God and His Book/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII.
The Lord "Creating" More than he Knew of—The Living Organisms in Thames Water Praising the Lord—Jehovah "Created" Worlds without Knowing it—We "Created" God—Jehovah has Served his Purpose and Become Obsolete—A Roll of Dead Gods.
I have, O Lord, drawn your attention to the fact that, when you did, in the fulness of time, take to "creating" you "created" a good deal more than you were aware of. I have ventured to bring it under your notice that you "created" America, and that, when your son and the devil went to the top of the high mountain to survey all the kingdoms of the earth, neither of them seems to have had any notion that the earth was round, and that it was of such prodigious dimensions. Neither your son nor the devil knew of America. I am not quite sure that your son knows of it yet; but I could produce some proofs that the devil knows of it full well.
Without going as far as America, may I suggest to you that, at my very door, there are countless trillions of creatures that you, judging from your Book, do not seem to know you "created"? O Lord, you know the Thames? From the banks of that river you have had several shaky saints, including Charles Peace, Esq. If you wish to know some particulars about the Thames, ask them.
Well, in the Thames there is water. May I remind you what water is? You will remember what it is when I recall it to your recollection that you once drowned the world with it. What I wish to bring under your notice is the fact that a cubic centimetre of Thames water has been found to contain upwards of 4,000,000 of living organisms! In your Book you speak of cubits, but never mention centimetres, so I may explain to you that a centimetre is less than four-tenths of an inch; so that a cubic inch would contain more than sixteen times as many, or upwards of 64,000,000 of living organisms. These beasts, some of them as outlandish and terrible as the apocalyptic beasts round your white throne, do not live in peace, but fight as if they were Christians. They actually swallow each other; and, O Lord, you have so constructed me that I swallow the lot every time I taste water. Come, now; you do not mean to tell me that, when you wrote your Book, you knew you had "created" the utterly incalculable myriads of living organisms that inhabit even a cubic foot of the world's many cubic miles of water? When your son cursed the fig-tree was he aware that every leaf which he shrivelled up and withered was a densely-peopled world, and that, by drying up the sap of that tree, he destroyed more of your creatures than there were of men, women, and children on the face of the earth?
When you had done with the "creation" you pronounced it "all very good." What would you have said, O Lord, if you had had even a faint idea of what you had really done? No wonder that you rested from your work. No wonder you have done nothing since. "God does nothing," complained the late Mr. Thomas Carlyle. I do not complain that he does nothing; as far as I can judge, he has already done too much. "All thy creatures praise thee," O Lord. I hereby present to you the portraits of a few of your creatures that "praise thee," and of whose existence I make bold to say yon were not aware when, in your Book, you wrote down the two accounts of "creation," and which two accounts, in proof of their divine truth, conflict with and contradict each other:—
The circle thou beholdest representeth, O Lord, a magnified drop of Thames water. What think you of the praises of that square-built creature with the long neck and the two forks? How like you the prayer of that ugly worm near the centre? How like you a hymn from that dot to the left, and a doxology from that dash below it? How like you hallelujahs from that star-of-Bethlehem-looking creature at the top, and hosannas from that cart-wheel-looking thing at the bottom?
When you wrote your Book, O Lord, you had no idea that these things praised you. Since I have had the honour to point out to you that so many queer wastrels praise you, perhaps, out of gratitude, you will excuse me from praising you. Be that as it may, it is clear that, if I do not provide myself with a filter, you and I must meet at an early date. I am in no hurry to meet you. I am a water-drinker, O Lord; but giving me water like this is enough to drive me to drinking whiskey. The best way to keep out of the kingdom of heaven is to use only distilled water. But the distillation of even a cup of water entails the death of millions of those worms and dots and stars and cart-wheels that "praise thee." Who am I that I should live when my life entails the death of millions? I do not know that your son died to save us; but the dots and cart-wheels do die to save us. Why should not we die to save them? As far as I am able to judge, there has been a good deal of work expended upon them. I should say that some of them are as wonderfully got up as I am; and on some of them you appear to have taken far more pains than you have taken on me. Adam named all the beasts. What did he name that brute near the centre? Perhaps these creatures were the handiwork of Melchisedek. He, like you, had no "beginning of days;" and, sitting through the silence and loneliness of the eternity that elapsed before the creation of the world, he may have amused himself by "creating" that which now amazes me, and which possibly, O Lord, amazes you.
