III

     In my youth I read religious books -- books about God, about
the atonement -- about salvation by faith, and about the other
worlds. I became familiar with the commentators -- with Adam Clark,
who thought that the serpent seduced our mother Eve, and was in
fact the father of Cain. He also believed that the animals, while
in the ark, had their natures' changed to that degree that they
devoured straw together and enjoyed each other's society -- thus
prefiguring the blessed millennium. I read Scott, who was such a
natural theologian that he really thought the story of Phaeton --
of the wild steeds dashing across the sky -- corroborated the story
of Joshua having stopped the sun and moon. So, I read Henry and 


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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      WHY I AM AN AGNOSTIC.

MacKnight and found that God so loved the world that he made up his
mind to damn a large majority of the human race. I read Cruden, who
made the great Concordance, and made the miracles as small and
probable as he could.

     I remember that he explained the miracle of feeding the
wandering Jews with quails, by saying that even at this day immense
numbers of quails crossed the Red Sea, and that sometimes when
tired, they settled on ships that sank beneath their weight. The
fact that the explanation was as hard to believe as the miracle
made no difference to the devout Cruden.

     To while away the time I read Calvin's Institutes, a book
calculated to produce, in any natural mind, considerable respect
for the Devil.

     I read Paley's Evidences and found that the evidence of
ingenuity in producing the evil, in contriving the hurtful, was at
least equal to the evidence tending to show the use of intelligence
in the creation of what we call good.

     You know the watch argument was Paley's greatest effort. A man
finds a watch and it is so wonderful that he concludes that it must
have had a maker. He finds the maker and he is so much more
wonderful than the watch that he says he must have had a maker.
Then he finds God, the maker of the man, and he is so much more
wonderful than the man that he could not have had a maker. This is
what the lawyers call a departure in pleading.

     According to Paley there can be no design without a designer
-- but there can be a designer without a design. The wonder of the
watch suggested the watchmaker, and the wonder of the watchmaker,
suggested the creator, and the wonder of the creator demonstrated
that he was not created -- but was uncaused and eternal.

     We had Edwards on The Will, in which the reverend author shows
that necessity has no effect on accountability -- and that when God
creates a human being, and at the same time determines and decrees
exactly what that being shall do and be, the human being is
responsible, and God in his justice and mercy has the right to
torture the soul of that human being forever. Yet Edwards said that
he loved God.

     The fact is that if you believe in an infinite God, and also
in eternal punishment, then you must admit that Edwards and Calvin
were absolutely right. There is no escape from their conclusions if
you admit their premises. They were infinitely cruel, their
premises infinitely absurd, their God infinitely fiendish, and
their logic perfect.

     And yet I have kindness and candor enough to say that Calvin
and Edwards were both insane.

     We had plenty of theological literature. There was Jenkyn on
the Atonement, who demonstrated the wisdom of God in devising a way
in which the sufferings of innocence could justify the guilty. He
tried to show that children could justly be punished for the sins 


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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      WHY I AM AN AGNOSTIC.

of their ancestors, and that men could, if they had faith, be
justly credited with the virtues of others. Nothing could be more
devout, orthodox, and idiotic. But all of our theology was not in
prose. We had Milton with his celestial militia with his great and
blundering God, his proud and cunning Devil -- his wars between
immortals, and all the sublime absurdities that religion wrought
within the blind man's brain.

     The theology taught by Milton was dear to the Puritan heart.
It was accepted by New England and it poisoned the souls and ruined
the lives of thousands. The genius of Shakespeare could not make
the theology of Milton poetic. In the literature of the world there
is nothing, outside of the "sacred books," more perfectly absurd.

     We had Young's Night Thoughts, and I supposed that the author
was an exceedingly devout and loving follower of the Lord. Yet
Young had a great desire to be a bishop, and to accomplish that end
he electioneered with the king's mistress. In other words, he was
a fine old hypocrite. In the "Night Thoughts" there is scarcely a
genuinely honest, natural line. It is pretence from beginning to
end. He did not write what he felt, but what he thought he ought to
feel.

