"Bi 
 
 2.H 
 
 ECUS 
 MPHLETS. 
 
THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID 
 
CHRISTIAN 
 
 PERSECUTION. 
 
 BY 
 
 PALADIN 
 
 Author of " 6W ^^^/ His Book," " 7"/^^ Bottomless Pit? 
 "Lays of Romance and Chivalry" etc. 
 
 LONDON : 
 W. STEWART & CO., 41 FARRINGDON ST., E.G. 
 
By SALADIN. 
 
 Price 1d., Post Free 1\d., unless otherwise specified. 
 
 HISTORICAL PAMPHLETS. 
 
 THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 A Reply to Cardinal Manning. 
 
 THE CRUSADES. Their Reality and Romance. 
 CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 
 THE FLAGELLANTS. 
 THE ICONOCLASTS. 
 THE INQUISITION. Part I. 
 THE INQUISITION. Part II. 
 
 THE DANCERS, SHAKERS AND JUMPERS. Part L 
 THE DANCERS, SHAKERS AND JUMPERS. Part II. 
 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. Part I. 
 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. Part II. 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. A Letter to Cardinal Manning. 
 
 Part I. 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. A Letter to Cardinal Manning. 
 
 Part II. 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. A Letter to Cardinal Manning. 
 
 Part III. 
 ST MUNGO. The Saint who Founded Glasgow. Price 3d. v 
 
 post free 4d. 
 
 Or in one vol., handsomely bound in cloth, gilt lettered, 2s., post 
 free 2s. 2d. 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PAMPHLETS. 
 
 THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. Price id., post free i^d. 
 A VISIT TO MR SPURGEON'S TABERNACLE. 
 
 With Portrait. 
 A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. 
 
 With Portrait. 
 ROBERT BURNS: WAS HE A FREETHINKER? 
 
 With Portrait. Appendix : The Prize Poem in Connection 
 
 with the Dumfries Statue to Burns. 
 
 HELL: WHERE IS IT? Price id., post free i|d. 
 BEETLES AND BATHERS: Coffins and Cantrips. 
 CONCERNING THE DEVIL. 
 A FEARFUL FLOGGING. Price 3d., post free 4d. 
 THE AGONIES OF HANGING. Price 3d., post free 4 d. 
 
 The above, in one vol., cloth, gold lettered, price is. 6d., post 
 free is. 8J. 
 
 LONDON: W. STEWART & CO., 41 FARRINGDON STREET, B.C. 
 
 **'%. 
 
 x-j - .--.- 1 t 
 
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 
 
 THE Church that is better at argument must give way to 
 the Church that is better at blows. Theology is not a 
 dialectician with words she debates with the shillelagh. 
 The young plant of Christianity never grew till it was 
 fenced round with a hedge of swords. " Proof," say 
 you ? If such a statement be not true on the very face 
 of it, history can produce proof in abundance. The 
 Saxon axes hewed Christianity out of Britain ; it had to 
 be restored by the monks of St Augustine, and they 
 managed to re-establish it, only because they managed to 
 get the axes on its side. The Society of Jesus fairly 
 planted Christian colonies in Japan ; but, in spite of the 
 sword of the spirit and the whole armour of righteous- 
 ness, Christianity became utterly exterminated before a 
 torrent of spears. If Christian cannon had only spoken 
 louder, the sound of the "glad tidings of great joy'' 
 (save the mark !) might to-day have been ringing from 
 the cathedral of Yeddo. If, instead of the sword of the 
 spirit, there had been 20,000 British bayonets, the 
 breezes of Niphon might at this hour have been musical 
 with the psalms of David. Persecution paralysed the 
 heresy of the Albigenses, and ran its stilleto through the 
 heart of Protestantism in Spain. In France, Catholicism 
 waded to power through the carnage of the St Bartho- 
 lomew massacre, and set her heel on the neck of the 
 Huguenots by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 
 In England the issue between Rome and the Reforma- 
 tion hung in the balance till the diplomatic ability of 
 Elizabeth and her ministers flung the preponderance of 
 bills and bows, pikes and spears, into the scale against 
 the interests of her of the Seven Hills. 
 
 M317022 
 
4 CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 
 
 State religion is State persecution. It is privilege to 
 one band of sectaries and disability to all others. " The 
 opinions," says Lecky, * "of 99 persons out of every 100 
 are formed mainly by education, and a Government can 
 decide in whose hands the national education is to be 
 placed, what subjects it is to comprise, and what prin- 
 ciples it is to convey. The opinions of the great 
 majority of those who emancipate themselves from the 
 prejudices of their education are the results, in a great 
 measure, of reading and discussion, and a Government 
 can prohibit all books, and can expel all teachers, that 
 are adverse to the doctrines it holds. Indeed, the 
 simple fact of annexing certain penalties to the profes- 
 sion of particular opinions, and rewards to the profession 
 of opposite opinions, while it will, undoubtedly, make 
 many hypocrites, will also make many converts. For 
 any one who attentively observes the process that is 
 pursued in the formation of opinions must be aware that, 
 even when a train of argument has preceded their adop- 
 tion, they are usually much less the result of pure reason- 
 ing than of the action of innumerable distorting influences 
 which are continually deflecting our judgments. Among 
 these one of the most powerful is self-interest." Thus 
 the mere act of taking one sect of Christians under State 
 protection is injustice and persecution to all other sects 
 whatever. 
 
 But, in the past, Christian persecution has seldom 
 stopped at the infliction of mere civil and social disabili- 
 ties. When persecution is spoken of to Christian apolo- 
 gists, under the influence of modern humanitarianism, 
 they reply that persecutions have, indeed, been carried 
 on by professing Christians ; but that, in so far as they 
 indulged in them, they belied Christian principles and 
 permitted their vindicative passions as men to overmaster 
 the essentially tolerant and humane principles of their 
 faith. This is false. Nay, the very opposite is the truth. 
 The modern and cultured Christian is tolerant only in 
 proportion as he is not a Christian, and in ratio as he 
 has progressed in the path of enlightenment and bene- 
 volence and forsaken that of Paul and the Fathers. The 
 
 "The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe," vol. ii. p. 3. 
 
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 5 
 
 belief that you have the finality and fixity of truth from 
 authority that cannot err is an inevitable source of 
 intolerance towards those who cannot accept the truth 
 which is, to you, a complete entelechy. Doubt in your 
 own mind, as regards the tenets you hold, is the well- 
 spring of toleration towards those whose tenets are 
 different. Absolute faith inevitably means persecution ; 
 doubt is the fons et origo of toleration. " The only 
 foundation for toleration," said Charles James Fox,* " is 
 a degree of scepticism, and without it there can be none. 
 For, if a man believes in the saving of souls, he must 
 soon think about the means, and if, by cutting off one 
 generation, he can save many future ones from hell-fire, 
 it is his duty to do it." Not only, then, does Chris- 
 tianity, being a divine revelation, " the very word of very 
 God," contain in it essentially the principle of persecution ; 
 but the Bible exemplifies the practice as well as supplies 
 the theory. For his most horrible cruelties to the heretic 
 the Churchman could always quote, " Idolatra educebaiur 
 ad portas rivitatis, et lapidibus obruebatur." t 
 
 Christianity itself whined and groaned under persecu- 
 tion on the scaffold or among the wild beasts of the 
 arena; but, in conformity with its inherent principles, 
 the moment it got the power to do as it had been done 
 to it inaugurated persecution upon a scale tremendous 
 and terrible, and to which the world had previously 
 been a stranger. The early Christians were real ; the 
 modern Christians are a sham. If the Christians were 
 real, they would before this have burnt to ashes the 
 hand that pens these lines. Christianity would have 
 done it unhesitatingly in the days before it degenerated 
 into a conventional bogus that nobody can well attack, 
 because nobody knows exactly where it stands. But 
 in the old and true days, when it stood by the Scriptures 
 and the Fathers, it acted in a way which, however 
 deplorable, we must respect the actors for sincerity and 
 consistency. To try to stamp out heresy it hesitated 
 not to slaughter thousands and tens of thousands nay, 
 to exterminate a nation, or even to depopulate the 
 world. " Give me the earth purged from heretics, and I 
 
 * Rogers' " Recollections," p. 49. f Deuteronomy xvii. 
 
6 CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 
 
 will give you a heaven ! " was the vehement cry of 
 Nestorius to the Emperor. After the mission of 
 Dominic the persecution of heretics in certain districts 
 amounted to absolute extermination ; and in 1568 a 
 sentence of the Inquisition doomed the entire popula- 
 tion of the Netherlands to death as heretics. " Three 
 millions of people, men, women and children were 
 sentenced to the scaffold in three lines." * So terribly 
 in earnest was the Christian Church, preferring that the 
 earth should be rendered a depopulated and howling 
 wilderness rather than be peopled by heretics. 
 
 No sooner had the perfidious murderer, Constantine, 
 declared in favour of Christianity than, armed with the 
 civil power, it sprang from the dust in which it had 
 been writhing and shrieking under the rod, and, wrench- 
 ing that rod from the hands of the persecutors, it 
 brought it down with remorseless cruelty upon the backs 
 of all and sundry who failed to recognise deity incarnate 
 in the wandering preacher of Galilee. First, with 
 terrible hate, the Christian blade was stabbed into the 
 Jewish heart, and persecution, such as they had never 
 before experienced, fell upon the seed of Abraham, 
 although they were of the same race as the man-god 
 of this new faith in whose name they were called upon 
 to suffer. The race-blood from which their Christ had 
 sprung the Christians shed like water. Next, the 
 Christian fury was directed against the Pagans, who, 
 when in power, had been so tolerant to them, and who 
 had never punished them for their monstrous creed, 
 but only for their flagitious crimes. And, next, the 
 Christian fury fell upon such Christians as differed from 
 the majority on some nugatory and hair-breadth point 
 of doctrine ; and neither Jew nor Pagan was hounded 
 to dungeon and death with more remorseless zeal than 
 was Christian by brother Christian. " There are," 
 exclaimed the heathen, "no wild beasts so ferocious as 
 Christians who differ concerning their faith." A Jew 
 who married a Christian incurred the penalty of death \ 
 a Christian who might select a Jewess for his mistress 
 was liable to be burned alive ; and a certain Christian 
 
 * Motley's " Rise of the Dutch Republic," vol. ii. p. 155. 
 
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 7 
 
 Queen* passed a statute going into the details as to how 
 Christians were to be entertained and accommodated in 
 Christian brothels, but enacting that, if a Jew dared to 
 enter the chamber of the holy harlots, he was to be 
 flogged. 
 
 The Jew's own Scriptures furnished texts which the 
 new sect read as his death warrant. Deity himself was 
 cited as the first persecutor in that he expelled Adam 
 from Eden for a breach of the divine law, and cursed 
 his descendants. Elijah was referred to as having slain 
 the prophets of Baal, and also Hezekiah, Josiah, and 
 Nebuchadnezzar as noted persecutors of heretics under 
 divine approval. Moreover, the master-spirit of the early 
 Church, St Augustine, gave to persecution the impetus 
 of his genius, learning and zeal. He cursed religious 
 liberty in the memorable words : " Quid est enim pejor, 
 mors animce quam libertas erroris"\ With him heresy 
 was the most destestable of all crimes, immeasurably 
 worse than ordinary murder, being the murder of the 
 soul. Toleration was an absolute crime. The closest 
 and the tenderest relations of life were to be utterly 
 trampled on and disregarded in the interests of suppress- 
 ing heresy. " If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or 
 thy son, 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 and serve other gods which 
 thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; namely, 
 of the gods of the people which are round about you, 
 nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one 
 end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth \ 
 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 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; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from 
 the Lord thy God."} " He that believeth and is baptised 
 
 * Jeanne I., in 1347. Vide Sabatier, "Hist, cle la Legislation 
 sur le Femme Publique," p. 103. 
 
 t Epist. clxvi. Deut. xiii. 6-10. 
 
8 CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 
 
 shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be 
 damned."* " If there come any unto you and bring not 
 this doctrine, receive him not into your house, nor bid 
 him God speed."f " If any man preach any other 
 Gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be 
 accursed." " I would they were even cut off that 
 trouble you."f The whole Christian fabric was rested 
 upon " Believe and be baptised." Any hypocrite and 
 liar could, when he found it suited his interests, say he 
 believed, and generally there was an end of it. But, 
 with baptism, it was different ; there required to be the 
 u outward and visible sign : " every human being that did 
 not submit to being damped by a priest went inevitably 
 to perdition. Practically, the Christian watchword was 
 " Be damped or be damned." 
 
 The Church took care that children who were likely 
 to die before their mothers gave them birth should be, 
 prenatally, baptised with a syringe. Christendom was 
 baptism mad. Only the waters of baptism could render 
 you so damp as to be unsuited for hell. The keenest 
 intellects of the Middle Ages engaged in a subtle and 
 acrimonious controversy in regard to a Jew who got 
 converted to Christianity in an arid desert. The Jew 
 was dying, no water could be found, and, instead of 
 the cooling fluid, his brow was sprinkled with hot desert 
 sand, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. || 
 The controversy hinged on the question as to whether 
 baptism with sand was, or was not, effective in securing 
 salvation. The Council of Trent settled the matter, and 
 declared that baptism must be by water, and water only ; 
 and so it was discovered that, after all the bother, the 
 converted Jew was damned. Every unbaptised infant 
 was consigned to the same region as the sand-baptised 
 Jew. Every child came into the world bearing the 
 guilt of "Adam's first sin," and under the sentence of 
 eternal torment ; and learned works advocating this view 
 have been written as late as in the memory of men still 
 living, and by no less able theologians than Dr Jonathan 
 
 * Mark xvi. 16. f 2 John i. 10. 
 
 Gal. i. 9. Gal. v. 12. 
 
 || Vide Thiers' "Traite de Superstitions." 
 
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 9 
 
 Edwards so firmly based is Christian persecution upon 
 the bed rock of infallible dogma. 
 
 Under Christian persecutions thousands of Jews took 
 the precaution to get baptised with water to save their 
 lives. Christianity thus made tens of thousands of 
 hypocrites and liars, and she makes millions of them 
 even at this hour men and women who do not believe 
 her dogmas, but who are too indolent to investigate and 
 too cowardly to avow in vindication of conscience as 
 against selfish interest. The converted Jews had more 
 moral verve. Whenever there was a lull in the storm of 
 persecution they returned to Judaism. No fewer than 
 17,000 converts that had been made by one man re- 
 turned, as soon as they dared avow it, to the faith of 
 Israel. This one man was St Vincent, a friar so pure 
 that it is recorded of him that he always undressed in 
 the dark lest his modesty might be shocked by seeing 
 himself naked. The Christians have had numerous 
 purists of this order : they had, in more recent times, the 
 holy ones who inveighed against 'Linnaeus as indecent 
 because his system of botany taught the doctrine of the 
 sexes of plants. 
 
 The Crusades alone are estimated to have cost the 
 lives of two million Christians, who dashed their religious 
 fury, almost as impotently as the wave dashes its foam 
 on the rock, on the warriors of the turban and crescent. 
 And even to this day the detested Mohammedan has his 
 mosque on the site of the Holy Sepulchre. But the 
 fury of Christian against Infidel was surpassed by the 
 ferocious zeal with which Christian persecuted Christian, 
 often for differences all but imperceptible, except to the 
 faith-opened eyes of religious lunatics. As we have seen, 
 a keen and rancorous dispute raged for years as to 
 whether it was lawful to baptise with sand, instead of 
 water; and to the learned and devout such problems 
 were ever presenting themselves as the double proces- 
 sion of the Holy Ghost, the exact nature of the trans- 
 figuration light upon Mount Tabor, and the existence in 
 Christ of two coincident, but perfectly independent, 
 wills. Want of soundness on such insane subtleties was 
 sufficient to have the unsound one burnt to a cinder. 
 
 Indeed, to a common-sense observer, who can divest 
 
10 CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 
 
 himself of the distorted and diseased spirit which 
 animated the centuries when Christianity was yet strong, 
 it would seem that the faith had entered into a solemn 
 league with the powers of Evil to fill the world with 
 horror and misery. When accused by the Inquisition 
 you were not permitted to confront your accuser, nor 
 even to know his name. You might be as orthodox as 
 it was possible to be ; but, if any one entertained a 
 grudge against you, he could have you tortured to death 
 by simply giving in your name to the nearest agent of 
 the Holy Office. Then it was all over with you. 
 The procedure was thus : " The Inquisitor tried to 
 mystify the accused by captious questions. He asked 
 the presumed delinquent whether the new-born infant 
 came from man or God. If the reply was, * From man,' 
 'Then,' said the Inquisitor, 'you are a heretic; for only 
 heretics deny the creation of man by God.' And if the 
 accused happened to reply, ' From God,' he was equally 
 convicted of heresy, as making God the paramour of a 
 woman. They asked, too, whether the soul began with 
 the embryo, or after it ; whether all souls were made at 
 one and the same moment, and where ; whether the host 
 consecrated by the priest was the whole deity, or only 
 part of him. If he answered, 'The whole deity/ the 
 examiner exclaimed : ' Suppose, then, that four priests 
 consecrate the host at one time in the same church, 
 how can the whole deity be contained in each conse- 
 cration ? ' and, if the trembling respondent admitted, in 
 his confusion, that such was the necessary inference, the 
 Inquisitor triumphantly convicted him of asserting the 
 existence of four gods at once. A Franciscan monk 
 ventured to declare openly (1319) in Toulouse that Peter 
 and Paul themselves would have been unable to prove 
 their orthodoxy before the Inquisition, and was con- 
 demned to imprisonment for life for uttering this un- 
 palatable truth." * 
 
 Among the first schismatics to suffer martyrdom were 
 the Arians and the Donatists. Their churches were 
 destroyed, their leaders banished, and their writings 
 committed to the flames. Then there was a lull. The 
 
 * Mackay's " Rise and Progress of Christianity," pp. 301, 302. 
 
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. II 
 
 tremendous power of the hierarchy had welded and 
 pressed together the shattered fragments of the dis- 
 membered Roman Empire. The influence of the then 
 Church and the condition of the then Western Europe 
 were commensurate, and on the quiet of moral apathy 
 and intellectual atrophy rested the pillars of the Age of 
 Faith. But this age was, naturally, only a transition, not 
 a permanency. The innate restlessness of human specu- 
 lation and the Revival of Learning chafed against the 
 iron ring with which the Vatican bounded the world. 
 Under the blow of the crozier Europe lay stunned, but 
 not slain. She arose, and, looking around in the dim 
 sunrise which had succeeded a rayless night, she beheld 
 Rome holding the crown and keys, and posing as the 
 sole and only oracle to which the problems of existence 
 and destiny could be carried and the vexed questions of 
 secular life referred. The pretensions of the oracle were 
 doubted. Scepticism arose spontaneously and blossomed 
 into heresy in the eyes of the Church the most exe- 
 crable of all crimes. 
 
 Though heaven and earth should fall to pieces, this 
 heresy must be put down. Rome arose in her majesty, 
 strong as the north wind, cold and pitiless as the de- 
 scending avalanche. Her attitude had been, and must 
 be, unquestioned, unchallenged AUTHORITY ; and that 
 authority must be vindicated. The issues of man's 
 everlasting destiny were in her hands, and she would 
 rise equal to the charge confided to her. She had the 
 whole truth, and outside her pale was inevitable perdi- 
 tion. The fate of souls was in her keeping, and those 
 souls should be kept, at whatever cost to the body. 
 Better that earth should shriek for a thousand years 
 under the fellest tortures human ingenuity could devise 
 than that a single soul should pass an eternity of fiery 
 agony in hell. Her mind was made up, her Holy 
 Scriptures explicit, and her duty clear. She set afoot 
 her Inquisition, deepened her dungeons, sharpened her 
 heading axe, got ready her torch and fagot and her 
 machines of torture, and set about her duty as expressly 
 indicated in her doctrines. Christianity was then strong 
 and honest. She could see her duty and carry it for- 
 ward for God's sake, even through consequences the 
 
12 CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 
 
 most terrible through the annihilation of all that is 
 essentially human and the substitution of all that is 
 positively fiendish. 
 
 " Men, like fish, were devourers of each other ; there 
 was no fear of God or man ; iniquity trod on the heels 
 of iniquity ; adultery, sacrilege, and homicide abounded ; 
 the strong oppressed the weak."* This was the state 
 of matters that obtained from 1208, when Pope Innocent 
 III. established the Inquisition. For weary century after 
 century the red spectre of persecution presided over 
 the thud of the heading-axes and built up the fires that 
 were fed with human flesh. On, from 1208, this spectre 
 stalked down the ages till it was lost amid the blood- 
 mists of the French Revolution. The ancient red 
 spectre died in the grasp of the modern one ; the rack 
 of Innocent gave way to the guillotine of Marat. But 
 the Inquisition did not depart till it had piled its 
 holocausts mountain high. According to Llorente, who 
 had free access to the Inquisitorial archives, in Spain 
 alone the Inquisition' burnt 31,000 persons to death, 
 and condemned 290,000 to punishments in many cases 
 only nominally less extreme than the death penalty. 
 These numbers do not include the victims who perished 
 under branches of the Inquisition established in Mexico, 
 Lima, Carthagena, the West Indies, Sicily, Sardinia, and 
 Malta. In the Netherlands alone 50,000 suffered death 
 for heresy in a single reign that of Charles V. 
 
 Vivicremation burning alive was the stale and ordi- 
 nary manner in which the Christian Tweedledum dis- 
 posed of the equally Christian, but more unfortunate, 
 Tweedledee. But the vivicremation had, in the interests 
 of Jesus, to be conducted on a scale so extensive that 
 the ordinary stake-and-fagot arrangement was found to 
 be inadequate. Besides, the quantity of timber it took 
 to roast him was too expensive to be consumed on such 
 a worthless thing as a heretic. It accordingly came 
 into fashion to make strong enclosures, like cattle-pens, 
 into which the heretics were packed along with some 
 cart-loads of straw and brushwood. Then the pen was 
 closed and surrounded with troops, and the straw and 
 
 * Hallam's " Middle Ages," ii. 223. 
 
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 13 
 
 brushwood set fire to. And there, amid flame and 
 smoke, perished scores at a time, their cries of agony 
 falling on the impervious ears of their brother Christians, 
 and the stench of their burning flesh ascending as a 
 sweet-smelling savour to the nostrils of Jehovah Elohim, 
 in whose accursed interests man had so terribly turned 
 his hand against his brother man. Then followed the 
 wholesale and unconsecrated burial. Scores still alive, 
 but blistered with burning straw and half-suffocated with 
 smoke, had the cold earth of the grave-pit laid upon 
 their scorched flesh, and were, in their tomb, left to die 
 at their leisure. The Archbishop of Rheims and seven- 
 teen other prelates looked upon the conflagration in 
 such a pen as I have referred to, when no fewer than 
 184 heretics were in it, at one and the same time, 
 suffering death by fire. 
 
 In the face of the appalling numbers of those who died 
 for real or suspected heresy in regard to often incom- 
 prehensibly subtle points in that most unscientific of all 
 sciences, theology, dare you, O Christian apologist, con- 
 tend that a faith that, in one way or other, has been 
 guilty of the violent death of millions of the human race 
 has brought "glad tidings of great joy"? Thousands, 
 tens of thousands, were tortured for days with the fellest 
 torture that human ingenuity could devise, and then 
 borne out with dislocated joints, broken bones, and 
 mangled limbs to, over a slow fire, writhe out the bitter 
 dregs of life that yet remained. Hear their groans, their 
 shrieks, their yells of anguish arise from the torture- 
 chamber and the fagot's burning agony. These cries of 
 mortal pain yet peal down the corridors of the ages, and 
 proclaim your " peace and goodwill " a mockery and a 
 lie. And to the fiery sufferings of dissolution was added 
 all the poignancy of supernatural terrors. The Spanish 
 heretic was burnt in a yellow blouse, upon which the 
 flames of hell were painted to indicate that the few days 
 or hours of torment on earth were to be succeeded by 
 torment everlasting in the infernal world. The heretic's 
 goods were confiscated, his children left to perish, and 
 his wife, under social and ecclesiastical ban, to sink to 
 prostitution and beggary ; for the heretic's crime was so 
 terrible that it blighted all that had been connected with 
 
14 CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 
 
 him like a canker and a curse. Thus was spread the 
 suffering over an immeasurably wider area than the mere 
 tens of thousands who perished at the stake. For every 
 sufferer had some friend, some father, some mother, some 
 child, and the bane of his martyrdom alighted upon all, 
 and the fearful conviction that the one who had been so 
 dear to them had gone only through a fiery prelude on 
 earth to the everlasting burnings of hell. Thus the 
 Christian faith blighted and embittered the lives of 
 millions whom its malevolence only indirectly reached. 
 Unsatiated with the burning of the living, the Romish 
 Church tried for heresy the very dead man in his grave, 
 and the coffin and the pall and corruption could not save 
 him from the dread tribunal, more especially if his heirs 
 were in possession of property which, finding him guilty, 
 would confiscate to the Church. Death and suffering 
 to millions and outrage to the very dead in the tomb are 
 associated with the faith of the Galilean and his Gospel 
 of sarcastic mockery : " On earth peace and goodwill 
 to men" 
 
 If any apologist for Christianity may venture to affirm 
 that Catholicism had the monopoly for persecution, I am 
 prepared to maintain that Protestantism, in proportion 
 to its power, in the work of persecution, was no whit 
 behind tlje Church of Rome. 
 
