CHAPTER IV.

At the dawn of, and during the first stages of their civilization, the people of the Earth found themselves surrounded with natural forces which, in their scant knowledge of the laws of the universe, were ascribed to the arbitrary and willful caprices of a great hidden being. They found a mysterious power above them, and everywhere an overwhelming evidence of design. The unthinkable and unknown character of the infinite and eternal was not then acknowledged; and the failure of any to explain this unseen intelligence and power incited their imaginations to do for them what the closest investigation had failed to accomplish. As may have been expected, they clothed their imaginary deity with the qualities, propensities, and passions of themselves. Any violent convulsion of nature was taken by them as a certain sign of his anger; while the normal state of rest, and the undisturbed processes of animal and vegetable development and growth were looked upon as concessions in their special favor. From a belief in the supervision[Pg 107] of the deity over every single one of the innumerable processes of nature, they naturally imbibed the idea that they each were objects of his personal watchfulness and attention, and as a consequence, that all the fortunes and vicissitudes of their lives were dependent upon his moods. It may very well be supposed that with this conception of the deity, the chief purpose of life would be to find favor with Him, to discover his wishes, and to learn his commands; since, in accordance with this simple and crude idea, every one’s success and comfort in life depended upon his conciliation. With these views of nature and the universe, they came in due time to observe that within themselves were feelings and sentiments entirely apart from the ordinary epicurean impulses which governed them. We may imagine in those cruel times the warrior standing over his prostrate victim with upraised club, stayed in the act of killing him by a sentiment of pity, and enjoying afterward as a result of his compassion a pleasure which was as strange and unaccountable to him as his first sight of a comet. There was no apparent motive whatever for his humane act. On the contrary, it had deprived him of spoil, and reduced the honor of his victory. And so, all the inclinations to[Pg 108] virtue which brought no material and immediate rewards were regarded as mysterious and inexplicable as the great hidden power, and by a very natural sequence of reasoning, a part of it.

As your civilization advanced, it was to be seen that the virtues, and especially those which had a direct influence upon material welfare, grew and enlarged. The path to honor was no longer exclusively through carnage and victory, and the possession and cultivation of certain virtues brought consideration and respect. It was at this critical stage of your progress that there was inflicted upon you an evil greater than any your people have known. You were not content with viewing the deity as we do from afar, and with accepting the impulses of virtue as a part of yourselves, instituted for the wise purpose of a continuous self-development toward a better earthly life; but instead, in your unreasonable yearning to communicate with the supreme Author, you surrendered yourself to the wiles of the seers, and became the willing dupes of their delusions.

There is nothing more unhappy to tell of you than the consequences of this grave error. Your assumed possession of the commands and wishes of the Deity in the[Pg 109] shape of a revelation, has proved more a misfortune than a blessing to you. In the first place, it has lowered your conception of the Deity below ours. It has turned your religion into a contest. It has rendered possible the establishment of certain ecclesiastical bodies among you, who, while assuming entire control of the morals of your people, are beset in their internal parts with all the vices which come from cruelty, cupidity, and love of power. Besides, your formulated conditions of punishments and rewards have degraded religion from a cultivation of virtue for itself, and the immediate good it brings, to a selfish scramble, each one struggling to shoulder his way into the midst of celestial delights.

It can be easily understood why your religion, with all its crudities and superstitions, has taken so firm a hold upon your society. You are constituted as we are, with the same inherent elements of progress. The steady increase of your affinity for the virtues, and those who practice them, is a marked quality of your career, and as they all lead, in one way or another, towards that union of interests which constitutes the perfect social state, you are thereby impelled by a natural and providential desire to build them up. So that, as a matter of fact, there[Pg 110] being an inherent love of goodness ingrafted in your very natures, your religious creeds have attracted you to them, and held you in fetters, under the false theory that the good within you is but a contribution from their exclusive and abundant sources of supply.

It has been your misfortune to be held captive throughout your progress by the shrewd designs of your seers and prophets, who have not failed until recently to supply you with an occasional change of supernatural pabulum, to meet the new wants of a steadily advancing development.

