.—Your argument is, that in America, as everywhere else, Nature always produced the animals and plants that were proper for the climate and soil; but according to your theory the surface of this globe is everlastingly undergoing changes, from the motion of the sea and other elements, which unceasing action is alternately making and reducing land; so that the sea becomes the true creator or parent of the land. Now, if this be the case, the best criterion of the age of the child will be its height above the parent; consequently, as Asia has higher land than America, it must be older in its formation by the sea, and might, therefore, furnish the more recent continent with man and other animals.
LUCIAN.—That the sea, by its restless, mighty, and irresistible workings and creations, is the parent of all land, is a fact so demonstrable, from the proofs it has everywhere left behind it, that it is undisputed except by theology; and though it may require many millions of years completely to alternate the surface of our globe, or to make those portions of it sea, which had been land, and vice versa; yet that process and routine, though almost inconceivably slow, is nevertheless sure in endless succession. Man has no doubt migrated from land to land in the way you state; but this would not affect the natural distinction of species, which, however much they may be crossed and mixed for a time, will assert and recur to their primitive distinction ultimately; for Nature positively refuses to perpetuate, within themselves, any of the varieties. This is conclusive proof of the specific difference under the genus homo. Allowing that the height of land is the best criterion of its antiquity, America may by this rule dispute the palm with Asia, as the mountains of the former are nearly as high as those of the latter; and, therefore, the theologian's assertion that the western hemisphere was peopled from Asia, may, with as much truth, be reversed. Whatever may be the respective age of these continents, it seems highly probable, if not certain, that the Andes of South America will be reduced to the fluid state, by the action of the sea and other elements, many hundred thousands of years before the Himmalaya mountains of Asia are levelled by these unsleeping powers; for the former have now the great Pacific Ocean undermining their very foundations, whereas, the latter are still two thousand miles from the sea.
MOD.—The time required to bring about these and other changes which have relation to the celestial globes is so prodigious, that in giving it admittance we virtually set at nought not only all scripture authority, but turn the extent of human chronology into something inconceivably less than a moment sand-glass. Yet it is quite agreeable to the opinion of a great authority among the ancients;—Ocellus Lucanus says:
The universe admitteth neither creation nor annihilation, for it ever was, and ever shall be; if any man should conceive it to have been made, he would not be able to know from what material it was made. Now, I call universal matter by the name of universe, which appellation it obtaineth in that it comprehendeth all things, being an absolute and perfect collection of all natures; and besides the universe there is nothing. Wherefore, there can be nothing without, or external to that which comprehends all things. After men and other animals finish the progress of their nature, and have passed their several ages, they die, and are dissolved, becoming in the same state they were; quo non nati jacent. There is no such thing asquies in natura, all things being in a perpetual circular motion. Nor hath man any original production from the earth, or elsewhere, as some have believed; but hath always been, as he now is, co-existent with the world, whereof he is a part. "Nature and generation govern all things."
LUCIAN.—Such were the opinions of nearly all the wise men of antiquity. Theology, in its ridiculous pretensions to knowledge about the origin of time, has utterly infatuated the minds of its dupes, by instilling false notions concerning it; and limiting, comparatively within the duration of a moment, the existence of the material universe! All discoveries in theology—every appearance in Nature, unite in exposing the absurdity of what is called the Mosaic account of time and creation. So exceeding slow is the resistless innovating progress of the sea, in changing the face of the globe, that millions of years must elapse before a total alternation of land and water takes place on its surface; but as the quantity of water can never immerse the whole, a certain portion of the surface must ever be land, in succession.* This alternate succession of land and water is sure as fate, though imperceptible in the ephemeral life of man.
* Succession no more implies a beginning, than it predicatesan end.
MOD.—This watery theory of yours seems not very objectionable; but I can neither agree in the Mosaic account of the first man, nor in the opinion of Ocellus, who says, "he had no original production from the earth," but was always upon it, his power of propagation existing in himself. Man is an animal so transcendent above all others in his intellectual organisation, and reasoning powers, as to warrant our inference that the supreme ruler of the world had some particular design in his production, such as giving him dominion over all others, none of whom are possessed of immortal souls, that distinguishing proof of excellence which is found in man alone.
LUCIAN.—You may perhaps be able to tell me in what part of him it is to be "found" and what it consists of; but until that is done demonstrably, Nature, experience, reason, and all analogy, will flatly deny that man is possessed of any immortal part that is not common to every other animal. Man is immortal and universal in his materiality alone; as the matter which composes his body belongs to the immortal whole called Nature, or the infinite all-in-all; and he is annihilable in his personal identity only. That which you call design in the production of man, the Materialists, we repeat, ascribe to the energies, adaptations, and affinities in matter, whereby all organic structure in Nature is effected.We cannot trace the effects which these and other motions of matter produce, to anything above its own powers; and therefore the deceptive arrogance of the theologian, in pretending to look beyond these powers, has been pernicious in the highest degree, in preventing a more full development of Nature's secret arcanum. The non-existence of the abstract immaterial something, which priests have set up as the supernatural ruler of the universe, is best demonstrated by all they have yet said of it—that all being downright contradiction.