 " He that believeth not," etc., was a statement so explicit 
 and on such inexpugnable authority that the extirpation of 
 those who should tend to shake the belief of the orthodox 
 became the foremost and most imperative of duties. Be- 
 lieve this statement, and the better man you are, the more 
 merciless persecutor you will be. Buckle has cor- 
 roborated the testimony of Llorente, that the most terrible 
 of the persecutors, Torquemada included, were, in them- 
 selves, humane and kind-hearted men ; but they believed 
 in the doctrines of their Scriptures and Church, and con- 
 sequently, when heresy was under judgment, deemed it 
 their duty to God and man to steel their heart against 
 every human emotion, and to become merciless as the 
 she-wolf from whose dugs her young had been torn away. 
 The crime lay not with the inquisitors and torturers ; it 
 lay with those who forged writings which they alleged to 
 be of divine origin it lay with the Church that, in 
 
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 15 
 
 maintenance of her own dominancy, perpetuated and 
 enforced the fiendish corollary of the written fraud. 
 
 Consequently, as I have said, Papist and Protestant 
 alike persecuted in proportion to their respective influ- 
 ences. For the stake and rack were on both sides, at 
 the disposal of strong and earnest men souls capable 
 of the direst renunciation and sacrifice, and prepared, 
 at the call of what they felt certain was duty, to make 
 earth an Aceldama of gore and groans, that heaven might 
 be an Elysium of gold and glory. In England here we 
 have been fed full of horrors on the recital of the per- 
 secutions by the Papists ; and the ordinary Protestant 
 in the street holds persecution to be a trait of the hated 
 Romish Church, and is unaware that his Church ever 
 persecuted at all. The prolonged and gallant struggle 
 of the Scottish Covenanters was not against Papists but 
 against their fellow Protestants. It was a Protestant 
 hammer that drove the wedges down upon the splintered 
 bones of Hugh MacKail ; it was Protestant murder that, 
 in front of his own doorstep, scattered the brains of John 
 Brown of Priesthill. They were Protestant hands that 
 tore the body of Alexander Peden from the grave. Those 
 fierce blades at Bothwell are in Protestant hands, and, 
 from point to hilt, they are red with Protestant blood. 
 The mad and miserable hundreds in Greyfriars' church- 
 yard are Protestants, and it is a hedge of Protestant 
 muskets that keeps them there. The Crown that goes 
 down into the churned fury of the deep, gored to ruin on 
 the rock horns of the Orkneys, is filled with Protestants, 
 shipped off by other Protestants to be sold in the Indies 
 as slaves. Protestant voices sing that death-psalm till the 
 sea closes and roars over the psalm and the singer. 
 
 The John Calvin was no Papist who, in order to 
 prolong his agony, caused Michael Servetus to be slowly 
 roasted to death. In Holland a man who had already 
 been scorched, racked, and partly flayed is trailed across 
 the floor of the dungeon out into the light, that other 
 horrors may be perpetrated for the purpose of inducing 
 him to take a certain view of certain doctrinal points 
 one more attempt to bring him properly to him who said, 
 "He that believeth not shall be damned." The man, 
 back downwards, was firmly secured to the floor. Then, 
 
I 6 CHRSTIAN PERSECUTION. 
 
 on his naked abdomen, was placed an inverted metal 
 vessel containing under it a number of rats. On the 
 bottom uppermost of this basin live coals were heaped 
 till the rats underneath, to escape being roasted alive, 
 tore their way through the man's flesh into the cavity of 
 his body to find refuge among his intestines. The basin 
 was removed, and fiery cinders were thrust into the holes 
 in the flesh through which the rats had torn their way.* 
 
 * Adapted from "The Bottomless Pit" to which the reader is 
 referred for further details of persecution by Protestants. 
 
THOUGHTS 
 
 ON 
 
 The Proposition of the Pope in Rome, 
 
 TO THE 
 
 PROTESTANT CHRISTIANS IN ENGLAND, 
 
 Co fray to 
 
 THE VIRGIN MARY THE MOTHER OF GOD, 
 
 AND ON 
 
 HIS OFFER OF 300 BUYS INDULGENCE. 
 
 Respectfully dedicated to Pope Leo XIII. 
 BY 
 
 CHRISTY NOSIN MORALSON. 
 
 t 
 
 LONDON : 
 W. STEWART & CO., 41 FARRINGDON STREET, E.G. 
 
THOUGHTS 
 
 ON 
 
 THE PROPOSITION OF THE POPE 
 
 TO THE 
 
 ^rcrtcstant Christians in 
 
 THESE lines are written in sincerity to honour God, 
 and I do much esteem the mental and physical 
 struggles of mankind to get nearer and nearer to the 
 Deity, and see him somewhere. Such struggles com- 
 menced since the creation, and the dark ages witnessed 
 many and much of them according to the knowledge 
 of the times ; even at the present period there are over 
 thirty millions of Christians who are desirous of know- 
 ing God, and seeing him, according to their light, 
 some day. 
 
 But the Christians, with the advantage of education, 
 ought to be ready at all times to assign rational reasons 
 for their faith in God. It ought to be founded by 
 " fairness in listening to evidence, and judging accord- 
 ingly, without being led away by prejudice and inclina- 
 
tiori." Seek for the arguments of faith to honour God, 
 and receive nothing as truth, even if it dribbled from 
 the lips of a prophet or an apostle because both 
 might be incompetent. " Know ye that the prophet 
 was foolish, the spiritual man was mad ? " (Hosea x. 7)- 
 The Jews of Berea were more worthy than those of 
 Thessalonica, for they searched the Scriptures before 
 their conversion (Act xvii. 10-13). 
 
 The gratuitous proposition of the Pope and the. 
 unseemly offer of indulgence necessarily provoke the 
 following questions : 
 
 1. Was the Virgin Mary the mother of God ? 
 
 2. Was Jesus the son of God ? 
 
 3. Was Jesus God? 
 
 4. Was the history of Jesus by the Evangelists 
 a myth ? 
 
 5. Is the Pope the divine authority of God on 
 earth ? 
 
 6. Was it proper for the Pope to tender to the 
 Protestants of England an indulgence ? 
 
 7. Ought Englishmen to be grateful for the 
 Pope's Christianity in England subsequent to the 
 departure of St. Augustine back to Rome ? 
 
 My arguments to meet these questions are based 
 upon the Scripture and the reasons of many intelligent, 
 prudent, and learned men, vouchsafed to illuminate 
 the world from ignorance to wisdom for the glory of 
 
[ 5 1 
 
 God, and for the mental and material comfort and 
 happiness of mankind. 
 
 Pirst. Was the Virgin Mary the mother of God ? 
 
 No woman is virgin nor maid in her purity after 
 conception or birth of her still-born or live child. 
 
 It is not a momentous matter in religion to address 
 Mary, the mother of Jesus, as " Virgin Mary." The 
 appellation in the earlier Christian times was necessary 
 to distinguish that lady from the nervous, the amorous, 
 and the seven times devilised Mary who frequented the 
 social circle of Jesus and his mother, and gave him 
 no less than seven opportunities for displaying miracles 
 on her person. 
 
 The Virgin Mary never acknowledged to man or 
 woman that she was the mother of God. Her spouse, 
 the thoughtful and kind Joseph, it is said, dreamed 
 that his Mary, before the completion of the marriage, 
 was conceived by the " Holy Ghost." That name was 
 never heard prior to the practice of the mission of 
 Jesus, so how did he know that the nightmare was 
 "Holy Ghost"? 
 
 No human being could dream of a thing that he has 
 never seen, read, nor heard of. " Nations have their 
 gods according to their opinion." Joseph and Mary, 
 and their people, Zacharias, Elizabeth, and others,, 
 were Hebrews and Jewish Unitarians ; so they never 
 had a Holy Ghost for an extra god. 
 
 The story of the conception is not unlike the 
 
[ 6 ] 
 
 phraseology and sentiments of the monks and priests 
 since the trial and crucifixion of Jesus under the. 
 Roman law, which, .even to the present times, is 
 respected by civilised nations and applied in their dis- 
 putes and decisions. Therefore Joseph's .dream is not 
 a reliable evidence that God was the. son of the Virgin 
 Mary. 
 
 Secondly. Was Jesus the son of God? 
 
 In filiation the mother's evidence is of much import- 
 ance. No mother would conceal the name, r the 
 character (even the behaviour, if necessary) of her 
 child's father were there nothing to be ashamed of in 
 the matter. The Virgin Mary would have realised 
 the honour had she been divinely impregnated, and 
 would have freely narrated how it came to pass that 
 she found herself to be the mother of God. But she 
 kept her own counsel and secret ! 
 
 The Virgin Mary is the principal human medium of 
 a tangible God, disrespectfully called by the angel 
 Gabriel the " holy thing " (St. Luke i. 35). The young 
 lady was not frightened at the appearance of the angel 
 in the closet,, with wings on the shoulders, unlike any 
 man ; but his words and salutations " troubled " her, 
 and she innocently asked him : " How shall this be,, 
 seeing I know not a man?" But the impossible 
 process of conception .was described by the angel 
 from heaven in the inspired language of the reputed 
 Saints, Matthew and Ljuke, upon earth for the edifica- 
 
[ 7 ] 
 
 tion of mortals that God's ways are unlike the ways of 
 men. However, the obtuse in understanding them 
 ought to be pardoned for denying that Jesus was the 
 son of God. 
 
 Thirdly. Was Jesus God ? 
 
 Joseph and the Virgin Mary were indifferent in the 
 care of their son Jesus. Could the doubt about the 
 filiation be the reason for it ? They were religious, 
 and kept the Passover at Jerusalem, where, unknow r n 
 to them, their son of twelve, with " the grace of God 
 upon him," remained to converse with the " doctors," 
 perhaps on miscellaneous subjects of law, medicine, 
 and divinity. Be that as it may, after a day's journey 
 his parents thought of him. Upon finding him, his 
 weary mother exclaimed : " Son, why hast thou thus 
 dealt with us ? Behold, thy father and I have sought 
 thee sorrowing." Never mind the answer of the 
 heartless and unruly boy of twelve, who, when a man 
 over thirty, advocated domestic desertion, encouraged 
 violation of natural sentiments, and pleaded in favour 
 of self-mutilation and personal degradation, and sup- 
 ported the practice by offering rewards of a hundred- 
 fold. In addition to the same, there was the great 
 advantage of the "Glory of eternal life in the world to 
 come" (vide Matt. xix. 12, Mar. ix. 43-47, Mar. ix. 
 29 and 30). Jesus found no fault in the rich and unrea- 
 sonable employers, but advised good and industrious 
 servants not to expect any reward, not to brace their 
 
I < s j 
 
 energy with rational hopes of finding grace and meet- 
 ing the favour of their masters, but to feel satisfied in 
 saying, "We have done our duty." Never mind if it 
 was extra work. 
 
 Jesus, it is said, did many things and spoke much ; 
 but they were generally of an evasive nature, con- 
 trary to good sense, and not acceptable in practice. 
 He was hasty and abusive, well up in the use of strong 
 epithets such as hypocrites, vipers, fools, etc. He 
 was impatient in hunger, and when disappointed he 
 destroyed a fig-tree that did not belong to him ; 
 besides, he killed the pigs of other people for the 
 glory of God. If Jesus was God, then he extolled his 
 own acts. But God would not commit such unseemly 
 acts nor extol them himself. 
 
 Jesus is admired for saying, " Foxes have holes, 
 birds of the air have nests ; " but he has left the 
 thoughtful to find out how he, "the son of man," had 
 no place to rest. He had the power of working 
 miracles, he knew the means to feed and lodge with- 
 out expense, and to procure the free use of ships, 
 boats, and donkeys whenever necessary. 
 
 Jesus puzzled the simple woman of Samaria by 
 speaking of the "Living water,'' the "Gift of God," 
 and other spiritual matters, but, as she could not com- 
 prehend, he reverted to mundane topics, and informed 
 her that she had five husbands, that the mate she has 
 now is not a "great shake," but only a locum tenens ; 
 
[ 9 ] 
 
 she should fetch him, and come back for the "Living 
 water." The poor unfortunate called Jesus a prophet 
 to her he was nothing but a prophet for her reli- 
 gion and country recognised prophets, whereas for 
 tune-tellers and character-readers were stoned, burnt, 
 and otherwise killed. (Our London magistrates are 
 more lenient ; they either fine or imprison.) 
 
 In spite of the story of Joseph, the report of the 
 shepherds, the leap of the unborn John Baptist in the 
 womb of the aged Elizabeth, the Lady Virgin Mary 
 was cruel to her husband and son for twelve years with 
 regard to the matter of the paternity of Jesus. Would 
 she have acted thus if Jesus was God ? 
 
 Jesus, when at large, never said that he was Cod, 
 or the son of God. He always spoke of God as his 
 superior without an equal, and that he himself was the 
 "son of man." If Jesus was the "Word, and the 
 Word was with God, and the Word was God," he 
 would have known it, and the consciousness would 
 have precluded the necessity of his asking his disciples, 
 " Whom do men say that I, the son of man, am ? " 
 
 The passages in St. John x. 30, xiv. 9" I and my 
 father are one," " He that hath seen me hath seen 
 the father ; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the 
 father " do mean that they are both one in counsel, 
 purpose, and design. Any person may use similar 
 phraseology in conversation when alluding to an absent 
 party. Take another instance : when pniying for 
 
his disciples, he asked God, his superior, " that they 
 may be one, as thou, father, art in me and I in thee ; 
 they also may be one in us." Would all of them, if 
 the prayer were granted, mean to be metamorphosed 
 into God ? No ; it meant that they should be like 
 unto God and Jesus in thoughts, words, and works. 
 It is through the unhappy misconstruction of the 
 words of Jesus that the Church propagated the doctrine 
 of the " Holy Trinity." Adore God only. 
 
 The erratic and credulous Peter was the sole human 
 being when Jesus was at large to avow that Jesus was 
 the Christ. But Jesus warned him and the other 
 disciples to tell it to no man. Perhaps the fulness of 
 time had not then come it was proper to postpone it 
 for thirty years, till his followers called themselves 
 Christians, or for a few centuries after, to be revealed 
 by inspired or designing writers. The postponement 
 of the report was a mistake, and it practically enhanced 
 the doubt that Jesus was God. 
 
 Fourthly. Was the history of Jesus by the 
 Evangelists a myth ? 
 
 Oh ! do not mock the anxious seeker of the truth 
 with the assumed history of Jesus. Nearly nineteen 
 centuries have passed away in doubts owing to the 
 ominous enjoinment of Jesus : " Tell no man that he 
 was Jesus the Christ " (see Matt. xvi. 20). Even -when 
 he resorted to miracles for the glory of something or 
 somebody, he wanted the matter to be unknown (ride 
 
[ II ] 
 
 Matt. viii. 4). He inherited the queer quality of his 
 mother to keep secret when publicity was prudence. 
 
 His birth, it is said, was ushered with the halle- 
 lujahs of angels, whom the shepherds saw ; and the 
 wise men of the East beheld the Star of Bethlehem, 
 that at once convinced them that a King of the Jews 
 was born publicly ; yet it is said that King Herod and 
 his officers were unable to find the baby boy. The 
 wise men of the East promised to inform him of the 
 whereabouts, that he also might worship the baby. 
 But there was a dream that induced the wise men to 
 elude King Herod. Dreams are essential in religion, 
 and they compromise many difficulties for was it not 
 a dream that prevented Joseph from divorcing the 
 Virgin Mary ? (see Matt. i. 24). It was his dream that 
 stopped the collapse of the Christian doctrine or 
 faith. 
 
 The Hebrew prophecies about Jesus are not accepted 
 by the Hebrews, who ought to know best, for Jesus 
 belonged to that nation. Moreover, he, at his trial 
 for blasphemy and high treason, did not cite them as 
 evidence that he was the son of God, or God. 
 
 His sermons and teachings indicated that he was 
 introducing a new doctrine ; in similar manner did the 
 instructions of the other reformers, and even the 
 founders, like Moses and Mahomet, indicate. Were 
 they God ? 
 
 If he did work miracles, so did Moses and the 
 
apostles, the prophets, besides others, who were 
 sinners, and did not know Jesus. Were they God ? 
 According to Jesus, there could be no miracle without 
 faith. In some locality he worked no miracle because 
 the inhabitants thereof had no faith. 
 
 In performing miracles, Moses used the rod 
 jugglers used the wand ; but Jesus always demanded 
 faith. Many things could be accomplished through 
 faith even ruination. Though very many years have 
 elapsed since I was a playful boy, yet I remember the 
 agony of my fond mother on the news of the failure of a 
 mercantile firm, wherein was deposited upon faith the 
 source of her subsistence. I still remember her pale 
 face, her uplifted eyes dimmed with tears, her closed 
 hands pressed to her breast, her bended knees on the 
 hard floor. With such a scene impressed on my 
 memory, and the practical training of thirty-three 
 years to balance evidence and untangle the string of 
 argument, it would not be a crime to ask for the 
 rational history of the life of Jesus ? 
 
 His crucifixion is no proof that he was the son of 
 God, or God. Jesus was punished, and he died like a 
 man. If Jesus was God, then God had had himself 
 punished and crucified ; if so, it was suicide. If 
 Jesus was the son of God in verity, then the crucifixion 
 was the violation of paternal love, and a clumsy 
 example of it. 
 
 The resurrection of Jesus. IF true, does not prove 
 
t '3 ] 
 
 that he was God. The Scripture shows that the 
 revival from the grave or death was not confined to 
 Jesus alone. 
 
 FiftJi. Is the Pope the divine authority of God on 
 earth ? 
 
 The works of God are patent and visible in his 
 inimitable acts of the Creation, but his words are 
 never known. Prophets and poets inform us that God 
 possesses the attributes to speak, laugh, repent, drink, 
 fight, besides other human accomplishments ; but the 
 Church, with the Pope, assumed the right to interpret 
 the meaning of God's language, whether spoken or 
 written. The Pope of the times of incipient 
 Christianity accepted the words in the Epistle of 
 St. Matt. xvi. 1 8 and 19, and interpreted that "Peter" 
 and "rock" meant a pun, and were the same thing, upon 
 which Jesus will build his Church ; and as there are 
 many mansions in heaven, their keys will be in the 
 charge of Peter ; and whatsoever Peter shall bind on 
 earth shall be bound in heaven ; and whatsoever he 
 shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Now, 
 Jesus never built a church, nor did Peter play the game 
 of loose and fast. The interpretation was rendered 
 when the Pope was liable to err or to be deceived ; 
 but about 1870 the Pope of the day declared that the 
 Pope in council was infallible. Yet it has not been 
 proved nor pointed out which was the Church that 
 Jesus built, and what was the thing that Peter made 
 
[ 14 ] 
 
 fast upon earth. Further, it must be remembered that 
 Jesus was not God, nor the son of God ; so he could 
 not have given Peter the keys of heaven. The words 
 of the Epistle, if true, were expressed in a rapturous 
 delight of Jesus on finding theyfrj*/ man who acknow- 
 ledged him to be " Christ, the son of the Living God." 
 Is this not an exercised ecclesiastical mode of expres- 
 sion in vogue by the Christians since the days of 
 foreign monks and priests? How came the Galilean 
 fisher of olden times to learn and use it ? The Pope's 
 pretension to be the head of the Church of God is 
 nonsense. The Church of God is everywhere ; his 
 temple is the universe ; and his altar and sacrifice are 
 the heart and mind of man. 
 
 Sixth. Was it proper for the Pope to tender to 
 the Protestants of England an indulgence ? 
 
 Evidently it was not proper. The value of the fond 
 kindness of the Pope is an unknown article to the 
 heretics and schismatics of England ; and the Pope 
 has not explained whether there is any virtue in his 
 conditionally-offered indulgence of three hundred days 
 to those who prayed to the Virgin Mary. How would 
 the Pope know that they did pray ? How can it be 
 ascertained that the Deity shall permit the Virgin 
 Mary and the saints to intercede for the heretics and 
 schismatics? Was not the blood of the final victim, 
 if true, sufficient to appease the Deity, who, the 
 prophets and the spiritual men say, is merciful ? The 
 
[ '5 ] 
 
 Virgin Mary is represented in Roman Catholic pictures 
 as weeping and praying for her son upon the cross, 
 but neither the infallible Pope nor the spiritual men 
 could know what were the words of her prayer, and 
 whether it was granted. If so, then, is it not idle 
 and conceit to pray to God through presumed inter- 
 cessors ? 
 
 Lastly. Ought Englishmen to be grateful for the 
 Pope's Christianity in England subsequent to the 
 departure of St. Augustine back to Rome ? 
 
 No ! Pope Gregory was informed by St. Augus- 
 tine that he found on his arrival Christianity " flourish- 
 ing in Cornwall and Cumberland, in Wales and Ireland." 
 He and his fellow missionaries converted a portion 
 of England, then inhabited by the heathen Saxons and 
 Angles. But the Christianity of his time, whether at 
 Rome or England, was unlike the Christianity of 
 the Pope after the papacy of Gregory. It did not then 
 persecute ; transubstantiation was not sanctioned till 
 1215; the " Blessed Virgin " and " Immaculate Con- 
 ception " were not recognised ; the story of purgatory 
 was not published by authority at Florence till 1438 ; 
 and the last act of self-sanctification of the Pope was 
 in 1870, when he proclaimed that he was "infallible 
 when in council." Did the Holy Ghost inform him 
 of it in a dream ? 
 
 Religion is a system of faith and worship, and it is 
 considered by all nations to be a duty to God. The 
 
old Christian Church of England existed prior to the 
 advent of the Romish faith in England, and it did its 
 duty both before and after the Reformation. May it 
 continue its hallowed task of teaching " how to carry 
 on a correct life on earth " without compulsion and 
 persecution. 
 
 Should the serious reader consider my arguments to 
 be indelicate, then they are so unavoidably, on account 
 of the examination of a peculiar doctrine veiled in 
 impurity and absurdity during 1,895 vear s, and now 
 roused by Pope Leo XIII. 
 
PROPAGANDIST PAMPHLETS No. 1, 
 
 Did Jestts Cfefist of the Four 
 Gospels eve* Live? 
 
 BY ERNEST PACK. 
 
 WHETHER Jesus Christ of the four Gospels 
 ever existed is the question we propose- 
 briefly to examine, and space being limited 
 we have none to waste by way of preamble. 
 We seek to save the reader's time and trust 
 we shall not be considered abrupt because we are 
 direct. We even expect a little credit for our consider- 
 ation. First, then, by Jesus Christ of the four Gospels 
 we mean not some fanatical man Christ or crafty im- 
 poster who may have claimed for himself divine hon- 
 ours, but the said-to-be immaculately born Son of the 
 Virgin Mary, and miracle-working God-man this, and 
 no other. It is necessary to be very particular upon this 
 point for there have been many Saviours, both before 
 His reputed time and since. Saviours to right of us sa- 
 viours to left of us, saviours all round us, as one might 
 say. And although the same claims are made for them 
 all, Christians would have us believe that their Jesus 
 only is genuine and that the others are spurious. Well, 
 in our mustard-and-cress days we were wont to hold 
 the same opinion, and it will be our duty to give a few 
 reasons why we renounced it. 
 
