CHAPTER VII   THE “TRIUMPH” OF CHRISTIANITY

“Destruction to the Triumphant Beast!”  Giordano Bruno.

“Ecrasez l’Infame!” - Voltaire.

Even MORE INDUCIVE than its own sweet reasonableness and persuasive truth, as accredited by the records and vouchers we have examined, were several very effective forcible aids to the propagation of the new Faith in the hearts and minds—and upon the bodies—of the Pagan populations. The strange phenomenon of the persistence of Christianity into the XXth Century can be understood only by consideration of the means employed for, and the medium of un-culture permitting, the propagation of this forged faith through the centuries of the Dark Ages of Faith, with its medieval “hangover” into the present scientific era.

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PRIESTLY TERRORISM

GOD-ORDAINED MURDER FOR UNBELIEF

The Jewish forgers of the near-sacred Books of Enoch, Esdras, etc., had pilfered from the Sacred Books and System of Zoroaster of Persia, their superstitions of angels and devils and hell-fire, and had invented the infernal doctrines of Original Sin and eternal damnation therefor,—all which counterfeit passed to and became current among the religious zealots of the debased Judaism then in vogue. Attributing their “revelation” or invention to Jesus Christ himself, the second-century forging Fathers of the new Faith bodily plagiarized these ready-made Pagan-Jewish superstitions, and by the potent “Sign of the Cross” metamorphosed them into holy “revelations” and inspired truths, the which to doubt was to be damned.

 The fanatic Hebrew religion and its derivative Christianity are the only religions ever known on earth based on and maintained by systematic persecution and murder. God-given laws of murder for disbelief were decreed at Sinai. A holy monopoly of priests was founded, and the divine ukase ordained: “They shall keep their priesthood, and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death.” (Num. iii, 10.) Murder was God-decreed: “The man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the priest. ... even that man shall die.” (Deut. xvii, 12.) Again the Jealous God decrees: ”He that sacrificeth to any other god—[thus admitting the other gods]—save unto Yahweh alone, he shall be utterly destroyed.” (Ex. xxii, 20; Deut. xvii, 2-5.) The ne plus ultra of inspired atrocity of Divine legislation is this infamy devised by priests and attributed to their mythic God: ”If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go serve other [more civilized] gods, ... Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shalt thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him: thine hand shall be the first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die”! (Deut. xiii, 6, 8-10; xvii, 2-7.) Old Elijah murdered by his God’s help two {238} companies of soldiers and their captains by calling down fire from heaven, and 450 priests of Baal and 400 priests of the phallic Asherahs, to prove by these 850 murders “if I be a man of the gods.” (2 Kings, i, 12.) His old side-partner Elisha stood by and watched God-sent bears which he had invoked tear and eat forty small children who ill-manneredly thumbed their noses at his old bald pate; and throughout the blessed Old Testament of God some hundreds of thousands of people were murdered by God outright and by his holy priestly agents, simply for differences of opinion or of conduct with respect—or disrespect—to the holy Hebrew God and religion. Only, fortunately, probably little of it is true.

The Son of the Hebrew God came in course of time to Jewry ostensibly to make amends for some of his Father’s damning vengeances. He came “to fulfill the law”; not only that, he overdid it and added to it sundry fiery climaxes of cursing and damnation, religious bigotry and intolerance unique to the “Gospel of Love” and of redemptive salvation. For sanctions ad terrorem of the new preachments of Christ who “came to bring not peace but the sword,” Jesus himself kindled the fires of Hell and decreed eternal damnation for unbelief: “He that believeth not shall be damned”; “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire”; “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish”; “He that believeth not the Son, the wrath of God abideth on him”! These genial persuasions to belief in the priests were added to by Paul the Persecutor; harking back to his God’s Law of Sinai: “He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy; ... Of how much sorer punishment ... shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”—”The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, and shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascendeth forever and ever: and they shall have no rest day or night” from “the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God”! All this is for the happy Hereafter; but the pious deviltry begins by Hell-on-earth, as the gentle Jesus himself prescribed: “Those mine enemies, which would not that I reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.” (Luke, xix, 27.) The whole body of Apostles appealed for Divine permit, that “we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them” (Luke ix, 54), who sought to imitate their pious devil-enchantments. Peter, Prince of Apostles, takes up the bloody cue: Every soul which will not hear that prophet shall be destroyed” (Acts, iii, 23); and Bigot Paul enjoins persecution, boycott and murder for the dissentient: “For there are many unruly and vain talkers ... whose mouths must be stopped” (Titus, i, 10, 11): and “He that troubleth you ... I would they were even cut off” (Gal. v, 10, 12), The Church Persecutrix is thus amply warranted of its holy task of “preserving the purity of the Faith” by fire and sword. Right quickly it began to “deal damnation‘ round the land on all they deemed the foe” of the Faith and its priests. The rule of death to heretics was proclaimed by the “Prince” and executed by sword and stake by his holy “Successors” so long as they were let: “There shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in heresies, ... and bring upon themselves swift destruction” (2 Peter, ii, 1); and his arch-coadjutor Paul continued to go up and down the land “breathing out threatenings and slaughter” against all who despised his holy preachments. {239}

 As we shall hear confessed: “Toleration came in only when Faith went out; lenient measures were resorted to only where power to apply more severe measures was wanting”! (CE. vii, 262.) The infernal fact that Intolerance is the “natural accompaniment” of Religion, and that obsessed religionists are no different from a man-burning mob of lynchers, is thus again confessed: “A kind of iron law would seem to dispose mankind to religious intolerance. (p. 35.) ... When Christianity became the religion of the Empire, and still more when the peoples of Northern Europe became Christian nations, the close alliance of Church and State. ... heresy, in consequence, was a crime which secular rulers were bound in duty to punish. ... The heretic, in a word, was simply an outlaw whose offense, in the popular mind, deserved and sometimes received a punishment as summary as that which is often dealt out in our day by an infuriated populace to the [supposed] authors of justly detested crimes. That such intolerance was not peculiar to Catholicism, but was the NATURAL ACCOMPANIMENT OF DEEP RELIGIOUS CONVICTION in those, also, who abandoned the Church, is evident from the measures taken by some of the Reformers—[ex-children of True Church, who were there schooled and drilled in the infamies]—against those who differed from them in matters of belief. ... Moreover, ... the spirit of intolerance prevalent in many of the American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be cited in proof thereof.” (CE. viii, 35, 36.) The only way to kill the pernicious flower of Faith is to uproot and destroy the noxious weed with truth!

THE GOSPEL OF FEAR AND TREMBLING

Such as this, repeated ad infinitum for terror, coupled with the threats of the quick “Second Coming,” when the Unbelievers should receive reward “unto the resurrection of damnation” (John v, 29), effectively seared the Gospel of fear and trembling into the superstitious Pagan dupes of Christianity.

Hear for a moment the zealous Father Tertullian throw the fear of Hell into the trembling Pagan patrons of the theater and the circus. As quoted by Gibbon from the De Spectaculis (Ch. 30), they are introduced with some pertinent words descriptive of the spirit of bigoted Christianity: “These rigid sentiments, which had been unknown to the ancient world, appear to have infused a spirit of bitterness into a system of love and harmony. The ties of blood and friendship were frequently torn asunder by the difference of religious faith; and the Christians, who, in this world, found themselves oppressed by the power of the Pagans, were sometimes seduced by resentment and spiritual pride to delight in the prospect of their future triumph.‘ You are fond of spectacles, exclaims the stern Tertullian;‘ expect the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe. How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs, and fancied gods, groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates, who persecuted the name of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal, not of Minos, but of Christ; so many tragedians, more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; {240} so many dangers—.’ But the humanity of the reader will permit me to draw a veil over the rest of this infernal description, which the zealous African pursues in a long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms.” (Gibbon, Ch. xv, p. 146-7.)

UNBORN BABES TO BURN FOREVER

The damnable doctrine of Infant Damnation was one of the most terrifying and effective impostures of the Church to drive helpless victims into the fold of Christ. Infamous enough was the earlier doctrine of exclusive salvation, that the unbaptized adult, the individual outside Church was the heir to eternal damnation. But soon the terror was extended to the just-born infant, to even the fetus in its womb. St. Augustine affirmed this atrocity with all his vehemence; all the Fathers without exception dinned it eternally,—as yet today. A treatise of the greatest authority, De Fide, long attributed to Augustine, but now known to be the work of Bishop St. Fulgentius (CE. vi, 317) thus states the horrid doctrine: “Be assured, and doubt not, that not only men who have attained the use of their reason, but also little children who have begun to live in their mothers’ womb and have there died, or who, having been just born, have passed away from the world without the sacrament of holy baptism, administered in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, must be punished by the eternal torture of undying fire; for although they have committed no sin by their own will, they have nevertheless drawn with them the condemnation of original sin, by their carnal conception and nativity.” (sec. 70.) Lecky, who quotes the passage, thus comment the effects as witnessed in practice throughout the Middle Ages: “Nothing indeed can be more curious, nothing more deeply pathetic, than the record of the many ways by which the terror-stricken mothers attempted to evade the awful sentence of their Church. Sometimes the baptismal water was sprinkled upon the womb; sometimes the still-born child was baptized, in hopes that the Almighty would antedate the ceremony; sometimes the mother invoked the Holy Spirit to purify by His immediate power the infant that was to be born; sometimes she received the Host or obtained absolution, and applied them to the benefit of her child. For the doctrine of the Church had wrung the mother’s heart with an agony that was too poignant for even that submissive age to bear.” (Rationalism in Europe, i, 362-364.) And all this on account of an apple eaten four thousand years before they were born; willed by the Deity who had foreordained their birth and premature death, before His Holy Church could come at the Baptismal fees!

A CONTRAST IN TOLERANCE

With the miraculous “conversion of Constantine”—to at least the practical advantages of Christianity as providing numerous partisans to his ambitious cause and great numbers of recruits to his armies, the Church of Christ emerged from obscurity and catacombs; by dint of servile flatteries, bold impostures, and shameless forgeries, of which we have seen examples, it quickly insinuated itself into imperial favor and popular regard, and soon dominated the superstitious court and populace. This was a signal triumph for Faith, which now became popular and the means to preferment; the truth of the Christ did now more rapidly spread and {241} abound. That such considerations, much more of this material world worldly than of the other-world of the spiritual, best further the cause of Christ and are its most powerful propaganda, is thus delicately confessed: “ When a Government, for instance, reserves its favors and functions for the adherents of the State religion, the army of civil servants becomes a more powerful body of missionaries than the ordained ministers”! (CE. vii, 259.) Thus began that fullest League with Death and Covenant with Hell between State and Church, persistent yet to this day!

THE EDICT OF MILAN

But until the Christian priests poisoned his mind with their arrogant pretensions, Constantine was truly liberal in his policy of “religious indifferentism” or toleration. His broad-minded and states-man-like grasp of the principles of liberty of belief in any and all forms of religious superstition, or in none at all, rose to heights never since attained until Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, reflected in Art. VI and Amendment I of the Federal Constitution. Constantine’s Edict of Milan, of 313, was the first charter of religious freedom and toleration, securing equality and liberty of worship to the Christians,—and very quickly repudiated by them as against all others; it is preserved and thus quoted by Lactantius.

"Not many days after the victory, Licinius ... on the ides of June (13th), while he and Constantine were consuls for the third time, he commanded the following edict for the restoration of the Church, directed to the president of the province, to be promulgated—

"When we, Constantine and Licinius, emperors, had an interview at Milan, and conferred together with respect to the good and security of the commonweal, it seemed to us that, amongst those things that are profitable to mankind in general, the reverence paid to the Divinity merited our first and chief attention, and that it was proper that the Christians and all others should have liberty to follow that mode of religion which to each of them appeared best; so that God, who is seated in heaven, might be benign and propitious to us, and to everyone under our government. And therefore we judged it a salutary measure, and one highly consonant to right reason, that no man should be denied leave of attaching himself to the rites of the Christians, or to whatever other religion his mind directed him, that thus the supreme Divinity, to whose worship we freely devote ourselves, might continue to devote His favor and beneficence to us. ... For it befits the well-ordered State and the tranquillity of our times that each individual be allowed, according to his own choice, to worship the Divinity; and we mean not to derogate aught from the honor due to any religion or its votaries.”