     We had Pollok's Course of Time, with its worm that never dies,
its quenchless flames, its endless pangs, its leering devils, and
its gloating God. This frightful poem should have been written in
a madhouse. In it you find all the cries and groans and shrieks of
maniacs, when they tear and rend each other's flesh. It is as
heartless, as hideous, as hellish as the thirty-second chapter of
Deuteronomy.

     We all know the beautiful hymn commencing with the cheerful
line: "Hark from the tombs, a doleful sound." Nothing could have
been more appropriate for children. It is well to put a coffin
where it can be seen from the cradle. When a mother nurses her
child, an open grave should be at her feet. This would tend to make
the babe serious, reflective, religious and miserable.

     God hates laughter and despises mirth. To feel free,
untrammeled, irresponsible, joyous, -- to forget care and death --
to be flooded with sunshine without a fear of night -- to forget
the past, to have no thought of the future, no dream of God, or
heaven, or hell -- to be intoxicated with the present -- to be
conscious only of the clasp and kiss of the one you love -- this is
the sin against the Holy Ghost.

     But we had Cowper's poems. Cowper was sincere. He was the
opposite of Young. He had an observing eye, a gentle heart and a
sense of the artistic. He sympathized with all who suffered -- with
the imprisoned, the enslaved, the outcasts. He loved the beautiful.
No wonder that the belief in eternal punishment made this loving
soul insane. No wonder that the "tidings of great Joy" quenched
Hope's great star and left his broken heart in the darkness of
despair.

     We had many volumes of orthodox sermons, filled with wrath and
the terrors of the judgment to come -- sermons that had been 
delivered by savage saints.

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                      WHY I AM AN AGNOSTIC.

     We had the Book of Martyrs, showing that Christians had for
many centuries imitated the God they worshiped.

     We had the history of the Waldenses -- of the reformation of
the Church. We had Pilgrim's Progress, Baxter's Call and Butler's
Analogy.

     To use a Western phrase or saying, I found that Bishop Butler
dug up more snakes than he killed -- suggested more difficulties
than he explained -- more doubts than he dispelled.

     Among such books my youth was passed. All the seeds of
Christianity -- of superstition, were sown in my mind and
cultivated with great diligence and care.

     All that time I knew nothing of any science -- nothing about
the other side -- nothing of the objections that had been urged
against the blessed Scriptures, or against the perfect
Congregational creed. Of course I had heard the ministers speak of
blasphemers, of infidel wretches, of scoffers who laughed at holy
things. They did not answer their arguments, but they tore their
characters into shreds and demonstrated by the fury of assertion
that they had done the Devil's work. And yet in spite of all I
heard -- of all I read. I could not quite believe. My brain and
heart said No.

     For a time I left the dreams, the insanities, the illusions
and delusions, the nightmares of theology. I studied astronomy,
just a little -- I examined maps of the heavens -- learned the
names of some of the constellations -- of some of the stars --
found something of their size and the velocity with which they
wheeled in their orbits -- obtained a faint conception of
astronomical spaces -- found that some of the known stars were so
far away in the depths of space that their light, traveling at the
rate of nearly two hundred thousand miles a second, required many
years to reach this little world -- found that, compared with the
great stars, our earth was but a grain of sand -- an atom -- found
that the old belief that all the hosts of heaven had been created
for the benefit of man, was infinitely absurd.

     I compared what was really known about the stars with the
account of creation as told in Genesis. I found that the writer of
the inspired book had no knowledge of astronomy -- that he was as
ignorant as a Choctaw chief -- as an Eskimo driver of dogs. Does
any one imagine that the author of Genesis knew anything about the
sun -- its size? that he was acquainted with Sirius, the North
Star, with Capella, or that he knew anything of the clusters of
stars so far away that their light, now visiting our eyes, has been
traveling for two million years?

     If he had known these facts would he have said that Jehovah
worked nearly six days to make this world, and only a part of the
afternoon of the fourth day to make the sun and moon and all the
stars?

     Yet millions of people insist that the writer of Genesis was
inspired by the Creator of all worlds.