Under all previous conditions of society, there existed churches, priesthoods, fervid beliefs, promoting religious and moral action to the fullest degrees of which humanity under those circumstances was capable.
But now there are no equally genuine fountains of fervid beliefs, adapted to produce similar moral and religious results, according to our circumstances.

Who is not aware that the churches now are one vast lie?
Religions, with all the churches and the insane statements of the ministers, appear but as empty shells,
What we call religion, a mere mask of wax or lace,
For piercing beneath, we find there is no life, no faith, no reality of belief, but that all is essentially a pretense, a sham.
The priests are continually telling what they know well enough is not so, and keeping back what they know is so,
The people do not believe them, and they do not believe themselves;
Any living fountains of belief in them are now utterly ceas’d and departed from the minds of men—
How few see freedom or spirituality, or hold any faith in results.

The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,
The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar,
The tune of the choir of the whitewash’d church,
The earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impress’d seriously at the camp-meeting—
Who does not see that the outward religious belief of the sects of this age is a mere crust, crumbling everywhere under our feet?
Yet people get accustomed to a certain order of traditions, forms. They think these are never to be displaced, are eternal. They will not be easily shaken out of their conviction, even when they know all their vitality has departed.

The churches, sects, pulpits, of the present day exist not by any solid convictions, but by a sort of tacit, supercilious, scornful sufferance. Few speak openly—none officially—against them; doctrine gets empty consent or mocking politeness; it wriggles through mankind, it is never loved or believed, the throat is not safe that speaks it aloud. It is the very worst kind of infidelity because it suspects not itself but proceeds complacently onward and abounds in churches.

Churches and preachers fill a large area, but I don’t take much interest in them—never did! The church has not bothered me—I do not bother the church; that is a clean cut bargain.
I think one of the churches is as good and as bad as the other; as safe and as perilous as the other—as institutions they are all menacing, to be guarded against.

I have said many positive things about the Unitarians. But how these Unitarians and Universalists—bloodless religion addressed merely to the intellect—want to be respectable and orthodox, just as much as any of the old line people!

I thoroughly disapprove of, hate—yes, even fear—institutional, official goodness. The whole idea of the church is low, loathsome, horrible—a sort of moral negation, as if men got down in the mud to worship, delighting in the filth.
Christian gentleman! In fact, we do not know what a Christian gentleman is. He is a rare bird—so rare he is never found at all! I would any time rather trust myself in the hands of an avowed secular merchant—he is less likely to do you up.

We do not look with a favorable eye on these splendid churches—on a Christianity which chooses for the method of its development a style that Christ invariably condemned. Jesus and the churches have got divorced; the institution has destroyed the spirit.

We are not at all deceived by this great show that confronts us of churches, priests, and rituals,
Not willing longer to have their stupid superstitions,
Not to be deceived by this huge show of churches enveloping us with all their dramatic scenery of religion.
They are not alive, they are cold mortar and brick,
To a developed person they stand for little or nothing.

As George Fox rais’d his warning cry, “Is it this pile of brick and mortar, these dead floors, windows, rails, you call the church? Why this is not the church at all—the church is living, ever living souls.”
What does the soul know of any church—or of all churches? With all these churches, ministers, and all the surface deference paid to the sects, the souls of the people, needing something deeper and higher, have irrevocably gone from those churches.
The flights and sublime ecstasies of the soul cannot submit to the exact statements of churches or any creed. The identified soul can really confront religion when it extricates itself entirely from the churches, and not before.

Not all the traditions can put vitality in churches,
The bodies are dead, the spirits have flown to other spheres.
I have seen corpses shrunken and shriveled,
But no corpse have I seen that appears to me more shrunken,
More inert and blue and fit for the swiftest burial,
Than the whole and the best of what over this great earth has been called, and is still called, religion.
Yet they know it not—so melancholy!
They keep on the same, celebrating over the coffins—
The spectacle is a pitiful one.

The Bible admits of exhaustion like the rest and is now exhausted;
It may be left to its fate on these terms:
As long as it stands it is worthy of standing,
(These are perhaps the true terms of all religions.)
Now it is certain that what is called revealed religion as founded or alleged to be founded on the Old and New Testament is not responded to by the highest, devoutest modern mind.

O, Bible! (say I,) what nonsense and folly have been supported in thy name!
The Bible—you can read anything in it,
The Bible in the hands of the preachers—nearly anything can be proved from it,
There’s no assumption so preposterous but that it can be bolstered by some text from somewhere in the book.
If there are 301 different ways of interpreting a passage—300 right, 1 wrong—the great mass will hit upon that wrong interpretation, insist upon it, dogmatize.

The whole miracle dogma business has been swung as a club over the head of the world;
It has been a weapon flourished by the tyrannical dynasties of the old world—
Dynasties murderous, reeking, unscrupulous, barbarous,
They have always tried to justify their crimes by an assumed divine grant of some sort.
The people have always suffered—they have always been the victims of their gods—for abstract religion is easily led astray, ever credulous, and is capable of devouring, remorseless, like fire and flame.

Silent and amazed even when a little boy,
I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in his statements,
As contending against some being or influence—
Ah, there is no religion there,
I don’t see how it is possible to worship God there at all;
Whatever would put God as contending against some being or influence is of no account.

It was no small addition to the tedium to have him lightening himself of his load of doctrine,
These preposterous and painful screamings from the pulpit,
To whine about sin and hell, to pronounce his race a sham or swindle.
Are you so poor that you are always miserly, priests?
Will you grub and chatter all your life,
Unwitting that you do not know how to speak properly a single word?

I often get mad at the ministers,
(They are almost the only people I do get mad at.)
Damn the preachers! the smooth-faced, self-satisfied preachers,
What do they know or care to know?
The ministry is spoiled with arrogance,
It takes all sorts of vagaries, impudences, invasions, for granted,
It even seizes the key to the bedroom and the closet.
I always mistrust a typical deacon, a church functionary—
The damnable psalming, praying, deaconizing of our day is made too much the liberal cover for all sorts of sins, iniquities.

I am not willing to admit that we have further serious use for the old style authoritative preachers; their methods have passed out for good. However they struggle, the universe is against their impossible explications. No amount of formal, salaried petitioning of God will serve to work out the result aimed for—we might as well think of curing people of measles, the smallpox, what not, by mere sermonizing, yawpings, as of saving their souls by such tactics.
The world is through with sermonizing, the ministers are practically done for; if a man will once consent to be a minister he must expect ruin.

The true religious genius now seems to say, Beware of churches! Beware of priests!
From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests,
Allons! from all formules.
They surely, surely go,
It may be sooner, or it may be later, but go they must,
(They may wait a while, perhaps a generation or two, dropping off by degrees.)

There will shortly be no more priests.
Those rhymsters and sexless priests, whose virtues are lathered and shaved three times a week,
I say their work is done,
The most they offer for mankind and eternity less than a spirt of my own seminal wet.

(Though I hate preaching, I do not hate preachers. They, too, have their reasons for being. I have met many preachers, many of them personally good fellows. The instant a priest becomes a man I am on his side—I no longer oppose him.)

NEXT: THE VALUE OF THE OLD RELIGIONS

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