 We found (i) we had been bamboozled into believing 
 by faith, instead of by facts. (2) That contemporarv 
 history had nothing to say about this mythical person- 
 age (3) The Christians had done their best to rectif\ 
 this misfortune by forging the missing testimony. (4) 
 
That no evidence was forthcoming that any such per 
 sons as the twelve Apostles ever lived. (5) That no 
 trace of our four Gospels could be found prior to about 
 150 A.D., and (6) we thought that had the miracles ever 
 taken place during the active life of Jesus (31 to 33 
 A.D.) there would have existed ample records of them 
 in the historical accounts of that period, and we looked 
 upon this solemn silence on the part of every contempor- 
 ary writer, as conclusive testimony in confutation of 
 the Christian legend. We reflected also that one little 
 grain of evidence traceable to the first half of the first 
 century would have been of greater value than whole 
 granaries of assertions made in the latter half of the 
 second century. Then there was presented to us the 
 fact recorded by Gibbon, that in Rome, Christianity 
 was rejected " as an idle and extravagant opinion by 
 every man of a liberal education and understanding. M 
 (Decline and Fall, chap, xv.) We observed likewise 
 that " both parties M (Christian and Pagan), " seemed 
 to acknowledge the truth of those miracles which were 
 claimed by their adversaries; and while they were con- 
 tented with ascribing them to the arts of magic and to 
 the power of demons they mutually concurred in restor- 
 ing and establishing the reign of suoerstition." (Ibid, 
 chap, xvi.) And the same great scholar sagely re- 
 marks in a footnote that, " it is seriously to be lamen- 
 ted that the Christian Fathers by acknowledging the 
 supernatural, or as they deem it, the infernal part of 
 Paganism, destroy with their own hands the great ad- 
 vantage which we might otherwise derive from the 
 liberal concessions of our adversaries. " (Ibid.) Fur- 
 ther, we noted in the pages of this learned writer that 
 those among the Romans " who condescended to men- 
 tion the Christians, considered them only as obstinate 
 and perverse enthusiasts who exacted nn implicit sub- 
 mission to their mysterious doctrines without being able 
 to produce a single argument that could engage the at- 
 tention of men of sense and learning. " (Chap, xv.) 
 These truths we read, and many others, and they burst 
 upon us like a revelation, while the belief of our youth 
 was shaken mightily, yea, even to its very foundations 
 and after that, the earthquake ! Down fell the whole 
 
edifice of our faith, and there we stood looking on with 
 mixed feelings of annoyance, disappointment, and re- 
 gret, for we received in our youth a very pious train- 
 ing and were ill-prepared for such disquieting discover- 
 ies. But the facts were too strong, and forced upon 
 us the conclusion that we had been grossly deceived. 
 There can be no doubt that all Christian teaching has 
 been anticipated by other masters long prior 
 to the time that Christ is said to have lived, as a study 
 of comparative religion amply proves, and religious 
 parallels everywhere abound. Here, for instance, is a 
 list of crucified Saviours who were all good enough to 
 die for us before Jesus thought of doing so. Chrishna 
 of India, 1200 B.C.; Sakia, of Hindustan, 600 B.C.; 
 Thammuz, of Syria, noo B.C.; Wittoba, the Telingon- 
 ese, 522 B.C.; lao, of Nepaul, 622 B.C.; Hesus, of 
 Great Britain, 834 B.C.; Quexalcote, of Mexico, 587 
 B.C.; Quirinus, of Rome, 506 B.C.; Prometheus, of 
 Greece, 547 B.C.; Thulis, of Egypt, 1700 B.C.; Indra, 
 of Thibet, 725 B.C.; Alcestos, of Greece, 600 B.C.; 
 Atys, of Phrygia, 1170 B.C.; Crite, of Chaldea, 1200 
 B.C.; Bali, of Orissa, 725 B.C.; Mithra, of Persia, 600 
 B.C.; Salvahna, of Bermuda; Osiris, of Egypt; Horus, 
 of Egypt; Odin, of Scandinavia; Zoroaster, of Persia; 
 Baal, of Phoenecia; Bali, of Afghaniston; 
 Xamolxis, of Thrace; Zoar, of the Bonzes; Adad, of 
 Assyria; Deva Tat, of Siam; Alaides, of Thebes; Mika- 
 do, of the Sintoos; Beddin, of Japan; Thor, of the Gauls; 
 Cadmus, of Greece; Hil and Feta, of the Mandaites; 
 Gentaut, of Mexico, etc., etc. 
 
 We should think that after knowing of all these hu- 
 man sacrifices, -Christians will feel more important than 
 ever. They may find the various histories of these ob- 
 liging gentlemen in a work by one, Kersey Graves, 
 entitled Sixteen Crucified Saviours, Also they may 
 consult The Hindu, Pantheon, Mexican Antiquities ; 
 Higgins* Anacalepsis, and The Progress of Religious 
 Ideas, all strongly recommended by the clergy. 
 The present following of the principal among these 
 Saviours is, for Chrishna 400,000,000 (for Christ 
 200,000,000); for Mahomet 150,000,000; for Confucius 
 
i2o,ooo,oob, and for Mithra 50,000,000. So that 
 there still remains much missionary work to be done. 
 
 History repeats itself, especially religious history. 
 Take, for example, the accounts of Chrishna and Christ 
 which furnishes a striking illustration. It is said of 
 Chrishna that his birth was foretold; that he was an 
 incarnate god; that his mother was a virgin; that he 
 had an adopted father who was a carpenter; that there 
 was rejoicing on earth and in heaven at his birth; that 
 his mother's name was Maia; that he was born on Dec. 
 25th; was visited by wise men and shepherds who were 
 led by a star; was warned by an angel of danger, that 
 all children were ordered to be destroyed in order to 
 include him; that his parents fled to Mathura; that he 
 had a forerunner; that he was wise in his childhood; 
 was lost and searched for by his parents; had other 
 brothers; retired to solitude; fasted; preached a note- 
 worthy sermon; was entitled Saviour and Redeemer; 
 existed prior to birth; and on earth and in heaven at 
 the same time; was both human and divine; 
 worked miracles; read thoughts; ejected devils; had 
 apostles; reformed the existing religion; was poor; was 
 conspired against; denounced riches; \vas meek; un- 
 married and chaste; merciful; associated with sinners 
 and was rebuked for it; befriended a widow; met a wo- 
 man at a well; submitted to insults and injuries; was 
 a philanthropist; had a last supper; was crucified be- 
 tween two thieves; darkness supervened; he descended 
 to hell; was resurrected, and after three days seen by 
 many people! And all this, 1200 B.C. ! ! ! 
 
 With regard to prophecy we have the coming to earth 
 foretold of others besides Chrishna and Christ, as, for 
 example, Chang-Ti, Osiris, Cadmus, Quirinus, Quexal- 
 cote, and Mahomet, and Messianic prophecies are to be 
 found in the Vedas^ the Chinese Sacred Books, and 
 in those of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mexico, Arabia, and 
 Persia. There are also many other " odious " com- 
 parisons. Osiris is spoken of as having bruised the 
 serpent's head after it had bitten his heel, Hercules is 
 represented with his heel on a serpent's head, Chrishna 
 is pictured and sculptured in the same way, and Persia 
 
has the same old legend. Miraculous conceptions are 
 recorded of Plato (who was said to be a son of Apollo); 
 of Zoroaster; of Mars and Vulcan; of Quexalcote; of 
 Suchiquetqual; of Yu; of Appolonius; of Buddha; of 
 Mahamaya; of Chrishna; of Yasuva; and incidentally, 
 of Jesus ! 
 
 Of virgin mothers we have Yasoda, mother of Chrish- 
 na; Maia, of Sakla; Celestine, of Zulis; Chimalman, of 
 Ouexalcote; Semele, of Bacchus; Prudence, of Hercules; 
 Alcmene, of Alcides; Shing-mon, of Yu; Mayence, of 
 Hesus; and Mary, of Jesus, who is all behind again. 
 Angels, shepherds, and Magi visited Confucius, Chrish- 
 na, Sakia, Mithra, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, and Jesus ! 
 Again, December 25th is the birthday given for Bac- 
 chus, Adonis, Chrishna, Changti, Chris (of Chaldea), 
 Mithra, Sakia, and the inevitable Jesus. Of infants 
 threatened by hostile rulers we have Chrishna, Osiris, 
 Zoroaster, Alcides, Yu, Rama, Indra, Bacchus, Romu- 
 lus, Salvahana, and our dear friend Jesus ! Of those who 
 descended into hell and were resurrected after three days 
 may be named Quexalcote, Chrishna, Quirinus, Prome- 
 theus, Osiris, Atys, Mithra, Chris, and fcl-ow-my-leader 
 Jesus ! We trace the Trinity in Brahmanism, Zoroas- 
 trianism and the religions of Chaldea, China, Mexico, 
 and Greece ! And then the ceremony of the Eucharist 
 was observed by the Essenes, Persians, Pythagoreans, 
 and Gnostics, who used as elements bread and water. 
 It was also taught by the Brahmans and Mexicans, 
 which unpleasant little coincidence so greatly annoved 
 St. Justin that he remarked : " And this verv solemnity 
 an evil spirit introduced into the mysteries of Mithra." 
 Such is the Christian explanation, but there be those 
 who will declare that all these little fairy tales have a 
 common origin. Well might St. Augustine remark 
 that " This in our day is the Christian Religion, not as 
 having been unknown in former times, but as recently 
 having received that name," and Eusebiu^ tells us that 
 " The religion of Jesus Christ is neither new nor 
 strange. " 
 
 We respectfully submit that there exists not a particle 
 of evidence to prove that Jesus Christ of the four Gos- 
 
pels ever lived. The nearest approach to anything of 
 the kind is the Tacitus passage in which Christ is men- 
 tioned as having been put to death. But be it known 
 unto you, my brethren, the celebrated passage was 
 never seen by mortal man until the Fifteenth Century. 
 The Rev. Robert Taylor informs us (Diegesis) that ''the 
 first publication of any part of the annals of Tacitus was 
 by Johanne de Spire, at Venice, in the year 1468 his 
 imprint being made from a single manuscript in his own 
 power and possession only, and purporting to have been 
 written in the eighth century. From this manuscript, 
 which none but the most learned would know of, none 
 but the most curious would investigate, and none but 
 the most interested would transcribe, or would be al- 
 lowed to transcribe, and that too, in an age and coun- 
 try when and where to have suggested but a dou'ot 
 against the authenticity of any document which the au 
 thorities had once chosen to adopt as evidence of Chris- 
 tianity would have subjected the conscientious sceptc 
 to the faggot; from this, all other manuscripts and 
 printed copies of the works of Tacitus are derived. Tay- 
 lor considers this passage to be one of the numerous 
 forgeries of which Christian hands have been guilty, for 
 example, the passage in Josephus where Jesus is refer- 
 red to, admitted on all hands to be a forgery and which 
 as such has been given up by every scholar of note the 
 church possesses. It was also rejected by Ittigius, Blon- 
 dell, Le Clero, Vandale, Bishop Warburton, and Tana- 
 quil Faber likewise by the great Dr. Lardner. It was 
 first mentioned by Eusebius who probably forged it 
 himself. Gibbon says of it, ** The passage concerning 
 Jesus Christ which was inserted into th^ text of Jose- 
 phus between the time of Origen and that ofEusebius 
 may furnish an example of no vulgar forgery. " And 
 here we may ask, if there existed undeniable evidence 
 that Christ ever lived, where was the need and what was 
 the object of such forgeries? It is pretty clear that there 
 was no evidence, and that the Christians thought it 
 about time that they manufactured a sample or two. 
 " Daille on the Use of the Fathers^ remarks : " This 
 opinion has always been in the world that to settle a 
 
certain and assured estimation upon that which is good 
 and true it is necessary to remove out of the way what- 
 soever may be an hindrance to it. Neither ought we to 
 wonder that even those of honest, innocent, primitive 
 times made use of these deceits, seeing for a good end 
 they made no scruple to forge whole books.'* (B. i, c-3). 
 And all the testimony against Christianity was des- 
 troyed. Porphry wrote no less than thirty volumes cri- 
 ticising it, and these by Christian orders were all burnt. 
 Comes the question Why? Why, brethren, why? Be- 
 cause those books would doubtless have shed too strong 
 a light on the subject, and as Bishop Burnet (not Burn- 
 it) said : " Too much light is hurtful to weak eyes." 
 So, so, Bishop, so, so ! But the Christians perpetrated 
 a worse infamy than burning these books. They attri- 
 buted to Porphry that which he never did write, and then 
 proceeded to answer "the very weak arguments " which 
 they themselves had invented for the purpose of show- 
 ing the reasoning against Christianity to be insignifi- 
 cant. Therefore, as Taylor says, " They attributed 
 their own vile trash to him." Thus they forged all the 
 testimony in favour of Christianity, and burnt all the 
 evidence against it. And when they became powerful 
 enough they not only burnt the books but their authors 
 also. They read their blessed Scriptures by the light 
 of the bonfires they made of their opponents' books. 
 
 But we must draw our remarks to a close. We have 
 not gone into this interesting subject as exhaustively 
 as we should have liked, and as it deserves, but with 
 the end in view of cramming as much material as pos- 
 sible into the very limited space at our disposal for 
 verily, brethren, printers' bills are a mighty burden, 
 and we are not a Rockefeller or a Morgan, neither have 
 we that leisure at our command which is enjoyed by the 
 clergy whose occupation employs their talents onlv one 
 day in seven, whilst we are compelled to spend the 
 other six days uncongenially getting our talents toge- 
 ther. But if in the foregoing pages we have succeeded 
 in exposing to view the fraud and deceit with which 
 Christian history abounds, and in assisting to dispel the 
 notion that such a mythical personage as the Christ of 
 
8 
 
 the fonr Gospels ever existed, we shall have achieved 
 our object. We have furnished a magazine of infor- 
 mation upon the subject which no priest or parson is 
 ever likely to disclose (always allowing him to be ac- 
 quainted with it) for though the clergy talk much of 
 Revelation with a capital R, these be the kind of reve- 
 lations which they like not. Brethren, farewell. 
 
 IN ACTIVE PREPARATIONNO. 2 . 
 
 from tbc 6allou>$ to 6lorp, 
 
THE 
 
 FLAGELLANTS 
 
 THE 
 
 COVENANTERS 
 
 (New Edition). 
 
 Author of "God and His Book," etc 
 
 LONDON : 
 W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON STREET, E.G. 
 
THE FLAGELLANTS. 
 
 FROM the era of its half-mythical Galilean down- 
 wards, Christianity has laid incontestable claims to 
 be considered the Religion of Misery. A radical 
 doctrine of the faith is that this world is only a 
 Babelmandeb, or Gate of Tears to the " glory that 
 shall yet be revealed." The teachings recorded of 
 Christ have all the jaundiced acerbity of the Essenes. 
 The son of Mary was an ascetic, or nothing. Ac- 
 cording" to him, the end of the world was close at 
 hand. Its concerns and aims were despicable, and 
 the best that could be done was to regard its plea- 
 sures as pernicious seductions and lay up " treasures 
 in heaven," as it would avail a man nothing should 
 he " gain the whole world and lose his own soul." 
 
 Strictly compatible with the teachings of Christ 
 were the doctrines of Cardinal Damiani, when he 
 wrote a panegyric upon the efficacy of self-inflicted 
 suffering, and those of the celebrated Dominic, when 
 he introduced penitential hymns, to be chanted to 
 a tune to which the self-inflicted lash kept time. 
 Hair shirts, protracted periods of fasting, and the 
 like, had long been in vogue as means to propitiate 
 an angry heaven ; but Dominic affirmed that twenty 
 recitations of the Psalms, accompanied by self- 
 inflicted scourging, was equal to a hundred years 
 of ordinary penitence. 
 
 Dominic flourished towards the middle of the 
 eleventh century ; but it was not till about two 
 centuries later (1260) that the seed of asceticism 
 he had sown sprang up to be a great and popular 
 tree of self-torture. It was in an age of gloom 
 and suffering and wickedness that, at Pergugia, 
 in Italy, a monk named Regnier, with \vild and 
 bitter eloquence, preached Flagellation as the anti- 
 dote that would restore an afflicted people to the 
 
The Flagellants, 3 
 
 favour of an angry God. Like Peter the Hermit 
 in the first Crusade, like Luther at the Reformation, 
 or Bernhardt of the Millenarian insanity, this 
 Regnier had rightly interpreted the spirit of the 
 times. He put in his sickle, and the corn was 
 already ripe for the harvest. The wars of Guelph 
 and Ghibelline, famine, pestilence, rapine, murder, 
 and misery had, after a thousand years of Chris- 
 tianity, made Italy and the most of Europe feel 
 that life was, indeed, not \vorth living, but only 
 a horrid and mysterious burden, which was taken 
 up involuntarily, and which left those who bore it 
 such cravens that they had not the courage to lay 
 it down. 
 
 And so another violent epidemic of Lose your 
 Reason to Save your Sotil fell upon Christendom 
 like a rinderpest. The memory and inspiration of 
 the Man of Sorrows was again to lay the load of 
 a great sorrow upon the shoulders of the world. 
 Once more, as, under the preaching of Bernhardt 
 and Peter the Hermit, rowdy and rascal, swash- 
 buckler and sword-player, blackguard and blackleg, 
 worked themselves into a frenzy concerning one 
 Jesus, whose name has always been a spell-word 
 with miscreants from the time of the Christian cut- 
 throats mentioned by Tacitus down to Booth's latest 
 prize, the " blood-washed soul " of 'Arry Juggins 
 the burglar. 
 
 Two by two the holy ones of the whip-lash 
 marched through the gaping multitudes on the 
 crowded streets. Their heads were covered with 
 sackcloth ; their remaining article of attire was a 
 bandage round the loins, which rendered them a 
 little decent for God's sake. Their backs and breasts 
 were entirely nude. The back bore a huge cross, 
 daubed upon the skin with red paint ; and another 
 cross was smeared upon the naked breast. On 
 through the town, and through the wilderness, in 
 long and narrow file, like the march of the ducks 
 from the dub to the dung-hill, marched those nasty 
 saints of God. The hand of each sacred fanatic 
 bore a heavy and horrible whip, the thongs tipped 
 with iron ; and, with this whip, every pious madman 
 lashed his own bare back till the thongs were clotted 
 and gory, and long lines of bipod running down 
 
4 The Flagellants. 
 
 from the scapula to the pelvis defaced the red cross 
 which had been painted on the skin. 
 
 To what shall we liken the men of that genera- 
 tion? To a crazy dog-, refusing its food and chew- 
 ing- off its own hind legs to please its master. But 
 the analogy is imperfect, and the man flogging his 
 own back to please his Jesus is more irrational than 
 the dog' chewing off his own hind legs to please his 
 master ; for the dog is positively sure he has a 
 master ; but the ablest Christian that has ever writ- 
 ten has not been able to establish that his Jesus 
 really ever existed. The only record of him is in 
 four so-called " Gospels," written by nobody knows 
 who, nobody knows where, and nobody knows when, 
 and the statements of which are contradicted by 
 each other and are utterly unsupported by history. 
 A pretty source, indeed, from which to derive a 
 Jesus in whose honour you can flog your back ! 
 But backs always will be flogged, and noses ever 
 will be held close to the grindstone, till he w r ith 
 the back and he with the nose takes the trouble to 
 cultivate his brain, and dares to confront, eagle- 
 eyed, the authorities that would make him a chattel 
 and a poor mad cats-paw in the hands of priest 
 and tyrant. 
 
 Jehovah has ever liked singing and dancing and 
 capers to his glory and honour. David, the " man 
 according to God's own heart," danced naked be- 
 fore deity and certain young girls ; and another 
 worthy sang to God's glory with acceptance because 
 Jael had hammered a jiail into her guest's head 
 while he slept. So the Flagellants, besides tickling 
 their own backs with whips, deemed it would be 
 well to tickle Jehovah's ears with music. Accord- 
 ingly they sang while they flogged. If you think 
 flogging your back is conducive to making you 
 rival the efforts of Sims Reeves, just try the ex- 
 periment. Flog your back while you sing, and you 
 will find that many a quaver flies off into a scream, 
 and that many a crotchet is dead-born. But the 
 Lord had just to content himself with such music 
 as was obtainable under the circumstances. Cer- 
 tain frag-ments of the hymns which the Flagellants 
 sang have been preserved. Here are brief speci- 
 mens : 
 
The Flagellants. 5 
 
 " Through love of man the Saviour came, 
 
 Through love of man he died ; 
 He suffered want, reproach, and shame, 
 
 Was scourged and crucified. 
 Oh, think, then, on thy Saviour's pain, 
 And lash the sinner, lash again ! " 
 
 The following- are a few lines from the metrical 
 rendering into English of " The Ancient Song of 
 the Flagellants " : 
 
 "Tears from our sorrowing eyes we weep, 
 Therefore so firm our faith we keep 
 With all our hearts, with all our senses : 
 Christ bore his cross for our offences. 
 Ply well the scourge, for Jesu's sake, 
 And God, through Christ, your sin will take. 
 For love of God abandon sin 
 To mend your vicious lives begin ; 
 So shall we his mercy win."t 
 
 Thirty-three days and a-half was the shortest term 
 in which a Flagellant must macerate and lacerate 
 himself ; and these thirty-three and a-half days were 
 meant to be mystically symbolical of the thirty-three 
 years and a-half which the third part of God, and 
 yet equal to the whole of God, had lived on earth 
 "saving souls" and making three-legged stools. 
 The devotees fell down on their dirty knees in the 
 dirty streets, and, setting up their naked, putrid, 
 and horrible backs, prayed to Jah and Jesus and 
 Mary to have meucy on their souls, before having 
 taken the trouble to find out whether they had souls 
 or not. Jah and Jesus and Mary had, however, 
 something else to do than attend to kneeling lunatics 
 with voices like cross-cut saws and backs like half- 
 cooked beef-steaks. But the cities, then as now, 
 had plenty of fools, and certain of them rushed out 
 at their doors or leapt from their windows for God's 
 sake to join the ranks of those who lashed their 
 hurdies with thongs and prayed with their knees 
 In the gutter. When all Christendom had managed 
 to lash its back to its own satisfaction, it threw 
 down the whip, got up from its knees, and took 
 *o swearing and sinning in the usual way. 
 
 But, some fifty years afterwards, Christendom 
 again took it into its head that its back would be 
 
 * Preserved by L'Evesque : quoted by Lingard. 
 t Dr. He:ker. 
 
6 The Ftagellents. 
 
 all the better fora flogging-. So, in 1296, the saints, 
 particularly those of Strasburg, Spires, and Frank- 
 fort, took unto themselves whips, and began busi- 
 ness in earnest. The Jews had good broad backs, 
 which they were impious enough never to whip, 
 and this mightily offended the Christian Flagellants. 
 The Jews did not see their way to whip their own 
 backs, so, in the most obliging manner, the Chris- 
 tians offered to w r hip them for them. The Jews 
 preferred to look after their commercial enterprises 
 to tearing away with a scourge at their own dorsal 
 rafters ; and, for this deadly sin, they were foully 
 massacred. The wretches who did not scourge their 
 backs had scourged the third of deity and crucified 
 him. Down with them to Tophet ! One Jew, 
 goaded to desperation by Christian persecution and 
 outrage, set fire to the Town Hall and the Cathedral 
 of Frankfort, and they were reduced to ashes. Down 
 with the seed of Iscariot and Barabbas ! The holy 
 ones flung away their whips, and, seizing sword, 
 hatchet, and knife, devoted some hours of horror 
 to the slaughter of man, woman, and child of the 
 seed of Israel. The God of Jacob looked on ; but, 
 apparently, did not see his way to interfere. In 
 Frankfort, of all the sons and daughters of Salem 
 who'se ancestors had sung to the Lord by the streams 
 of Babel, none remained alive, except a small rem- 
 nant that, bursting through the carnage, had 
 escaped into Bohemia. Christ had " redeemed " 
 these Christians (they were well worth it) by a 
 bloody sacrifice upon Calvary, and, out of com- 
 pliment like Catherine Medici in her sanguinous 
 bath they set him in blood to the chin. Every 
 tree must be judged by its fruit. I hereby defy the 
 history of all the other faiths to produce a tree like 
 the Christian one, which, from the deepest root to 
 the topmost twig, is dyed with human gore. 
 
