It is now nearly two thousand years since the New Testament began to "carry us," and where have we reached? In how many things have we advanced beyond the Greeks and the Romans, for instance? Only yesterday the black man carried chains in our land, and throughout Christendom white slavery of a more degrading type than ever known before is still with us. Political corruption of a character which Mr. Roosevelt himself has pronounced the most deep-seated and chronic is eating away the vital parts of the American nation, while the hunger, the misery and the squalor in the slums of our great cities, side by side with the waste of wealth and the worship of show, prove daily the complete failure of Christianity as a regenerating force. Whatever of hope there is to-day in the human heart for a better future on earth, and whatever signs there may be of a realization of justice and happiness for all men, here and now, we are indebted for them, not to the New Testament, but to modern thought, which is heresy from the point of view of the New, as well as the Old, Testament.
It is the passing of the bible that has opened the way for real and radical reforms. It is the failure of the inspired teachers to fulfill their promises that has at last induced man to step to the front and assume full control of the world's destinies. Man no longer prays to the gods; he works. When the bible was supreme in Europe, was the world better? Would Mr. Roosevelt return to the Middle Ages? Will he go back to the times of Knox, Wesley, Calvin and the New England clergy, or to the times when, by the authority of the bible which then ruled without a rival, in court and church, in the home and the school, men and women were bought and sold like animals, or burned alive as witches, or tortured to death in a thousand dungeons for daring to think? When the bible was supreme in Europe there was neither science nor commerce. When the bible was supreme, tyrant and dissolute kings ruled by the "grace of God," and priests persecuted the thinker in every capital of the Christian world. It is the emancipation of thought, and not the New Testament, that has conquered for us every blessing we enjoy. Not until the Renaissance, that is to say, not until Europe deserted its Semitic or Asiatic teachers for those of Hellas and Rome, did modern nations begin to wax strong in mind and body. The New Testament really carried us to the times of the Old Testament. It was the Renaissance of Greek thought and art that changed the "thorns and thistles" of theology into the golden fruit of science.
But what about the claim that "the Old Testament advanced Israel far beyond the point any neighboring nation had then reached." I wish Mr. Roosevelt would read these lines as carefully as I have read his, which, if he does, I feel confident he will admit that he made the above statement without taking the pains to look up the evidence. What answer would the ex-president of the United States make if he were asked to prove his claim that the Old Testament carried the Jews to a higher state of civilization than the nations who were their contemporaries?
Were the Jews intellectually more advanced than any other nation of antiquity? Solomon was the contemporary of some of the immortal Greeks, but while Greece was nursing the arts and crafts, the Jews, in order to build a temple to God—a temple very much smaller than many of our modern cathedrals and churches and far less formidable—had to send abroad for masons and carpenters. "The laborers employed in the temple were all the strangers in the land," says one of the texts. Under Saul, their first king, while their enemies were well equipped with weapons of warfare, the Jews had "neither sword nor spear in the hand of any of the people except Saul and Jonathan." We are informed also that "in all the land of Israel not a smith was to be found," and that the Jews had to cross over to the land of the gentiles "to sharpen every man his share and his ax." Surely we can not conclude from conditions as barbarous as these that the Lord bestowed any great intellectual gifts upon the Jews as tokens of his peculiar love for them.
It is admitted by the bible writers themselves that the neighboring nations were much more powerful than "the chosen people," and that only by the daily miraculous intervention of God could they cope with them at all, and that even then they were not always successful. The following text is quite significant:
And the Lord was with Judah, and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron *
* Judges i, 19.
We respectfully call Mr. Roosevelt's attention to this positive testimony to the superiority in equipment of the Gentiles to the Jews in bible times. Even the God of Israel was helpless against the science of the Gentile nations. He could throw down stones from heaven, or stop the sun and moon, or slay the firstborn of Egypt, but against science, against human inventions, he could do nothing. Is it a sign of superiority to depend upon miracles for one's daily existence? Is it not rather a proof of the intellectual sterility of the people?
I am aware, of course, of the argument that Israel's superiority lay in its clearer moral visions. But why should a people morally superior to their neighbors be so mediocre in everything else? Is moral excellence prejudicial to national development? But it is not true that the Old Testament helped to make Israel morally superior to the heathen "round about them." It is to be regretted that the opposite of this is the truth. A few examples from the bible will be sufficient to support the thesis that the bible did even less for the moral development of Israel than it did for its intellectual and industrial expansion.
Abraham, one of the most "righteous" characters of the bible, twice trafficked in his wife's or sister's, honor, by selling her, the first time, to the King of Egypt for sheep and oxen, asses and camels, and male and female slaves; he repeated the imposture by selling her a second time to Abimelech, King of Gerar, for more "sheep and oxen, and men servants and women servants." His son Isaac followed his father's example, and sold to the same Abimelech his wife, Rebekah. Compare now the behavior of the "heathen" Abimelech, with that of the bible saints. After Rebekah had been introduced to the king as an unmarried woman by her husband, Isaac, she was taken into his palace:
And it came to pass, when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out at a window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife.
And Abimelech called Isaac, and said, Behold, of a surety she is thy wife: and how saidst thou, She is my sister? And Isaac said unto him, Because I said, Lest I die for her.
And Abimelech said, What is this thou hast done unto us? one of the people might lightly have lien with thy wife, and thou shouldst have brought guiltiness upon us.
And Abimelech charged all his people, saying, He that toucheth this man or his wife shall surely be put to death. *
* Genesis xxvi, 8-II.
Which of these two characters was the more civilized? Though in daily communion with God and protected by miracles at every step, Isaac preferred to lie about his wife than to trust in God, and, like his father, Abraham, he enriched himself by her shame; while the "heathen" Abimelech, on the other hand, grieved at the thought of the wrong which the lying Isaac might have tempted his subjects to commit. And while not even David, another bible saint, ever thought of separating himself from the woman he had stolen by causing her husband to be shot, these "heathen" princes returned to Abraham and Isaac their wives.
Even Jehovah is compelled to pay a tribute to the "heathen" king:
And God said unto him (Abimelech) in a dream, Yea, I know that thou didst this in the integrity of thy heart; for I also withheld thee from sinning against me: therefore suffered I thee not to touch her.
Now therefore restore the man his wife; for he is a prophet, and he shall pray for thee, and thou shalt live: and if thou restore her not, know thou that thou shalt surely die, thou, and all that are thine. *
* Genesis xx, 6-8.
This is a terribly incriminating admission for the deity to make. After paying a tribute to the "integrity" of Abimelech, and acknowledging his innocence,