O Lord, while I am on the subject of creation, may I be pardoned for drawing your attention to the fact that you not only "created" animalcule of which you were ignorant, but boundless and numerous worlds of which you knew nothing. You have turned out to be a far, far cleverer God than you thought you were. You "created" the Earth on the first day; while, on the third day, you, apparently as the result of an after-thought, "created" the Sun, Moon, and Stars, just as a sort of lamps to give light to the Earth. You seem to have had no idea that you had "created" the lamps vastly bigger and grander than the object they were "created" to light. Just read the following few lines, O Lord, and you will see what I mean:—
This earth is nearly eight thousand miles in diameter. You, when you wrote your Book, supposed the earth to have been flat and immovable, resting on four corners. The Christian theologians believed that theory down to the day when Galileo and Bruno declared the world was round, and moved, and Bruno was put to death. They continued in that belief even down to the day of Columbus, whom they caused to be imprisoned as a heretic for espousing the Copernican system that the world moved, thereby contradicting the Bible. The sun, the centre of our planetary system, and which is represented to have been made after our earth to give light to it, is nearly ninety-five millions of miles from us. Its magnitude is one million four hundred thousand times greater than that of the earth.
More than ninety members of the group of asteroids, planets exterior to the orbit of Mars, have been discovered; while Jupiter, the first planet exterior to the asteroids, is nearly five hundred millions of miles from the sun; it is ninety thousand miles in diameter, and is attended by four moons or satellites. Saturn's orbit is four hundred millions of miles beyond Jupiter, and is attended by eight moons or satellites; while Uranus is double the distance of Saturn. Neptune is the most remote known member of the planetary system, its distance being nearly three thousand millions of miles. A cannon ball flying at the rate of five hundred miles per hour would not reach the orbit of Neptune from the sun in less than six hundred and eighty years.
The appearance of more than seven hundred comets belonging to our system has been recorded. These are new worlds thrown off from the sun, in gaseous form, travelling through space for millions of ages before assuming a solid form or producing vegetation; and this was the process our earth had to pass through. In gazing beyond the planets we behold millions of stars, all worlds, many of far greater magnitude than ours, while far beyond these and Neptune are other solar systems of worlds stretching out through illimitable space.
You "created" not these, O God; but we created you. You are made in the image of man; in the image of man are you made. Long ago ye were made out of the mists of our ignorance ; ye were dyed in the streams of our blood. We knew little of the expanse and glory of the subjective and objective world. But, even in our rude savagery, the stale contingencies of life were too narrow for us; and, in the incipient longings of our immortal energies, we invented you. We made you rude as the stone cairn we piled over our dead, and gory as the axe with which we did battle with our foes. You were then the best god we were capable of making. And that we had even a god like you kept alive in our hearts the vestal flame of aspiration and hope, and differentiated us from the steed that obeyed our bridle and the boar overthrown by our spear.
Even you, O God, rude as we had made you, were yet the highest line on the shore to which the tide-mark of our thought had risen—the loftiest cloud whose fringe had ever been touched by the white wings of our hope. You gave a depth and meaning to the busy day and the melancholy night while we were yet strangers to the march of thought and the discipline of schools. The lightning was the gleam of your sword, the thunder was the battle-cry of God. You are not framed, O Jehovah, for the age when the steam-engine rushes through the glens and crashes through the bowels of the everlasting hills; when, on the wings of the lightning, we speed our messages over the nations of the continents and under the billows of the oceans; and when the press lays at the feet of the humblest the mind-wealth of the world. Such an era needs not, and never would have framed, a god like you.