The physical organisation of man is by no means superior to that of many other animals, except in his extraordinary allowance of brain, which, if cultivated for his advantage and happiness, would certainly set him above most of the others, in intellectual qualities; but hitherto these have been developed only to be perverted by a total departure from the laws of his nature, in everything wherein that happiness is concerned. Completely estranged at all points from the salutary paths which the mother of all things intended for his walks, he beggars himself in keeping hireling priests, who conjure up before his bewildered mind's-eye those chimerical nonentities which decoy him, like an ignis fatuus, madly to dance after them through life.
MOD.—With all your hostility to priests, you cannot do without them, as our laws and society are at present constructed: from your birth to the day of your death, the church has got something to do or say in every step you take of importance.
LUCIAN.—That is the chief evil afflicting society. There is hardly a bad law, custom, or institution amongst men, that has not been priest-procured in some age ancient or modern. They have not left even a vestige of the natural rights of women, and very few of those of men; from the water sorcery called baptism, in infancy, to the funeral incantation of the priest, they are misled, abused, and cheated systematically, by the lawgiver and the theologian; whilst every natural right is sacrificed on their altar of oppression. In room of the birthright liberties, of which man is thus robbed from childhood, supernatural excellencies (such as soul), and peculiar favors from a place called heaven, are falsely bestowed upon him, without which he cannot be sufficiently donkified to answer the purposes of priestcraft; and the selfish and contemptible falsehood is palmed upon him, that the ruler of this ideal region ycleped heaven, created everything for his particular use and service. This stupid arrogance would be matchable only in the vegetables declaring that all animals were made for their sustenance.
MOD.—The pride of man will for ever prevent your convincing him that he is not the most favored creature of the Supreme Being, who has fitted him out with a soul, and given him such other qualities of mind and body, as show indisputably his vast superiority over the brute creation, to whom souls have been refused. Your appeal to the miseries of his life, which are greater than those of any other animal, or even the frightful number of chances recorded by his priests against him, on the score of damnation, will not shake his belief in these preternatural distinctions in his favor. You complain that soul-saving in England and Ireland is too expensive; but by a late Transatlantic calculation, the average per head for saving heathen souls, in the Australian Archipelago, by the missionaries of the United States, costs the old women of both sexes, children, and fools of these States, the sum of £82 sterling. Now, reckoning the population of China and India at 450,000,000, which is nearly the half of all the human species on this globe, without including the ourang outang species of homo, in whom souls have not yet been detected (probably owing to their keeping no priests), the total expense of saving the whole, at the rate of £82 per soul, would cost the above description of persons among the Christian godly, the enormous sum of £36,900,000,000. We cannot for a moment suppose that these holy disinterested missionaries would charge a farthing; above the prime cost in pursuing their "glorious work."
LUCIAN.—The grand support of missionaries abroad and of established priesthoods at home, is the female sex of Christendom, without whose sustaining zeal no one of all the great stocks of superstition which now infest the world would stand for another century. Whatever may be the origin or absurdity of any system of theology, set up in any country, the timidity of the female sex stimulates them generally to cling to it with fervor and devotedness, without the slightest examination. And while the priest "harrows up their souls" through the fears of his mysterious futurity, a subtle influence is exercised by them over the weaker and more uninformed portion of the male sex, whose apathy gives a tacit assent to the endless string of inconceiveables, for the sake of domestic quiet. Here the double battery of the wife and priest is irresistible. A learned clergyman, in writing to a female friend, makes this remark:—"if, indeed, your sex should enter into the irreligious notions, which now prevail too much among men, the next generation would be irrecoverably lost." This amounts to a plain confession that, should the priest lose his deep-rooted impulsive power over the female mind, his trade would be "irrecoverably lost." Women have been, in all ages and countries, the upholders of superstition, owing, in the first place, to their nature, which, according to Hippocrates, "is more weak and fearful than the nature and disposition of men"; secondly, to the delusive and mischievous theological dogma about the superintendence of what are called spiritual powers; to which may be added, the gaudy and imposing pomp of ceremonies; all of which, taken together, readily operate upon the female mind, it being, as it were, a softer and more pliant wax than that of man, to receive the unnatural impression of the priest. Before Christianity was known, Strabo made the following strong remark:—"It is a thing universally taken for granted, that women are the ringleaders of superstition; they tease their husbands into all sorts of worship of the gods, into the observation of feasts and fasts; but it is a rare thing that any man, leading a single life, is found to be such a person." I shall close my authorities on this subject, with a quotation from Selden. "When priests come into a family, they do as a man that would set fire to a house,—he does not put fire to the brick wall, but puts it into the thatch;they work upon the women, and let the men alone."
THE END.