 After the Frankfort tragedy of 1296, Flagellantism 
 did not rear its head conspicuously till the year 1348. 
 To students of history the mention of this date re- 
 calls the deepest and widest grave that was ever 
 dug to receive the slag and refuse of morality. The 
 " BLACK DEATH " took into her hands the besom 
 of destruction, and swept into the sepulchre twenty- 
 five millions of human beings ! Europe fell upon 
 
The Flagellants. 7 
 
 her knees, and from Dirt appealed to Deity. But 
 the appeal was in vain. In every Christian city 
 there was a plethora of disgusting" sewage and un- 
 speakable stench. Cleanliness is, proverbially, next 
 to godliness ; but the citizens of mediaeval Europe 
 were so godly that they forgot to be cleanly. Out- 
 side Mohammedan Constantinople there was not a 
 bath on the entire European continent, from the 
 Straits of Behring to the Straits of Messina. Pious 
 Ignorance and theological Intolerance sat to the 
 eyes in filth, which it would give my readers the 
 jaundice to describe ; and mankind perished as do 
 clouds of locusts when overtaken by a gale at sea, 
 or as perish at the end of autumn tens of thousands 
 of hives of bees, when imprisoned amid the fumes 
 of burning brimstone. 
 
 ** God in heaven, Mary and all the Saints, what 
 is the matter now? " gasped Christendom, as, with 
 pale lips and phrenized eye, she, in whole cityfuls, 
 staggered into the grave. Nothing practical, as 
 connected with this wretched " Vale of Tears," 
 suggested itself to the follower of Jesus. He was 
 beyond and above attending to the carnal conditions 
 of this despicable earth, and from the midst of his 
 priests and relics and shrines and miracles his whole 
 liope was in heaven, and his only court of appeal 
 his " Maker and Redeemer." But neither Maker 
 nor Redeemer could be induced to interfere ; and 
 graves were dug till there were none left to dig 
 them, and corpses were borne out of the streets 
 and nouses till there w r ere none left to bear them. 
 There were only the voice of prayer, the cry of pain, 
 and the rattle of the death-cart ; and in certain dis- 
 tricts even these sounds died away. In the houses 
 the dead were left with the dead. There lay a dis- 
 used cart and a skeleton horse. Grass and weeds 
 flourished in the streets where a busy traffic had 
 rolled its tides, and there the wind waved ghastly 
 shreds of human apparel, still adhering to more 
 ghastly relics of human beings. There was high 
 carnival for maggot and fly, and dogs and swine 
 tugged and snarled among the entrails of those who 
 had trusted in Jesus and neglected their dust-bins. 
 
 The New Testament was looked to as the anti- 
 dote to the bane ; and, whatever may be its merits, 
 
8 The Flagellants. 
 
 it is a poor manual of hygiene. Scrubbing is never 
 mentioned, and there is no reference to washing, 
 except to the washing of " souls," whatever they 
 may be, in blood. There is, moreover, allusion to 
 the washing of a certain party's feet with tears, 
 and then drying them with maiden's hair ; but this 
 is a sentimental and not an efficacious lavation. It 
 is not on record that Mary or Tabitha, or anyone 
 else, ever washed the shirt or tunica which was 
 worn under the seamless garment of Jesus, and I 
 question if it was ever washed or changed from 
 the day on which he left the carpenter's bench till 
 the day that, with his life, he expiated his sedition 
 and folly. Through all the horrors of the Black 
 Death we hear of no wholesome and honest wash- 
 ing with water ; but there certainly was a washing- 
 of the streets with blood. It was surmised that 
 this visitation of the wrath of Heaven was instigated 
 by the sinfulness of the Christians in allowing the 
 Jews to live ; for it was the Jews who had crucified 
 the Lord ; and yet, according to the Christian theory, 
 if the Lord had not been crucified, the world \vould 
 inevitably have been lost. The Black Death w<as 
 accompanied with another merciless massacre of the 
 Jews. It was also accompanied by another pitiless 
 flogging of backs. So fanatically wild did this self- 
 inflicted back-flogging become that many held that 
 the rite of Flagellation should, in the Christian 
 Church, supersede the rite of Baptism. Many liter- 
 ally flogged away the flesh off their bones, and yet 
 the plague did not abate ; and the sky and the earth 
 were pregnant with supernatural terrors. A pillar 
 of fire hung over the pope's palace at Avignon ; 
 a red ball of fire in the heavens blazed over Paris, 
 and Greece and Italy were shaken with an earth- 
 quake. And the Christians flogged and prayed, and 
 prayed and flogged, and sang and slew, and slew 
 and sang, and still the plague went on. 
 
 Flagellantism was not without its serio-comic as- 
 pect. I cannot say whether it copied from the game 
 of Leap-the-Frog, or whether Leap-the-Frog has 
 copied from it. In Leap-the-Frog each boy vaults 
 over his neighbour's bended back, and then bends 
 his own, and so on the process goes till each has 
 vaulted over the back of all. The Flagellants lay 
 
The Flagellants. 9 
 
 in rows, and one ran along- the row scourging 
 furiously as he went with a leathern scourge tipped 
 with iron, and then he lay down ; and so on and 
 so on, till each had flogged the naked backs of all. 
 In lying in the rows to be flogged, however, those 
 who wished to do penance for certain crimes had 
 to observe certain recognized postures indicative of 
 these crimes. If the crime was perjury, till it was 
 his turn to get up and flog, the penitent lay on his 
 side, holding up three fingers ; if it was adultery, 
 he lay flat with his face on the ground ; and so on r 
 different postures of the body were fixed upon to 
 indicate different crimes. The Flagellants, too, were 
 not without their grotesque impostures in the shape 
 of pious forgeries. At one of their assemblies they 
 actually read a letter which had been sent to them 
 direct from heaven, and in which Jesus Christ was 
 good enough to give them his favourable opinion of 
 the efficacy of flagellation. The " Blessed Virgin " 
 had, with maternal affection, given her son some 
 assistance in the composition of this celestial missive. 
 Unlike the Millenarian mania, the Flagellant craze 
 extended even to England. In 1351 a deputation 
 of 120 continental Flagellants visited London ; but 
 insular stolidity did not see its way to carry its piety 
 to the extent of lacerating its own flesh with 
 scourges. Even on the continent the frenzy began 
 to exhaust itself. The leaders betook themselves to 
 desperate resources to buttress up a falling cause. 
 They set themselves to the task of restoring life 
 to a dead child, and performed the "miracle" so 
 clumsily that the performance hastened their dis- 
 solution instead of giving them a new lease of in- 
 fluence. In the hey-day of their fanaticism neither 
 king nor pontiff saw it prudent to interfere with 
 the Flagellants ; but when the tide turned against 
 them, king and pontiff turned against them too. A 
 bitter persecution set in, and Flagellantism, like 
 most other isms, was called upon to furnish its roll 
 of martyrs, and it heroically enough responded to 
 the x call. Its dying spasm and it was a vigorous 
 and terrible one w r as in 1414, and some time later 
 it 'finally expired in the dungeons and amid the 
 fagots of the Holy Inquisition. Mankind, in the 
 -snass, continue to be fools ; but, in the last four 
 
io The Couenanteis. 
 
 centuries, there has been some small advance to- 
 wards sanity, and it is now somewhat difficult to 
 get anyone to flog" his own back for the love of God. 
 
 W. S. R. 
 
 THE COVENANTERS. 
 
 MONDAY, OCTOBER 27th, 1884. 
 The House met at four o'clock. 
 
 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS. 
 
 Answering Mr. Buchanan, the Marquis of Hartington said he 
 had communicated with Loid Wolseley as to the employment of a 
 greater number of Presbyterian chaplains with the Scottish regi- 
 ments under his charge, adding that one at present at Alexandria 
 would be available, if his services were required. 
 
 ALAS, that the world has not yet dispensed with' 
 the services of Presbyterian Beetles of god and gun 1 
 [ myself ran such a narrow escape of being a Scotch 
 Beetle that this project of employing the Scarabceus 
 Scotorum in Egypt brings up to my memory sundry 
 of the bloodthirsty insects' previous ravages scrolled 
 over history's panoramic canvas, and that in pig- 
 ments of blackness and fire. 
 
 There, with high cheek-bones and scowling brows y 
 with black gowns and Geneva bands, file past the 
 dour and grim fanatics who barred the path of 
 Charles I., and of Laud, Juxon, and Wren. There 
 go they who, for twenty-eight years, through steel 
 and blood and heather, set their backs against the 
 wall of Fate, and practically swore to lead Scotland; 
 to Hell, rather than to Rome. 
 
 History has a pretty feasible hint that the shower 
 of clasp-Bibles that, on July 2jrd, 1637, rained so 
 murderously round the head of Dean Hanna, in 
 St. Giles's Church, were flung by Scottish ministers, 
 dressed in female gowns and mutches, and that 
 their pulpit-trained voices initiated the popular yell 
 of "Anti-Christ! Anti-Christ! A Pope! A Pope! 
 A Belly-god! Stone him!" It was the fanatical 
 and hard-headed Presbyterian Beetles who, by their 
 wild biblically-phrased warnings, roused the Scottish; 
 
The Covenanters. \ i 
 
 peers to a vivid apprehension that, if Charles and" 
 Laud succeeded, the estates \vhich had been con- 
 fiscated from the Church at the Reformation would 
 be wrenched from the nobles and restored to Rome. 
 This was a potent argument ; for, whatever might 
 be the territorial lord's desire for a place in the 
 kingdom of heaven, he would fight and sing psalms 
 for twenty years rather than lose a single acre of 
 his lands in the kingdom of Scotland. And thus 
 there was almost instantly arrayed against the 
 Government a black phalanx of ninety Beetles, 
 walled round by John, Earl of Rothes ; John, Earl 
 of Cassilis ; Alexander, Earl of Eglington ; James, 
 Earl of Home ; William, Earl of Lothian ; John, 
 Earl of Wemyss ; and John, Earl of London ; Lord 
 Lindesay, Lord Yester, Lord Balmerino, Lord 
 Cranston, and large numbers of the gentry and 
 lesser nobility. These, of course, led with them 
 the psalm-singing yokels of their estates, primed 
 up by the Beetles to a perfect phrenzy of religious 
 fanaticism, which could not fail to be exceedingly 
 profitable to their lords and masters. There is no 
 patriotism in denying that Scotland's desperate 
 struggle in the seventeenth century was carried out 
 by the immoral instrumentality of Beetle and noble- 
 primed bumbkins, howling from Jeremiah and cant- 
 ing from Ezekiel, grimly frantic with suffering and 
 fanaticism, who, singing psalms, mutilated the slain, 
 and dashed their texts and swords at the same time 
 through the bodies of the dragoons of the Govern- 
 ment. Scotland did all this drunk with divinity, 
 and I should respect her quite as much if she had 
 done it all drunk with whisky. And yet I should 
 like to see the land in the whole world that can 
 afford to scoff at her. Man, up to this time, has 
 been a small and nasty animal at the best, and what 
 are magniloquently called his noblest motives will 
 not . bear anything like rigid analysis. You are 
 kinder to mankind when you expect too little of 
 them, than when you expect too much. And it w 7 ill 
 puzzle your ingenuity to expect less than you will 
 get. 
 
 The passage in Genesis, anent God's making all 
 things very good, would have stood better on its 
 legs if it had read, " God made all things very good 
 
12 The Covenanters. 
 
 save man, and him he made mad." It is teleology 
 alone that makes man madder than his " earth-born 
 companions and fellow-mortals." Well might Burns 
 .apostrophise the mouse: 
 
 " Still thou art blest, compared wr me : 
 
 The Present only toucheth thee ; 
 
 But, ah ! I backward cast my e'e 
 On prospects drear ; 
 
 And, forward though I canna see, 
 
 I guess and fear," 
 
 It is all very well for writers of the school of Dr. 
 Lewins to abjure teleology absolutely. It rises 
 superior to abjuration. The speculatively religious 
 instinct is strong in normal man, and I, for one, 
 rejoice rather than lament that it is so. It is not 
 the religious instinct that has stultified and cursed 
 the race, but the diversion of that instinct into 
 baleful channels by interested sacerdotal and civil 
 chicane. Man has too little religion, rather than 
 too much ; but he has certainly too much theology, 
 rather than too little. 
 
 But, back to the Black-Beetles of the Presbyterian 
 corner of the vineyard of the Lord. So well did 
 the interested leaven of religious sedition work, that 
 in June, 1638, the High Commissioner swaggered 
 up to Holyrood escorted by 20,000 men, most of 
 them mounted. There were present, moreover, 700 
 Beetles, the most sour and grim kind that ever 
 banged a bible for the love of God. Many of them 
 had buff coats under their Geneva cloaks, and, 
 according to Burnet, many wore in their belts 
 swords, pistols, and daggers, that, for the love of 
 heaven, they might redden the' earth with blood. 
 Madly Beetle-bitten, the peasantry flew to arms ; 
 every Beetle-box in the country breathed of fire and 
 slaughter ; the crackle of musketry was in every 
 sermon, the roar of cannon in every prayer ; the 
 sword-blade was sharpened on the pulpit, and the 
 kirk became a recruiting-ground for the battlefield. 
 " We have now cast down the walls of Jericho ; 
 let him who rebuildeth them beware of the curse 
 of Kiel and Bethelite," was the refrain of a Tyrtaean 
 sermon by Henderson, of Leuchars. Beetles Mushet, 
 Row, Cant, Dickson, and a mighty host of mur- 
 derous piety, took up the cry. It was thundered 
 irom hundreds of pulpits. The heather was, indeed, 
 
The Covenanters. 13 
 
 on fire. The Beetle struck the Bible with his fist 
 in the emphasis of bloodthirsty rhetoric, and his 
 voice found a terrible echo in the ring- of the 
 armourer's anvil, as the hammer clashed and clanged 
 upon the red-hot iron that was being fashioned into 
 bit and stirrup, helmet and sword-blade. 
 
 The Lords of- the Covenant prepared for war. 
 Wheresoever the carcase of prey is, there shall the 
 eagles of militarism be gathered together. Hereto- 
 fore Scotland had proved too stale and pacific to be 
 a fitting- arena for the restless energies of her gentle- 
 men of the sword and swashbuckling fire-eaters, 
 and they had accordingly poured in thousands from 
 the banks of the Forth, the Dee, and the Clyde to 
 the banks of the Elbe, the Oder, and the Danube, 
 to follow Gustavus Adolphus for gold and glory, 
 and write their names imperishably in their blood 
 in the annals of the Thirty Years' War, in which 
 the stubborn valour of the Scottish Legion filled 
 all Europe with their renown. The Beetles had now 
 wrung- the coin out of the pockets of their frugal 
 countrymen at home, and their fighting- countrymen 
 abroad rushed back to offer their steel blades and 
 their blood for the merks of the peasant and the 
 burgher. The world had no better soldiers than the 
 Scoto-Swedish officers of Gustavus, among- the most 
 distinguished of whom were Sir Alexander Leslie, 
 Sir Alexander Hamilton, Sir James Livingstone, 
 Monroe, Baillie, and other heroes of Prague and 
 Fleura, and numerous battlefields in Polish Prussia, 
 Brandenberg, Westphalia, and Silesia. The Beetle, 
 the ancestor of him now wanted in Egypt, had done 
 it with a vengeance. Every fourth man in Scotland 
 was to consider himself a soldier. The sword of 
 the Lord and of Gideon ! The land was as busy as 
 a beehive declaiming sermons, whining prayers, 
 drawling psalms, and getting ready arms and muni- 
 tions body armour for the cavalry, buff-coats and 
 morions for pikemen, and muskets with rests for 
 the musketeers. A cannon foundry was, moreover, 
 established at the Potter Row 7 , Edinburgh, under 
 the direction of Sir Alexander Hamilton, formerly 
 master of the cannon foundries of Gustavus 
 Adolphus at L T rbowe, in Sweden. And all Beetle- 
 dom was up on end, and raving to Jehovah to hurl 
 
^14 The Covenanters. 
 
 -down the curse of Meroz upon those who failed 
 to gird up their loins and go forth to help the Lord 
 against the mighty. 
 
 The old legend-book of Judah was clasped to the 
 -very heart of Scotland. Its bloodiest and most ter- 
 rible texts were interwoven with the common par- 
 lance of mundane affairs, and preached from with 
 a wild and volcanic vehemence. " And I will feed 
 them that oppress thee with their own flesh ; and 
 they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with 
 sweet wine: and all flesh shall know 7 that I, the 
 Lord, am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty 
 one of Jacob." " The Lord hath a sacrifice in 
 Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of 
 Idumea. " " Cursed be he who keepeth back his 
 sword from blood." " Thus saith the Lord God of 
 Israel : Put every man his sword by his side, and 
 go in and out, from gate to gate, throughout the 
 camp, and slay every man his brother, and every 
 man his companion, and every man his neighbour." 
 These were the sort of bases of Beetle-spun 
 harangues that scared the pee-wheet and the plover 
 of the hills and moors. " Now go and smite Amalek, 
 and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare 
 them not ; but slay both man and woman, infant 
 and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. And 
 Saul gathered the people together, and numbered 
 them in Telaim, two hundred thousand footmen, 
 and ten thousand men of Judah. And the Lord sent 
 thee on a journey, and said : Go and utterly destroy 
 the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them 
 until they be consumed," was the fearful text from 
 which a certain Beetle of Hell preached, and incited 
 the Covenanters to, after the Battle of Philiphaugh, 
 enclose the defeated musketeers of Montrose in the 
 courtyard of Newark Castle, and pour in volley 
 after volley of shot upon the defenceless and un- 
 resisting mass, till not a man remained standing ; 
 and the gunpowder smoke cleared away and left the 
 -court covered with blood and brains like the floor 
 of a slaughter-house, and the air rent with the 
 shrieks of those to whom Death had not yet come 
 in mercy to end their agony. After this holy 
 massacre, 1,000 corpses were interred in a spot 
 which to this day bears the shuddering name of 
 
The Covenanters. 15 
 
 The Slain Man's Lea. And so much did the 
 Presbyterian Beetles insist upon the curses that 
 would overtake those who spared the Amalekites, 
 the enemies of God, and so terribly did they em- 
 phasise " man and woman, infant and mcklingj] 
 that the swords of the Covenant ripped open the 
 bodies of the women with child, and transfixed the 
 unborn babe with the blade reeking with the bl< 
 -of its mangled mother,* that the Scripture might 
 be fulfilled. 
 
 So mucji for the antecedents of the Presbyterian 
 Beetles Mr. Buchanan inquires about so kindly, and 
 in regard to whom the Marquis of Hartington repHes 
 that there is a spare one to be had at Alexandria. 
 Even now, it would seem, Scottish soldiers do not 
 feel they can slaughter properly for the Lord unless 
 they are under the beetlefications of an Ephraim 
 MacBriar or a Gabriel Kettledrummle ! 
 
 How long, O Lord, how long, will it be accounted 
 rglorious to drill a bayonet through a diaphragm, 
 and* valorous to lodge a leaden pellet in the medulla 
 >oblongata? No religion whatever can be true whose 
 God is the God of Battles, and whose priests officiate 
 in the sanctification of slaughter. O that there \vere 
 a righteous heaven, and that man's objective Para- 
 dise was correlative with man's subjective desire! 
 Then w r ould I call to this heaven to witness that 
 the torn banners and emblazoned rags of war are 
 hung up as trophies in the Christian churches avnJ 
 -cathedrals the relics and memorials of wounds and 
 misery and hate and death in the temples of '* the 
 Prince of Peace " ! I have sat in a certain cathedral 
 and listened to the Gospel of goodwill to all man- 
 kind, although, at the entrance, I had to pass dusty, 
 torn, and ghastly relics of some of the bloodiest 
 engagements in India and the Peninsula. I yearn 
 for the religion that will account State murder and 
 private murder alike unhallowed, and which will find 
 no room in its fanes for bannered rags in memorial 
 of burning towns, slaughtered men, shrieking 
 widows, and breadless orphans, more than for the 
 gory knives which were wielded by the miscreants 
 and murderers whose infamy is perpetuated in the 
 Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's. 
 
 \V. S. R. 
 
 * Gordon of Ruthven. 
 
NEW EDITION. 
 380 pp, cloth, gold lettered. Price 35.; post free, 35. 3d,, 
 
 GOD AND HIS BOOK. 
 
 By SALADIN. 
 
 IN Two VOLUMES COMPLETE. 
 
 New Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt lettered, 
 
 Vol. I., 260 pp. Price 2s. 6d. ; post free, 2s. 9d. 
 Vol. II., 268 pp. Price 2s. 6d.; post free, 2s. gd. 
 
 WOMAN : 
 
 Her Glory, Her Shame, and Her God, 
 By SALADIN. 
 
 Large Crown 8vo, cloth, gold lettered, 265 pp. 
 Price 3-. ; post free, 35. 3d. 
 
 THE 
 
 BOOK OF "AT RANDOM." 
 
 Bv SALADIN. 
 
 Catalogue of Recent Works bp Saladin free on application. 
 
 London : IT. Slew art &- Co., 41, Farringdon St., E.C. 
 
ZOOTHEISM: 
 
 TALES OF 
 DIVINE ANIMALS 
 
 Pmee 
 
 W. STEWART & CO., 
 
 19 Newcastle Street, Farringdon Street, 
 London, E.G. 
 
ZOOTHEISM: TALES OF DIVINE ANIMALS. 
 
 
 
 Whenever animals have had unnatural characteristics 
 attributed to them, they have always attained promi- 
 nence in religion, and, in many instances, the lower the 
 beast the grosser were its godly pretensions. 
 
 Varro estimated that more than 30,000 different gods 
 have existed, and that most of them originated from the 
 animal kind. He also adds, that they were responsible 
 for abominable crimes such as are found only in the 
 vilest of men. And although these gods were declared 
 to b$ eternal and immortal, every one of them has its 
 history of birth, death, and burial. 
 
 The earliest and most popular animal-deity appears 
 to have been the Ox, and of this specie, according to 
 Pliny and Herodotus, there were two first prize ones 
 among the bovine herd. These were Apis and Mnevis, 
 and they commanded the largest share of patronage. 
 Apis had its temple in Memphis, facing due East, while 
 Mnevis chewed its divine cud at Heliopolis, the City of 
 the Sun, which the Jews called ON, where Joseph's 
 father-in-law, Potipherah, was its high priest (Gen. 41.) 
 
 The ox-god Apis was a black beast. It was miracu- 
 lously conceived by the lightning entering a beautiful 
 cow. Even its tongue and tail were different from 
 those of other oxen. There was a white square patch 
 upon the forehead, and its back was marked with the 
 figure of an eagle. During the seven days feast devoted 
 to its birthday celebration, the high priest plunged a 
 silver cup into the Nile, and it was believed that as long 
 as this cup remained in the river, the crocodiles would 
 not bite ; but as soon as the cup was withdrawn and 
 replaced in the temple, those crocodiles became rapa- 
 cious again. 
 
 Both Apis and Mnevis were ridiculously alike in 
 prophesying. This they did either by nodding their 
 heads, wagging their tails, or using dancing children as 
 mediums. 
 
 When a god died (as all gods must) the priests, being 
 magicians, had no difficulty in producing another god, 
 
peculiar marks and all, after the same manner as Jacob 
 did with Laban's sheep. 
 
 Respecting the details of animal worship and its cere- 
 monials, these must be left with Diodore of Sicily, for 
 they were so abominable and utterly abhorred by other 
 nations who were provoked to war against the Egyptian 
 zootheists. In one of these engagements, Cambyses, 
 King of Persia, mortally wounded the helpless god Apis 
 with a spear, and actually gave its carcase to the dogs to 
 be devoured by them. But as the dogs were sacred 
 animals also, such a sacrament as one god eating 
 another, was too much even for the Egyptians, who 
 struck off the dogs from the Catalogue of Gods. 
 
 Darius Ochus, another Persian king, sorely troubled 
 the Egyptians for calling him an ass. Darius replied, 
 "the ass would eat their ox." This he did, and then 
 caused an ass to be installed in the Temple in place of 
 Apis as a token of achievement. For this sacrilege, an 
 Egyptian eunuch named Bagoas assassinated Darius, 
 whose corpse the sacred cats ate. 
 
