God and His Book/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX.
Acquaintance with God's Book—The Assault not upon the Bible's Own Pretensions, but upon the Pretensions Made for it—Two "Creations," the First by the Gods, the Second by the Lord—Reconcilement of the Two Conflicting Accounts—Woman Made in the Dark—The Damnation-Trap in Eden—The Question.
I am no bigot for or against his Book, being neither Protestant nor Papist; and I simply wish to give the Ghost fair play as an author. I have said little about the merits of his work; but that is not because they, such as they are, have escaped my recognition. From my earliest boyhood I have been steeped in the writings of the Ghost. As a child, I had heard of the Waters of Babel in Babylonia before I had heard of the Water of Dee in my own Galloway. For long, Jordan was a more familiar word than Clyde; and I knew of Carmel and Olivet years before I had heard of Cairngorm and Ben Nevis. I could tell all about Adoption, Sanctification, and Redemption before I knew the genitive from the dative, before I had heard of the Equator or could tell how many roods there were in an acre. I was suckled upon "the milk of the word;" I was dandled on the knee of the Virgin Mary; and the linen that enshrouded the corpse of Jesus was my swaddling clothes. Before I had as yet learnt to read I could recite from memory some dozens of the "psalms of David." In my native moorlands the echo of the voices of the Covenanters had hardly as yet died away. Tradition fondly nursed the martyrs' memory; I beheld their graves in the grey cairns, and the burn wimpling over the pebbles murmured their dirge. The plaided shepherd on the hill-side spake of them, and so did the miry-footed ploughman on the furrowed field.
Every one knew the Bible. The buirdly farmer read it night and morning regularly, summer and winter, to his family and servants; and the lone old woman stopped her wheel to read it in her thatched cot miles away on the moor among the peats, the heather, and the pee-wheets. They were familiar with Moses who had never heard of Robert Peel, and they were intimate with the Siege of Jericho who knew nothing of the Siege of Badajos. David was not only King of Israel; he was, practically, King of rural Scotland. Never by the Waters of Babel were the Songs of Zion sung more devoutly than by the Nith and the Cairn.
A remnant of Covenanting times, the phraseology of the Bible entered into the parlance of ordinary life, always solemnly, never irreverently. This custom sank deep into my childhood's speech, and subsequently into my literary style. I have read many, many books now besides the Bible; but its English and its forms of expression are even yet the bed-rock upon which the edifice of my diction stands. Those who know me know that I am neither irreverent nor ungrateful. The book that inspired my earliest awe does not lightly provoke my most recent scoff. A book from which I learnt so much—from which, at my mother's knee, I learnt how to read, does not find me an ungrateful recipient of its blessings and benefits. I know its antique nooks of familiar quaintness; I know its glimpses into the simple heart of the olden world; I know its curious tales and fascinating incidents; I know how the comet of its history trails its tail through a chaos of legendary mist; I know the magnificent fervour of its devotional passages; I know the artless simplicity of its prose; I know the lurid thunder-light of its poetry; I know its piping times of peace by the Jordan or the Kedron; I know its fury of fire and sword, the army of the Lord of Hosts, the rush of the chariot, the thrust of the spear; the buckler, the javelin, and garments rolled in blood.
It is not the Bible and the pretensions it makes for itself that I assail; it is the Bible and the pretensions in regard to it put forth by Protestant Christianity. Taken for what it really is—a collection of more or less connected tracts belonging to times more or less remote, and reflecting as it does the deed and motive of ages and races that are no more—it is a deeply-interesting antiquarian study. But here its use and its merit end. That there is anything divine and supernatural about it more than there are about the Vedas and the Koran and the Times newspaper is an utterly untenable hypothesis. When, a century or two hence, the student looks back upon it, all the warping prejudices in its favour forgotten, it will be to him all but incredible that such a bundle of heterogeneous tracts was ever regarded as one homogeneous volume, upon which a definite religious system could be founded. It will appear to him that the impudence and ingenuity which could find a religious system in such a mass of self-contradicting platitude and exploded absurdity could have found a religious system in a wheel-barrow or in a bag of nails.
I have no irreverence for the Bible and its God, as the Bible and its God. It and he were the natural evolutionary product and index of a remote and half-barbarous time. The Bible as the Bible and Jehovah as Jehovah I cannot treat with disrespect. It would be quite as legitimate to heap ridicule upon the fact that I had to creep before I had learnt to walk. The Bible and Jehovah are interesting relics of the cradle upon which the baby-world leant before it had strength to stand. I have no quarrel with those quaint old relics, per se; but when I find that the world would still lean upon them after all these long and weary centuries, in the interests of the human race I do my best to dash the relics to splinters. It is not the Book and the God, in themselves, that provoke my enmity; it is the pretensions put forward on their behalf by an interested priesthood. These pretensions must excite in every man who is a patriot and a friend of his race feelings of repugnance and aversion. I meet these Protestant pretensions with the most cruel laugh of derision, with the most venomous stab of hatred.