We are parting company with you, Jehovah, impelled to do so by the civilisation of mankind rising to loftier levels. You have played your part, and now we must play ours; and, in the interests of our race, argue you and jeer you out of the world. But we are students of history and anthropology, and we are not ungrateful. There lies an awe under our levity and a solemnity under our ridicule. We have tender reminiscences of the days when the world was young, of the dim and stormy flight of ages stretching between Abraham and Ur of the Chaldees and the day that Columba founded you a Church on Iona's lonely isle. You have waded with our fathers through rivers of blood and lakes of fire when, on the pillars of carnage, rested the thrones of the world. You were their guardian, God, in their few days of peace when the sun glinted down through the forest leaves, and when the hills lay dreaming under the silent stars. Your blessing was invoked over the cradles of our sires, and your benison over their graves. In old churchyards, and in churchyards which the dead never enter now, but which are streets over which the feet and wheels of commerce clash and whirl, there are memories and relics of you. We dig down to the broken marbles and the ancient graves, and we find references to your Book and you mixed up with the epitaphs of our ephemeral and our immortal dead. The blood that runs in our veins is drawn from those who lie under the ancient and broken gravestones that call you God. And the wedded love of the mothers of our race for more than a thousand years has been, in your name, consecrated at the altar, and the fruits of their love in baptism offered to you. And yet we must desert you, O God, even as we deserted other deities to worship you.
"In the vast cemetery, called the Past, are most of the religions of men, and there, too, are nearly all their gods. The sacred temples of India were ruins long ago. Over column and cornice, over the painted and pictured walls, cling and creep the trailing vines. Brahma, the golden: Vishnu, the sombre, the punisher of the wicked with his three eyes, his crescent, and his necklace of skulls; Siva, the destroyer, red with seas of blood; Kali, the goddess; Draupadi, the white-armed, and Chrishna the Christ, all passed away and left the thrones of heaven desolate. Along the banks of the sacred Nile, Isis no longer wandering weeps, searching for the dead Osiris The shadow of Typhon's scowl falls no more upon the waves. The sun rises as of yore, and his golden beams still smite the lips of Memnon; but Memnon is as voiceless as the sphinx. The sacred fanes are lost in desert sands; the dusty mummies are still waiting for the resurrection promised by the priests, and the old beliefs, wrought in curiously-sculptured stone, sleep in the mystery of a language lost and dead. Odin, the author of life and soul, Vili and Ve, and the mighty giant Ymir, strode long ago from the ice halls of the North; and Thor, with iron glove and hammer, dashes mountains to the earth no more. Broken are the circles and cromlechs of the ancient Druids; fallen upon the summits of the hills, and covered with the centuries' moss, are the sacred cairns. The divine fires of Persia and of the Aztecs have died out in the ashes of the past, and there is none to rekindle and none to feed the holy flames. The harp of Orpheus is still….. The gods have flown from the high Olympus……Hushed forever are the thunders of Sinai; lost are the voices of the prophets, and the land once flowing with milk and honey is but a desert waste. One by one the myths have faded and the phantom host has disappeared; and, one by open, facts, truths, and realities have taken their places. The supernatural has almost gone, but the natural remains. The gods have fled, but man is here. Nations, like individuals, have their periods of youth, of manhood, of decay. Religions are the same. The same inexorable destiny awaits them all. The gods created with the nations must perish with their creators. They were created by men, and, like men, they must pass away. The deities of one age are the byewords of the next. The religion of our day and country is no more exempt from the sneer of the future than the others have been. When India was supreme, Brahma sat upon the world's throne. When the sceptre passed to Egypt, Isis and Osiris received the homage of mankind. Greece, with her fierce valour, swept to empire, and Zeus put on the purple of authority. The earth trembled with the tread of Rome's intrepid sons, and Jove grasped with mailed hand the thunderbolts of heaven. Rome fell, and Christians, from her territory, with the red sword of war, carved out the ruling nations of the world; and now Jehovah sits upon the old throne. Who will be his successor?"[1]
- ↑ R. G. Ingersoll.