 Although one specie of animals deified by one sect 
 would be abominated by others, yet whole nations were 
 unanimous respecting the worship of an ox-god. And 
 such was the extraordinary variety of animals claimed 
 for zootheism, that we find wolves worshipped in 
 Lycopolis. Venus had a pigeon and Minerva the Dragon/ 
 Peacocks were claimed by Juno, while Esculapus loved 
 serpents, about which several ridiculous tales are told. 
 Others showed their preference for the Ibis and Ichne- 
 umon. Some worshipped the grasshopper -god, Locus- 
 tarius ; and a ratkiller-god is mentioned by Eustathius, 
 the famous commentator of Homer upon the Iliad, etc. 
 Even the old Romans, as Clemens Alexandrinus says, 
 had a god as expeller of flies in the Temple, in the Ox 
 Market, where neither dogs nor flies were ever known to 
 enter. Tacitus exhibits a monstrosity having three 
 heads, viz., that of a lion in the middle, a dog's on the 
 right, and a wolfs head to the left. This trinity was 
 known as God Serapis, which means the Prince of my 
 Father. 
 
 Vigilance being a characteristic peculiar to dogs, 
 
caused these animals to be deified under the name of 
 Anubis. The crocodile having no tongue, likewise be- 
 came a symbol of divinity. Clemens of Alexandria 
 describes a religious procession in which two golden 
 dogs were carried with much solemnity ; and in the city 
 of Arsinoe there was a divine crocodile with the appel- 
 lation of Suchus. Both hemispheres reverenced tortoises, 
 and the sentiment of veneration for sacred elephants is 
 accounted for by ancient religious traditions. Many 
 images of these pachydermita may still be seen in the 
 grotto of Elephanta. 
 
 Apion, Tacitus, and Plutarch charge the Jews with 
 worshipping the ass, whose golden image was preserved 
 in the Temple of Jerusalem. They declare that the 
 primitive Jews also worshipped swine, and for this 
 reason its flesh was not eaten by them. Josephus, of 
 course, says this was not so, but he remarks, had the 
 world embraced zootheism, there would have been only 
 animals left. Their absurdities knew no bounds, for 
 these sacred animals were fed and housed most sumptu- 
 ously, and some were regularly bathed and even per- 
 fumed. Such an expenditure the priests could well 
 afford, as their gains from so lucrative a business 
 amounted to thousands of talents annually. 
 
 Juvenal, in his i5th Satire, regarding zootheistic 
 absurdities says : " How distracting is monster worship. 
 This sect adores the Crocodile, that dreads the Ibis 
 glutted with Serpents. The golden image of a sacred 
 Monkey shines where the ancient Thebes with its 
 hundred gates lies ruined. Whole towns venerate Sea 
 Fishes, and the. Fish of the river; another worships 
 dogs. It is even impious to violate a leek and an onion, 
 or to bruise it by a bite. O Holy nations, for whom 
 these deities grow in their gardens. It is profane to 
 kill a young goat, but it is allowed to feed upon human 
 flesh." 
 
 Among this vast zoological collection, the ox-gods 
 were always the most numerous, being lavishly adorned 
 with jewels and garlands, in the same manner as the 
 gods were adored by the Israelites (Ex. 32). 
 
 Referring to the religious divisions and their adopted 
 
animals, Osiris, King of Egypt, decreed that each sect 
 should have a banner, and upon it a figure of its tribal 
 animal god. 
 
 Moreover, according to the Pentateuch, when the 
 Lord divided the Twelve Tribes into Four Bodies. He 
 ordered a banner also for each of them. Reuben's de- 
 picted the figure of a Man, Judah's a Lion, Dan's an 
 Eagle, and Ephraim's had an Ox. 
 
 Likewise, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have their 
 emblems of a man, lion, eagle, and an ox. And behold, 
 Christ is the lion of the tribe of Judah (Rev. v. 5). And 
 to this day, Zootheism is perpetuated. Its idols may be 
 seen over the facade of St. Paul's Cathedral, where full- 
 sized images of a man, a lion, an eagle, and an ox, 
 together with St. Peter and his famous cock-bird, are 
 placed and carefully protected by lightning conductors. 
 
 Christians who pride themselves upon THEIR sacra- 
 ments would do well to consider ancient sacred animal- 
 ism and its connections with the Lamb of God, and a 
 paraclete dove. Let them compare the hieroglyphics 
 (holy writings) with those of the Bible, and the one will 
 be found to be equally zootheistical as the other. Why, 
 the cattle worshippers even had this inscription : " I am 
 that was, that am, and shall be, and that am everything," 
 which is an exact interpretation of the word "Jehovah," 
 and is the same definition appropriated by the Bible God. 
 
 Now turn to 2 Kings i. 2, where Beelzebub is men- 
 tioned in connection with the death of Ahaziah, King of 
 Israel, who sent messengers to inquire of the God of 
 Ekron, whether Ahaziah's disease would be fatal or not. 
 This is the same Beelzebub referred to in the New 
 Testament, under the name of the Prince of Devils, and 
 by whose virtue the Jews said that Jesus Christ cast out 
 devils. The words in the Second Book of Kings are 
 rendered by the Septuagint as " inquire of Baal-Fly," 
 and by Flavius Josephus as the " God Fly " ; images of 
 which were made up of a human body and a head repre- 
 senting a fly. The Jews derided this fly-god by chang- 
 ing the final " b " into the letter " 1," which then signi- 
 fied the. God of Dung, for Zebub means fly, and Zebul 
 is dung. 
 
To tell the truth, these alterations were made deliber- 
 ately, in order to make the repulsive presentable, or the 
 ridiculous to appear more reasonable. For instance, 
 " Bethaven " was originally rendered " House of 
 Iniquity," where Jeroboam set up his calf-gods. But 
 the Christian translators turned Bethaven into Bethel, 
 the " House of God." Another example of this method 
 of exchange was, when an impostor appeared with a 
 pious name, it was turned into one of ridicule. Thus, 
 the word Jesus, signifying Saviour, was altered to Jeshu, 
 which means " nothing." 
 
 Whether Beelzebub was dung or flies, or both, the 
 Israelitish King trusted in it, and as Orpheus says, 
 " believed the oracles of the greatest god of all, wrapt in 
 dung." 
 
 Here is another notable specimen, the God Dagon 
 (Judges 1 6). It was the House of Dagon, we are told 
 (i Sam, v.) that received the ark of God, and Saul's 
 head after battle with the Philistines (i Chron. x. 10). 
 Dagon was a fish-god, and of all the fishy tales related. 
 that of St. Anthony is the most absurd. 
 
 In explanation of 2 Kings, 17, 30, where the men of 
 Cuthah brought their Nergal, etc., zootheistical research 
 declares Nergal to be a cock-god ; the Ashima of the 
 men of Hamath was a wild goat ; the Avaites called 
 their gods Nibchaz and Tartak, which were a dog and 
 an ass. The Talmud Tract Sanhedrim also tells us at 
 the sacrifices of Sepharoaim, sons and daughters were 
 burnt in honour of Adrammelech and Anamelech, mule 
 and horse gods. "Therefore the Lord sent lions among 
 them " (2 Kings 17, 25). The gods of Seir, mentioned 
 in the history of Amaziah (2 Chron. 14, 25) are really 
 Abraham and Isaac deified as calves, and known by the 
 name of Aretsa (Arza), i Kings 9, 16. 
 
 Herodotus has handed down a startling story con- 
 cerning Sennacherib, the most insolent blasphemer of 
 all gods. It appears that the Egyptian King Sethon 
 was in a terrible plight. He accordingly went into the 
 Temple and prostrated himself before his god. Sethon 
 was distressed so much that he went to sleep. His god 
 then appeared saying, " no harm shall befall thee." 
 
Being comforted by this revelation, and refreshed by 
 sleep, the King immediately arose and marched his 
 soldiers to Pelusium, through which place his enemy, 
 Sennacherib, had to pass. At the scheduled time, the 
 Assyrians arrived and bivouacked. During the night, 
 a multitude of terrible rats gnawed all the harness, their 
 bow strings, and shield straps. In the morning, finding 
 themselves disarmed, the troops were seized with terror 
 and hastily retreated with heavy losses. These were the 
 185,000 men of Sennacherib's Army who, "when they 
 awoke in the morning were all dead corpses (2 Kings 
 xix. 35). And to commemorate this farrago, a statue 
 was set up representing Sennacherib handling a huge 
 rat, and inscribed upon the base were these words: "Let 
 him that looks upon me learn to fear the Gods." 
 
 Wiser men were thoroughly ashamed of these 
 godly enormities, and contrived many methods to expose 
 them ; but so long as the priests were supported and 
 protected by kings and magistrates the god-fancying 
 business continued to flourish. Socrates was condemned 
 to death for scoffing the pagan gods. He ridiculed their 
 whole menagerie, in order to show that there was no 
 more divinity in it than in a dog. To the zoological 
 priests, Socrates was an atheist, yet he was termed " the 
 wisest of men." 
 
 Among other mystical religious emblems, animals' 
 horns signified Strength and Fulness. In this sense, the 
 Bible tells us of the Horn of the Wicked, as well as the 
 Horn of God's People. Horns are frequently referred 
 to in Daniel, and Revelation declares that Kings are 
 horned beasts. It should be remembered, too, that 
 Moses had horns (Ex. 34, 22) and "Joseph's horns were 
 the horns of a wild ox to gore the people to the ends of 
 the earth " (Deut. xxxiii. 17). 
 
 Balaam was told that God was as strong as an ox 
 antelope, and in Habakkuk III., we learn that God had 
 horns coming forth from his hand. These horns of God 
 evidently account for what He did to the other sacred 
 animals in Egypt (Num. 33, 4). 
 
 The history of Zootheism is not only interesting but 
 instructive, It teaches that the Christian God idea 
 
8 
 
 evolved from the Israelitish God a golden calf which 
 originated in pagan animal worship. Gregory of 
 Valence clearly states that the Israelites believed the 
 Ox Apis to be their God, and they made a calf of Him. 
 It is written (Ex. 32,14) " These [golden images] be thy 
 Gods O Israel, which brought thee out of the Land of 
 Egypt." And that the Bible thoroughly supports this 
 bovine idea, there is a definite statement that the God of 
 Moses was so jealous that He was ready to destroy all 
 other gods and their worshippers on the spot. " Let me 
 alone," says He to Moses, " that I may consume them" 
 (Ex. 32. 10). And He did too, for 3,000 were destroyed 
 in a single day (Ex. 32, 28) ; thus the God of Peace and 
 Love prevailed for a time. 
 
 Howbeit, the same calf -gods were still worshipped, 
 many years afterwards, during the reign of Jeroboam, 
 when he made a feast, proclaiming, " Behold thy Gods, 
 O Israel, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt " 
 (i Kings 12, 28). 
 
 All the foregoing Biblical quotations clearly evince 
 that the Israelites, God's chosen people, continued to 
 worship their God, The Creator of Heaven and Earth, as a 
 golden calf. 
 
 Now, in order to completely solve this animal-god 
 problem, we must go even to the New Testament. Yea, 
 even to St. Paul, who accoiding to Acts 17, 24, said, 
 the God whom we declare unto you is The Creator of 
 Heaven and Earth. 
 
 But The Creator of Heaven and Earth is the God of 
 Israel. Therefore, the God of Israel is equal to St. 
 Paul's God. And St. Paul's God is also the Christian's 
 God. But gods which are equal to one another are the 
 same. Therefore, the Christian God is equal to the God 
 of Israel. But it is has been shown that the Israelitish 
 God was an animal god. 
 
 Therefore, the Christian God is an animal god. And 
 this agrees with the words of the Psalmist (96, 5) 
 
 " All the Gods of the People are things of Nought." 
 
 Q. E. D, 
 
MY VISIT TO 
 
 MR SPURGEON'S TABERNACLE. 
 
 I LEARNT, on the evening of Thursday, Feb. 25th, 
 1886, that it was one of Pastor Spurgeon's dipping 
 nights ; so I, for the nonce full of holy zeal and fervour, 
 strode off to the house of the Lord. The house of the 
 Lord in Newington is not like the houses that the Lord 
 usually lives in. It has no steeple, towering up impu- 
 dently and uselessly into heaven. It is a big square 
 clump, which, it would seem, originally thought it would 
 be a prison, but which afterwards changed its mind and 
 tried to become a madhouse. It is of the dumpy, gouty 
 order of architecture, in which Mr Spurgeon himself has 
 been designed and constructed. 
 
 And in those days the sons of God went up to present 
 themselves before him, and I, Satan, went up amongst 
 them. I entered by the door to the extreme left, facing 
 the street, and, ascending a flight of stairs, found myself 
 in the first gallery, and in the front seat thereof. There 
 was plenty of ro-om for more saints than had assembled, 
 so I had little difficulty in edging myself up till I had an 
 excellent view of the platform and the sanctified duck- 
 pond in front of it. The platform is a spacious one, with 
 a good deal of sitting room on it and behind it. And on 
 
2 MY VISIT TO MR SPURGEON S TABERNACLE. 
 
 it and behind it sat some dozens of what I took to be 
 Mr Spurgeon's principal fugle-men and bottlewashers in 
 this Newington corner of the Lord's vineyard. 
 
 The only person standing upon the platform was a 
 squat, rubicund little man, who was pawing away at the 
 railing and talking platitudes. It was a good many years 
 since I had heard that squat little personage before ; but 
 the pleasing and musical, albeit full and resonant, voice, 
 the dictional glibness of gab, and the unaffected but 
 singularly accurate pronunciation told me at once that 
 I had before me the world-renowned Charles Haddon 
 Spurgeon. His subject was faith^ and the assurance of 
 Christ to his disciples that the reason they could not 
 * cast out devils ' was ' because of their unbelief/ 
 
 The preacher had no more attentive hearer than I 
 was. Acquainted as I was with Mr Spurgeon's atavisms 
 of thought, I confess that I was yet absolutely dumb- 
 foundered to hear the crudities and puerilities of the 
 Dark Ages discussed as though the light of the sub- 
 sequent centuries had never cast a single ray upon them, 
 and as though the babblings round the world's cradle 
 were good enough to be uttered in the arena in which 
 the world now wrestles in the might of its manhood. 
 Spurgeon's devil is simply the devil without a soupfon of 
 subjectivity or metaphysical explaining away. He is no 
 Ahriman, or Siva, or Lok, or Evil Principle. He is 
 simply the old, crude, objective devil that can now 
 frighten only children and the handful of adult children 
 who hang on to the coat-tails of Mr Spurgeon, and let 
 the world go round without carrying them with it. 
 
 This crude and objective old devil can be ' cast out.' 
 It is one of the evidences of divine goodness that the 
 devil is permitted to get inside us. It gives us the oppor- 
 tunity to ' chuck him out,' and thereby show God how 
 strong we are. The Omniscient, of course, does not 
 know how strong we are till he learns it from marking the 
 
MY VISIT TO MR SPURGEON'S TABERNACLE. 3 
 
 measure of our success or non-success in chucking out 
 devils. But Mr Spurgeon does not see even thus far 
 before his nose. He is, perhaps, the most single-minded 
 man in Europe. With him there is just a light and no 
 cross light, far less the interminable interweaving of cross 
 lights of every prismatic tint and hue that, in suggestion 
 springing from suggestion, and thought vaulting from 
 thought, strains and bewilders and agonises the whole 
 being of men of mental grasp and intellectual subtlety. 
 
 Mr Spurgeon believes in demoniacal possession, just 
 as his prototype did in Galilee nearly two thousand years 
 ago. He tries to thrust on Newington the cultus of 
 Capernaum, and he, to an appreciable extent, succeeds. 
 For the non-thinker is always the non-thinker ; he has 
 always been with us, and ever will be with us. His men- 
 tal (by courtesy) qualities are negative, and are all stereo- 
 typed. What Peter or John would have believed at the 
 beginning of our era, Spurgeon would believe to-day. 
 He referred to the disciples beholding * Satan as light- 
 ning fall from heaven/ just as if that phenomenon were 
 as widely recognised and as validly established as, say, 
 the event of the first Reform Bill. No subtleties, no 
 embellishments, no explanations that explain away \ 
 simply the devil was seen as lightning to fall from heaven ! 
 Mr Spurgeon takes his time from a clock in Jerusalem, 
 which eighteen centuries ago stopped and has never gone 
 since. His brain has no convolutions. What he wishes 
 to believe he succeeds in believing ; for where there is 
 just one thought there can be no counter thought. 
 Persons of this type seem to have been very numerous 
 in primitive and unlettered times. But evolutionary 
 processes have given more momentum to the fly-wheel 
 and more complexity to the machinery of cerebration ; 
 and few specimens of the type are found now outside 
 our asylums for imbeciles. When they are found and 
 are deemed sufficiently sane to look after themselves, 
 
4 MY VISIT TO MR SPURGEON S TABERNACLE. 
 
 and not to be dangerous to their fellows, they form the 
 soil to support the only plant of true and unadulterated 
 Christianity that now remains in the world. I make 
 bold to say that, on the old-fashioned and neglected 
 Jesus and Paul lines, Mr Spurgeon is the most genuine 
 Christian now in Europe. 
 
 The divine duck-pond in front of the platform is the 
 peculiar feature of Mr Spurgeon's hell-and-thunder shop. 
 There it yawns like the abyss in the forum into which 
 Curtius leapt ; and there are plenty of Curtiuses waiting 
 to leap into it, not to save Rome, or England, or any- 
 thing stupendous, but simply to save their own micro- 
 scopic souls. After a few bouts at praying, and other 
 devout tomfoolery, Mr Spurgeon disappears from the 
 rostrum. In passing, I wish to put it on record that 
 Mr Spurgeon prays to his maker in a loud voice, as if 
 his maker were deaf. He assures everybody that his 
 maker is quite near, and yet he continues to bawl at him 
 as if he were a quarter of a mile away. He dogmatically 
 insists that his maker is inside of him. Inside of him, in 
 the abdominal cavity, there is certainly room for a good- 
 sized maker ; but he might surely select more desirable 
 accommodation. To this said maker, inside of him, to 
 whom Mr Spurgeon bawls knowing best the acoustics 
 of his own interior he is familiar, if not, indeed, imper- 
 tinent. If I were God, I should snub Mr Spurgeon for 
 his irreverent familiarity. He prays for a great deal, 
 likely for much more than he ever expects to get. He 
 apparently keeps in mind the proverbial maid-servant 
 who prayed for a silk gown, which she never got, but she 
 got one of the sleeves. 
 
 The preaching and praying prelude is as dull as it is 
 silly. It is certainly among the ill-informed that Charles 
 Haddon Spurgeon can pass as an orator. His diction is 
 as trite as his thinking, and his conception as common- 
 place as his face and figure. Whatever God intended 
 
MY VISIT TO MR SPURGEON S TABERNACLE. 5 
 
 him to be, he never intended him to be an orator. He 
 has nothing, or next to nothing, of 
 
 * Wit and words and worth, 
 Action and utterance and the power of speech 
 To stir men's blood.' 
 
 He is a glib speaker. So are all who have only two or 
 three ideas, and who are not burdened with an extensive 
 vocabulary. Mr Spurgeon makes use of no word that 
 is not in the vocabulary of a dustman, and, apparently, 
 for the best of all reasons. He evolves no thought which 
 transcends a dustman's comprehension. God's purpose 
 in creating Mr Spurgeon appears to have been to make 
 sure that a good many dustmen should reach the king- 
 dom of heaven, and I will not be presumptuous enough 
 to say that they are not needed there. 
 
 It is when the preaching and praying prelude is over 
 that the real comedy begins. Mr Spurgeon disappears, 
 and his brother in the flesh and in the Lord, James 
 Spurgeon, steps out from behind some red curtains in 
 front of the platform, and, arrayed in fishing boots and 
 a holy waterproof, wades as deep as the pelvis into the 
 pond for gospel goslings. 
 
 On the right, emerging from behind the red curtains, 
 came seven silly females, dressed in white from head to 
 foot, and sloping up conically from the floor to the crown 
 of the head. One of the silly females was a quondam 
 maid-servant of mine; but there stood the seven in a 
 row by the side of the tank motionless, glistening, and 
 conical, like seven huge sugar-loaves. From the height of 
 Sugar-loaf No. 3, I conjectured that it was my quondam 
 Abigail. 
 
 At a given signal, Sugar-loaf No. i stepped down into 
 the vat, up to the waist in water. There she took her 
 stand by the pork-butcher-looking person with the fishing- 
 boots and the holy waterproof. And there stood the 
 
she-noodle in white, with only one half of her visible 
 above the water. The saint in the fishing-boots, ungal- 
 lantly keeping himself dry while she was being soaked, 
 insinuated his right hand beneath her tippet from behind, 
 and laid his left hand affectionately upon her breast, just 
 under the chin. Then says he, in the voice which saints 
 assume when they mean to be supremely solemn : 
 'My dear sister in Christ, as an outward and visible 
 testimony that you enter into communion with our Holy 
 Church, by your own desire, I baptise you in the name 
 of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost/ 
 The word * ghost ' is pronounced with a jerk, for the 
 saint in oil-skin and over the haunches in water simul- 
 taneously pushes with the hand on the chest and pulls 
 with the hand on the waist, and, in an instant, throws 
 the 'dear sister of Christ' off her feet, and she falls 
 back into the water with a splash, and it closes over her 
 upturned face. 
 
 The waterproof saint, however, fishes her out and 
 hands her to a person who stands on the margin of the 
 holy pond in a sort of marble horse-trough. Another 
 person stands opposite him, in an exactly similar marble 
 horse-trough. This person of the second horse-trough 
 throws a long white cloak over the drenched and drip- 
 ping sister. This is necessary, as the thin and clinging 
 wet garments would reveal to us the exact form and 
 symmetry of the 'dear sister in Christ 7 in a manner 
 that would demand the attention of the Lord Chamber- 
 lain. The two saints in the two horse-troughs have, 
 altogether, the style and bearing suggestive of their having 
 served their apprenticeship as barmen and chuckers-out in 
 the Elephant and Castle tavern hard by. Each 'dear 
 sister in Christ ' is taken in turn, till the whole seven are 
 drenched in the name of an unproven God, a fabulous 
 Christ, and an incomprehensible Ghost. 
 
 One of the sacred sugar-loaves, as she was being im- 
 
MY VISIT TO MR SPURGEON S TABERNACLE. 7 
 
 mersed, uttered two lusty squeals, that rang through the 
 Tabernacle. Whether she feared she was going to be 
 drowned outright, or whether she screamed under the in- 
 fluence of an excessive influx of the Holy Ghost, it is not 
 for the like of me to determine. I did not hear any voice 
 from heaven, and I saw no dove descending indeed, if 
 any fowl were represented there, it was not the dove, but 
 the goose. The shrieking saint was hustled in behind the 
 omnivorous red curtains, through the openings of which 
 I had seraphic visions of bustling slippers and hands and 
 petticoats, suggestive to me of the mysteries that were 
 being enacted behind the veil. 
 
 Formerly each she-saint had to provide her own divine 
 toggery; but this led to a want of uniformity in she- 
 tailoring which was offensive to the eyes of the Lord and 
 his elect. So, to obviate this, Mr Spurgeon now keeps 
 a sort of divine haberdashery establishment, and lets out 
 the sort of garments that the Lord loves at 2s. a-piece, 
 and has them duly stiffened with Glenfield starch for each 
 baptismal occasion. The 2s. includes a cup of coffee and 
 a cooky in the name of the Lord, which the shivering one 
 devours behind the curtains of crimson. The chat over 
 the coffee, I am told, turns upon who stood ' it ' (that is, 
 the ducking) well, and who stood * it ' ill ; and, as Mr 
 Spurgeon's clientele are more distinguished for piety than 
 refinement, the baptismal badinage, if divine, is hardly 
 parliamentary. I should not be surprised if the female 
 who squealed twice under the influence of the Holy Spirit 
 was not rallied upon the fact that she might have resisted 
 the said Holy Spirit, and thereby have behaved more de- 
 corously, if she had only taken * a quart'n o' gin 'ot.' 
 