As I may possibly have to spend eternity with him, may I respectfully ask Jehovah a question or two which are personal, but, I trust, not impertinent? How many Gods was he originally, and in what mysterious hiatus between the first and second chapter of Genesis did he get altered from being a plurality of Gods into one God? In the first verse of the Ghost's book we find it was Elohim (the gods) who "created the heaven and the earth." But, in the fourth verse of the second chapter, we find that it was not the Gods, but the Lord God, or Jehovah, who started the universe. It requires no ripe scholarship to recognise this. All preachers except those of the unlearned Booth and Spurgeon order are aware of the discrepancy to which I refer; but the admission of it would not comport with the interests of their business of gospel-grinding, so they are dishonestly silent. One passage of Scripture they never for a moment forget—the passage which states that the Tree of Knowledge bears "Forbidden Fruit." Dispel ignorance and set the dupes of Christianity on the path of earnest and honest inquiry, and the occupation of the priest is gone. It would never do to impress it upon pious Mr. John Smith, nonconformist and cheesemonger, that the gods created the heaven and the earth, and that subsequently the Lord God created them over again. If it were to be impressed upon Mr. Smith that the heaven and the earth were "created" twice over, first by a plurality of gods and next by a single god, he might stop his pew-rents, and cease to drag to the local Bethel his frump of a wife, Mary Anne, and his giglet of a daughter, Araminta. A god more or less or a world more or less would be a small thing to the parson compared with Mr. J. Smith ceasing to pay his pew-rents and to air off sacredly the Lord's-Day haberdashery upon his Mary Anne and his Araminta. Every kind of parson except the Spurgeon and street-corner kind knows that the heaven and the earth were "created" by the gods; but, for their salary's sake, they are prepared to suppress this knowledge. Some of those Most Low valets of the Most High have only about £100 per annum. So, for this £100 per annum, they, all their lives, read the very first line of the Bible erroneously, making one god where there are several gods. The Ghost goes in for polytheism; but Christian theology goes in for monotheism, and the Ghost is made a monotheist whether he will or not. The Ghost tells us that the gods "created" this planet ; but the parsons know better than the poor ignorant Ghost, and put him right on the subject. They were, of course, present at the "Creation," and saw how the thing was done and how many gods were engaged in it, and this gives them full warranty to correct the Ghost in the very first line he has written.
When the parsons are found out, when even their dupe, Mr. J. Smith, stops cutting cheese with a wire to ask how the blazes it came about that the world was "created" by a batch of gods, and then, in next chapter, "created" over again by a solitary but exceedingly clever God, the poor spider that spins prayers will concoct some stupidly ingenious answer. He will very likely contend that, like a reaping machine, God, with a big G, consists of a great number of parts, and that, finding that he had before him the tough job of "creating" the universe, he screwed himself to pieces that he might the more readily accomplish the task. When he "created" the world for the second time, knowing that the job would be easier this time, he gathered up his disjecta membra, and screwed himself together, so as to make one compact and good-sized God. "My Christian brethren, this is the explanation. Wicked Infidels, in their lack of the spirit of God dwelling within them, cannot see this beautiful manifestation of divine power, for it is spiritually discerned. Dear brothers and sisters in the Lord, it is simply a matter of divine screwing and unscrewing. In the first chapter of his own Holy Word God is not screwed, in the second chapter he is screwed. And whatsoever he screweth in heaven, it shall be screwed unto him; and whatsoever he screweth on earth it shall be screwed into him again. Forever blessed be his holy name. Let us pray." And Mr. J. Smith will be satisfied with the explanation, and his Mary Anne and his Araminta will be more than satisfied. Every day in the year the Christian clergy give their congregations explanations more preposterous than this; and the congregations accept such explanations and pay for them; for God made man only a little lower than the angel—the angel being, most probably, a misprint for the ass.
The gods in the first chapter of Genesis seem to have "created" a rather better universe than the god "created" in the second chapter of Genesis. The god forgot in this second "creation" to make the sun, moon, and stars. But the gods in the first creation had "made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night," and "the stars also." It was the second "creation" that went in for the rib business, and the performing of the surgical operation upon Adam while he slept. God seems to have been so absorbed in this feat that he forgot to "create" the sun, moon, and stars. So, out of the rib, woman must have been made in the dark. It has often occurred to me that she is not all she should be; but, considering that she was made out of a rib, and in the dark, I must admit that she is a really wonderful performance. If in the second "creation" Jehovah had not been in such a hurry to make her that he forgot to "create" the sun, God only knows what she would have been like! Even as it is, she is the best thing he has ever made. And all out of a rib and in the dark! I am constrained to admit that the Lord is not without a certain amount of cleverness.
