Chapter 7
Joseph Wheless
82 page printout, pages 238 to 319 of 322
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.
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
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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 aseendeth
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.
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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;
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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
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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 (313)
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.)
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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
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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
codifleations 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 (313) 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.)
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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.)
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"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
"Pagan Rites Forbidden and Bequests for Pagan Cults
Prohibited." (Cod. Just. i, 11, 9; 472.)
"Baptized Persons who follow Pagan Practices to Suffer Death.
Provisions for the Conversion of the Unbaptized. Pagans Forbidden
to Give Instruction." (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
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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 Pious 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
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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
guilele 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
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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 wrathing "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:
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"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: Apostacy 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
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of the Clergy in all countries, after they have solicited the
government to make penal laws against those they call heretics, or
schismaties, 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
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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 commttitur, 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
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oblivion] -- under the anathema of the guardians of the
deporecorded: "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
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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
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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. ...
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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 objeit, 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.)
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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
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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
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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.
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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
Prophylaea, 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 Belvidere, 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 resop, 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
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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
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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. Therle 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
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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 Stagarite, 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.
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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. Erastostlienes (c. 276-194
B.C.) was the Librarian of the great Library of Ptolemy II
Philadelpbus, 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,
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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." Empedoeles 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
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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].
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"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
gramniaticus 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 --
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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). ...
"The Educational 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. ...
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"[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
dogmas without the least fear of contradiction. ...
"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-
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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
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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.)
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.)
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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
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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 conscie