 Then came the turn of the ' dear brothers in Christ,' 
 who, dressed like convicts, minus the broad arrows, were 
 standing in a row on the other side of the tank. The 
 saint in waterproof stood up to his holy hurdies in water, 
 and made quite a little speech over the first * dear brother 
 
8 MY VISIT TO MR SPURGEON's TABERNACLE. 
 
 in Christ.' This brother, we were advised, had ' found 
 Jesus ' in the centre of Persia (who would have thought 
 of finding him there ?), and had come all the way thence 
 for the privilege of getting knocked heels over head into 
 the sacred (but not over clean) water into which seven holy 
 hoydens had been soused. After his ducking he was to 
 go back to Persia * to preach the blessed Gospel of Christ 
 to the poor heathen of that benighted land/ 
 
 This ninny from glorious Iran of the olden ages was a 
 tall, bald-headed holy one, his long, meaningless face and 
 bald crown being of the colour of mahogany. He was 
 tripped up like the women who had preceded him. Back 
 went the mahogany head the wood came in contact 
 with the water and the countryman of Xerxes sank 
 with a plunge which sent the splashes into the eyes of 
 those who sat too near this tomfoolery in the name of 
 God. As he scrambled out to take refuge behind the 
 red curtains he ran with his doubled backbone stuck up 
 through his dark, dripping and clinging clothes. He 
 looked ridiculously like a huge tom-cat that had escaped 
 drowning by tearing its way through the sack in which it 
 had been sunk along with a couple of big stones. No 
 mantle of modesty was thrown over his retreating figure. 
 God has made the male of the human race so uninterest- 
 ing that nobody cares a straw anything about it. 
 
 Several things with starched collars and weak faces, of 
 the mamma's-good-little-boy order, followed Xerxes into 
 the goose-dub. The sight was too melancholy. For my 
 race I drew a long sigh of pity and despair. I walked 
 home to Brixton in the commingled light of the gas and 
 the moon, and, to drown the feeling of humiliation that 
 oppressed me, I buried myself among my books. 
 
THE 
 
 CRUSADES 
 
 Gbeir IReaUty anfc IRomance. 
 
 S ALADI N 
 
 Author of " God and His Book" "Lays of Romance 
 and Chivalry? u Roses and Rue? etc. 
 
 LONDON: 
 W. STEWART & CO., 41 FARRINGDON ST., E.G. 
 
By SALADIN. 
 
 Price 1d,, Post Free 7|r/., unless otherwise specified. 
 
 HISTORICAL PAMPHLETS. 
 
 THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 A Reply to Cardinal Manning. 
 
 THE CRUSADES. Their Reality and Romance. 
 CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION. 
 THE FLAGELLANTS. 
 THE ICONOCLASTS. 
 THE INQUISITION. Parti. 
 THE INQUISITION. Part II. 
 
 THE DANCERS, SHAKERS AND JUMPERS. Part I. 
 THE DANCERS, SHAKERS AND JUMPERS. Part II. 
 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. Part I. 
 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. Part II. 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. A Letter to Cardinal Manning. 
 
 Part I. 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. A Letter to Cardinal Manning. 
 
 Part II. 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. A Letter to Cardinal Manning. 
 
 Part III. 
 ST MUNGO. The Saint who Founded Glasgow. Price 3d., 
 
 post free 4d. 
 
 Or in one vol. , handsomely bound in cloth, gilt lettered, 2s., post 
 free 2s. 2d. 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PAMPHLETS. 
 
 THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. Price id., post free i|d. 
 A VISIT Tp MR SPURGEON'S TABERNACLE. 
 
 With Portrait. 
 A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. 
 
 With Portrait. 
 ROBERT BURNS: WAS HE A FREETHINKER? 
 
 With Portrait. Appendix : The Prize Poem in Connection 
 
 with the Dumfries Statue to Burns. 
 
 HELL: WHERE IS IT? Price id., post free i^d. 
 BEETLES AND BATHERS: Coffins and Cantrips. 
 CONCERNING THE DEVIL. 
 A FEARFUL FLOGGING. Price 3d., post free 4d. 
 THE AGONIES OF HANGING. Price 3d., post free 4 d. 
 
 The above, in one vol., doth, gold lettered, price is. bd., post 
 free is. %d. 
 
 LONDON: W. STEWART & CO., 41 FARKINGDON STREET, E.G. 
 
REALITY. 
 
 THE maddest and bloodiest picture in the history of the 
 world is a Christian picture. As the picture is wound 
 off the reel of Time it is two centuries in length,* and 
 is everywhere hideous with swords and skeletons and 
 cinders. Like everything else in sacerdotal history, such 
 a refulgent halo of sanctity and romance has been flung 
 over it as to render its true and horrible lineaments 
 almost imperceptible. It has been urged that the 
 Crusades opened up and developed the resources of 
 commerce, and conferred sundry other blessings upon 
 the occidental nations. Perhaps so they did. But, if 
 hell were to be established on Salisbury Plain, and burn 
 all England to ten feet below the level of the Atlantic, 
 theologians would tax their ingenuity to prove that the 
 globe had benefited by the fiery destruction and ever- 
 lasting immersion of England. Say what you may about 
 the opening-up of commerce and the introduction of 
 oriental culture, every footprint of the Crusades is 
 marked with blood, every step is profaned with lust, every 
 impulse is tainted with madness. 
 
 How was it that, for centuries before the first Crusade, 
 under the polite permission of the caliphs of Bagdad, 
 Christian pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre had visited 
 Jerusalem with impunity ? How was it, if the Moham- 
 medans were such perfidious and detested monsters, that 
 the renowned Haroun al Raschid, with all the delicacy 
 of oriental courtesy, sent the keys of Jerusalem as a 
 friendly present to the Christian Charlemagne ? 
 
 It was not till the incursions from the madhouses and 
 
 * The Crusades were carried on from the end of the eleventh 
 till the end of the thirteenth century. 
 
4 THE CRUSADES : 
 
 piggeries of Europe became intolerable, that caliph 
 Hakem felt induced to put a curb upon the fanatical 
 nuisance. If a polite and tolerant Mohammedan had 
 still been caliph, the pilgrims might still have gone un- 
 scathed ; but they had now to do with one of their own 
 persecuting and intolerant breed. Caliph Hakem was 
 the son of a Christian woman. Besides, the pilgrim 
 nuisance had never been so abominable as now. The 
 Rev. xx. 2-3 canard respecting the fast-approaching end 
 of the world,* had poured into Europe a religious rabble- 
 ment without precedent in the previous ages. Numbers 
 of devout wastrels managed to return from their pious 
 peddling Jerusalemward, and to represent how they had 
 been snubbed and kicked by the subjects of the Fatam- 
 ite caliphs. Nobody seemed to mind whether the 
 pilgrims had been snubbed and kicked or not perhaps 
 thinking that, even if they had been, they had got only 
 their deserts till a clapper-tongued religious lunatic, 
 Monk Peter of Amiens, known as Peter the Hermit, 
 magnified his kicking into an outrage upon Christen- 
 dom, and thereby unscrewed the sluices which poured 
 forth rivers of human blood, heaped Asia Minor with 
 human skeletons, and made history march for two 
 hundred years up and down a hideous Golgotha. 
 
 "Is," bawled Peter, "the land which was trodden by 
 the feet of the blessed Redeemer to be soiled and 
 insulted by the sandals of the followers of the Camel- 
 Driver of Islam? Is it possible that over Tabor, the 
 scene of the Tn. figuration over Olivet, from which 
 the Saviour ascem-cd into heaven the Crescent banner 
 of an alien faith '.all be permitted to wave? Shall the 
 Infidel be ailowc^ to perform his revolting rites over the 
 site o, ;he manger at Bethlehem? Shall a race that 
 knov> not the Lord jabber its pagan litanies in the 
 Garden cjf lethsemane, and by the Pool of Siloam? 
 Shall tl ezzin sound where sounded the voic of 
 
 Jesus ? Siu. \ the spot be blasted with desecratic- wlx nee 
 the cross flung its shadow down the brow of Calvary, 
 and shall heathen scimitars guard the Holy Grave where 
 the body of the Lord was laid, the spices and the myrrh 
 
 * See Saladin's "The Divine Interpretation of Scripture: A 
 Reply to Cardinal Manning." 
 
THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE. 5 
 
 of his entombment mingling with the blood from his 
 hands and feet and wounded side and thorn-pierced 
 brow the blood of God himself, designed to redeem a 
 lost world from the eternal torments of the damned? 
 Is this, and the insult and murder of the pilgrims to the 
 tomb of God, to be endured ? By the arm of Omnipo- 
 tence, No ! Are there no hearts in Europe, no swords 
 in Christendom is there no blood in France that is ready 
 to be shed to avenge the sacrilege to the blood that 
 darkened the rough bark of the tree at Calvary at the 
 hour when Death and Hell were conquered ; when the 
 sun grew dark in the heavens, when the veil of the 
 Temple was rent and the graves of Salem gave up their 
 dead ? For the blood of the Son of God are ye pre- 
 pared to give the blood of the sons of Men ? In this 
 case, he who would save his life shall lose it. May 
 torment unutterable be his who would for a moment 
 think of his safety or his life, when the God who gave 
 them demands that they be laid down in his cause ! 
 Horse and stirrup, sword and lance, the spear, the gipon, 
 and the shirt of mail ! Rush on their battalia like a boiling 
 torrent, and hurl the Infidel to Death and Hell, or may 
 Tophet and agony eternal wait upon you and yours, even 
 to the end of the world ! To Jerusalem ! to Jerusalem ! 
 Rescue the Holy Sepulchre ! Hear in my voice the 
 voice of Doom, and see in the heavens the arm of the 
 Almighty waving you on to the East to rescue the tomb 
 where his Son was laid ! " 
 
 The response was a roar of voices and a clash of swords. 
 " Deus vult" quoth the monks ; and the laity murmured, 
 " It is the will of God." So much for the oratory of 
 Peter, puny, ragged, and dirty, bareheaded, barefooted, 
 riding on an ass, and driven crazy by the naggings of a 
 vixenish wife much older than himself. 
 
 Thus, or somehow thus, were the orations of the 
 Hermit, and accompanied by forceful and vehement 
 gesticulations, and hissed and thundered and gasped with 
 all the intensity and fury of fanatical rhetoric ; and their 
 effect may easily be imagined upon an age that was 
 romantic or nothing, and a people strongly disposed to 
 religious emotion and martial enterprise. The oratory 
 of the Hermit set France on fire. The land seethed and 
 
6 THE CRUSADES : 
 
 boiled and reeled under the lava and detonations of an 
 oratorical volcano. Wild dreams usurped the place of 
 sober, waking life. A mad medley rushed to Peter to 
 offer their services to him or to whoever would lead them 
 to Judea to rescue the Holy Sepulchre. 
 
 Provisions and modes of transport were overlooked. 
 All classes and conditions of men flew to arms and 
 insisted upon being led at once to Jerusalem. The sick 
 rose from the bed of disease or death ; the lame and 
 crippled came with their staves and crutches ; the noble 
 brought his riches, and the beggar his wallet. Women 
 left their spindles and their cows, their embroidery and 
 their tapestry, to don helmet and gauntlets and carry 
 sword and flame into the Holy Land. And, rapidly, 
 helter-skelter, from all quarters, came the miscreant and 
 the scoundrel, the liar, the thief, the ravisher, and the 
 murderer, for had not Pope Urban II. and his priests 
 promised absolution from all sin to whomsoever should 
 take up arms to win back to Christendom the Tomb of 
 Jesus? Christendom put weapons in the hands of all 
 its scoundrelism and harness on the backs of all its 
 villainy, and hounded them on frantically to slaughter in 
 the name of him who has been called the Prince of Peace ! 
 A Goose and a Goat were borne in front of the excited 
 rabblement, the one well symbolising its folly and the 
 other its lechery. Its horrible cruelty was above sym- 
 bolisation ; it was written with sword and torch in a 
 long trail of over 600 miles, proceeding from the centre 
 of France till lost in the wilds of Syria. 
 
 The great multitude which no man could number 
 surged about in its hundreds of thousands, leaving all 
 to God, but somehow breaking itself up into three huge 
 armies, the first led by Gaultier Habenichts, known in 
 France as "Sans Avoir," and in England as "Walter 
 the Penniless." The second army was under the com- 
 mand of Peter the Hermit, in person ; and the third 
 was led by Gottschalk, a monk, raving mad with religious 
 fanaticism. 
 
 Away rolled these armies Pales lineward, a surging, 
 muddy, and boiling river of the social scum and refuse 
 of Europe. The very sort of rabble that the Roman 
 historians tell us first embraced the Christian faith now, 
 
THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE. 7 
 
 eleven centuries later, laid on the Christian shrine the 
 offering of their filthy hearts and dirty swords. And 
 now, some six centuries later still, the scum of England 
 lays its rowdy hymn and horrid tambourine on the shrine 
 of the same faith ever the same rabid rabble through 
 all the centuries, whether it follow General Booth or 
 Walter the Penniless ! I mourn the fact, and, with all 
 the valour of despair, set myself to the task of Sisyphus. 
 
 " Is that Jerusalem ? " was the cry of the ignorant host 
 whenever on their march a town came in sight. If the 
 leaders, many of whom were nearly as ignorant as their 
 followers, had led their hosts to Rome, Paris, or London, 
 and cried, " There is Jerusalem ! " these European 
 capitals would have been razed to the ground, and the 
 first stone pig-sty .discovered in any of them would 
 probably have been hailed as the Holy Sepulchre, and 
 any hog's bristles collected therein would likely have been 
 adored as the hairs of Jesus. On, dying by hundreds 
 and thousands, the motley multitude pursued its way, 
 and the wolf followed for the carnival of human flesh, 
 and great coveys of ravens and vultures darkened the 
 sky overhead. On, in front, went the Goat and the 
 Goose, and on, behind, followed every fool (and worse) 
 with the sign of the cross upon his shoulder, symbolical 
 of the two trans verse sticks to which his deity was alleged 
 to have been nailed. But carpenter or tom-cat, god or 
 cockroach, would have served equally well as a peg upon 
 which to hang the antics of ignorant fanaticism. 
 
 Slaughter, rapine, and ravishment were the order of 
 the day wherever the hosts of the Crusaders rolled. 
 Having made no provisions for their march, leaving that 
 to " Providence," they ate up and devoured everything 
 that lay within reach. Those who resisted their rapine 
 were run through the body with spears, or cleft to the 
 chin with axes, as enemies of God, and their wives and 
 daughters were violated, and then butchered by the 
 soldiers of Jesus on their march to thrust back the Infidel 
 from the stone sepulchre that had belonged to Joseph 
 of Arimathea. The Crusading camp itself containing 
 thousands of she-fanatics from Christendom was a 
 saturnalia of barbarous licentiousness. Loose rein wa? 
 given to almost unheard-of and unprecedented iniquities, 
 
8 THE CRUSADES : 
 
 for had not the Church impressed upon the mob the 
 assurance that taking up arms against the Infidel was an 
 atonement for every possible transgression, and that all 
 who now set out for the Old Jerusalem on earth had 
 thereby secured an incontestible right to enter the New 
 Jerusalem in heaven ? 
 
 What disease and debauchery and famine had left of 
 the holy rabble trailed along through Hungary. The 
 Hungarians hailed them as brother Christians bound 
 upon a sacred errand, and wished them God-speed. But 
 they soon discovered that the pious Crusaders were only 
 a horde of impious fiends, who repaid hospitality with 
 cruelty, rapine, and lust. This was too much for the 
 Hungarians. Stung to retaliation by deeds of wrong, 
 outrage and base ingratitude, they flew to arms, and 
 falling upon the disordered rear of the Crusaders, saved 
 some thousands of them the trouble of proceeding any 
 further towards the Holy Land by leaving their corpses 
 to rot on the plains of Hungary. On the still numerous 
 remnant swarmed into Bulgaria. The Bulgarians flew to 
 arms to guard the mountain passes against the murdering 
 and ravishing demons of the Red Cross ; and hundreds 
 and thousands, instead of being privileged to set foot on 
 the Holy Land or cross swords with the Infidel, under 
 the weapons of brother Christians, left their bodies to feed 
 the eagles of the Thracian hills. 
 
 At last, about one-third of the horde that left France, 
 footsore and worn, haggard and gaunt, hungry, ragged, 
 and naked, malodorous from putrid wounds, wild with 
 hardship, mad with fanaticism, and festering with vermin, 
 staggered into Constantinople, the unquenchable fire of 
 theological frenzy still blazing within them, and urging 
 them on to Jerusalem and the tomb, where their carpenter 
 and world-maker was alleged to have lain. 
 
 The experiences of the multitude under the Hermit 
 were much the same as those of the multitude that 
 followed Walter the Penniless. Of them too, a miserable 
 remnant reached Constantinople. The third army, under 
 Gottschalk, never got so far. It was treacherously fallen 
 upon by the Hungarians and put to the sword, no man 
 or woman being allowed to escape to tell the tale. And 
 yet their fate was, perhaps, less tragic than that of their 
 
THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE. 9 
 
 brethren, who, by dint of strong constitution and in- 
 domitable hardihood, had reached Constantinople. They 
 crossed over into Syria, only to be mowed down like grass 
 under the sharp and crooked scimitars of the very Infidel 
 Turks they, under the auspices of their deity, had 
 set out so confidently to vanquish. And all this in thy 
 blessed memory, O Jesus ! Here were ravages of fire 
 and sword, to which the destruction of the army of 
 Xerxes is almost insignificant, and the retreat of Napoleon 
 from blazing Moscow to 
 
 " Berescina's icy flood, 
 Riven with shot and thawed with blood." 
 
 Still mad with priestcraft, indomitable and undaunted, 
 Christendom poured out her treasure and her life to 
 drive the Infidel from the Holy Land. But all in vain. 
 The votaries of the Camel-Driver had still the best of it 
 against the followers of the Carpenter. The excesses and 
 crimes of the Christians had been such that, at length, it 
 occurred to them that their non-success might be heaven's 
 retaliation upon them for their wickedness. Damascus, 
 they became convinced, could not be taken by the guilty ; 
 so they determined to try the effect of a siege by the 
 innocent. Accordingly, an army of children was the 
 craze of the year 1212. A contemporary monkish 
 chronicler writes : "There came together, from different 
 countries, I know not how, so many children that they 
 made a formidable army. These little ones had standards 
 carried before them, setting forth that they were going 
 to cross the sea, and that the Holy Land had been 
 assigned to them as an inheritance, as it had been to 
 the children of Israel. In whatever town they arrived, 
 the inhabitants received them in the name of God." 
 
 This army of child Crusaders was led by a boy named 
 Nicolas, a native of Cologne. Two ship - loads of 
 Crusading children were embarked at Genoa ; but they 
 never reached Palestine. The boys were sold as 
 slaves and the girls to the oriental harems of the 
 Infidel. The children had been taught to expect that 
 the Mediterranean would divide, as the Red Sea had 
 done before the Israelites, and let them pass over to 
 
io THE CRUSADES: 
 
 Syria on dry land. But when the poor little dupes found 
 that the Mediterranean would not oblige in the manner 
 they had been led to expect it would, as many as could 
 find room were crowded into the two ships, and of the 
 thousands left behind, the greater number died of 
 starvation, and all for the traditional grave of this priest- 
 invented Jew ! 
 
 More than one army of children took the cross and 
 were equipped for the Holy Land ; but only to the 
 advantage of the slave-owner and the master of the 
 harem. And the Christian chroniclers are compelled 
 to admit that certain monks and traders were active in 
 getting up child-crusades in order that they might enrich 
 themselves by shipping off the boys to be sold for 
 slavery, and the girls for prostitution. And all this in 
 thy name and for thy glory, O Jesus ; and here, nearly 
 nineteen centuries after thy alleged crucifixion, I am 
 called an "Infidel," because I yearn to waken Man from 
 the nightmare of Priestcraft, and lead him forth into the 
 bracing morning of a more rational and a happier world ! 
 
 The Christians teach that man was made in the image 
 of God, and that his body is " the temple of the Holy 
 Ghost ; " and yet they voraciously ate " the temple of 
 the Holy Ghost " roast infant, and occasionally roast 
 adult, appeared on the tables or turned on the spits of 
 the Crusaders. Moreover, in the plain of Nice alone, the 
 Infidel piled up a mountain* of Christian bones ; and at 
 a subsequent siege the crusaders themselves made use of 
 cartloads of human corpses to construct a military ram- 
 part. So much for the use to which they put the ruins 
 of certain temples of the Holy Ghost ! 
 
 " Not fair to visit all this upon the Church only the 
 barbarism of the times," urges the Christian apologist. 
 "You, sir, distort and travesty history to suit your 
 purposes as a special pleader." Not so, Stiggins of 
 Bethel, as regards the barbarous excesses of the Christians 
 and their thirst for retaliation, blood and savagery. We 
 go to the " Infidel " for magnanimity and mercy, and to the 
 " Faithful " for pusillanimity and cruelty. We have room 
 for one contrast only between the followers of him who 
 
 * Anna Comnena describes the pile as O<JTUV KO\OVOS and as 
 Kai fiados KOLL TrXaros a 
 
THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE. TI 
 
 drove a camel and the votaries of him who rode upon an 
 ass. 
 
 When, in 637, Jerusalem surrendered at discretion 
 after a four months' siege, Ali, the general of the Arabian 
 forces, sent, in accordance with one of the terms of 
 capitulation, to request that the caliph should come in 
 person to ratify the articles and take possession. The 
 master of Persia and Syria rode, in the most simple and 
 unostentatious manner, from Medina to Jerusalem on a 
 red camel, carrying a bag of corn and one of dates, a 
 wooden dish, and a leathern water-bottle. On his arrival 
 he issued the following proclamation : 
 
 IN THE NAME OF THE MOST MERCIFUL GOD. 
 
 From Omar Ebno'l Alchitftb to the inhabitants of CElia. They 
 shall be protected and secured, both in their lives and their fortunes, 
 and their churches shall neither be pulled down nor made use of by 
 any but themselves. 
 
 The caliph rode into the city by the side of Sophronius 
 the patriarch, conversing on the antiquities of the place. 
 When the hour of prayer struck they were in the Church 
 of the Resurrection. The patriarch bade the caliph pray 
 where he was (that was in a Christian church) ; but he 
 would not. He then took him into the Church of 
 Constantine (another Christian church), and laid a mat 
 for him to pray there ; but he still refused. At last, he 
 went out alone, and knelt on the steps outside. He 
 afterwards told the patriarch that he had refused to pray 
 in any Christian church because, had he done so, his 
 followers might have seized it, and thereby broken his 
 promise to the Christians to respect their places of 
 religious worship. He further enjoined that even on the 
 steps they should pray only singly, nor should they meet 
 there to go to prayers, nor should the muezzin stand 
 there to call the people to prayer, lest thereby the Mos- 
 lems might annoy the conquered Christians. This 
 knightly faith and magnanimous toleration was natural to 
 a cultivated and learned race, among whom were ever 
 circulating such maxims as: "The ink of the doctor is 
 equally valuable with the blood of the martyr ; " " Para- 
 dise is as much for him who has rightly used the pen as 
 for him who has fallen by the sword;" "The world is 
 
12 THE CRUSADES : 
 
 sustained by four things only the learning of the wise, 
 the justice of the great, the prayers of the good, and the 
 valour of the brave." 
 
 We have seen the Infidel picture of the capture of 
 Jerusalem ; now let us see the Christian one. When, at 
 last, the ramparts and towers of the Holy City yielded to 
 the battering-engines of Godfrey, the Christian victory 
 was signalised not by courteous and magnanimous 
 restraint, but by sanguinary and relentless massacre. 
 Three mortal days the Crusaders gave up to the work of 
 carnage. Far from their, like Omar, respecting the 
 religious convictions of the vanquished, they burned the 
 Jews to death in their synagogues, and mixed with the 
 ruins of the captured city the bodies of 70,000 Moslems 
 whom they had slain with the sword. Down blazed the 
 sun upon fire-blackened and siege-shattered masonry, 
 upon stones, and rafters, and mud caked deep with gore, 
 and the stench grew insupportable. A plague ensued, 
 and many of the Christian victors mingled their plague- 
 stricken corpses with those of the 70,000 Moslems who 
 had escaped the fever that followed by having previously 
 perished by the sword. 
 
 Drenched with the blood of 70,000 of the defenceless 
 vanquished, the Christians ascended the hill of Calvary 
 with all the paraphernalia of monks and crucifixes, 
 candles, banners, incense, and anthems, and performed 
 their incantations on the mount upon which their baleful 
 Galilean was said to have perished. They kissed the 
 stone (or some stone or other) which had covered the 
 mouth of his grave, and perpetrated religious antics in 
 honour of the "redeemer" who has blighted the world. 
 