(Lact., Of the Manner in Which the Persecuters Died, ch. xlviii; ANF. VII, 320; Eusebius, HE. viii, 17.)

CHRISTIAN INTOLERANCE

But no sooner had the priests of the new Superstition foisted themselves securely into power, and by their threats of hell-fire dominated the superstitious minds of the ex-Pagan Constantine and his sons and successors, than the old decrees of persecution under which the Christians had themselves suffered, were revamped and with fiendish ferocity turned by them into engines of fearful torture and destruction of Pagans, Jews, and “heretic” Christians alike; and religious intolerance became the corner-stone of the Church Persecutrix. In the famous Code of Theodosius, about 384, it was at priestly instigation enacted:

"We desire that all the people under our clemency should live by that religion which divine Peter the apostle is said to have given the Romans. ... We desire that heretics and schismatists be subjected to various fines. ... We decree also that we shall cease making sacrifices to the gods. And if anyone has committed such a crime, let him be stricken with the avenging sword.”
Cod. Theod. xvi, 1, 2; v, 1; x, 4.)

What a shaming Christian contrast to the Pagan Edict of Milan, granting religious liberty and tolerance to all! In these laws of the now “Christian” empire priestly intolerance is made the law of the land; the accursed words “Inquisition of the Faith” and “Inquisitors” first appear in this Christian Code. “Theodosius I was called the Great because he was the first Emperor to act against heathenism, and also because he contributed to the victory over the Arians.” (CE. iii, 101.)

Even the “Infidel” Moslem, in his crude Koran, teaches a doctrine of tolerance to shame the Bible and the Christians: “Those who follow the Jewish religion, the Christians, the Sabeans, and whatever others believe in God and practice doing good, all these shall receive their recompense from the Lord. ... Virtue does not consist in turning the face towards the East nor towards the West to pray, but in being tolerant.” (Quran, ix, 59, 76;—from Spanish text.) 

FAITH ENFORCED BY LAWS OF MURDER

Holy Fraud and Forgery having achieved their initial triumph for the Faith, the “Truth of Christ” must now be maintained and enforced upon humanity by a millennial series of bloody brutal Clerical Laws of pains and penalties, confiscations, civil disabilities, torture, and death by rack, fire and sword, which constitute the foulest chapter of the Book of human history—the History of the Church!

When the Christians were weak and powerless and subjected to occasional persecutions as “enemies of the human race,” they were vocal and insistent advocates of liberty of conscience and freedom to worship whatever God one chose; the Christian “Apologies” to the Emperors abound in eloquent pleas for religious tolerance; and this was granted to them and to all by the Edict of Milan and other imperial Decrees. But when by the favor of Constantine they got into the saddle of the State, they at once grasped the sword and  began to murder and despoil all who would not pretend to believe as the Catholic priest commanded them to believe. When today the Church screams “Persecution!” and “Bigotry!” at every criticism and every attempt to restrict it in some of its presumptuous usurpations, let it recall a few of the laws of intolerance, plunder and death which it procured and enforced from the moment it got the prostituted power, so long as that power lasted.

Beginning with Constantine, and under succeeding “Christian” emperors, there is a series of scores of laws which the Christians procured to be enacted for the suppression and persecution to death of Pagans, heretics and Jews. These laws and edicts are to be found in the Codes of Theodosius and of Justinian, the two famous codifications of Roman Law. To exhibit the progressive and persistent system of proscription to which all but themselves were persecutingly subjected by the “Orthodox” Christians, I shall simply quote the titles of some of these laws, with indication of the names of the Emperors issuing them, the dates and number of the laws, and the Code or other source in which it is preserved. 

LAWS OF CONSTANTINE

The earliest laws of Constantine were those granting religious toleration, as the Edict of Milan already quoted, and laws for the redress of injuries done to Christians; such as release of prisoners and those in servitude, and the restoration of property; chapter 36 declares that “The Church is the heir of those who leave no kindred; and free gifts to it are confirmed”; chapter 41: “Those who have purchased property belonging to the Church or received it as a gift, are to restore it.” (Eusebius, Vita Constantine, N&PNF. Bk. II, chs. xxiv-xliii.)

“Edict to the People of the Provinces Concerning the Error of Polytheism.” (Ib. chs. xlviii-xlix.)

“Granting Money to the Churches.” (Ib. Bk. x, ch. vi.)

 “Catholic Clergy exempt from Certain Civic Duties.” (Code Theod. xvi, 2, 1; 313.) “The Catholic Church freed from Tribute.” (Id. xi, 1, 1; 815.) “Clergymen freed from Financial Burdens.” (Id. xvi, 2, 2; 319.) “The Church allowed to Receive Bequests.” (Id. xvi, 2, 4; 321.)

 “Bishop’s Powers as Judges and Witnesses”: “Whatever may be settled by a sentence of bishops shall ever be held as sacred and venerable ... All testimony given, even by a single bishop, shall be accepted without hesitation, by every judge, neither shall the testimony of any other witness be heard, when the testimony of a bishop is brought forward by either party”! (Const. Sirm. i; 333.)

“The Day of the Sun a Time of Rest.” “All judges, and city folk and all craftsmen shall rest on the venerated day of the Sun.” (Cod. Just. iii, 12, 2; 321.)

 “As it has seemed most unworthy that the Day of the Sun, famous by its venerable character, ... Therefore on the festive day.” (Cod. Theod. ii, 8, 1; 321.) {244}

A number of laws follow in favor of the Pagans, and while prohibiting “private divination and soothsaying,” and “Malevolent Magic Prohibited, but Beneficial Magic Encouraged”; also exempting Pagan Flamens, priests and magistrates from sundry restrictions and disabilities. No law of Constantine seems to be preserved which prescribes active persecution; he seems to have sought to hold an even balance of toleration to Pagans and Christians. But that he did enact such laws seems to be proved by recital in the first of the laws of his sons, Constantius and Constans, who were Arian heretics.

LAWS OF CONSTANTIUS AND CONSTANS

“Sacrifice Prohibited.”: “Let superstition cease and the folly of sacrifices be abolished. Whoever has dared in the face of the law of the divine prince, our father [Constantine] ... to make sacrifices, shall have appropriate penalty, and immediate sentence dealt to him.” (Cod. Theod. xvi, 10, 2; 341.)

“All Temples Closed and Sacrifices Forbidden.” “but if any one commit any offense of this sort, let him fall by the avenging sword,” and his property forfeited; judges neglecting to “mete out penalties for these offenses, they shall be similarly punished.” (Cod. Theod. xvi, 10, 4; 846.)

“Sacrificing and Idolatry Punishable by Death.” “We order that all found guilty of attending sacrifices or of worshipping idols shall suffer capital punishment.” (Id. xvi, 10, 6; 356.)

LAWS OF GRATIAN AND THEODOSIUS

“Wills of Apostate Christians to be Set Aside”: “The right of making a will shall be taken from Christians who become pagans; and if such persons make wills, they shall be set aside without regard to circumstances.” (Cod. Theod. xvi, 7, 1; 381: cf. Cod. Justin. i, 7, 2; 382.)

“The Right to Bequeath or Inherit Property Denied Apostates”: “We deny to Christians and the faithful who have adopted pagan rites and religion all power of making a will in favor of any person whatsoever, in order that they may be without the Roman law [outlaws]; ... even of enjoying a will with the power of acquiring an inheritance.” (Cod. Theod. xvi, 7, 2; 383.) “The Right of Making a Will Denied Christians Who enter Temples.” (Id. xvi, 7, 3; 383.)

LAWS OF THEODOSIUS AND VALENTINIAN

“Testamentary Disqualification for Christian Apostates,” and Outlawry as Witnesses.—”Those who betray the sacred faith and profane holy baptism are shut off from association of all and from giving testimony. ... They may not exercise the right of making a will, nor enter upon any inheritance; they may not be made anyone’s heir.” (Id. xvi, 7, 4; 391.)

“Sacrificing and Visiting Shrines Prohibited.” (Id. xvi, 10, 10; 391.)—”Sacrifices Forbidden and Temples Closed.” (Id. xvi, 10, 11; 391.) {245}

“PAGANISM OUTLAWED.”—“IF any one dares [to sacrifice, etc.], let any man be free to accuse him and let him receive, as one guilty of lese majeste, ... for it is sufficiently a crime.” (Id. xvi, 10. 12; 392.)

LAWS OF HONORIUS AND ARCADIUS

“Pagan Holidays Abolished.” (Cod. Theod. ii, 8, 22; 895.)

 “Privileges of Pagan Priests Abolished.” (Id. xvi, 10, 14; 396.)

 “Rural Temples to be Destroyed.” (Id. xvi. 10, 16; 399.)

 “Temples to be Appropriated by the Churches.” (Id. xvi, 5, 43; 408.)

 “Temples to be Appropriated by the Churches. Temple Buildings and their Revenues to be Confiscated and idols and Shrines to be Destroyed.” (Id. xvi, 5, 43; xvi, 10, 19; 407.)

 “Only Catholics to Serve as Palace Guards.” (Cod. Theod. xvi. 5, 42; 408.)

 “Laws Against the Pagans to be Enforced”: “The Donatists and other vain heretics and those others who cannot be converted to the worship of the Catholic communion, Jews and Gentiles who are vulgarly known as pagans; ... Let all judges understand, and not fail to carry out all decrees against such persons.” (Id. xvi,. 5, 46; 409.)

 “Pagans Barred from Civil and Military Offices.” (Id. xvi, 10, 21; 416.) “Existing Laws against Pagans to be Enforced.” (Id. xvi, 10, 22; 423.)

 “Pagans Who Sacrifice Shall Lose their Property and be Exiled” (Id. xvi, 10, 23; 423.)

 “Pagan Superstition to be Rooted Out”: “We are extirpating all heresies and all falsehoods, all schisms and all superstitions of the pagans and all errors that are inimicable to the Catholic religion. ... And since all attempt at supplication is denied forever, they will be punished with the severity befitting crimes.” (Id. xvi, 5, 63; 423.)

 “Pagans Barred from Pleading a Case or Serving as Soldiers”: “... and every sect unfriendly with the Catholics should be driven out of every city in order that they may not be sullied by the contagious presence of criminals. We deny to Jews or pagans the right of pleading a case in court or of serving as soldiers.” (Const. Sirm. No. 6; 425.)

LATER LAWS AGAINST PAGANISM

“Baptized Persons who follow Pagan Practices to Suffer Death. Provisions for the Conversion of the Unbaptized. Pagans Forbidden to Give Instruction.” - (Cod. Just. i, 11, 9; 472.)

“Pagan Rites Forbidden and Bequests for Pagan Cults Prohibited.” - (Cod. Just. 1, 11, 10; no date given.)

“Pagans Barred from Office and their Real Property Confiscated.” “The Emperors Justin and Justinian. ... It is our intention to restore the existing laws which affect the rest of the {246} heretics of whatever name they are, (and we label as heretic whoever is not a member of the Catholic Church and of our orthodox and holy faith); likewise the pagans who attempt to introduce the worship of many gods, and the Jews and the Samaritans. ... We forbid any of the above-mentioned persons to aspire to any dignity or to acquire civil or military office or to attain to any rank.”

(Id. i, 5, 12; 527.)

Thus was Pagan Superstition proscribed and destroyed by Christian law and sword; and the identical Pagan Superstitions under the veneer of the name of Christian established and enthroned. The subject is thoroughly examined by Prof. Maude A. Huttmann, in The Establishment of Christianity Through the Proscription of Paganism; (Columbia University Press, 1914).

