During the dark ages coming down even to our own time the very
light of truth was shut out from the eyes and hearts and minds of men. The
blood of the martyrs we were assured in those early days was the seed of
the church. The blood of the martyrs was the blood of man--weak, cruel,
fallible man, who, whether he got his inspiration from the Tiber or the
Rhine, from Geneva, from Edinburgh or from Rome, did equally the devil's
work in God's name. None of the viceregents of heaven, as they claimed to
be, knew much or seemed to care much about the word of the Gentle One of
Bethlehem, whom they had adopted as their titular divinity much as men in
commerce adopt a trade-mark.
II
It was knock-down and drag-out theology, the ruthless machinery of
organized churchism--the rank materialism of things temporal--not the
teachings of Christ and the spirit of the Christian religion--which so long
filled the world with blood and tears.
I have often in talking with intelligent Jews expressed a wonder that they
should stigmatize the most illustrious Jew as an impostor, saying to them:
"What matters it whether Jesus was of divine or human parentage--a human
being or an immortal spirit? He was a Jew: a glorious, unoffending Jew,
done to death by a mob of hoodlums in Jerusalem. Why should not you and I
call him Master and kneel together in love and pity at his feet?"
Never have I received any satisfying answer. Partyism--churchism--will
ever stick to its fetish.
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