 True, certain of the later of the Seven Crusades were 
 better managed than the first ; but they were all alike 
 mad and detestable and bloody. The most romantic 
 of them all was the third, in which that big, steel-shirted 
 swashbuckler and adulterer, and something else unspeak- 
 able, Richard Coeur de Lion, bore such a prominent part. 
 "Help us the Holy Grave, O God!" was the battle-cry 
 under which he and his Knights Templar and Hospitallers 
 rushed, in heavy Teuton lustihood, among the slim and 
 comparatively unarmed felaheen, and mowed them down 
 like grass before the scythe. When before Ascalon it 
 
THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE. 13 
 
 was his boast, that every day he brought back to his tent 
 ten, twelve, or twenty heads of Infidels he had slain 
 slain for the difference between Tweedledum and 
 Tweedledee, the difference between the Camel-Driver of 
 Mecca and the Carpenter of Bethlehem. 
 
 Killing an Infidel was to him much the same as 
 shooting a partridge is to a modern sportsman. There 
 had been abundance shed for Jesus during the preceding 
 centuries ; but now every drop of blood said to have 
 reddened the cross at Calvary demanded a river of human 
 gore. He who said, " I came not to bring peace, but a 
 sword," redeemed his promise, and the land of his birth 
 was drunk with massacre. On the surrender of Acre to 
 his followers, they bargained that a piece of the true cross 
 which had been captured from them should be restored, 
 and that the sum of 200,000 talents should be paid to 
 them. For the payment of this sum Cceur de Lion held 
 the prisoners taken at Acre as hostages. Saladin, the 
 one glorious name connected with the Crusades, failed 
 to raise the money from his financially-exhausted people, 
 and Richard deliberately led 2,700 hostages outside the 
 city walls and gave his soldiers holiday sport in behead- 
 ing them. The pastime was intensely enjoyed, and 
 participated in with joke and jest, and laughter and oath, 
 2,700 heads lay there in ghastly heaps, and 2,700 head- 
 less corpses reeked in the hot Syrian sun. The followers 
 of the son of Mary had stripped to their work. Their 
 blades were red from point to hilt; their faces were 
 bespattered with, and their clothes were soaked with 
 blood. They stood in blood to the ankles, and stumbled 
 and reeled over corpses, bandying their slang and chant- 
 ing their songs of bawd and revel. Glorious amusement ! 
 they had butchered the defenceless prisoners in the name 
 of the Nazarene ! The sun went down upon that 
 Aceldama, and in the groves and vineyards of Palestine 
 died away the Crusader's vesper cry : "Help us the Holy 
 Grave, O God!" 
 
ROMANCE, 
 
 AT Ascalon, Richard I. was seized with fever. But even severe 
 illness could not abate the warlike ardour of his temperament ; 
 and when he could no longer stand upon his feet, he ordered that 
 he should be carried in front of the walls on a litter, that he might 
 superintend operations, and incite the Christians to a vigorous 
 prosecution of the siege. 
 
 Ha ! ha ! my veins are raging hot, 
 
 My hectic senses reel ! 
 Pshaw, fever ! Bring my harness, squire, 
 
 My morion of steel. 
 I cannot live supine like this, 
 
 And die like coward slave ; 
 Ho, reeling front of battle be 
 
 The death-bed of the brave ! 
 
 No, no, my Berengaria ! 
 
 Take that bandage from my head ; 
 And bring me, gentle wife of mine, 
 
 The iron helm instead : 
 And put thy snow-white favour 
 
 In my plume, so dark and high ; 
 Steel harness be my winding-sheet, 
 
 A soldier let me die ! 
 
 Know, in this sainted Palestine, 
 
 The Saviour died for me ; 
 And my good sword and strong right arm, 
 
 Shall strike for Him, and thee. 
 
THE CRUSADES : THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE. 
 
 And ne'er shall heathen sandals tread, 
 
 And heathen banners wave ; 
 O'er the garden of His agony, 
 
 The glory of His grave ! 
 
 No ! o'er the Moslem turban, 
 
 And the flashing scimitar ; 
 We'll pour the hosts of England, 
 
 In the thunder-crash of war. 
 On, warriors of the high crusade, 
 
 Bended bow and swinging sword ; 
 And wave o'er pagan Ascalon 
 
 The banner of the Lord ! 
 
 Gird on my heavy armour, 
 
 Bring my war-horse from the stall ; 
 Sound the trumpet, shout Jehovah ! 
 
 Forward, onward to the wall ! 
 Come, gentle Berengaria, 
 
 Through the vizor bars a kiss ; 
 And I'll leave to weak old women, 
 
 A dying bed like this. 
 
 Let Leopold of Austria 
 
 Die thus, when die he may ; 
 Let craven Philip breathe his last, 
 
 Far from the battle fray. 
 The couch of Richard Lion-heart, 
 
 Must be the crimson sod, 
 Where, 'neath the bannered cross, he fought 
 
 For glory and for God. 
 
 See, holy Carmel's dark with shame, 
 
 Red blushes Jordan's tide ; 
 That Saladin should hold a day, 
 
 The land where Jesus died. 
 Ho ! where the dead lie thickest, 
 
 Upon earth's groaning breast, 
 At eve, search for King Richard, 
 
 And lay him to his rest ! 
 
1 6 THE CRUSADES: THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE. 
 
 And not in dear old England, 
 
 Lay you your leader dead ; 
 But deep within this holy land, 
 
 Lay you his helmed head. 
 Not English oak, but Syrian palm, 
 
 Shall guard his soldier's grave ; 
 In the sainted land he lived to love, 
 
 The land he died to save ! 
 
 Oh, Salem, for thy Holy Tomb, 
 
 Oh, England for thy throne, 
 King Death shall find King Richard, 
 
 With his armour girded on : 
 He'll greet thee, King of Terrors, 
 
 O'er Jordan's mortal flood, 
 With a forehead wreathed in laurel, 
 
 And a hand imbrued in blood ! 
 
 Come, laggard knights, I charge you, 
 
 Haste, ere the sun go down ; 
 And bear me on your shoulders, 
 
 To the ramparts of the town ! 
 Plunge him amid the battle shock, 
 
 The grapple, yell, and groan ; 
 That Death may find King Richard, 
 
 With his armour girded on ! 
 
Vicarious Suffering. 
 
 OUR SANCTIONS FOR 
 CRUELTY. 
 
 BY 
 
 SALADIN. 
 
 ( Reprinted from the "Agnostic Journal.") 
 MAY jist, 1902. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 W. STEWART & CO., 41, FARRINGDON ST., 
 E.G. 
 
EVERY THURSDAY. PRICE TWOPENCE. 
 
 THE 
 
 Agnostic Journal 
 
 AND ECLECTIC RBVIEW. 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 SALAD IN. 
 
 * # * Under name and pen-name, some of the most 
 scholarly and able writers of the age contribute regularly 
 to THE AGNOSTIC JOURNAL ; and, although the Editorial 
 policy is opposed to the popular and dominant faith, 
 the columns of the journal are ever open to articles in 
 defence of Christianity from clergymen or lay Christians 
 of recognized ability, while considerable space is devoted 
 to the investigation of Theosophy, Spiritualism, 
 Mysticism, etc. 
 
 THE AGNOSTIC JOURNAL can be had free by post on 
 the following terms : Quarterly, 25. 8^d. ; half-yearly, 
 55. 5d. ; yearly, los. icd. Orders should be given to 
 local newsagents ; but where this is impracticable they 
 should be sent direct to the Publishing Office. 
 
 London : W. STEWART & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.G. 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFERING. 
 
 " MAN'S inhumanity to man " is the blight and canker 
 and bane of human life. In recent decades human 
 ingenuity has been, in part, directed to such benignant 
 inventions as the steam-engine and the electric telegraph 
 and telephone. But, anterior to those decades, for 
 century upon century, man's mechanical ingenuity was 
 principally directed to the production of instruments of 
 torture, to contrivances which applied to those mystic 
 harp-strings, the human nerves, could evoke every note in 
 the gamut of agony. 
 
 In the Ages of Faith, in the ages in which the Church 
 which claimed, and still claims, to be of Christ was 
 supreme, we had no telescope, no gas-light, no railway, no 
 printing-press ; but we had the rack, the wheel, the boots, 
 the thumb-screw, the witch's bridle, the Iron Virgin, and 
 other torture-engines too numerous and devilish to be 
 catalogued here. In our museums you can still behold 
 preserved specimens of these mechanical horrors. The 
 sight of them makes me shudder : then, what effect must 
 their hellish spectacle of rust and horror have upon you, 
 O Orthodoxist, when you remember that it was almost 
 exclusively in the service of the Church that that rack tore 
 human joints out of their sockets, that the boots there 
 
4 VICARIOUS SUFFERING. 
 
 held the leg of a human being till blood from the ruptured 
 veins and marrow from the shattered bone splashed in 
 the face of him who, with swinging hammer, drove home 
 the merciless wedges? Here is heresy, some incom- 
 prehensibly subtle doctrinal distinction contemned : then, 
 tighten the wedges, apply the hammer ; as weighed against 
 the crime of heresy how trifling are blood and marrow 
 and anguish and agony ! 
 
 Were grimly fanatical believers culpably inconsistent 
 with their creed in thus mangling their fellow human 
 beings ? Did not the Lord, at the very outset of his 
 career with man, shew that he preferred the red blood of 
 the veins to the red flush of the rose ? Did he not prefer 
 the fat of Abel's veal to the fragrance of Cain ; s violets ? 
 
 CAIN : Poor Abel ! he was but a shepherd boy, 
 
 Who offered up the firstlings of his flocks 
 
 In order to appease Jehovah's wrath, 
 
 Who revelled in the pangs and dying groans 
 
 Of the poor beasts who never did him wrong. 
 
 My heart revolted at the cruel sport. 'Twas I 
 
 Refused to torture gentle innocents, 
 
 But, taking fruit, I offered it to Him, 
 
 Altho 1 'twas mock'ry, seeing all was His. 
 SPIRIT : Fruit would not do. The Lord has ordered blood. 
 CAIN : My brother, as a shepherd, offered lambs, 
 
 And I, as husbandman, did offer fruit. 
 
 Methought the offering of one's toil is best acceptable. 
 SPIRIT : Blood, dying pangs, the torture of the innocent, 
 
 Alone appeases the Almighty's wrath. 
 CAIN : Ay ! to the shame of all created things, 
 
 Thou speakest true He loveth blood ! * 
 
 Did not the entire wheel of the Christians' faith turn upon 
 the pivot of blood and suffering ? Was not the man-god 
 in whom they believed nailed, hand and foot, to the bitter 
 cross ? Painters, poets, theologians and historians, have 
 testified to the pain and ignomy of crucifixion. It was not 
 
 * Lady Florence Dixie, in " Abel Avenged," in Part II. of 
 
 " The Songs of a Child." 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFERING. 5 
 
 mere execution, as we now understand the word ; it was 
 studied torture. In being nailed, or lashed, to the cross, no 
 vital organ of the victim was affected. Crucifixion was, with 
 hellish ingenuity, designed to elicit and stimulate all the 
 suffering of which the nerves of the culprit were capable, 
 even to the last spasm and writhe of anguish and agony. 
 A strong culprit has been known to hang on the cross 
 for several days, before exposure to the sun, hunger, slow 
 haemorrhage and fiery thirst brought death in merciful 
 relief. 
 
 And this is the revolting and horrible torture to which 
 the Church deliberately and dogmatically subjected her 
 man-deity. Lest the horror upon which her very existence 
 rested should be overlooked or forgotten, crucifixes with 
 a tortured and nude human figure nailed thereto were 
 exhibited everywhere, in wood, in stone, on canvas. 
 And, as if this were not enough of the cruel and the 
 horrible, the twelve " Stations of the Cross," each more 
 shudderingly revolting than the other, were invented and 
 forced, in all their repellant gruesomness, upon the wild 
 and sanguinary imagination of an unlettered public. 
 Blood! Blood! Blood everywhere! " Without the 
 shedding of blood there is no remission." " Except 
 ye eat my flesh and drink my blood, there is no life in 
 you." 
 
 This horrible dithyramb with the refrain of " Blood " 
 only too truculently commended itself to the fierce races 
 in the fields of Christian mission. Blood, not brain. 
 Brain was crude, credulous and inchoate, and applied its 
 raw rapacity to blood and the merciless shedding 
 thereof. Zealots, bigots, their god had been tortured, and 
 they, not incoherently, took to inventing instruments " for 
 His name's sake." Habituation to the idea of crucifixion 
 " and, being in agony, He prayed more earnestly, and 
 the sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFERING. 
 
 down to the ground" hardened all the more gentle 
 and tender humanitarian instincts, as daily contemplation 
 of cruel and morbid topics inevitably will. And, here, in 
 London, only a few years ago, we had, on exhibition, a 
 collection of torture-engines by which, through dark and 
 bloody ages, on the scaffold and in the dungeon, the Gospel 
 had been protected in its purity against the taint of 
 heresy. 
 
 Perdition to the church that required such engines to pro- 
 tect her against heresy ! Now, on every side, she is assailed 
 by heresy nay, by blank unbelief; and this contumacious 
 journal is, every week, hurled in her teeth in defiant 
 scorn. Yet who will say that, in spite of this, the world 
 is not better than it was at the time when this serial would 
 have been in the flames and its editor on the rack ? 
 
 Blood ! Blood ! " There is a fountain filled with 
 blood." Well, disinfect the abhorrent nuisance and fill 
 it up with rubble : scatter over it a layer of rich and 
 generous mould ; there let the wholesome green grass wave 
 round the rathe roses of Reason and the white lilies of 
 Peace. Can it be wondered at that this habituation to the 
 conception of the sanguinary and horrible has rendered 
 Christianity the bloodiest agency that has ever cursed the 
 earth with its presence ? I fearlessly appeal to history in 
 corroboration of my averment. " I come not to bring 
 peace, but a sword," is a dictum put into the mouth of 
 the clumsily-invented myth from whom the faith of the 
 vulgar takes its name. Yes, and, by Heaven, the sword 
 came, and came to stay ; and with it came ignorance and 
 superstition and bigotry, and cruelty and rancour and hate. 
 " The Lamb of the Great Sacrifice" was hoisted on the back 
 of The Ass of the Great Credulity, and the Dark Ages was 
 the result, and the darkness of the Dark Ages flings its 
 penumbra upon the vaunted illumination of to-day to a 
 degree that he who looks upon Society conventionally 
 little suspects. 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFERING. 7 
 
 Not only did the " glad tidings of great joy " O 
 mordant irony ! tend to the reckless and merciless waste 
 of life ; but, by a far hotter and more real hell than any 
 previous faith had known, it lent new terrors to death. 
 Never, before Christianity was devised, was it dis- 
 covered that there was any sting in death worth speaking 
 of. Ask the death-bed memories of certain sincere 
 Christians of the type of John Bunyan and William 
 Cowper, in their raving terror, how Christianity takes 
 away the sting from death ; and, if I, like them, were a 
 Christian, I feel certain that my death-bed would be as 
 shudderingly terrible as was theirs. There are, I know, 
 many Christians who feel quite sure that they will " fall 
 asleep in Jesus," and who console themselves by repeating 
 maudlin, nauseous, and meaningless Gospel tags. They 
 know that the vast majority of human kind go to perdition, 
 but they have the despicable self-conceit to believe 
 that they have been selected from that overwhelming 
 majority, that they are members of that select few, that 
 mere handful, the elect, that they have " found Jesus/ 
 that they have been " washed in the blood of the Lamb," 
 and much else of canting commonplace. And, in their 
 selfish meanness, they feel idiotically happy although, 
 practically, the whole of the rest of the world is to be lost. 
 And only by this intensely selfish and self-conceited 
 imbecility does Christianity " take away the sting from 
 death." Plato knew how to die, ignorant of this 
 sting-extracting process ; and so did Socrates, so did 
 Cato, so did Epaminondas, so did Codes, so did Caesar, 
 so did Julian. 
 
 He who mercilessly drowned a multitude of swine, 
 after, in his superstitious ignorance, he deemed he had 
 put devils into them, cannot be cited as a zoophilist. 
 Buddha and Mahomet alike insisted upon kindness to the 
 "lower" animals; but where did Jesus utter one word 
 that can be quoted enjoining upon us kindly treatment 
 
8 VICARIOUS SUFFERING. 
 
 of our poor non-human fellow-mortals ? We find attri- 
 buted to him a number of fatuous utterances like, 
 " I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven " ; "I and 
 my father are one " ; and " The father is greater than I." 
 But he never once said : " Be merciful to the ass " ; " Be 
 kind to the dog"; or "Liberate the slave." And, 
 consistently enough, till this hour, the countries professing 
 the faith that bears his name are by far the cruellest and 
 zoomistic in the world. 
 
 Even while I write, in Spain, the most Christian 
 country in Europe, a bull-fight* on a more than ordinarily 
 colossal scale is being arranged, and which will involve 
 reeking slaughters and horrors in which the Mahometan 
 could never participate, and which the Buddhist would 
 rather die than sanction. By far the best organized and 
 numerically strongest section of the Church that bears 
 Christ's name formulates thus, in brutal candour, in 
 " The Catholic Dictionary," published under the 
 imprimatur of Cardinal Vaughan : " The brutes are 
 made for man, who has the same right over them that he 
 has over plants a,nd stones. He may, according to the 
 express permission of God, given to Noe, kill them for his 
 food, and this without strict necessity ; it must also be 
 lawful to put them to death or to inflict pain on them for 
 any good or reasonable end, such as the promotion 
 of man's knowledge, health, etc., or even for the purposes 
 of recreation." 
 
 There are, however, humanitarians among the Papists, 
 as among the Protestants, men and women nobler than, 
 and unconsciously in revolt against, their creed. For 
 instance, the Christian pietist, Frances Power Cobbe, 
 denounces Vivisection as " to the last degree un-Christian " ; 
 and then, by a tour de force of the glaring inconsistency 
 to which Christian apologists are driven, she admits : 
 
 *See p. 13. 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFERING. 9 
 
 " This abominable sentiment, and all the cruelty to man 
 and brute of which it has been the promoter, remains 
 after twenty centuries of Christianity almost unnoticed 
 by the churches of Christ. No moralist so far as my 
 small knowledge extends, whether Catholic or Protestant 
 no father, no schoolman, no casuist of later times, no 
 Protestant preachers, have denounced Cruelty and the 
 Pleasure in Pain with anything approaching to the nature 
 of its moral delinquency." 
 
 Again : " If we really accepted the precept of Love to 
 all and under all conditions as the supreme Divine Law, 
 should we not regard the sin of positively torturing and 
 taking pleasure in the sight of torture as the very last and 
 worst of offences? Should not the early Christian 
 teachers, when they mapped out the Seven Deadly Sins, 
 have placed Cruelty the very first on the list ? What 
 were they doing, and what has the Church of Rome been 
 doing ever since, to tell us that Sloth, Covetousness, Lust, 
 Anger, Envy, Pride, and even Gluttony are mortal sins, 
 and say not one word about Cruelty to man or beast ? 
 
 Again : " Even our own English minds (through whole 
 regions of which the old Roman theology and morals still 
 unconsciously dribble) rarely take in the idea that the 
 supreme Vice is Cruelty, that while all other vices degrade 
 man to the level of the beast, Cruelty sinks him to that 
 of the fiend. When we speak of Vice commonly, we 
 think of sexual vice or intemperance. We do not think 
 of that Vice of which so it seems to me we must, if 
 guilty, repent through all the cycles of our immortality."* 
 Yes, Miss Cobbe, and to this Vice of all the vices that 
 " most holy religion " of yours is not appreciably opposed, 
 in either theory or practice ! 
 
 That truculent Romish dictum I have quoted gives 
 full warranty, not only to hunting our fellow-mortals to 
 
 * Contemporary Review, May, 1902. 
 
10 VICARIOUS SUFFERING. 
 
 death for " sport," but gives sanction to the hideous 
 horrors exposed in a brochure * which I have glanced 
 at and closed with a shudder. Jesus was crucified to 
 secure our spiritual, and now, consistently enough with 
 that immoral and revolting proposition, dogs and cats and 
 rabbits and guinea-pigs are being vivisected to secure our 
 physical well-being. In the name of Mercy, who and 
 what are we that both god and dog should suffer and die 
 for us ? I who, till recently, was endowed with far above 
 the normal strength and agility, and could leap a five-bar 
 gate, was wont to feel more proud of the feat than that 
 of writing an " At Random " ; but I have now, through a 
 nerve-malady, to move cautiously, and not over steadily, 
 along by the aid of a staff. Yet, even were the torture 
 of the mouse, exhibited in figure 447, to disclose the 
 neurotic secret that would again make me a swift-footed 
 Achilles, I should, unscathed, set the " wee bit creeping 
 timorous beastie " free. What right have I to make his 
 impotency my potency, to make his woe my weal ? 
 
 In Figure 503^, these Christian vivisectionists have 
 actually stuck up a rabbit with a nail through each foot 
 and in an attitude grimly suggestive of their man-god 
 upon the cross. The brutal burlesque is theirs, not 
 mine. But in the figures on page 158, the cat, my 
 favourite among all the animals, is exposed in three 
 attitudes of vivisectional agony. I finish this at "the 
 wee short hour ayont the twal," and go to bed to pass a 
 sleepless night. Visions of my lost friend, the " Prodigal 
 
 * Catalogue of apparatus and appliances for experiments with 
 animals, issued by F. and M. Lautenschlager, Berlin. Translated 
 into English by Paul Griinfeld, who was nominated at the request 
 of the National Anti- Vivisection Society, by the librarian of the British 
 Museum. The illustrations, which have been reproduced by 
 photographic zinco-etching, are fac-similes of the originals, and have 
 been placed beside the letterpress as they appear in the original 
 catalogue. Second Edition. Twentieth Thousand. Printed for 
 The National Anti-Vivisection Society, 92, Victoria Street, London. 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFERING. II 
 
 Son," will pass before me, between my closed but 
 sleepless eyes and heaven's dome filled with the awful 
 stars. His remains lie affectionately interred in the small 
 plot of garden behind my home in London, and a giant 
 Scots thistle from Galloway keeps vigil over his grave. 
 
 My ever tenderly remembered " Prodigal Son," 
 who was young and happy, and to whom life was 
 dear, yet died like a philosopher. I feel convinced that 
 he knew he was dying ; but he died like a hero. He 
 knew he was dying ; but he knew nothing about the sting 
 having been taken from death by the reputed sacrifice 
 of an old-time carpenter ; he did not know that death had 
 ever had any special sting. As I nursed him, he only 
 looked up with a deep and tender mournfulness into my 
 tearful eyes. I have among "my puir earth-born 
 companions and fellow mortals," had pet pigs, pet 
 bullocks, pet horses, pet rats, pet sheep, pet crows and 
 pet owls. I never had the self-conceit to feel myself so 
 superior to any of them that I presumed to regard them 
 as subordinates ; I regarded them as friends, and (I wish 
 I could say the same of the human animal) not one 
 of them ever betrayed me. 
 
 I read inexpressible volumes of pathos in the counten- 
 ance of my expiring feline friend. His teeth, which he had 
 often used upon me playfully, were visible between his 
 parted lips, as he panted for laborious breath. And, as 
 he cast upon me his last look, there was an eloquence 
 therein which can never be expressed in any weak words of 
 mine. It meant : " Dearest friend, Saladin, my poor green 
 eyes, of which you were the delight, are closing. I am in 
 pain. It is growing dark. My one regret is, I shall see 
 you no more." 
 
 I am aware that what I here express is only the 
 emotionalism of an intense zoophilist who sometimes feels 
 inclined to doubt that " the lower animals " are the lower 
 animals at all, it being difficult to get lower than the 
 
12 VICARIOUS SUFFERING. 
 
 average J. Smith, and impossible to get lower than the 
 lowest J. Smith. 
 
 If, in the awful arcanum of inexorable Fate, I cannot 
 have my soul saved without a tortured Christ, or my body 
 cured without a vivisected Cat, let soul and body perish. 
 I am not without egoistic self-esteem ; but I have 
 also moral self-respect, and this latter revolts at my 
 accepting of weal at the cost of another's woe. Barbaric 
 conception of pristine savages ! If my soul cannot be 
 saved without another's blood and agony Let it be lost. 
 Doom, I face thee and whatever thou mayest have in 
 reserve for me ; and I decline to escape my weird through 
 the anguish of a Christ on the Cross, or, through its 
 natural sequence, the agony of a Cat on the " Operation 
 Board." GOD, whom I cannot formulate in thought, but 
 whom I meet in ecstatic vision, THOU wilt not permit 
 me to be lost because I decline to accept of a cruel 
 coward's method of being saved. 
 