BLOODY RECORD BOASTED

A graphic sketch of the origin, the universal scope, and the crushing effect of the early imperial laws, supplemented and expanded by those of medieval and more modern times, is given by CE., related with all the sinister and cynical insolence, sophistry and hypocrisy of intolerant bigotry. To its Christ it imputes the horrid justification of the sword and the infernal principles of butchery whereby the Church Murderess has “made a hell of earth to merit heaven.” This recital is not alone of ancient sacred history; CE. admits: “These primitive views on heresy have been faithfully transmitted and acted on by the Church in subsequent ages; there is no break in the tradition from St. Peter to Pius X.” (vii, 259.) The principles are yet alive and cherished, their practical application has only for the time being “fallen into abeyance,” only, for the reason that in these modern times “the power to apply more severe measures is wanting.” he admitted ecclesiastical record of repression and murder in its forged and fraudulent faith:

Constantine had taken upon himself the office of lay bishop (episcopus externus) and put the secular arm at the service of the Church, the laws against heretics became more and more rigorous. Under the purely ecclesiastical discipline no temporal punishment could be inflicted on the obstinate heretic, except the damage which might arise to his personal dignity through being deprived of all intercourse with his former brethren. But under the Christian emperors rigorous measures were enforced against the goods and persons of heretics. From the time of Constantine to Theodosius and Valentinian III (313-424) various penal laws were enacted against heretics as being guilty of crime against the State. In both the Theodosian and Justinian codes they were styled infamous persons; all intercourse was forbidden to be held with them; they were deprived of all offices of profit and dignity in the civil administration, while all burdensome offices, both of the camp and of the curia, were imposed upon them; they were disqualified from disposing of their own estates by will, or of accepting estates bequeathed to them by others; they were denied the right of giving or receiving donations, of contracting, buying, and selling; pecuniary fines were imposed upon them; they were often proscribed and banished, and in many cases scourged before being sent into {247} exile. In some particularly aggravated cases sentence of death was pronounced upon heretics, though seldom executed in the time of the Christian emperors of Rome. Theodosius is said to be the first who pronounced heresy a capital crime; this law was passed in 382 against [several named sects of heretics]. Heretical teachers were forbidden to propagate their doctrines, publicly or privately; to hold public disputations; to ordain bishops, presbyters, or other clergy; to hold religious meetings; to build conventicles or to avail themselves of money bequeathed to them for that purpose. Slaves were allowed to inform against their heretical masters and to purchase their freedom by coming over to the Church. The children of heretical parents were denied their patrimony and inheritance unless they returned to the Catholic Church. The books of heretics were ordered to be burned.

 (Vide Codex Theodosianus, lib. XVI, tit. 5, “De Hereticism”)

“This legislation remained in force and with even greater severity in the Kingdoms formed by the victorious barbarian invaders on the ruins of the Roman Empire in the West. The burning of heretics was first decreed in the eleventh century. The Synod of Verona (1184) imposed on bishops the duty to search out heretics in their dioceses and hand them over to the secular power. Other Synods, and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) under Pope Innocent III, repeated and enforced this decree, especially the Synod of Toulouse (1229), which established inquisitors in every parish (one priest and two laymen). Everyone was bound to denounce heretics, the names of the witnesses were kept secret; after 1243, when Innocent III sanctioned the laws of Emperor Frederick, II and of Louis IX against heretics, torture was applied in trials; the guilty persons were delivered up to the civil authorities and actually burnt at the stake.

“Paul III (1542) established, and Sixtus V organized, the Roman Congregation of the Inquisition, or Holy Office, a regular court of justice [!] dealing with heresy and heretics. (See Roman Congregations.) The Congregation of the Index, instituted by St. Pius V, has for its province the care of faith and morals in literature; it proceeds against, printed matter very much as the Holy Office proceeds against persons (see Index of Prohibited Books). The present pope, Pius X (1909), has decreed the establishment in every diocese of a board of censors and of a vigilance committee whose functions are to find out and report on writings and persons tainted with the heresy of Modernism (Encycl.‘ Pascendi,’ 8 Sept. 1907).—[At another place the pious clerical reason for this flagrant attempt against the mind and its liberty of inquiry is thus with unctuous priestly speciousness stated: “for it is notorious that clever sophistry coated with seductive language may render even gross errors of faith palatable to a guileless and innocent heart”! (CE. xiv, 766).]—The present-day legislation against heresy has lost nothing of its ancient severity; but the penalties on heretics are now only of the spiritual order; all the punishments which require the intervention of the secular arm have fallen into abeyance. ...

“The Church’s legislation on heresy and heretics is often reproached with cruelty and intolerance. Intolerant it is; in fact its raison d’etre is intolerance of doctrines subversive of the {248} Faith. Cruelty only comes when the punishment exceeds the requirements of the case. ... It suffices to remark that the inquisitors only pronounced on the guilt of the accused and then handed him over to the secular power to be dealt with according to the laws framed by emperors and kings—[at the instigation of the Church!].

“Toleration came in only when faith went out; lenient measures were resorted to ONLY WHERE POWER TO APPLY MORE SEVERE MEASURES WAS WANTING. ... Christ says:‘ Do not think that I am come to send peace upon earth,: I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ The history of heresy verifies this prediction”!

 (CE. vii, 256-262, passim.)

The Church Persecutrix, under this forged Christ-Lie, has shed oceans more of blood than of its boasted “light” upon religion-cursed Christendom. The only “light” it has diffused has been from the flames of “heretic” cities, and the lurid fires of myriads of Autos-da-Fe, kindled by hypocrite priests, burning in agony the bodies of countless heroic men and women who scorned to prostitute their minds to the sinister lies of priestcraft, and who have dared defy with their lives the blighting “rule and ruin” dominion of the power-lusting Church.

With a shudder of undying loathing for the cruel cynical Hypocrite, we may admire the sweet charity of tender mercy displayed by the Holy Church of the Christ, exampled in the sanctimonious Formula of Judgment whereby its Holy Inquisition handed over the racked and broken errant Child of Faith to the prostituted Secular Arm for the final Act of Murder—the blessed Auto-da-Fe, with a prayer for the hated heretics: “Ut quam clementissime et sine sanguinis effusionem puniretur—should be punished as mildly as possible and without the shedding of blood”! The while Their Holinesses kept a standing Decree of Indulgences from the pangs of Purgatory for all the hoodlum Faithful who would please and glorify God by attending the sacred ceremonials of Burning, and especially to those who would aid God and the priests by fetching fagots for the consecrated fires, and throw water on the wood so that the priest-set flames would be slower in their purifying work and allow the writhing “Obstinate” longer time to make Peace with God and Holy Church by meet Repentance; in which event, the “reconciled” Child of Faith would be dragged from the flames only partly cremated, and returned to prison cell there to agonize out the remainder of his life in rapt contemplation of the beauties and sweetness of the blessed Christian Religion, crooning “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”

The foregoing loathsome boasted record of the Church, sinister and infamous as it is, may be complemented by the following cynical and sophistical recital of the mental and moral debauch of ignorance imposed by the Church, concluding with the formal admission that “the theocratic State was called upon [by its prostituted mistress the Church] to avenge with the pyre” defiance of the lying fraudulent pretensions of the Church: {249}

”During the Middle Ages the Church guarded the purity and genuineness of her Apostolic doctrine through the institution of the ecclesiastical (and State) Inquisition. ... Following the example of the Apostles, the Church today watches zealously over the purity and integrity of her doctrine, since on this rests her whole system of faith and morals, the whole edifice of Catholic thought, ideals, and life. For this purpose the Church instituted the Index of Prohibited Books, which is intended to deter Catholics from the unauthorized reading of books dangerous to faith or morals, for it is notorious that clever sophistry coated with seductive language may render even gross errors of faith palatable to a guileless and innocent heart. (p. 766.) ... Now, formal heresy was likewise strongly condemned by the Catholic Middle Ages; and so the argument ran: Apostasy and heresy are, as criminal offenses against God, far more serious crimes than high treason, murder, or adultery. ... But, according to Romans xiii, 11, seq., the secular authorities have the right to punish, especially grave crimes, with death; consequently, heretics may be not only excommunicated, but also justly (juste) put to death’ (St. Thomas, II-II, Q; xi, a, 3). ... The earliest example of the execution of a heretic was the beheading of the ring leader of the Priscillianists by the usurper Maximum at Trier (385). Even St. Augustine, towards the end of his life, favored State reprisals against the Donatists. ... Influenced by the Roman code, which was rescued from oblivion, Frederick II introduced the penalty of burning for heretics by imperial law of 1224. The popes, especially Gregory IX, favored the execution of this imperial law, in which they saw an effective means for the preservation of the Faith. ... Unfortunately, neither the secular nor the ecclesiastical authorities drew the slightest distinction between dangerous and harmless heretics, seeing forthwith in every (formal) heresy a‘ contumelia Creatoris,’ which the theocratic State was called upon to avenge with the pyre.”

 (CE. xiv, 766, 768.)

“THE SECULAR ARM”

“Hypocrites! Ye compass land and sea to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves!” Jesus. (Matt. xxiii, 15.)

“The barbarous penal forms of the Middle Ages are to be credited, not to the Church, but to the State”! (CE. xiv, 768.) It is a monstrous hypocritical perversion of truth to pretend, as the Church ever does, that these inhuman and devastating legal enactments and deeds of fire and blood, which ad horrendum we have just read in faint outline from secular and ecclesiastical history, and which brought several “Most Christian” nations to utter ruin, moral and economic, were the voluntary and spontaneous expressions of the social policy of Secular rulers, enacted and wrought against their subjects in order to preserve the peace and safety of the State and to regulate the civil and political conduct of their peoples. The Church, by fraud and fear, brought the secular rulers under her ignominious domination, and forced them by her threats, as we have seen proved and admitted, to make and enforce these infernal enactments and destructions. “ This is the stale pretense {250} of the Clergy in all countries, after they have solicited the government to make penal laws against those they call heretics, or schismatics, and prompted the magistrates to a vigorous execution, then to lay all the odium on the civil power; for whom they have no excuse to allege, but that such men suffered, not for religion, but for disobedience to the laws.” (Somers Tracts, vol. xii, p. 534; cited by Buckle, Hist. of Civilization in England, i, p. 246.)

 But the Church waited not for the secular rulers to obey her murderous behests to “avenge with the pyre” the crime of disbelieving and deriding the Faith, nor did she lose time while watching the execution of her commands of murder by the secular arm. The Church was then itself a secular ruler over vast territories, the stolen “Patrimony of Peter” or States of the Church; and for those territories their Royal-Holinesses set the example of murder and burning of their own heretics. His Holiness Pope Gregory IX (1227-41) was, we are told” “very severe towards heretics, who in those times were universally looked upon as traitors and punished accordingly. ... When in 1224 Frederick II ordered that heretics in Lombard should be burnt at the stake, Gregory IX, then Papal Legate, approved and published the imperial law. In 1231 the Pope enacted a law for Rome that heretics condemned by an ecclesiastical court should be delivered to the secular power to receive their‘ due punishment.’ This‘ due punishment’ was death by fire for the obstinate and imprisonment for life for the penitent. In pursuance of this law a number were arrested in Rome, burnt at the stake, and imprisoned.” (CE. vi, 797.) And it was in Rome, by law and command of His Royal-Holiness Clement VIII, that the defier of‘ the “Triumphant Beast,” Giordano Bruno, was burned alive in Rome in 1600.

The hypocritical lie is repeated—and in the same breath belied. “ Officially it was not the Church that sentenced unrepenting heretics to death, more particularly to the stake ... Gregory IX ... admitted the opinion, then prevalent among legists, that heresy should be punished with death, seeing that it was confessedly no less serious an offense than high treason. ... [The succeeding popes went from opinions to acts.] In the Bull‘ Ad Extirpanda’ (1252) Innocent IV says:‘ When those adjudged guilty of heresy have been given up to the civil power by the bishop or his representative, or the Inquisition, the podesta or chief magistrate of the city shall take them at once, and shall within five days at the most, execute the laws made against them.’ Moreover, he directs that this Bull and the corresponding regulations of Frederick II [for burning heretics] be entered in every city among the municipal statutes under pain of excommunication, which was also visited on those who failed to execute both the papal and the imperial decrees. ... The passages [of the imperial decrees] which ordered the burning of impenitent heretics were inserted in the papal decretals. ... The aforesaid Bull‘ Ad Extirpanda’ remained thenceforth a fundamental document of the Inquisition, renewed or reinforced by several popes, Alexander IV (1254-61), Clement IV (1265-68), Nicholas IV (1288-92), Boniface VIII (1294-1303), and others. The civil authorities, therefore, were enjoined by the popes, under pain of excommunication to execute the legal sentences that condemned impenitent heretics to the stake. It is to be noted that excommunication itself was no trifle, for, if the person {251} excommunicated did not free himself from excommunication within a year, he was held by the (papal) legislation of that period to be a heretic, and incurred all the penalties that affected heresy.” (CE. viii, 34.)