Still harping on woman, the Lord forgot, in the second "creation," to make fish as well as the sun, moon, and stars. I sympathise with him: if you get your head thoroughly taken up about a woman, you are apt to forget a great many things you would do better to remember. The Lord, however, remembered to make a great many birds and animals generally. He took it into his head that he would like to hear what Adam would call them; so he sent them up in droves before Adam to have them named. How the Lord found them in the dark is not stated; and how Adam saw them in the dark the divine penman sayeth not. Possibly Adam felt them in order that he might give them appropriate names. Feeling the lion, especially about the jaws, must have been highly interesting; feeling the business end of the wasp would be a trifle exciting; and, as he felt the cobra, that hospitable worthy would anoint him with mucus and invite him to go inside. The laughter of Jehovah must have shaken the darkness as he heard Adam naming the tiger—and the tiger naming Adam. But all things, including all future inventions, were known to the Omniscient, so he possibly struck a lucifer on his boot that Adam might see not to meddle too freely with the tails of such creatures as the scorpion. There are a few trifles connected with this first and second "creation" that are not quite clear to me, and, if Jehovah would enlighten me on the subject a little just now, it might prevent my troubling him by putting questions to him when I get into Abraham's bosom. He, it would seem from the second chapter of Genesis, made woman in the dark, and, up to this time, he has kept me completely in the dark as to how he did it.
I should regret to be considered troublesome; but I should like to ask Jehovah one or two more trifling questions, the answers to which might put himself and myself on less strained relationships than at present exist between us. If he do not care to roar at me all the way down from the kingdom of heaven, stunning Rahab and alarming "the Lamb's wife," a still small voice, if it speak sense, will quite satisfy me. He may address me some night after I am in bed. I am sure to know his voice instantly from that of bellicose and amatory cats in the back yard, and I will at once get up on my elbow and say, "Speak Lord, for thy servant heareth thee."
1. We learn from the Ghost's Book that Adam and Eve "heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day." Does the voice of the Lord God often walk in gardens and elsewhere, and does it wear Wellington boots?
2. Was it from the pigeons at Hurlingham, that are hatched to be shot, that Jehovah caught the idea of "creating" man to be cursed? Did Jehovah derive great pleasure from the cursing of the two poor featherless bipeds, Adam and Eve? Is it the favourite recreation of a God to place two weak, silly creatures in a garden, when, in that garden, he has placed a damnation-trap and baited it with an apple, knowing well that his two poor children would munch at the apple, and thereby spring the damnation-trap, letting its terrible teeth cut through their flesh and rasp upon their bones, and upon the bones of generations yet unborn? When I get to heaven am I to be imbued with tastes which will enable me to delight in this sort of thing? If yes, would I not be a trifle better in hell, and, if possible, even further my God from thee?
3. The trap sprang upon the two rabbits in Eden, and it was some 4,000 years before anything was done to take its iron out of their flesh, to take its teeth out of their bones. Is this a specimen of "loving kindness and tender mercy" as the expression is understood in heaven? Did the monotheos take 4,000 years to unscrew himself into segments, and send down the third part of himself to see what could be done by way of atoning for the snapping of that trap in Eden? What a clumsily-constructed monotheos! I could unscrew a tricycle to pieces in four minutes. It apparently takes 4,000 years to screw a God into three. It shall take less than 4,000 years now, however, to screw this deity out of existence. Have not men eaten of the "forbidden fruit" of the tree of Knowledge, and is not the fact screwing Jehovah's neck?
4. After the third part did come down here to see what could be done for the limbs which had been broken in Eden's patent damnation-trap, could he, she, or it not have set about the task in a more sensible fashion? Tramping about in an obscure and outlandish corner of the world, accompanied by twelve yokels and a few huzzies, and talking communism and nonsense, was, to put it mildly, a roundabout way of breaking the rusty iron and the gory teeth of that trap in which all creation groaned. This third part of God lived as long as it could, and died when it could not help it; and I am rather anxious to know what this had to do with the redemption of mankind. Had not the last blossom that fell from the apple tree, has not every snow-drop that holds out its white cup to catch the dew, has not every flake of thistle-down which the wind blows over the field, as much to do with the redemption of man as had the life and death of that poor peasant of Palestine? Answer me, O God; and you can answer me only one way, unless you be as priest-cursed and credulous as the bipeds down here who are half-blind to the glory of thy creation, living as they do in a fantastic and horror-haunted creation of their own brain. Send us common sense, O God, and keep thy "only begotten son" to thyself, and make a kirk and mill of him. Will you only do this, Lord God, and you and I will be friends forever.
5. That last question is my main one. Will you not expose this redemption sham and enjoin upon man to gird up his loins and redeem himself? For Godsake turn his eyes away from that well-meaning rustic who may or may not have been crucified some 2,000 years ago. Direct man to rely upon righteousness and love and high endeavour to redeem himself from crime and sorrow and man's inhumanity to man. Will you do this? This is my question, and the other trifles I hardly care whether you answer or no. Do not answer them if it give you the least trouble. But, if drawing your attention to the matter does not inconvenience you, you might be good enough to say whether the exhumation of certain tablets in Assyria does not prove that the Sabbath you instituted when you had done "creating" the world was not known in the world centuries before either you or your friend Moses were in existence ? According to your Book, it is only 6,000 years since you "created" the world, and it can be proved that the Sabbath was celebrated in that part of the world known as Assyria long before the world was "created" and before Jehovah had been invented. How do you account for this? If you cannot make it out, ask David. If he cannot answer you, ask Sarah. Anachronism! Poor God!—Man was in the world long before you were, and he will be in it long after you are dead.