A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.* 
 
 THE hold the ring has on Spain is enormous. There 
 are four weekly journals in Madrid devoted solely to the 
 interests and literature of the bull-ring. There are dozens 
 of books written on the subject, and on every day of a 
 fight Madrid is simply painted green with copies of the 
 "Programa de Espectaculos," a four-page sheet sold fora 
 penny by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hawkers. 
 
 This gives pictures of the bulls to be slaughtered on the 
 day in question, their pedigrees and owners and short 
 histories of the animals, together with the names of all 
 the performers in the day's spectacle. About an hour 
 before the time for the show to begin the picadores, 
 dressed in their clumsy but picturesque costume, set out 
 from their hotel in the Puerta del Sol for the Plaza de 
 Toros, about a mile away. 
 
 These gentry are mounted on fine horses, not the sorry 
 hacks they use in the ring, and are followed by immense 
 crowds of admiring men, women, and children, who con- 
 sider it an honour to be near the heroes. 
 
 At this time of the year the spectacle begins at about 
 four, earlier or later, according to the number of animals 
 to be killed. The scene for a couple of hours before this 
 time beggars description. A sense of furious struggle, 
 wild desire, fierce eagerness hangs over the city comes 
 pouring down with the rays of the hot sun, rises with the 
 dust from the suffocating streets, gets into the blood of 
 every Madrileno, and compels him or her for women go 
 to bull-fights in their thousands to make a mad rush for 
 the place of slaughter. 
 
 Even if he cannot afford to enter the show and it is 
 an old saying that a Spaniard will sell his shirt to go 
 
 * Daily Express , May 2ist, 1902. 
 
14 A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY. 
 
 to a bull-fight to be near the ring is something. Per- 
 haps he may hear a wounded bull bellow with rage or 
 a dying horse scream in his agony, and he is certain 
 to see the chief actors come or go. 
 
 Private carriages, with well-dressed men and daintily- 
 clad women, electric trams succeeding each other with 
 amazing rapidity, each laden to the full with sweltering 
 humanity (or inhumanity), horse and mule trams that 
 use no rails, but clatter madly over the cobbles, extra 
 omnibuses, and open cars drawn by five, six, or eight 
 red-tasselled mules, all dash at full gallop for the Plaza 
 de Toros to turn out their loads and tear back for 
 more. 
 
 As the time grows short they come only part of the 
 way back and turn at the half-way mark to hurry on 
 belated stragglers. It is not gay, it is feverish, exciting, 
 bewildering. Men's faces are set and keen. There is 
 no badinage or merriment, even if it were possible, 
 while thundering over the ill-paved streets. The one 
 idea is to get to the fight quickly. Anger is swift to the 
 surface, drivers are urged and sworn at, and woe be to the 
 wretched horse or mule that stumbles. He is greeted 
 with a shower of curses from roof and window of the 
 vehicle and flogged unmercifully by his driver. 
 
 If anyone is of opinion that bull-fighting does not 
 brutalize these people, let him watch the crowd that goes 
 to the Plaza de Toros any Sunday in Madrid. He need 
 not go inside the amphitheatre he will see enough out- 
 side to change his mind. 
 
 We are having fights nearly every day just at present. 
 I went to Thursday's contest, and saw six bulls and 
 fifteen horses slaughtered. I was disgusted and bored, 
 and came away simply worn out, not with excitement, 
 but with a sinking stomach and fluttering heart. My 
 first feeling was that of anger at the men in the ring 
 for brutally sacrificing the poor horse, who, with his 
 bandaged eye on to the side towards the bull, was made 
 to receive broadside the cruel horns of the maddened 
 and worried brute. The result was sickening. The 
 horse was ripped open, and amidst screams of pain he 
 was forced to stand again with his entrails dragging on 
 the sand of the arena. Every step he took he trod on 
 
A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY. 1 5 
 
 his entrails, but was not allowed to lie down and die until 
 he could no longer bear the burden of the picador, who 
 urged him forward as long as possible with spurs while his 
 servant slashed the dying brute over the head with a 
 stick. 
 
 I do not intend to describe the fight ; you would 
 probably not publish the revolting details if I did. I 
 merely give one instance which was multiplied over a 
 dozen time with variations more loathing and gory as the 
 insistent crowd's lust for blood grew with what it fed upon. 
 Finally, the bull, his fore part a crimson flood, spirit 
 exhausted, an easy victim for the cowards who were 
 torturing him, was put out of his misery by the matador. 
 For three hours this went on until the six bulls had been 
 dragged out dead by mules. 
 
 Bull-fighting is a cruel, soul-debasing sight. Men, 
 women, and children must become brutalised made 
 callous to suffering and pain. It must and does stamp 
 the character of the people who love it, and degrade 
 them. Many Spaniards will tell you that they do not 
 care for it, and never go. They wish to have the " sport " 
 stopped, but they are few compared to the millions here 
 who would cause civil war rather than their favourite 
 pastime should be abolished. In some parts of the United 
 States the law does not permit a butcher to sit on a jury 
 trying a prisoner for capital crime, because he is sup- 
 posed to be accustomed to the sight of blood. If such a 
 law were in force here it would be hard to obtain a jury 
 in Madrid, where nearly everyone is a butcher, by proxy 
 at least. 
 
 After witnessing a bull-fight it is easy to understand 
 Spanish cruelty in Cuba and elsewhere, and to realise that 
 it was in this Spain that the Inquisition originated. You 
 may see to-day in Madrid the square, Plaza Mayor, where 
 thousands of persons were tortured and burned to death 
 to the great delight of the spectators crowding the bal- 
 conies about the four sides of the square. It has changed 
 but little in appearance, except that the instruments of 
 torture have been removed a little further away to the Plaza 
 de Toros. 
 
 There are many laws in Spain regulating bull-fighting, 
 mostly in favour of the institution. As an example of its 
 
1 6 A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY. 
 
 legality, I may merely point out that should all the horses 
 available be killed at a corrida the law allows the managers 
 of the rings to go into the public streets and commandeer 
 the first horses at hand, paying for them, of course. There 
 are more than two hundred and fifty bull-rings in Spain, 
 About five hundred fights are held every year, in which 
 one thousand five hundred bulls and six thousand horses 
 are killed. These are average figures. It is impossible 
 to get any reliable figures of the expense of this national 
 institution, but it must be very large. Matadors of first 
 rank make sometimes from ^10,000 to 15,000 a year, 
 and everybody finds money for the bull-fight, though 
 schools suffer in this country, where about fifty per cent 
 of the people are illiterate. 
 
 London : W. STEWART & Co., 41, Farrinejdon Street, E.G. 
 
By the same Author, 
 
 " Life and Times of C. C. Cattell." One Penny. 
 Perils of Genius" (Illustrious Men who suffered in times 
 past). Published at is., post free, ;d., of C. Cattell, 
 " Emerson/' Boscombe Park, Bournemouth. 
 
 Agnosticism : 
 
 AN EXPOSITION AND A DEFENCE. 
 
 Selected from leading authorities by 
 
 CHARLES COCKBILL CATTELL. 
 
 Introduction. 
 
 Long before I heard of Huxley, or Agnosticism, I 
 held that whatever was presented to the intellect de- 
 manding assent, must have reasonable grounds for its 
 acceptance rational proof. In forming a judgment 
 on any subject, faith or authority must never be per- 
 mitted to usurp the place of facts. We find ourselves 
 living among incessant changes called " causes and 
 effects," interminable in time and space. These changes 
 have been observed to occur in a certain order ; and 
 such are named "Laws of Nature." Hence we are 
 led to believe in universal causation a first or a last 
 cause having no meaning. 
 
 As to why there is one existence we call " Nature," or 
 why there 'is any existence at all Who,' can tell ? 
 The idea of one existence includes all that is and all 
 that is necessary for all that happens. 
 
 Science in some measure explains how things now 
 existing became what they are ; the conditions of 
 existence appear to determine the duration of their 
 varying qualities and forms. These conditions must 
 have been adequate to produce these effects, or the 
 earth in our time would not supply the varied forms 
 and manifestations of life. But why all this has taken 
 
Agnosticism An Exposition and a Defence. 
 
 place Who can tell? Spencer teaches that the 
 power manifested in nature is inscrutable. Those who 
 do not accept the idea of a power indescribable operat- 
 ing in nature, resort to the alternative of an external 
 power. This much we know that all the changes 
 observable take place in the nature we know ; hence, 
 a power assumed external to it explains no more than 
 a power assumed to operate within it. As to the 
 durability of Nature, the indestructibility of matter 
 points to unlimited time, an everlasting existence. 
 
 Our only scope of inquiry is, therefore, clearly 
 Nature and its laws ; the latter term being a name for 
 observed changes, and not in any sense implying 
 causes, such use of the term being misleading, although 
 very common. Law is not a cause, an agent, or an in- 
 strument, but merely the name of the path or way 
 along which forces travel to phenomena. 
 
 The subject may be made clear by recalling the 
 fact that while the Theist may affirm a God infinite 
 and eternal, and the Atheist may affirm the same of 
 Nature, Agnostics maintain that these terms do not 
 admit of being thought of at all. At most, they 
 convey the idea of indefinite extent in space and time, 
 while every thought implies a boundary, a limit, 
 something definite. 
 
 Some perverse people insist that " Agnostic " stands 
 for Ignorance, and others contend it is adopted through 
 want of courage to avow what we really are. I hold 
 the name is a fitting title to distinguish one who finds 
 it beyond his mental powers to believe in things that 
 have no relation to common knowledge. 
 
 In formulating a thought about anything, we dis- 
 cover it implies likeness, relation, and difference, 
 which cannot apply to the terms " infinite " or 
 " eternal " no such thought is possible ; they have no 
 likeness, relation or difference, although no words 
 are more commonly heard in the religious world. The 
 Agnostic's position is governed by limits found to rule 
 our intellect in forming conclusions. An examination 
 of the formulation of consciousness about the infinite 
 will reveal the fact that parts of known things have 
 been used in its formation. 
 
Agnosticism An Exposition and a Defence. 3 
 
 A popular writer maintains that he can grasp all 
 the ideas which the Agnostic deems beyond our powers 
 to grasp, such as self-existence, eternity, infinity, 
 u although it is only by consciousness, by feeling that 
 we know. 1 ' 
 
 But no explanation is given as to how finite con- 
 sciousness (and there is none other) can feel infinite 
 self-existence. 
 
 Although in former years I wrote at length on this 
 subject, I leave the following extracts to represent my 
 views on the present occasion. 
 
 The term Agnostic and Agnosticism arose as 
 follows : 
 
 u I took thought and invented what I conceived 
 to be the appropriate title of Agnostic. It came 
 into my head as suggestively antithetic to the 
 1 Gnostic ' of Church history, who professed to 
 know so much about the very things of which I 
 was ignorant. To my satisfaction the term took ; 
 and when the Spectator had stood godfather to 
 it, any suspicion in the minds of respectable 
 people that knowledge of its parentage might 
 have awakened was, of course, completely lulled. 
 That's the history of the terms. 
 
 And it will be observed that it does not quite 
 agree with the confident assertion of the Rev. 
 Principal of King's College, that ' the adoption 
 of the term Agnostic is only an attempt to shift 
 the issue, and that it involves a mere evasion ; 
 in relation to the Church and Christianity. . . 
 . . The people who call themselves ' Agnostics ' 
 have been charged with doing so because they 
 have not the courage to declare themselves 
 1 Infidels/ have adopted a new name to escape the 
 unpleasantness which attaches to their proper 
 denomination. . . Agnosticism is not properly 
 described as a ' negative ' creed, nor, indeed, as a 
 creed of any kind, except in so far as a principle 
 which is as much ethical as intellectual. The 
 principle may be stated in various ways, but they 
 all amount to this : that it is wrong for a man 
 to say that he is certain of the objective truth of 
 
Agnosticism An*Exposition and a Defence. 
 
 any proposition unless he can produce evidence 
 which logically justifies that certainty. That is 
 what Agnosticism asserts, and, in my opinion, 
 it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That 
 which Agnostics deny and repudiate as immoral, 
 is the contrary doctrine, that there are propo- 
 sitions which men ought to believe, without 
 logically satisfactory evidence; and that repro- 
 bation ought to attach to the profession of dis- 
 belief in such inadequately supported proposi- 
 tions. The justification of the Agnostic principle 
 lies in the success which follows its application, 
 whether in the field of natural or in that of civil 
 history ; and in the fact that, so far as these 
 topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of 
 denying its validity. Agnosticism is the essence 
 of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply 
 means that a man shall not say he knows or 
 believes that which he has no scientific grounds 
 for professing to know or believe. Agnosticism 
 says that we know nothing beyond phenomena. 
 . . . . As to the interests of morality, I am 
 disposed to think that if mankind could be got to 
 act up to this principle in every relation of life, a 
 reformation would be effected such as the world 
 has not yet seen ; an approximation to the 
 millenium, such as no supernaturalistic eligion 
 has ever yet succeeded, ior seems likely ever to 
 succeed in effecting." Huxley. 
 
 " That which persists* unchanging in quantity, 
 but ever changing in form, under the sensible 
 appearances which the universe presents to us, 
 transcends human knowledge and conception, is 
 an unknown and unknowable power, which we 
 are obliged to recognise as without limit in space, 
 and without beginning or end in time. This is 
 in its highest form, the philosophy of Agnos- 
 ticism. . . . If we ask how came the atoms 
 into existence, endowed with marvellous energy, 
 we can only reply in the words of the poet : 
 ' Behind the veil, behind the veil.' We can only 
 form metaphysical conceptions, or I ought rather 
 
Agnosticism An Exposition and a Defence. 5 
 
 to call them the vaguest guesses. One is, that 
 they were created and endowed with their 
 elementary properties by an all-wise and all- 
 powerful creator. This is Theism. Another, 
 that thought is the only reality, and that all the 
 phenomena of the universe are thoughts and 
 ideas of one universal all-pervading mind. This 
 is Pantheism." 
 
 " Or, again, we may frankly acknowledge that 
 the real essence and origin of things are ' behind 
 the veil/ and not knowable or even conceivable 
 by any faculties with which the human mind is 
 endowed in its present state of existence. This 
 is Agnosticism. Agnostics do not deny that, in 
 the course of evolution, certain feelings and as- 
 pirations have grown up which find a poetical ex- 
 pression in the ideas of God and immortality. 
 They simply deny that we have, or can have, any 
 certain, definite and scientific knowledge respect- 
 ing these mysteries." Laing. 
 
 " The Agnostic is one who asserts what no- 
 body denies that there are limits to the sphere 
 of intelligence. He asserts, further, what many 
 theologians have expressly maintained, that these 
 limits are such as to exclude at least what Lewes 
 called ' metempirical ' knowledge. But he goes 
 further, and asserts, in opposition to theologians, 
 that theology lies within the forbidden sphere/' 
 
 " ' Trust your reason/ we have been told until 
 we are tired of the phrase, ' and you will become 
 Atheists or Agnostics.' What right have you to 
 turn round and rate us for being a degree more 
 logical than yourelves ? You say, as we say, that 
 the natural man can know nothing of the Divine 
 nature. That is Agnosticism. Our fundamental 
 principal is not only granted but asserted. . . . 
 Dr. Newman's arguments (in * Grammar of 
 Assent') go to prove that man, as guided by 
 reason, ought to be an Agnostic, and that at the 
 present moment, Agnosticism is the only reason- 
 able faith for, at least, three-quarters of the 
 race. . . . The race collectively is Agnostic, 
 
Agnosticism An Exposition and a Defence. 
 
 whatever may be the case with individuals. . . 
 There is riot a single proof of natural theology of 
 which the negative has not been maintained as 
 vigorously as the affirmative. You tell us to be 
 ashamed of professing ignorance. Where is the 
 shame of ignorance in matters still involved in 
 endless and hopeless controversy ? Is it not 
 rather a duty." Sir Leslie Stephen. 
 
 ' The Agnostic neither believes nor disbelieves 
 in a Superior Existence, from lack of satisfying 
 evidence to warrant affirmation or denial. He is 
 neutral, not because he wishes not to believe, or 
 desires to deny, but because language should be 
 measured by proof of conviction. Huxley's wise, 
 useful, and honest word ' Agnostic ' has done 
 more to teach theologians to think, and incite 
 in them discrimination and tolerance, than any 
 other word which has been added to the nomencla- 
 ture of controversy this century/' 
 
 " Is it * dodging ' to refuse to identify yourself 
 with the preposterous presumption of the Theist 
 or the Atheist ? Is it not imposture in any one 
 to adopt a term which implies all-penetrating 
 knowledge, when you know you have it not ? 
 Nature is too illimitable to be conceived, and 
 the past is beyond all human experience. The 
 Agnostic neither decries nor disparages them 
 [Theist and Athiest], but frankly says he is not 
 of their way of thinking. Many now see no 
 distinction between Agnosticism and Atheism. It 
 is the wide distinction between knowing and not 
 knowing. Agnosticism means scruplousness and 
 truth." G. /. Holyoake. 
 
 " The contest between Theology and Agnos 
 ticism is like that between a man in a balloon and 
 one on the solid ground. The balloon man 
 shouts down to his enemy, ' Come up here and I 
 will give you a good beating.' The reply is 
 4 No ; I cannot leave the solid ground of fact. I 
 cannot float myself with the gas of sentiment and 
 imagination. But, if you come down to tevva 
 firma, I will very soon test the strength of your 
 
Agnosticism An Exposition and a Defence. 
 
 balloon. If your silk can stand the sharp edge 
 of my knife scientific criticism well and good, 
 you will continue to float above the earth. But 
 if not, and a rent is made, you and your balloon 
 will collapse into nothingness. The balloon man 
 shouts down that his antagonist is a coward, 
 throws some dust into the eyes of the spectators, 
 and so ascends into the heavens. The theologian, 
 so long as he remains in the region of emotion 
 and imagination, is safe from any attack on the 
 part of the scientist ; but the moment he touches 
 the ground of fact he must prepare for hostilities ; 
 and it is well that he should understand that 
 such things as miracles, the inspiration of the 
 Bible, etc., are subject to criticism, and will be 
 vigorously combatted." John Wilson, M.A. 
 
 " If after devoting our best energies and highest 
 endeavours to the investigation of the arguments 
 of Maratheism, Dualism, Polytheism, Pantheism, 
 and Atheism, we find none entirely convincing, 
 there is no cowardice involved in the admission. 
 On the contrary, it becomes our highest duty to 
 confess that all our labour has been without 
 fruit or reward. Though we have fervently 
 sought we have failed to find. We are sceptics 
 or agnostics, and recognise the fact that, even 
 should one or other of these five interpretations 
 of the mystery of existence be accepted as its 
 true solution it is but a proximate solution and 
 thus but removes the essential mystery but a step 
 further back.' 7 Constance E. Plumptre. 
 
 " We get rid of the accursed spirit of condem- 
 nation, and the setting open wide as wide as 
 humanity itself the gates that lead to truth 
 and human progress. For the Agnostic is no 
 narrow pale, on one side of which stand the 
 saved and the other the lost ; and no ascription 
 of certain social experiments to a corrupt imagina- 
 and an evil heart 
 
 "We know nothing of the hereafter absolutely 
 nothing. But, freed as we are from the trammels 
 of superstition and the strangulation of fear, we 
 
8 Agnosticism An Exposition and a Defence. 
 
 deny the eternal Hell, and the omnipotent Devil 
 formulated by old-world ignorance and terror. For 
 us the life of man 'is emphatically his life in the 
 present, and his merits or demerits are determined 
 by his relations to others. He has, in a word, got 
 rid of night and its dreams, and has come out into 
 the light of waking day of which he does not pre 
 sume to foretell the state of the evening, or the 
 conditions of the night that follows after. All he 
 knows is that there must come this evening, when 
 strength will wane and the light will wax dim ; and 
 that then will steal down the night into which he 
 cannot peer. Whether that night is to be starless, 
 or brilliant with these ' : many mansions " of light, 
 must be left to time to settle. No, the Agnostic 
 does not waste his time in these speculative 
 futilities. He works for the present and in the 
 present, and he leaves the undiscovered future to 
 take care of itself. Mrs. Lynn Linton. 
 
 " The essential principles of Agnosticism were 
 known and recognised before the name was in- 
 vented ; but the introduction of a definite name 
 arrested the attention of the reflecting classes. . 
 Their attention once fixed on the subject, people 
 began to say this was what they always thought. 
 The unseen and unknown presents an ample field 
 for speculation, and by contemplative minds must 
 always be viewed with reverence and awe. A con- 
 sciousness that the sphere of known and knowable 
 phenomena, when expanded to its utmost limits, is 
 very far from embracing the whole universe, very 
 far from exhausting the possibilities of thought and 
 feeling, while the Beyond is, to the upright man 
 and pure in heart, an unfathomable abyss into which 
 he looks with much ground for hope and very little 
 for fear. Dr. BithelL 
 
 London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.G. 
 ONE PENNY. 
 
MUST READ 
 
 s. d. 
 BIBLE GEMS FOR BELIEVERS AND 
 
 FREETHINKERS ... (12 copies lod.) o i 
 
 Being a wonderful collection of Curiosities 
 and Crudities, and where to find them in the 
 Bible. 
 
 THE MADMEN OF GOD, or Religious Mania o 6 
 
 GOD AND HIS BOOK ... ..* ... 2 8 
 
 A complete critical Bible Text Book for 
 
 Freethinkers. 
 
 DID JESUS CHRIST RISE FROM THE 
 
 DEAD? ... ... ... ... o 4 
 
 The best essay on this important subject. 
 
 MISTAKES OF MOSES. By Col. Ingersoll ... o i 
 (12 copies iod., for free distribution) 
 
 BISHOP COLENSO'S People's Edition of the 
 PENTATEUCH AND JOSHUA. New 
 Popular Price ... ... . *. ... 5 o 
 
 BRIMSTONE BALLADS... ... ... i 2 
 
 Recommended by G. W. Foote. 
 
 THE BOOK OF VIRGINS. Holy and Unholy ' 2 3 
 
 WOMAN, HER GLORY AND SHAME. 
 
 500 pages ... ... ... 3 6 
 
 The story of Christianity Degrading Females. 
 DID JESUS EVER LIVE? ...... o ij 
 
 SECRET OF ALL THE CREEDS. 3 plates i 2 
 
 THE ROMAN CONFESSIONAL... ... i o 
 
 An Exposure of its corruption. 
 
s. d. 
 WAT TYLER .M o 3 
 
 A Thrilling Republican Drama. Con- 
 demned in Parliament. 
 
 DIVINE ANIMAL TALES o ij 
 
 Most interesting. 
 
 SCRIPTURE CONTRADICTIONS One 
 
 Hundred and More ... ... ... o ij 
 
 (12 copies iod., for free distribution.) 
 
 APOCRYPHAL NEW TESTAMENT. Re- 
 duced Price ... ... ... ...30 
 
 A Funny Inspired part of the " Holy 
 Gospels.'* 
 
 ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, 
 
 Or How it Came About. Half Price ... o 6 
 
 ALL SENT POST PAID. 
 
 To be obtained from: 
 
 MESSRS. W. STEWART & Co., 
 19, NEWCASTLE ST., FARRINGDON ST., LONDON, E.G. 
 
 WRITE FOR OUR INTERESTING CATALOGUE, 
 POST FREE. 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 LIBRARY UI 
 
 APT 1 1 1QF 
 
 
 UU 1 1 1 "* 
 
 
 V**"^****^ JP-J 
 
 i 
 
 OCT 12 re 
 
 
 
 
 ,^ 
 
 
 v^ 
 
 -r^n I O 
 
 
 RU.w *' 
 rro o A mf>? 
 
 
 ^t.v ^4 *^ u 
 
 
 ^#fSSP^^~ 
 
 
 HOWiH'bi-WI* 
 
 
 JUL 8 2006 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 LD 21A-50w-4,'59 
 (A1724slO)476B 
 
 General Library 
 
 University of Californi 
 
 Berkeley 
 
 ~ 
 
YC153944