Here it may be remarked, that prescription or statute of limitations runs not against the murderer. Thus Holy Church, who has murdered and procured the murder of millions, can never escape the just verdict and fatal sentence for her crimes before the bar of Civilization. Impotent now, senile, but venomous still in intention, she reeks yet with the blood of her slain; their ghosts, like Banquo’s, will never down. They cry yet to Humanity: Ecrasez l’Infame!

We have just read from CE. the confession that “the theocratic State was called upon to avenge with the pyre” all forms of heresy—or hate for the Church—as a “contumelia Creatoris.” Again it says—again contradicting its false pretense that the State is alone to be “credited” with these pious infamies: “After the Christianized Roman Empire had developed into a theocratic (religious) State, it was compelled—[by whom but by the Church with its terrorizing threats to the superstitious rulers]—to stamp crimes against faith (apostasy, heresy, schism) as offenses against the State. (cf. Cod. Justin., 1, 5, de Haer.: ‘Quod in religionem divinam committitur, in omnium fertur injuriam.’) Catholic and citizen of the State became identical terms. Consequently crimes against faith were high treason, and as such were punishable with death.” (CE. xiv, p. 768.) A truer statement of the direful consequences of this enforced prostitution of the “secular arm” of the State to the criminal purposes of the Church in coercing its false and accursed religion upon humanity, cannot be made than this confession, in specious and unctuous words: “The role of heresy in history is that of evil generally. Its roots are in corrupted human nature. It has come over the Church as predicted by her Divine Founder; it has rent asunder the bonds of charity in families, provinces, states, and nations; the sword has been drawn and pyres erected both for its defense and its repression; misery and ruin have followed in its track”! (CE. vii, 261.) The confessed accursed record of Christianity!

The utter dependence of the Church for the beginnings and for the persistence of its bloody dominance, upon the extorted favors and support of the prostituted “Secular Arm” of the State to do its dirty work of subjection, is confessed and illustrated by two instances, one with respect to the overthrow of Paganism, the other accounting for the ultimate suppression of the early heretical sects. Of the former, it is “credited” to the Emperor Gratian: “In the same year, 375, he abolished all the privileges of the pagan pontiffs and the grants for the support of the pagan worship. Deprived of the assistance of the State, paganism rapidly lost influence. ... He made apostasy a crime punishable by the State.” (CE. vi, 729.) With a clerical slur at the “fanciful speculations of the Eastern sects so dear to the Eastern mind,” oblivious of the equally fanciful “Oriental speculations” which are the only source of the holy dogmas of Western Christianism, it is cynically {252}

 [NB: Something omitted from here - RW]

recorded: “but, lacking the support of the temporal power, they sank—[just as “orthodox” Christianity would have sunk to “situm fidei”—holding the sword. (CE. vii, 259.)

As elsewhere suggested, it is pertinent to remark, that history would quickly repeat itself in this highly-to-be-desired respect, with the withdrawal of “the support of the temporal power,” through the immense and illegal support yet given to the Beggar Church through deadhead tax exemption on its thousands of millions of dollars of ill-gotten, idle and hoarded properties.

“St. Augustine seems to have originated the application of the words ‘Compel them to enter in,’ to religious persecution. Religious liberty he emphatically cursed: ‘Quid est enim pejor, mors animae quam libertas erroris?—For which is worse, the death of the soul than the liberty of error?’ (Epistle clxvi.) Boniface III decreed excommunication of any magistrate who either altered the sentence of the Inquisition, or delayed more than six days in carrying it into execution. In the beginning of the thirteenth century, Innocent III instituted the Inquisition, and issued the first appeal to princes to employ their power for the suppression of heresy. In 1209, De Montfort (at Innocent’s instigation), began the massacre of the Albigenses. In 1215, the Fourth Council of the Lateran enjoined all rulers,‘ as they desired to be esteemed faithful, to swear a public oath that they would labor earnestly, and to the full extent of their power, to exterminate from their dominions all those who were branded as heretics by the Church.’ The Council of Avignon, in 1209, enjoined all bishops to call upon the civil power to exterminate heretics. The Bull of Innocent III threatened any prince who failed to extirpate heretics from his realm with excommunication, and with the loss of his realm.”

 (Lecky, History of the Rise and Progress of Rationalism in Europe, vol. II, chap. iv, passim.)

As confessedly “tolerance came in only when faith went out,” eternal gratitude and glory are the due meed of RATIONALISM, which has struck the sword and the stake from the armory of Faith, and left it a jaded sycophant begging “tolerance” of and for its bloody self.

England was rather distant from Rome and the English spirit did not yield so debasedly as some others did to the orders and dominion of priestcraft; but so early as Alfred the Great, so vaunted by the Church for his piety and learning, we have this picture of prostitution of State to Church; and the effects on both: “In the joint code of laws published by Alfred and Guthrum, apostasy was declared a crime, the payment of Peter’s Pence was commanded, and the practice of heathen rites was forbidden. ... But the clergy, ... discharging in each district the functions of local state officials, seem never to have quite regained the religious spirit.” (CE. i, 507.)

Out of scores of instances of legal enactments made by superstitious rulers under the terrors of papal threats, I cite here but one, in the quaint words of a militant philosopher: “Consequent to this claim of the Pope to be the Vicar Generall of {253} Christ in the present Church is the doctrine of the fourth Counsell of Lateran, held under Pope Innocent the third (Chap. 3, de Haereticis), That if a King at the Popes admonition, doe not purge his Kingdom of Haeresies, and being excommunicate for the same, doe not give satisfaction within a year, his Subjects are absolved of the bond of their obedience. Where, by Haeresies are understood all opinions which the Church of Rome hath forbidden to be maintained.” (Hobbes, Leviathan, Pt. iv, ch. 44, p. 333; 1651.) The infallible but presumptuous claim of the Vicars of God may be stated in the terms of the famous Bull of the “Two Swords”:

“Under the control of the Church are two swords, that is, two powers. ... Both swords are in the power of the Church, the spiritual and the temporal; the spiritual is wielded in the Church by the hand of the clergy; the secular is to be employed for the Church by the hand of the civil authority, but under the direction of the spiritual power. The one sword must be subordinate to the other; the earthly power must submit to the spiritual authority, as this has precedence of the secular on account of its greatness and sublimity; for the spiritual power has the right to establish and guide the secular power, and also to judge it when it does not act rightly. ... This authority, although granted to man, and exercised by man, is not a human authority, but rather a Divine one granted to Peter by Divine commission and confirmed in him and his successors. Consequently, whoever opposes this power ordained of God opposes the law of God.” (Bull Unam Sanctam, Boniface VIII, Nov. 18, 1302; CE. xv, 126.)

Our review of the Forgery Founded Church having demonstrated the monstrous falsity of every divine premise of this “Bull,” the hollow sham of these sonorous braggart phrases is ghastly apparent. They are priestly lies!

COMPULSORY AND WHOLESALE CONVERSION

 “And the Lord said unto his servant, Go into the highway and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” Jesus. (Luke xiv, 28.)

Disparaging the commands of its Lord to force them in, his Vicarate apologizes: “Instances of compulsory conversions such as have occurred at different periods of the Church’s history must be ascribed to the misplaced zeal of autocratic individuals.” (CE. xi, 703.) The facts of history, as cited by CE. itself, belie this apologetic clerical passing of the odium for such felonious duress to autocratic individuals uninfluenced by the “moral” constraint of the Church-beneficiary and unswayed by its anathemas and threats of formal excommunication. A criminal who resorts to murder to prevent the escape of the victims who support him, would readily threaten murder to add greatly to the number of his supporting victims. It was St. Augustine himself, greatest pillar and authority of the Church Persecutrix, who first invoked, the Christ’s fatal fanatic command, “Compel them to come in,” as complementary to the bloody edicts of the earlier “Christian” emperors and of his own fatuous fulminations against the “liberty of error,” as above noticed. The first temptation to come to Christ was by bribes, as when Constantine offered a gold coin and a clean baptismal robe to all {254} who would undergo that process; and the example of the Emperor in favoring Christianity drew great numbers of servile subjects to the feast of the Lord. We have read the cynical confession: that when governments favor a religious sect by giving its adherents all the offices and honors of the State and excluding all opponents, “the army of civil servants becomes a more powerful body of missionaries than the ordained ministers.” When Clovis came to Christ he tolled 3000 of his retainers into the baptismal font with him at one time. Pepin “had been filled with this lofty conception, consequently extraordinary success attended the missionary labors of the Church. ... The conversion of the Avars had been attempted by the Bavarian Duke; after their subjugation, they were placed under the jurisdiction” of high prelates of the Church. (CE. v, 611.) “When the conversion of their prince was publicly known, the (people) of his kingdom are said to have flocked in crowds to receive the Christian faith.” (CE. i, 669.)

When Charlemagne spent those seven days in Rome with His Holiness, who tricked him into believing that “his imperial dignity was an act of God, made known, of course, through the agency of the Vicar of Christ” (CE. iii, 615), and they together formed those “many great designs for the glory of God and the exaltation of the Church,” due execution of the command of the Christ, “Compel them to come in,” was one of the great designs conspired with His Vicar: “True to his own and his father’s understanding with the pope, he invariably insisted on baptism as the sign of submission, punishing with appalling barbarity any resistance, as when, in cold blood, he beheaded in one day 4500 persons at Verdun, in A.D. 782. Under such circumstances it is not wonderful that clerical influence extended so fast. Always bearing in mind his engagement with the papacy, that Roman Christianity should be enforced upon Europe wherever his influence could reach, he remorselessly carried into execution the penalty of death that he had awarded to the crimes of: 1. refusing baptism; 2. false pretense of baptism; 3. relapse to idolatry; 4. the murder of a bishop or priest; 5. human sacrifice; 6. eating meat in Lent. To the pagan German his sword was a grim, but convincing missionary.” (Draper, The Intellectual Development of Europe, i, 374.) This secular authority is confirmed by this clerical admission; that under the Carlovingian Empire, “in war conversion went hand in hand with victory; in peace Charles ruled through bishops. ... The Teutonic Order began the great conflict which after more than half a century of bloodshed dealt the death-blow to paganism in Prussia.” (CE. iii, 700, 705.) Conversion by force and arms continued through the Ages of Faith and brought entire nations to Christ: “More lasting success followed the attempts, patterned on the Crusades, to carry on wars of conversion and conquest in those territories of north-eastern Europe peopled by tribes that had lapsed from the Faith or that were still heathen; among such pagans were the Obotrites, Pomeranians, Wiltzi, Serbs, Letts, Livonians, Finns, and Prussians. The preliminary work was done in the twelfth century by missionaries. They were aided with armed forces [by several kings and rulers]. From the beginning of the thirteenth century Crusades were undertaken against Livonia, Courland, Esthonia, and Prussia. In Lithuania Christianity did not win until 1368.” (CE. v, 612.) In Hungary, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, “the new religion was spread by the sword. ... {255} With these laws King St. Stephen brought over almost all his people to the Catholic Faith. ... He [a later King] took strong measures against those who had fallen away from the Faith.” (CE. vii, 548-9.)

