Читать книгу Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader - Benj. N. Martin - Страница 57

I know that those who hate and despise the religion of Jesus because it condemns their evil deeds, have endeavored to deprive him of the honor of communicating to mankind the glad tidings of life and immortality. I know that they have dragged the mouldering carcass of paganism from the grave, animated her lifeless form with a spark stolen from the sacred altar, arrayed her in the spoils of Christianity, re-lighted her extinguished taper at the torch of revelation, dignified her with the name of natural religion, and exalted her in the temple of reason, as a goddess, able, without divine assistance, to guide mankind to truth and happiness. But we also know, that all her boasted pretensions are vain, the offspring of ignorance, wickedness, and pride. We know that she is indebted to that revelation which she presumes to ridicule, and contemn, for every semblance of truth or energy which she displays. We know that the most she can do, is to find men blind and leave them so; and to lead them still farther astray, in a labyrinth of vice, delusion, and wretchedness. This is incontrovertibly evident, both from past and present experience; and we may defy her most eloquent advocates to produce a single instance in which she has enlightened or reformed mankind. If, as is often asserted, she is able to guide us in the path of truth and happiness, why has she ever suffered her votaries to remain a prey to vice and ignorance. Why did she not teach the learned Egyptians to abstain from worshiping their leeks and onions? Why not instruct the polished Greeks to renounce their sixty thousand gods? Why not persuade the enlightened Romans to abstain from adoring their deified murderers? Why not prevail on the wealthy Phoenicians to refrain from sacrificing their infants to Saturn? Or, if it was a task beyond her power to enlighten the ignorant multitude, reform their barbarous and abominable superstitions, and teach them that they were immortal beings, why did she not, at least, instruct their philosophers in the great doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which they so earnestly labored in vain to discover? They enjoyed the light of reason and natural religion, in its fullest extent, yet so far were they from ascertaining the nature of our future and eternal existence, that they—could not determine whether we should exist at all Bevon the grave; nor could all their advantages preserve them from the grossest errors, and the most unnatural crimes.

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=Joseph S. Buckminster, 1784–1812.= (Manual, p. 480.)

From the "Sermons."