Widnes Examiner. — 1895-11-02 (Widnes, Cheshire, England)

CHRISTIANITY ANALYSED. • "By their frifts ye shall know them." ir,—" And again," says my fair but anonymous criti 'you would have people live and die without religion Excuse me, Madam ;by no means so. On the contrary, I would have people more relis.o ma, even at the expense o same of the existing show piety. I hold it quite possible and consistent to expose the fabulous foundation —the impracticable and rationally untenable dogmas of Christianity—whilst advocating the following of the meek and lowly Jesus. For, my dear madam,l maintain that a great and fundamental distinction exists between Jesuism and Christianity or as I prefer to call it to avoid misundereanding—Christism.. The former is solely of the great Teacher and is the element of good in Christianity, whilst Christism is mainly, if not wholly, an unwarranted human accretion. Christism and its peculiar dogmas of atonement, resurrection and redemption, is the work of man's untutored imagination— founded upon certain quite imaginary cosmic and traditional occurrences. And, as man created them, so he is now destroying them—by showing the mythical nature of their origin. But, while scientific investigation is rapidly sweeping man-made Christism into the limbo of detected errors, Jesuism emergesf rom the fire unscorched and unscathed. While Christism is shrinking daily before the witherinc, glance of science, Jesuism, and all that its lovers hold dear, all that tends to the making of character, still stands unabashed and unabased before men. Jesuism is for the individual, for oneself, for chastening and ameliorating character and conduct. Christism is a thing of the churches, of ecclesiastic pomp and empty ritual; while the h-ayy indictment lies. against it of being the great cause of the too common neglect of its more Amiable sister, the cause too of the bickering,s, the jealOasies,the wars anitha rnartyrings of Christendom. Who ever heard of men fighting or burning their brother men In defence of the maxim 's Do as ye would be done, unto," or " Love thy neighbour as thyself ?" The time msy come when men will not thus culpably prefer the drosi to gold—the time when there will not be found a class of men earning a livelihood by striving for the recrudescence of that ugly ulcer, aboriginal ignorance and its concomitant evils, which makes religion and morality rest upon exploded myths and marvels, to the dishonour of God and the confusion of minkind. No, Madam, I would not "have people live and die without religion," but rather that they should adhere to and more and more constantly practice the scriptural injunction, and entirely rational precept, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." And Christ-ism stands to-day convicted of the foul miseries, murders, and martyrdoms sl justly imputed to the heterogenious compound called Christianity. This damning " proof " is supplied alike by history, scientific critical investigation, and common human experience. Can we then be wrong in rejecting what is thus proved to be bad and holding 1 fast—aid all the faster, to that which is good? lam fully persuaded that the second coming of Jesus would be a sad event to the high fiaminicals who take his name in vain and lose the hest part of his teaching beneath the mazes of a barbaric ritual.—Yours truly,