Thus it was that by war and bloody imposition rather than by washing in the Blood of the Lamb, “vast tribes of savages who had always been idolaters, who were perfectly incapable, from their low state of civilization, of forming any but anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity, or of concentrating their attention steadily on any visible object, and who for the most part were converted, not by individual persuasion, but by the commands of their chiefs, embraced Christianity in such multitudes that their habits soon became the dominating habits of the Church. From this time the tendency to idolatry was irresistible. The old images were worshipped under new names.” (Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 218.) The brand of conversion was marked by the outfit of missionaries and military auxiliaries who first caught the barbarians; and if the wrong kind got them first, it made all the difference in the world in point of whether the result was the intelligent working of the Holy Ghost or sheer ignorance. The, great Bishop “Ulphilas (311-388) taught the Goths the Arian theology; Arian kingdoms arose in Spain, Africa, Italy. The Gepidae, Heruli, Vandals, Alans, and Lombards received a system which they were as little capable of understanding as they were of defending, and the Catholic bishops, the monks, the sword of Clovis, the action of the papacy, made an end of it before the eighth century.” (CE. i, 707.) Arianism was very simple; it held that there was but a One-Person God, and denied the Blessed Trinity of Three-in-One. Thus Arianism was “an attempt to rationalize the Creed by stripping it of mystery so far as the relation of Christ to God was concerned” (Ib.). But this simple and de-mystified theology, the non-Catholic barbarians were too ignorant to understand; whereas, the other barbarians whose, minds were enlightened by the Holy Ghost at the point of the Catholic sword, were perfectly intelligent to comprehend the Mystery of the Holy Trinity,—which would have stumped Aristotle. The Arians had only to follow the ordinary Multiplication Table—”One times One is One”; whereas the Orthodox. had to multiply curiously,—”Three times One is One!” The true formula is—Three times Naught is Nothing! 

CONVERSION SKIN DEEP

In truth, however, “these nations were only Christianized upon the surface, their conversion being indicated by little more than their making the sign of the cross.” (Draper, Op. cit., i, 365.) True, indeed, it is, as is scores of times confessed: “Paganism had not been renewed in Christ.” (CE. iii, 700.) “Christians who considered themselves faithful, held in a measure to the worship of the sun. Leo the Great in his day says that it was the custom of many Christians to stand on the steps of the Church of St. Peter and pay homage to the Sun by obeisance and prayers.” (CE. iv, 297; cf, iii, 724-727.) And generally was it true: “The pagani retained the worship of the old gods even after they were all Christianized.” (CE. vi, 12.) Among the Germans, and it is exactly as with all others, “the acceptance of the Christian name and ideas was at first a purely mechanical one.” (CE. vi, 485.) {256}

 As the result of the superficial veneer, in the early days when persecution occasionally broke out, and offering incense to the statue of Dea Roma or the Emperor was the test of Pagan patriotism, great numbers of laity and even of clergy “flocked at once to the altars of the heathen idols to offer sacrifice.” (CE. ix, 2.) “The apostates and the timid who had bought a certificate of apostasy, became so numerous as to fancy that they could lay down the law to the Church, ... a state of affairs which gave rise to controversies and deplorable troubles. A bishop, followed by his whole community, was to be seen sacrificing to the gods.” (CE. i, 191.) At first the Church “imposed perpetual penance and excommunication without hope of pardon” on the backsliders; “however, the great number of Lapsi and Libellatici ... led to a relaxation of the rigor of ecclesiastical discipline, leaving the forgiveness of the sin to God alone” (CE. i, 624), while their easy return to the decimated fold of Holy Church immensely increased its sacred revenues and extended its sway. However, “when the Roman Empire became Christian, apostates were punished by deprivation of all civil rights. They could not give evidence in a court of law, and could neither bequeath nor inherit property. To induce anyone to apostatize was an offense punishable with death, under the Theodosian Code, XVI, 7, De Apostasis.” (CE. i, 625.)

Thus by centuries of fraud, fear and force was the “house of God” filled from the highways and the hedges, the forests and the wattle villages,, with Pagans “nominally converted to Christianity.” Heathen superstitions veneered with the Pagan superstitions called Christianity, blended together for the further bestialization of the Faithful of Holy Church of the Christ, and the pall of the Dark Ages of Faith settled down over benighted, Church-ruled Christendom,—that “civilization thoroughly saturated with Christianity,” and “fully absorbed in the supernatural.” Two holy characteristics of the Age of Faith, the grovelling fear of guilt and devout concern for the devil, are thus commended: “Superstition is abject and crouching, it is full of thoughts of guilt; it distrusts God and dreads the power of evil” (CE. i, 555); and, with the pious Christians, “as among all savages, disease and death were commonly ascribed to evil spirits or witchcraft.” (CE. xiv, 26.) So through the Ages of Faith!

Holy Church and Divine Christianity being now in full power and possession over mind and body of Christendom, it had free scope to bring forth fruits unto perfection of “Christian Civilization.” 

---

THE “FRUITS” OF CHRISTIANITY

“Wherefore, by their fruits ye shall know them.” Jesus.

What Christianity did for [to] Civilization

 The first effects of a new, and particularly an official State Religion, are upon mind and morals,—the state of culture or prevailing civilizing conditions; essentially, on the system of moral and intellectual education of the peoples subject to it. This is recognized by the Church: “ As in many other respects, so for the work of education, the advent of Christianity is the most important epoch in the history of mankind.” (CE. v, 299.) Alas, this is  disastrously true, as the Church’s own history demonstrates. Jesus Christ, says CE., was the “Perfect Teacher”; “to His Apostles He gave the command,‘ Going, therefore, teach ye all nations.’ These words are the charter of the Christian Church as a teaching institution” (ib.). Here it got its Divine License to teach, and it taught. How effective was the Church as the Divinely instituted Pedagogue of Christendom, can be justly appreciated only through a knowledge of what kind of education, moral and mental, previously and at the time existed, and what educational system the Church inherited from the “heathens” when it assumed its sacred monopoly of teaching, and by a comparison between the pre-christian and the Christian systems and results. By what the Church destroyed of existing systems, and by what is produced through its own,—by these fruits of its zeal for Christian teaching must the success of its execution of its Divine Commission be known and judged.

Christianity arose and finally prevailed in the Graeco-Roman world, and there is exercised its Divine License as exclusive teacher of faith and morals and of secular education. Before the advent of Christianity, the nations of the Pagan Empire were—we are told—”such as sit in darkness and the shadow of death”; the “Perfect Teacher” came “to give light to them that sat in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke, i, 79; cf. Matt. iv, 16). A dismal picture is thus presented, and for centuries was touched up with the darkest colors by Christian preachments, of the moral depravity if not intellectual benightedness of the poor heathens before the “Light of the World” was shed upon them from the Cross on Calvary. The Greeks and Romans knew naught of Moses and the Prophets, had never conned the Ten Commandments, and had never murdered any one “who hearkeneth not unto the priest,” as commanded in Deut. xvii, 12. Deplorable indeed must have been their state before the Divine Teacher undertook their enlightenment. The picture of their actual moral and intellectual plight we will scan as drawn by Christian scholars. Here is faintly a sketch of— 

“THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE”

 “The education of the Greeks exhibits a progressive development. ... The ideal of Athenian education was the completely developed man. Beauty of mind and body, the cultivation of every inborn faculty and energy, harmony between thought and life, decorum, temperance, and regularity—such were the results aimed at in the home and in the school, in social intercourse, and in civic relations.‘ We are lovers of the beautiful,’ said Pericles,‘ yet simple in our tastes,’ and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness’

 (Thucydides, II, 40). ...

“The Greeks indeed laid stress on courage, temperance, and obedience to law; and if their theoretical disquisitions—[or those of the Christians, for that matter]—could be taken as fair accounts of their actual practice, it would be difficult to find, among the products of human thinking, a more exalted ideal. The essential weakness of their moral education was the failure to provide any adequate sanction—[e.g., the fear of Hell and damnation]—for the principles they formulated and the counsels they gave their youth. ... The practice of religion, whether in public services or in household worship, exercised but little {258} influence upon the formation of character. ... As to the future life, the Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul; but this belief had little or no practical significance [as to them, virtue was its own reward]. ...

 “Thus the motive for virtuous action was found, not in respect for Divine law nor in the hope of eternal reward, but simply in the desire to temper in due proportion the elements of human nature. Virtue is not self-possession for the sake of duty, but, as Plato says,‘ a kind of health and good habit of the soul,’ while vice is‘ a disease and deformity and sickness of it.’ The just man‘ will so regulate his own character as to be on good terms with himself, and to set those three principles (reason, passion, and desire) in tune together, as if they were verily three chords of a harmony, a higher, a lower, and a middle, and whatever may lie between these; and after he has bound all three together and reduced the many elements of his nature to a real unity as a temperate and duly harmonized man, he will then at length proceed to do whatever he has to do’ (Republic, IV, 443). This conception of virtue as a self-balancing was closely bound up with that idea of personal worth which has already been mentioned as the central element in Greek life and education. ... The aim of education, therefore, is to develop knowledge of the GOOD.”

 (CE. v, 296-7.)

Saving their depraved want of respect for “Divine law”—(proclaimed by priests), and their woeful neglect to provide “adequate sanction” of “bribe of Heaven and threat of Hell” (priest-devised), for inducement to their Nature-harmonized character, the godless Greeks did fairly well in “developing the knowledge of the good” and attaining the most “exalted ideal”—outside of Jewish-Christian revelation—to be found among mankind, of personal and civic virtue, due alone to their high “idea of personal worth,” rather than to the revealed concept of humanity pre-damned, “conceived in sin and born in iniquity,” crawling through this Vale of Tears as “Vile worms of the dust,” of Christian self-confession. But then, God in his inscrutable Wisdom had withheld his precious revelation of Total Depravity from the Greeks,—knowing, probably, that they did not need it, and had bestowed it only on the obscure tribe of barbarian polygamous Hebrews, who eminently fitted the revelation. So it was not the Greeks’ fault that they were no worse off, without the revelation, than were the Jews with it. We will come to the Christians anon.

Though, thus, the “Sun of Righteousness” did not illumine the revelationless skies of Greek Culture, the most splendrous Stars of intellect and soul which ever—(before the Star of Bethlehem arose)—shone down the vistas of Time, blazed in its zenith. The name of every star in that Pagan Greek galaxy is known to every intelligent person throughout Christendom today; the light from these or those of them illuminates every page and every phase of Art, Literature and Science known today to the inestimable glory of man and boon of humanity. The living germ of some, the unsurpassed perfection of others, is the product of the intellect and the soul of the poor Pagan Greeks who had no Divine Revelation and were bereft of the priceless “benefit of Clergy” as a teaching institution. {259}

 Let us gaze for a moment as through the telescope of Time and scan the brilliant luminaries of the heavens of Pagan Greek genius, undimmed then by the Light of the Cross. Beginning with those who were about contemporary in their appearance with post-exilic Hebrew revelation, say about 600 B.C., we will name only those immortally known to every high-school student, skipping among the galaxies down to the time, about 400 A.D., when they were for a thousand years eclipsed by the Light of the Cross shining in the “Dark Ages” of Christian Faith.

The Pagan Greeks, unfamiliar with the Hebrew revelation of the Divine Right of Kings—(anointed by priests)—to rule mankind, invented Democracy, the right of the people to rule themselves,—a heresy recognized in the Declaration as a self-evident proposition, that all just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed. News about Moses and his Divine laws not having penetrated into Pagan Greece, a scheme of purely human codes for human conduct was devised by the heathen Lawgivers, Draco, Solon, Lycurgus. The revealed Mosaic History of the Hebrews not being available as a model, the poor Pagan Greeks had to make shift with Herodotus, “Father of History,” Thucydides, Xenophon, Strabo, Plutarch, Pausanius, Polybius, Claudius Ptolemy, Dion Cassius. The God-drafted plans of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness and of Solomon’s Temple not being at hand to imitate, uninspired Greeks planned and built the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, the Propylaea, the Temple of Diana of Ephesus, the Temple of Apollo at Corinth, the Serapion and the Museum, “Home of all the Muses,” at Alexandria. The summit of human art in sculpture was reached in Pagan Greece, the Apollo Belvedere, the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory, the Laocoon, the friezes of the Parthenon; consummate masters of the “Old Masters” were the Pagans Phidias, Praxiteles, Callimachus, Scopas, Polyclitus, with the chisel; Apelles, Zeuxis, Polygnotus, Parrhasius, Pausias, with the brush. Statesmen and military leaders unknown to Hebrew History, yet whose names are immortal, led the Pagan Greeks to greatness and glory: Themistocles, Pericles, Aristides the Just, Lycurgus, Miltiades, Leonidas, Alexander the Great, who conquered the God-led Jews. Poor heathen orators, who never heard Jehovah speak from Sinai, nor the Christ on the Mount,—their supreme eloquence has echoed down the ages: Demosthenes, Democrates, Aeschines, Lysias, Isocrates.

