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Digging through some old files I found this keeper, & felt like sharing.
Bible Teaching and Religious Practice
Religion had its share in the changes of civilization and national
character, of course. What share? The lion's. In the history of the human
race this has always been the case, will always be the case, to the end of
time, no doubt; or at least until man by the slow processes of evolution
shall develop into something really fine and high -- some billions of years
hence, say.
The Christian Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the
medical practice changes. For eighteen hundred years these changes were
slight -- scarcely noticeable. The practice was allopathic -- allopathic in
its rudest and crudest form. The dull and ignorant physician day and night,
and all the days and all the nights, drenched his patient with vast and
hideous doses of the most repulsive drugs to be found in the store's stock;
he bled him, cupped him, purged him, puked him, salivated him, never gave
his system a chance to rally, nor nature a chance to help. He kept him
religion sick for eighteen centuries, and allowed him not a well day during
all that time. The stock in the store was made up of about equal portions
of baleful and debilitating poisons, and healing and comforting medicines;
but the practice of the time confined the physician to the use of the
former; by consequence, he could only damage his patient, and that is what
he did.
Not until far within our century was any considerable change in the
practice introduced; and then mainly, or in effect only, in Great Britain
and the United States. In the other countries to-day, the patient either
still takes the ancient treatment or does not call the physician at all. In
the English-speaking countries the changes observable in our century were
forced by that very thing just referred to -- the revolt of the patient
against the system; they were not projected by the physician. The patient
fell to doctoring himself, and the physician's practice began to fall off.
He modified his method to get back his trade. He did it gradually,
reluctantly; and never yielded more at a time than the pressure compelled.
At first he relinquished the daily dose of hell and damnation, and
administered it every other day only; next he allowed another day to pass;
then another and presently another; when he had restricted it at last to
Sundays, and imagined that now there would surely be a truce, the homeopath
arrived on the field and made him abandon hell and damnation altogether,
and administered Christ's love, and comfort, and charity and compassion in
its stead. These had been in the drug store all the time, gold labeled and
conspicuous among the long shelfloads of repulsive purges and vomits and
poisons, and so the practice was to blame that they had remained
unused, not the pharmacy. To the ecclesiastical physician of fifty years
ago, his predecessor for eighteen centuries was a quack; to the
ecclesiastical physician of to-day, his predecessor of fifty years ago was
a quack. To the every-man-his-own-ecclesiastical-doctor of -- when? -- what
will the ecclesiastical physician of to-day be? Unless evolution, which has
been a truth ever since the globes, suns, and planets of the solar system
were but wandering films of meteor dust, shall reach a limit and become a
lie, there is but one fate in store for him.
The methods of the priest and the parson have been very curious, their
history is very entertaining. In all the ages the Roman Church has owned
slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to
trade in them. Long after some Christian peoples had freed their slaves the
Church still held on to hers. If any could know, to absolute certainty,
that all this was right, and according to God's will and desire, surely it
was she, since she was God's specially appointed representative in the
earth and sole authorized and infallible expounder of his Bible. There were
the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; she was right, she was
doing in this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So
unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to
say against human slavery. Yet now at last, in our immediate day, we hear a
Pope saying slave trading is wrong, and we see him sending an expedition to
Africa to stop it. The texts remain: it is the practice that has changed.
Why? Because the world has corrected the Bible. The Church never corrects
it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession -- and
take the credit of the correction. As she will presently do in this
instance.
Christian England supported slavery and encouraged it for two hundred and
fifty years, and her church's consecrated ministers looked on, sometimes
taking an active hand, the rest of the time indifferent. England's interest
in the business may be called a Christian interest, a Christian industry.
She had her full share in its revival after a long period of inactivity,
and his revival was a Christian monopoly; that is to say, it was in the
hands of Christian countries exclusively. English parliaments aided the
slave traffic and protected it; two English kings held stock in
slave-catching companies. The first regular English slave hunter -- John
Hawkins, of still revered memory -- made such successful havoc, on his
second voyage, in the matter of surprising and burning villages, and
maiming, slaughtering, capturing, and selling their unoffending
inhabitants, that his delighted queen conferred the chivalric honor
of knighthood on him -- a rank which had acquired its chief esteem and
distinction in other and earlier fields of Christian effort. The new
knight, with characteristic English frankness and brusque simplicity, chose
as his device the figure of a negro slave, kneeling and in chains. Sir
John's work was the invention of Christians, was to remain a bloody and
awful monopoly in the hands of Christians for a quarter of a millennium,
was to destroy homes, separate families, enslave friendless men and women,
and break a myriad of human hearts, to the end that Christian nations might
be prosperous and comfortable, Christian churches be built, and the gospel
of the meek and merciful Redeemer be spread abroad in the earth; and so in
the name of his ship, unsuspected but eloquent and clear, lay hidden
prophecy. She was called The Jesus.
But at last in England, an illegitimate Christian rose against slavery. It
is curious that when a Christian rises against a rooted wrong at all, he is
usually an illegitimate Christian, member of some despised and *****
sect. There was a bitter struggle, but in the end the slave trade had to go
-- and went. The Biblical authorization remained, but the practice changed.
Then -- the usual thing happened; the visiting English critic among us
began straightway to hold up his pious hands in horror at our slavery. His
distress was unappeasable, his words full of bitterness and contempt. It is
true we had not so many as fifteen hundred thousand slaves for him to worry
about, while his England still owned twelve millions, in her foreign
possessions; but that fact did not modify his wail any, or stay his tears,
or soften his censure. The fact that every time we had tried to get rid of
our slavery in previous generations, but had always been obstructed,
balked, and defeated by England, was a matter of no consequence to him; it
was ancient history, and not worth the telling.
Our own conversion came at last. We began to stir against slavery. Hearts
grew soft, here, there, and yonder. There was no place in the land where
the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No
place in all the land but one -- the pulpit. It yielded at last; it always
does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always
does, joined the procession -- at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery
text remained; the practice changed, that was all.
During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded
that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing
its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for eight hundred years, gathered
up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in
earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and
imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of
witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.
Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never
had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that
there was no such thing as a witch -- the priest, the parson? No, these
never discover anything. At Salem, the parson clung pathetically to his
witch text after the laity had abandoned it in remorse and tears for the
crimes and cruelties it has persuaded them to do. The parson wanted more
blood, more shame, more brutalities; it was the unconsecrated laity that
stayed his hand. In Scotland the parson killed the witch after the
magistrate had pronounced her innocent; and when the merciful legislature
proposed to sweep the hideous laws against witches from the statute book,
it was the parson who came imploring, with tears and imprecations, that
they be suffered to stand.
There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has
changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone,
but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from
the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.
It is not well worthy of note that of all the multitude of texts through
which man has driven his annihilating pen he has never once made the
mistake of obliterating a good and useful one? It does certainly seem to
suggest that if man continues in the direction of enlightenment, his
religious practice may, in the end, attain some semblance of human decency.
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