When at a certain stage of your civilization, about two thousand years ago, you had attained a point of intellectual culture among the few, the fruits of which have been reflected upon you to this day, in some of the grandest recorded achievements of human thought, and while the masses were left to take their undirected way among the empty superstitions which conceded nothing to the growing human sympathy, a seer appeared among you, who served rather as a suggestion than as an immediate success. After the lapse of sufficient time from his death to allow full scope for romance, there was built up out of his memory by your seers a picture of all the virtues[Pg 111] which had been growing within your hearts, so entirely adapted to the new age that all the pent-up forces of human sympathy within its scope and influence surrendered to it. But what might have been a triumph and a boon to you in the new impetus to a better and broader humanity, unfortunately held concealed within itself the subtle machinery of your seers and prophets, and was guarded by their evil eyes, so that with this tremendous lever to move you in the direction of their purposes, instead of advancing you, they have turned your civilization back upon itself more than a thousand years. No historical fact is more capable of demonstration than this. None has been more persistently and ingeniously denied, and no natural sequence ever followed more directly a moving cause. From a free and independent exercise of the intellectual activities in the direction of science, art, philosophy, and all knowledge pertaining to yourselves, the Earth upon which you dwell, and the universe, so far as your vision extends, the whole current of your thoughts was turned by the new doctrines toward a paradise, compared with which all things of the Earth were trifles. When you were brought by the fascination of these promises, and the unflagging efforts an interested[Pg 112] body of ecclesiastics, to a general belief in these doctrines, you sank into an intellectual torpor, from which you only emerged by a protest of your reason not yet wholly suppressed.

You cannot fail to see the utterly dehumanizing tendency of the influences which surrounded you for so many centuries. The common aims and purposes of your lives were submerged by the one engrossing wish to reach heaven; and while your imagination was carried away by its picture, you were led, without hesitation, to place your feet upon the neck of any earthly enterprise that seemed to stand in its way.

From the beginning of your history you have accepted one object of worship after another, each an ideal impersonation of the goodness which was inseparately a part of yourselves, and which was given to you for the wise purpose of making your society possible, and to perfect it; just as the parental instinct was bestowed upon you to protect your infants. All these subjects of adoration have perfectly reflected your intellectual condition, and have been discarded, one after another, as they outlived their uses; until you are just now beginning to realize, that for all these many centuries you have been virtually[Pg 113] worshipping yourselves. Your present ideal will, in time, share the fate of those which preceded it, and in the absence of a prevailing superstition, your seers luckily cannot build up for you another one. Your long period devoted to the pursuit of phantoms is rapidly passing away, and your new age of rationalism is approaching. You have no just conception of the evils it will remove, and the glories it has in store for you.

The difference between your present and future religion can be easily outlined. Your present religion, from a long course of erroneous teaching, is intense, aggressive and hysterical. It feeds and fattens itself upon the miseries of life, which it does not undertake to remove, except in a meretricious way for effect. Your religion of the future will be tranquil and voluntary, and its chief mission will be to permanently reduce the evils and misfortunes of life to a minimum. The impulses of your present religion are entirely apart from the moral sense, a significant fact easily substantiated by a glance over the every-day life of your people. Except in their observance of religious forms, your devout are not distinguished from your profane. The practical virtues are no greater among believers than among unbelievers. Your coming[Pg 114] religion will be founded upon the moral sense, and will be inseparable from it. It will support no doctrine of a ready and convenient atonement for bad acts, as the present one does. It will teach you that there can be no complete reparation of an evil deed except in its undoing, and that such an act, once performed, spreads its dire consequences in accordance with its enormity over a part or the whole career of the doer. It will not undertake to unburden the conscience of a crime, nor to give assurance of celestial bliss to the most heinous of offenders, upon the trifling and fallacious compliance with religious forms.

Your peculiar religious beliefs have so shaped and moulded your character that we have observed, what you are not likely to see of yourselves, certain traits or inclinations which are not promising as factors in your ultimate regeneration. Your churches, with the shrewd purpose of rendering their services invaluable, have given you to believe that your natural tendencies are evil, and that the unavoidable misfortunes and sorrows of your lives are but penalties for your many misdeeds. The general acceptance of this belief has lowered your pride, and given you, to some extent, that character of dejection and submissiveness which is entirely subversive to the attainment[Pg 115] of any destiny to be reached by yourselves.