Literature and the Theater were born in Pagan Greece; the “Classics” of Pagan thought and dramatic majesty came from the minds and pens of uninspired heathen who knew no line of the inspired “Law and Prophets” of the Hebrews, made semi-intelligible and sonorous only by the very free treatment of skilled translators into Elizabethan English; they are the immortal and inimitable standards of literary form, style, culture, in every university, high school, play-house, and cultured home in Christendom today. For poetry: Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Anacreon, Theocritus, the burning Sappho; for drama: Esebylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, besides the historians and orators named, the delightful old Aesop, the philosophers and scholars yet to name. The drama, tragedy, comedy, the chorus, melodrama; the epic, the ode, the lyric, the elegy, poetic form and measure, the very words for all these things, pure Pagan Greek. Philosophy—the love of Wisdom—the highest reach of the uninspired human intellect into {260} the mysteries, not of faith and godliness, but of mind and soul, in search of the first principles of being,—the “ousia of the on,” and for the Supreme Good, the noblest rules of human conduct and happiness: Thales, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Leucippus, Democritus, Protagoras, Socrates, Plato of the Academy, Aristotle of the Lyceum, Epicurus, Pythagoras, Zeno the Stoic, Antisthenes the Cynic, whose lofty moral systems have exalted mankind ever since, and whose words and works have dominated civilization and made their names immortal, though none of them knew of Moses, the Christ, or the Apostles,—although Heraclitus invented the “Logos” which St. John worked up into the creative “Word of God” for Christian consumption.

Science, supremest handmaid of civilization, the true “God of this world,” its splendid dawn was in Pagan Greece, unshackled by Genesis and Divine Mosaic revelation. Here Greek thought, undeterred by priestly ban and unafrighted by Popish Inquisition, sought to fathom the secrets of Creation and of Nature, to explain the Riddle of the Universe, to make the forces of Nature the obedient servitors of Man. Astronomy was born with Thales [640-546 B.C.], the first of the Seven Sages of Greece. Utterly ignorant of the Divine handiwork of the Six Days, and of universal creation out of universal Nothing, and not having travelled enough to verify the four corners of the flat earth, guarded by the Four Angels of the Corners, guardians of the Four Winds, he sought for the First Principle, the arche, of Creation, attributing all matter to changes in atoms; not knowing the revelation that the sun was set in a solid “firmament” arched over the flat earth, and somehow trundled across it daily to light Adam and his progeny, and had been stopped still for Joshua and turned backward ten degrees for Hezekiab, but fancying that it was governed by fixed natural law, by unaided power of mind he calculated and predicted the eclipse of 565 B.C., and discovered the Solstices and Equinoxes; he calculated so nearly the solar revolutions, that he corrected the calendar and divided the year into 365 days, which it still has; he taught the Egyptians to measure the height of the Pyramids by triangulation from the shadow of a rod he set up near them, and invented several of the theorems adopted by Euclid. Anaximander (610-546 B.C.), like his master ignorant of Mosaic astronomy, discovered and taught the obliquity of the ecliptic, due to the erratic behavior of the equator of the earth in swinging round the sun; he approximated the sizes and distances of the planets—not all set on the same solid plane; he discovered the phases of the moon, and constructed the first astronomical globes; he was the first to discard oral teaching, and commit the principles of natural science to writing. 

Pythagoras of Samos (c. 584 B.C.), was a universal genius; he coined the word “philosopher,” according to Cicero; made discoveries in music, which he conceived as a science based on mathematical principles, and fancied the “music of the spheres.” As he hadn’t read Genesis, he defiantly (through such ignorance) proclaimed that the earth was a globe revolving around the sun or central fire, and had inhabitable Antipodes,—heathen notions which got several Christian gentlemen into more or less trouble some 2000 years later when they revived the idea. He speculated on eclipses as natural phenomena rather than special dispensations of Providence; he disputed Moses on Geology by claiming that the {261} earth-surface hadn’t always been just so, but that the sea had once been land, the land sea; that islands had once formed parts of continents; that mountains were forever being washed down by rivers and new mountains thus formed; that volcanoes were outlets for subterranean fires, rather than public entrances into Hell; that fossils were the buried remains of ancient plants and animals turned into stone, rather than theological proofs of Noah’s Flood embedded for confutation of Infidels in the Rock of Faith.; Democritus (e. 460 B.C.), the “Laughing Philosopher,” the most learned thinker of his day and renowned for all the moral virtues; he wrote some 72 books on physics, mathematics, ethics, grammar; totally unlearned in Bible science, he scouted the idea of Design in Nature, declaring it lapped in universal law; he upheld belief in secondary physical causes, but not in a primary immaterial First Cause, declaring that by natural law could all the phenomena of the universe be accounted for; that there was no need of, no room for, supernatural interference or Divine Providence. He left immortal mark on the world of knowledge by his elaborated theory of atoms, or constituents of matter too small to be cut or divided; boldly and logically he applied this theory to the gods themselves, holding that they were mere aggregates of material atoms—(seemingly verified by the fact of eating the body of deity in wafers)—only mightier and more powerful than men,—and seemingly, to walk and talk, hate and kill, there must be something material about them. Modern chemistry the most universal and useful of the sciences, is founded on modifications of the atomic theory of Democritus.

Hippocrates (c. 460 - c. 377 B.C.) is known as the “Father of Medicine.” He was the first physician to differentiate diseases, and to ascribe them to different causes, on the basis of accurate observation and common sense. His great axiom was: “To know is one thing; merely to believe one knows is another. To know is science, but merely to believe one knows is ignorance.” In his days all sickness and ailments were considered as inflicted directly by the gods; the later revelation that it was all due to devils in the inner works of man was not then known. But the result was the same: all curing was the monopoly of the priests, the friends and favorites of the gods and possessors of all godly lore. As the only physicians, the priests had great revenues and a fine livelihood from the offerings made by patients who flocked for relief to the temples of Esculapius, which filled the ancient world. Hippocrates. sought to separate medicine from religion, thus incurring the venomous attacks of the priests and pious quacks. Never having heard of “fig leaf poultices,” or spittle to oust devils, “He laid down certain principles of science upon which modern medicine is built: 1. There is no authority except facts; 2. Facts are obtained by accurate observation; 3. Deductions are to be made only from facts.” Not knowing the Christian art of casting out devils, the heathen “Hippocrates introduced a new system of treatment; he began by making a careful study of the patient’s body, and having diagnosed the complaint, set about curing it by giving directions to the sufferer as to his diet and the routine of his daily life, leaving Nature largely to heal herself.” As about ninety percent of all ills are such as would heal themselves if let alone, or if treated with simple hygienic means, and many cures are greatly aided by “faith” even in Pagan gods, the element of the miraculous {262} is greatly discounted in the successes of the priests of Esculapius, and possibly in those of Loreto and Lourdes. He had no real successor until Vesalius, the first real surgeon; the Inquisition nearly got him because his anatomical researches disclosed that man had the same number of ribs as woman, not one less to represent that taken for Eve; and he disproved the Church’s sacred science of the “Resurrection Bone.”

Aristotle (384-322 iii. c.) the Stagyrite, friend and tutor of Alexander the Great, besides being one of the greatest philosophers, was the foremost man of science of his day, and in his encyclopedic works laid the foundation of Natural science or physics, Natural History, meteorology or the phenomena of the heavens, animal anatomy, to all which he applied the processes of closest research and experiment and the principles of inductive reasoning. By reason of the limitations of his process, and over-dogmatism rather than experiment in some lines, be made many curious mistakes, which ham-strung the human mind for ages. One was the assertion that two objects of different weight, dropped from the same height to the earth, would strike the earth at different intervals of time, the heavier first; when Galileo denied this theory and offered to disprove it by experiment, the pious Christians of Pisa scouted and scorned him; when he ascended the Leaning Tower and dropped two iron balls, one of one pound weight, the other of one hundred, and both struck the ground at the same instant, they refused to accept the demonstration, and drove him out of the city; so strong was the hold of even the errors of Pagan Aristotle on Christian credulity.

 Aristotle had not read the cosmic revelations of Moses, and was ignorant of the true history of Creation as revealed through him. He discovered sea shells and the fossil remains of marine animals on the tops of the mountains of Greece, and embedded far down from the surface in the sides of the mountain gorges; he noted that the rocks lay in great layers or strata one above another, with different kinds of fossils in the several strata. In his Pagan imagination Aristotle commented on this: that if sea-shells were on the tops of mountains far from the sea, why, to get there the tops of the mountains must once have been in the bottom of the sea, the rocks formed under the sea, and the shells and other animal remains embedded in them must once have lived and died in the sea and there have been deposited in the mud of the bottom before it hardened into rock. If Aristotle had climbed Pike’s Peak be would have found great beds of ocean coral in the rocks there; sea shell-fish and sponges—(which Aristotle himself first discovered to be animals)—in the rocky walls of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. 

Theophrastus (c. 373-287 B.C.), disciple and successor of Aristotle as head of the Peripatetic School of philosophy; his chief renown was as the first of the botanists, on which study he left some sixteen books; for 1800 years after his death the science lay dormant; not a single new discovery in that subject was made until after the close of the millennium of the Christian Ages of Faith. {263}

Aristarchus (c. 220-143 B.C.) was a celebrated astronomer of the new school at Alexandria. From his predecessors he knew that the earth revolved around the sun, and how the plane of the ecliptic was designed; he calculated the inclination of earth’s axis to the pole as the angle of 23 1/2 degrees, and thus verified the obliquity of the ecliptic, and explained the succession of the seasons. Aristarchus had not read Moses on the solid firmament and flat earth; he clearly maintained that day and night were due to the spinning of the earth on its own axis every twenty-four hours; his only extant work is “On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon,” wherein by rigorous and elegant geometry and reasoning he reached results inaccurate only because of the imperfect state of knowledge in his time. By exquisite calculations he added 1/1623 of a day to Callipsus’ estimate of 365 1/2 days for the length of the solar year; and is said to have invented a hemispherical sundial.

Hipparchus (c. 150 B.C.) made the first catalogue of stars, to the number of over 1,000; but his master achievement was the discovery and calculation of the “precession of the equinoxes” about 130 B.C. Without telescope or instruments, and with no Mosaic Manual on Astronomy to muddle his thought, by the powers of mathematical reasoning from observation he detected the complex movements of the earth, first in rapid rotation on its own axis, and a much slower circular and irregular movement around the region of the poles, which causes the equator to cut the plane of the ecliptic at a slightly different point each year; this he estimated at not more than fifty seconds of a degree each year, and that the forward revolution in “precession” was completed in about 26,000 years. Such are the powers of the human mind untrammeled by revelation.

Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), one of the most distinguished men of science who ever lived. He discovered the law of specific gravity, in connection with the fraudulent alloys put into Hiero’s crown; so excited was he when the thought struck him that, crying “Eureka” he jumped from his bath and ran home naked to proclaim the discovery. He discovered the laws governing the lever, and the principles of the pulley, and the famous endless water-screw used to this day in Egypt to raise water from the Nile for irrigation; he was the first to determine the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle, calculating pie to be smaller than 3-1/7 and greater than 3-10/71, which is pretty close for a heathen not having the “Book of Numbers” before him. He made other discoveries and inventions too numerous to relate; he disregarded his mechanical contrivances as beneath the dignity of pure science.

Euclid (c. 300 B.C.) is too well known for his “Principles of Geometry” to need more than mention. Erastosthenes (c. 276-194 B.C.) was the Librarian of the great Library of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, at Alexandria, containing some 700,000 volumes. He invented the imaginary lines, parallels of longitude and latitude, which adorn all our globes and maps to this day. Not knowing the revelation that the earth is flat, he measured its circumference. Noticing that a pillar set up at Alexandria cast a certain shadow at noon on the summer solstice, while a similar pillar at Syene cast no shadow at that time, and was thus on the tropic; he measured the distance between the two places, as 5,000 stadia, {264} about 574 miles; described a circle with a radius equal to the height of the pillar at Alexandria, found the length of the small are formed on it by the shadow, which was 1/50 of the circle, and represented the arc of the earth’s circle between Alexandria and Syene; multiplying the distance by 50 he obtained 28,700 miles as the circumference of the earth; a figure excessive due to mis-measurement, but a magnificent intellectual accomplishment. Erastosthenes was also the founder of scientific chronology, calculating the dates of the chief political and literary events back to the supposed time of the fall of Troy; a date quite as uncertain as that of the later birth of Jesus Christ from which the monk Dennis the Little essayed to fix the subsequent chronology of Christian history.

Hero of Alexandria (c. 130 B.C.) discovered the principle of the working-power of steam and devised the first steam-engines. In his Pneumatica he describes the aeolipyle, which may be called a primitive steam reaction turbine; he also mentions another device which may be described as the prototype of the pressure engine. (Encyc. Brit. xxi, 351-2.)

Strabo (c. 63 B.C.-19 A.D.), the most famous early geographer and a noted historian; he left a Geography of the world, as then known, in seventeen books, and made a map of the world; travelled over much of it, and described what be saw. From a comparison of the shape of Vesuvius, not then a “burning mountain,” with the active Etna, he forecast that it might some day become active, as it did in 79 A.D. to the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, described by the Roman philosopher and natural historian, Pliny, who overlooked the Star of Bethlehem, and the earthquake and eclipse of Calvary. Strabo was ignorant of the cosmogony of Moses and the Flood of Noah; so he declared that the fossil shells which he discovered in rocks far inland from the sea proved that those rocks had been formed under the sea by silt brought down by rivers, in which living shell animals had become embedded. If Moses had revealed this interesting fact, much human persecution and suffering would have been avoided.

The principles of Evolution were discovered and taught by most of the ancient Greek philosophers above named and many others, all of whom were profoundly ignorant of the cosmogony of Genesis, and who “endeavored to substitute a natural explanation of the cosmos for the old myths.” Anaximander (588-624 B.C.), though he had not read Genesis, anticipated to the very word “slime” used in the True Bible as the material of animal and human creation; “he introduced the idea of primordial terrestrial slime, a mixture of earth and water, from which, under the influence of the sun’s heat, plants, animals, and human beings were directly produced.” Empedocles of Agrigentum (495-435 B.C.) “may justly be called the father of the evolution idea. ... All organisms arose through the fortuitous play of the two great forces of Nature upon the four elements.” Anaxagoras (500-428) “was the first to trace the origin of animals and plants to preexisting germs in the air and ether.” Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), the first great naturalist, shows “in his four essays upon the parts, locomotion, generation, and vital principles of animals, that he fully understood adaptation in its modern sense; ... he rightly conceived of life as the function of the {265} organism, not as a separate principle; ... he develops the idea of purposive progresses in the development of bodily parts and functions.” The doctrine is very substantially developed by the Roman Lucretius, 99-55 B.C. (H.F. Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin, pp. 50, et seq.)

 The vital germs of virtually every modern science had thus their origin and some notable development in the fertile minds of the Greek thinkers and in their great schools of thought, in the centuries which preceded the Advent of the “Perfect Teacher” and his divinely instituted successors in school-craft. If these profound researches into Nature had been included in the Curriculum of the Church, rather than fire and sword employed to extirpate them and all who ventured to pursue them, Holy Church would not have had the “Dark Ages of Faith” to record and apologize for. To what perfection of Civilization and Knowledge might Humanity have arrived in these 2000 years wasted on the Supernatural, and the “Sacred Science of Christianity”! 

THE POWER THAT WAS ROME

 The Greeks with their brilliant culture and educational system lay for the most part remote from the Holy See of God’s Teacher-Church at Rome; so it may be that the environment of the Teacher was really in a region which lay in darkness and the shadow of death, and thus its divine efforts were thwarted and rendered desultory. Thus it becomes important to know the degree of intellectual darkness and incapacity which whelmed the Empire of the West. The tale may best be told in the words of its Inspired Tutor.

 “In striking contrast with the Greek character, that of the Romans was practical, utilitarian, grave, austere. Their religion was serious, and it permeated their whole life, hallowing all its relations. The family, especially, was far more sacred than in Sparta or Athens, and the position of woman as wife and mother more exalted and influential. ...

 “The ideal at which the Roman aimed was neither harmony nor happiness, but the performance of duty and the maintenance of his rights. Yet this ideal was to be realized through service to the State. Deep as was the family feeling, it was always subordinate to devotion to the public weal.‘ Parents are dear,’ said Cicero,‘ and children and kindred, but all loves are bound up in the love of our common country’

(De Officiis, I. 17). ...

“Thus the moral element predominated, and virtues of a practical sort were inculcated: first of all pietas, obedience to parents and to the gods; then prudence, fair dealing, courage, reverence, firmness, and earnestness. These qualities were to be developed, not by abstract or philosophical reasoning, but through the imitation of worthy models and, as far as possible of living concrete examples.‘ Vitae discimus, We learn for life,’ said Seneca; and this sentence sums up the whole purpose of Roman education—[in contrast to “We learn for heaven,” as we shall see the Christian ideal of education]. {266}

“In the course of time, elementary schools (ludi) were opened, but they were conducted by private teachers and were supplementary to the home instruction. About the middle of the third century B.C. foreign influences began to make themselves felt. The works of the Greeks were translated into Latin, Greek teachers were introduced, and schools established in which the educational characteristics of the Greeks reappeared. Under the direction of the literatus and the grammaticus education took on a literary character, while in the school of the rhetor the art of oratory was carefully cultivated.”

(CE. v, 298; see p. 358-9.) 

PAGAN CULTURAL RESULTS

“Pagan education, as a whole, with its ideals, successes, and failures, has a profound significance. It was the product of the highest human wisdom, speculative and practical, that the world has known—[thus confessedly, as the highest, higher than the Christian]. It pursued in turn the ideals that appeal most strongly to the human mind. It engaged the thought of the greatest philosophers and the action of the wisest legislators. Art, science, and literature were placed at its service, and the mighty influence of the State was exerted in its behalf. In itself, therefore, and in its results, it shows how much and how little human reason can accomplish when it seeks no guidance higher than itself and strives for no purposes other than those which find, or might find, their realization in the present phase of existence.”

(CE. v, 298.)

The splendors of the intellect and culture of Pagan Greece, its whole harmonious system of education, mental, moral and physical, which were the glory that was Greece, were transported thus to Rome and kindled anew there the torch of Reason which illumined and made splendid the power that was Rome. With clerical disparagement that all this intellectual and moral grandeur was accomplished by human reason alone with “no guidance higher than itself,” that is, without the heaven-endowed tutorship of priestcraft, CE. yet confesses, that “Pagan education ... was the product of the highest human wisdom ... that the world has ever known,” pursuing “the ideals that appeal most strongly to the human mind.” It was in literature and in law, in history, in government, and in the practical arts and sciences, rather than in pure science, that the Roman genius rose to its highest reaches. The undimmed lustre of the Roman mind yet casts its splendors over the world of thought; Roman law, “the action of the wisest legislators,” yet governs the actions of men and nations throughout the civilized world. A few illustrious names of universal renown must suffice to put into high relief the culture of Rome from the dawn of the Christian era till the pall of the Christian Ages of Faith fell over the Roman world. Augustus Caesar (not to mention Julius), Cicero, Cato, Seneca, the Plinys, Tacitus, Livy, Horace, Vergil, Lucretius, the Scipios, Gaius, Paulus, Papinian, Tribonius, Antoninius Pius, Marcus Aurelius; the roster may be mightily extended and every glorious name be known to every schoolboy.

Thus was the Pagan Roman world intellectually and morally illumined when there befell— {267}

THE CHRISTIAN AGE OF FAITH

under the tutelage of the vicars of the Perfect Teacher. The story again may be told by the accredited apologists who thus explain “The Aim of Christian Education,” in response to the Divine Command. All education for practical objects of this life, for all “purposes which might find their realization in the present phase of existence,” was piously and disdainfully rejected. For over a millennium, as will be soon admitted, Christian “education” was virtually limited to candidates for the priesthood and to the vain mummeries of monks; with few and straggling exceptions no one but a churchman was taught a word: the simple proof is, that scarce one person in a thousand of the population of Christendom except priests, could read or write his own name. The “education” of the Clergy will be known by its fruits, of which we shall have some tastes. Thus CE. discloses

THE AIM OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

“To these Apostles He gave the command, ‘Going therefore, teach ye all nations’ (Matt. xxviii, 19)—[a forged Mandate, as we have seen]. These [forged] words are the charter of the Christian Church as a teaching institution. While they refer directly to the doctrine of salvation, and therefore to the imparting of religious truth, they nevertheless, or rather by the very nature of that truth and its consequences for life, carry with them the obligation of insisting on certain characteristics which have a decisive bearing on all educational problems (p. 299-300). ...

 “Work of the Church. Apart from the preaching of the Apostles, the earliest form of Christian instruction was that given to the catechumens in preparation for baptism. Its object was twofold: to impart a knowledge of Christian truth, and to train the candidate in the practice of religion. ... Until the third century this mode of instruction was an important adjunct to the Apostolate; but in the fifth and sixth centuries it was gradually replaced by private instruction of the converts, and by the training given in other schools to those who had been baptized in infancy. The catechumenal schools, however, gave expression to the spirit which was to animate all subsequent Christian education: they were open to every one who accepted the Faith, and they united religious instruction with moral discipline. The‘ catechetical’ schools, also under the bishop’s supervision, prepared young clerics for the priesthood. The courses of study included philosophy and theology, and naturally took on an apologetic character in defense of Christian truth against the attacks of pagan learning. ...

 “Philosophy and literature were factors which had to be contended with as well as the educational system, which was still largely under pagan control. ... Fear of the corrupting influence of pagan literature had more and more alienated Christians from such studies. ... {268}

 “[In the Middle Ages] education was provided for the clergy in the cathedral schools under the direct control of the bishop and for the laity in parochial schools to which all had access—[but few availed thereof]. In the curriculum religion held the first place; other subjects were few and elementary, comprising at best the trivium and the quadrivium. ... [I cannot forbear to add this—The history of education records no greater undertaking; for the task was not that of improving or perfecting, [the brilliant system of pagan education], but of creating [the dull schools of religious instruction]; and had not the Church gone vigorously about her business, modern civilization would have been retarded for centuries [!]

 “The monasteries were the sole schools for teaching; they offered the only professional training; they were the only universities of research; they alone served as publishing houses for the multiplication of books; they were the only libraries for the preservation of learning; they produced the only scholars; they were the sole educational institutions of this period. ...

 “Two other movements form the climax of the Church’s activity during the Middle Ages. The development of Scholasticism meant the revival of Greek philosophy, and in particular that of Aristotle; but it also meant that philosophy was now to serve the cause of Christian truth. ... Having used the subtleties of Greek thought to sharpen the student’s mind, the Church thereupon presented to him her..

 “The same synthetic spirit took concrete form in the universities. ... In university teaching all the then known branches of science were represented. ... The university was thus, in the educational sphere, the highest expression of that completeness which had all along characterized the teaching of the Church.”

(CE. v, 299-303, passim.)

All these “universities were devoted for the most part to the development of theology.” (CE. vii, 368; i, 264.) The “greatest” of these Christian universities was that of Paris, which originated about 1211; “legends of foundation of universities by Alfred, Charlemagne, and Theodosius II, are myths. The students were not boys, but mature men, many clergy. ... Barbarous Latin of the universities and the wretched translations of Aristotle used in commentaries and lectures: the Scholastic method of teaching with its endless hair-splitting and disputations; much time was spent in gaining very little knowledge or hardly any value,” were the charges made by the new school of Humanists, headed by Erasmus, “Prince of Humanists,” which destroyed the old Christian ideals of education. (CE. xv, 194.)

The wonderful Middle Ages universities, so scorned by the Humanists of the Renaissance, and so fondly cherished by the Church, are not to be confounded in thought with such modernistic institutions as Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia or Harvard—(which all started on a purely “Christian” standard). A revealing pen- {269} sketch of them all, based on that of Paris, is drawn by Prof. James Harvey Robinson: “There were no university buildings, and in Paris the lectures were given in the Latin Quarter, in Straw Street, so called from the straw strewn on the floors of the hired rooms where the lecturer explained the text-book [a handwritten manuscript], with the students squatting on the floor before him. There were no laboratories, for there was no experimentation. All that was required was a copy of the text-book. This the lecturer explained sentence by sentence, and the students listened and sometimes took notes.