There is a quality of mind which we acknowledge as, above all others, the one which has assisted us to our present very desirable social condition, and that is the feeling to resist the perpetration of a mean or bad act, on account of the sense of degradation it inflicts upon the feelings of the doer. This motive of conscience, so plainly the offspring of self-esteem, and growing out of a cultivation of the mind alone, without any regard whatever to creed influences or teachings, is totally ignored, either as a promoter of virtue or preventive of vice, by all the religions that have existed upon your planet. The reason for this is easily explained. Under the knowledge that a cultivation of the mind and conscience, without creed influence, was capable of doing for you a better service in the advancement of your morals than your churches have performed, it has been made a part of their doctrine to belittle and abuse your purely intellectual faculties, under the unwarranted and unreasonable imputation that the free exercise of your reason was an assumption beyond your right. And all this, too, in face of the overwhelming evidence about you, that the most corroding and dangerous of your vices germinate and[Pg 116] seed themselves only in places where the mind lies in fallow.

There comes to us from our remote ages, through tradition and history, an account of some superstitious beliefs, but it has been our good fortune never to have had them built up into a system so overbearing and harmful as yours has been. It cannot be said of us that we ever denounced honest intellectual efforts in any direction, or that we ever regarded the expression of opinions founded on the dictates of reason as crimes, and your punishment of such, with all its atrocious and heart-rending details, serves as a lesson for the whole universe of worlds never to put trust in the smooth tongues and insinuating ways of the seers, for the spirit of fairness and truth is not in them. Your restrictions and punishments of the free expression of thought, inaugurated by the corporate organization of your present religion, and maintained with more or less rigor to the present, has left its blighting effects upon your society by encouraging some of the meanest of your vices. The assumption that one of you shall not have the right to convey to another his opposing convictions upon any religious question is so outrageously unjust, that it never could have been carried[Pg 117] out in any other way than by the general belief that it was in accordance with the wishes and purposes of the Almighty. Such a denial of the natural right of mankind could only be enforced when a majority of the multitude became converts to the doctrines which favored it. The leaders of religious persecution, during the centuries of church control, were merely carrying out the wishes of this majority. The spirit of intolerance, once abroad, became the parent of those habits of concealed thought, moral cowardice and hypocricy, which even to the present, so rule among you, that sincerity in expressing religious belief is not universal. In deference to the lingering opinion among a large body of your people that a dissension from old modes of religious thought is displeasing to the Almighty, and dangerous to society, many of you are constantly led to veil their thoughts on these questions, in dread of the social consequences which would follow their frank avowal. Many of skeptical tendencies are thus induced to hide their convictions in fear of disturbing their safe and comfortable positions in society. By silently working the penalty of withholding their political and social support, your great illogical multitude backed by their vigilant church organizations[Pg 118] still maintain a terrorism over you. Consequently, your writers are guarded in their lines, your public speakers in their language, your teachers in their instruction, and your statesmen in their legislation, that each shall not get beyond the soundings of orthodox religious belief, while with the knowledge of your time, most of them are conscious in their inner thoughts that they are trimming to avoid truth, in the full knowledge, that to this day upon the earth, the surest human preferment is only for those who support error in this direction.

The most lamentable instances to be found among you of this evasion are your chief institutions of learning. Of all places these should be the first to lead in truth, as they are best provided in all the equipments to find it; yet under the prevailing terrorism their predicament is embarrassing and pitiful. While holding class instructions in evolution, geology, astronomy and kindred sciences, they hesitate to openly deny those scriptural fallacies to which their knowledge is opposed, and the farcical spectacle is daily enacted among many of them of a ceremonious reverence for these fallacies, and at all times an artful evasion of any denial of their truth, every one of which it is their especial business to disprove in the course of[Pg 119] instruction.

I hope you will not infer from what I have said that the people of Mars have not great reverence and veneration for the Deity. Indeed, it is the universal belief amongst us, that the animus which is within us to do good to ourselves, and to make pleasant the ways of life among each other, is but the prompting of that divine presence which is leading us aright in the direction of the still better things to come. As we see in all living things a constant development upward toward a state of perfection, and having, of all creatures else, that within us most susceptible and easy of advancement in the universal march, we simply take our place in the line. What we have accomplished in that direction in our government, society, and morals, gives us new heart to further efforts, and if our methods may be of any service to you, I will give you some further account of them.