“The most striking peculiarity of the instruction of the medieval university was the supreme deference paid to Aristotle. ... Aristotle was, of course, a pagan. He was uncertain whether the soul existed after death; he had never heard of the Bible and knew nothing of the salvation of man through Christ. One would suppose that he would have been rejected with horror by the ardent Christian believers of the Middle Ages. But the teachers of the thirteenth century were fascinated by his logic and astonished at his learning. ... He was called‘ The Philosopher’; and so fully were scholars convinced that it had pleased God to permit Aristotle to say the last word upon each and every branch of knowledge that they humbly accepted him, along with the Bible, the Church Fathers, and the canon and Roman law, as one of the unquestionable authorities which together formed a complete and final guide for humanity in conduct and in every branch of science. ... No attention was given to the great subject of history in the medieval universities, nor was Greek taught.”

 (Robinson, The Ordeal of Civilization, pp. 207-208.)

The school of Erasmus and the other great Humanists who preceded and followed him brought the Renaissance to its fullness of glory in emancipating the mind from the fetters of the Dark Ages of Faith, and destroyed the rotten fruits of a millennium of “Christian education.” Thereupon, says CE., painfully confessing the truth, with reservations, once the schools were secularized, they fell rapidly under influences which transformed ideals, systems and methods. Philosophy detached from theology, formulated new theories of life and its values, that moved, at first slowly and then more rapidly, away from the positive teachings of Christianity. Science in turn cast off its allegiance to philosophy and finally proclaimed itself the only sort of knowledge worth seeking. ...

“During three centuries past, the main endeavor outside the Catholic Church has been to establish education on a purely naturalistic basis, whether this be aesthetic culture or scientific knowledge, individual perfection or social service. ... The Catholic Church has been obliged to carry on ... the struggle in behalf of those truths on which Christianity is founded; and her educational work during the modern period may be described in general terms as the steadfast maintenance of the union between the natural and the supernatural. ... It is specially the parochial school that has served in recent times as an essential factor in the work of religion. ... Sound moral instruction is impossible apart from religious education. ... Catholic parents are bound in {270} conscience to provide for the education of their children, either at home or in schools of the right sort.” (CE. v, 295-304, passim.) “Parochial schools ... aimed at fostering vocations to the priesthood.” (CE. xiii, 555.)

The high Christian educational ideal of fettering Reason with Faith, and the underlying objective of all Church teaching, is again strongly insisted upon by our spokesman for Christian education:

“The Christian Church, by virtue of her Divine charter,‘ Going, teach ye all nations,’ is essentially a teaching organization. ... Truths which are not of their nature spiritual, truths of science, or history, matters of culture, in a word, profane learning—these do not belong intrinsically to the pregame of the Church’s teaching. Nevertheless, they enter into her work by force of circumstances, when, namely, the Christian youth cannot attain a knowledge of them without incurring a grave danger to faith or morals. ... She assumes—[therefore, not divinely ordained to her, but self-arrogated]—the task of teaching the secular branches in such a way that religion is the centralizing, unifying, and vitalizing force in the educational process.”

(CE. xiii, 555.)

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A. THE MORAL “FRUITS” OF CHRISTIANITY 

THE CHRISTIAN “MORALITY LIE”

“Apart from Religion the observance of the Moral Law is impossible.” (CE. x, 559.)

 “The wonderful efficacy displayed by the religion of Christ in purifying the morals of Europe has no parallel.” (CE. iii, 34.)

 “Her holiness appears in the fruits which she brings forth.” (CE. iii, 759.)

The above gems of pious self-gratulation are culled from the plethoric treasure-chest of like paste jewels of ecclesiastical false pretense, and are set in high relief as tribute to the presumptuous genius of Pharisaism. A few more out of many may be displayed as a foil to what follows: “Sound moral instruction is impossible apart from religious education” (CE. v, 304),—though this seems to be discounted by this formal admission of the entire efficacy of purely secular ethic of Plato and the Pagans: “All moral conduct may be summed up in the rule: Avoid evil and do good” (CE. v, 28); and by this self-evident truth: “Material prosperity and a high degree of civilization may be found where the Church does not exist.” (CE. iii, 760.) Whether either of these highly beneficent conditions have been found where the Church in plenitude of power and pride did exist, will soon be disclosed. However, these disproofs to the contrary , “The Church has ever affirmed that the beliefs of Theism and morality are essentially connected, and that apart from religion the observance of the moral law is impossible.” (CE. x, 559.) {271}

 Yet we have just read from the teeming pages of CE. the glowing tributes to the morally “exalted ideals” of the Pagan Greeks, and that with the Pagan Romans “the moral element predominated”; that “Pagan education, as a whole, was the product of the highest human wisdom that the world has ever known,”—and withal without the Light of the Cross to illumine the Pagan mind and conscience. Indeed, in the next sentences after the last above, CE., waxing philosophical, belies fully its “Morality Lie” thesis, that “apart from religion the observance of the moral law is impossible,” by this explicit admission of the natural source and origin of Morality: “The Church admits that the moral law is knowable to reason: for the due regulation of our free actions, in which morality consists, is simply their right ordering with a view to the perfecting of our rational nature. ... The Greeks of classical times were in moral questions influenced rather by non-religious conceptions such as that of natural shame than the fear of the gods; while one great religious system, namely Buddhism, explicitly taught the entire independence of the moral code from any belief in God.” (CE. x, 559.) We shall wonder, as we read the Christian record, how far the “beliefs of Theism” make for morality in higher or more wholesome degree than “the entire independence of the moral code from any belief in God.” Morals is from mores, “custom”; it is social, not supernatural in origin; humanly conventional, not of divine imposition and sanction. The “morals,” customs, of an age or a people depend always on what is then regarded as socially convenient, on the character of education and example given by their preceptors and their environment.

The foregoing clerical admissions of the purely natural origin and sanctions of morals, of the Moral Law, are perfectly valid and convincing; a more formal and incontrovertible statement of the fact and the principle, taken from a special study of the subject, under the title “Ethics” in CE., by a Jesuit Professor of Moral Philosophy, is added for the complete refutation of the Christian “Morality Lie”:

”Morality, or sum of prescriptions which govern moral conduct. ... Ethics takes its origin from the empirical fact that certain general principles and concepts of the moral order are common to all peoples at all times. ... It is a universally recognized principle that we should not do to others what we would not wish them to do to us. ... The general practical judgments and principles:‘ Do good and avoid evil,’‘ Lead a life according to reason,’ etc., from which all the Commandments of the Decalogue are derived, are the basis of the natural law, of which St. Paul (Rom. ii, 14) says, it is written in the hearts of all men, made known to all men by nature herself.”

 (CE. v, 557, 562.)

It is because only of the nauseating persistence of the dingdonging of this pestilent “Christian Morality Lie,” by priest, parson and press, that the loathsome record of the unparalleled moral corruption of the Church and of Christendom under the Church, is here in very summary and imperfect manner displayed in refutation of this immense False Pretense. It rings false from every pulpit and Christian apologist today as it has through all the centuries of Creed and Crime of the Church. Here in thumbnail {272} sketch is the summary of Christian results after a millennium of undisputed moral sway: “The Church was the guide of the Western nations from the close of the seventh century to the beginning of the sixteenth” (CE. vii, 370); and for result: “At the beginning of the Reformation, the condition of the clergy, and consequently of the people, was a very sad one. ... The unfortunate state of the clergy, their corrupt morals.” (CE. vii, 387.) “The Lateran was spoken of as a brothel, and the moral corruption of Rome became the subject of general odium.” (CE. viii, 426.) That there may be no mistake about the insistent pretense of the Church to teach and impose morality, “The Roman Pontiffs have always, as their office demands, guarded the Christian faith and morals,” as admitted by the Apostolic Letter of His Holiness Pius IX, dated June 29, 1868, by which he summoned the celebrated Vatican Council which decreed Papal Infallibility in all matters of faith and morals. (CE. i, 176.) Therefore it was, that “the Church of the Middle Ages, having now attained to power, continued through her priests to propagate the Gospel. ... In the wake of religion follows her inseparable companion, morality.” (CE. xii, 418.) We shall now see the Church at work for morality and the moral “fruits” of Christianity through the Dark Ages of Faith. “Those were indeed golden days for the ecclesiastical profession, since the credulity of men reached a height which seemed to insure to the clergy a long and universal dominion,—until the prospects of the Church were suddenly darkened, and human reason began to rebel ... with the rise of that secular and skeptical spirit to which European civilization owes its origin,” as Buckle says and demonstrates and I will briefly sketch, after first letting CE. reveal facts which are the harvest-fruits of Christian Morality.

How, then, are we surprised to read the official confession, that these same Middle Ages were, of all human epochs, “an age of terrible corruption and social decadence”? (CE. i, 318.) Surely the good cleric who penned these shaming words was a moral dyspeptic or must have developed a pessimistic in-growing conscience. We turn the pages of this ponderous Apology for the Faith to find the records of Church history giving the lie to this scandalous and disgraceful confession. There are fifteen great quarto tomes of CE., of over 700 double-column pages each; and surely if this confession is mistaken or untrue, the glorious facts of Church morality, its ever-radiant and redolent “sweetness and light,” which cannot be hid, will be made manifest for the confusion of those who might mock over this confession. The following paragraphs are the gleanings from just one, the first, of these fifteen volumes, recording the sacred history of the Church, in which “her holiness appears in the fruits which she brings forth,” as therein preserved, and unparalleled “in purifying the morals of Europe” for fifteen centuries and more under her undisputed moral sway. In this one sample volume is the true assay of the “fruits” conserved in them all; a typical cross-section of Church history. Multiply by fifteen the product of these revelations of the “fruits which she brings forth,” and even the most unregenerate critic of Christianity must agree with CE, that “the wonderful efficacy of the religion of Christ in purifying the morals of Europe has no parallel” in any religion or history known to mankind. The following passages are word for word from Volume I—(unless otherwise indicated),—of the Catholic Encyclopedia, arranged {273} roughly in chronological order, through part only of one letter of the Alphabet. They give thus a sort of segmentary cross-cut and bird’s-eye-view of the moral and social conditions of Christendom through the centuries, with quite imperfect glimpses of that sweet charity one to another which distinguishes those who love their enemies—in the fashion of King Richard to his brother: “For I do love my brother Clarence so, That I would see his sweet soul In the bosom of good old Abraham!”

Countless instances of Christian “morality” we have already seen in the myriad holy forgeries of the Church throughout fifteen centuries; again are confessed “the many apocryphal [forged] writings in the first five centuries of the Christian era.” (CE. i, 132.) Whoever would forge for Christ’s sake or his own profit would as readily commit any other crime for the same ends, as we shall see to the limit of abhorrence. But the predilect perversity of the Christians clerical and lay, was the “lusts of the flesh,” that distinctive “crime” so proscribed and so practiced by the expounders of “Christian virtue,” and the “inseparable companion” of the most religious. That “sex-scandals” were rampant in the earliest days of the several infant Churches is manifest in quite all of the second-century Epistles of the New Testament, as any one may read unto edification. The Agape, or Christian “love feast” was all its name implies; it was “a form of ancient Pagan funeral feast. From the fourth century onward ... the agape gave rise to flagrant and intolerable abuses” (i, 202). From the first century, “the Agapeta, were virgins who consecrated themselves to God with a vow of chastity and associated with laymen, who like themselves had taken a vow of chastity. ... It resulted in abuses and scandals. ... St. Jerome [about 400] asked indignantly,‘ Why was this pest of Agapette introduced into the Church?’ St. Cyprian shows that abuses of this kind developed in Africa and the East. The Council of Ancyra, in 314, forbade virgins consecrated to God to thus live with men as sisters. This did not correct the practice entirely, for St. Jerome arraigns Syrian monks for living in cities with Christian virgins. These Agapetae are sometimes confounded with the Subintroductae, or women who lived with clerics without marriage.” (202.)

St. Cyprian, On the State of the Church, just before the Decian persecution (e. 250), admits: “There was no true devotion in the priests. ... That the simple w