Scoffers have long pointed with indignation at the Christian doctrine that a child inherits a moral bias from his parents, but nowadays evolutionists carry the law of heredity to an extreme which no hyper-Calvinist ever thought of, and many cavillers at “original sin” have become eloquent in their praises of Buddhism, which handicaps each child with the accumulated demerit of pre-existent beings with whom he had no connection whatever.[198] The Christian doctrine imputes punishable guilt only so far as each one’s free choice makes the sin his own:  the dying infant who has no choice is saved by grace; but upon every Buddhist, however short-lived, there rests an heir-loom of destiny which countless transmigrations cannot discharge.

In Mohammedanism the doctrine of fate—­clear, express, and emphatic—­is fully set forth.  The Koran resorts to no euphemism or circumlocution in declaring it.  Thus, in Sura lxxiv. 3, 4, we read:  “Thus doth God cause to err whom he pleases, and directeth whom he pleases.”  Again, Sura xx. 4, says:  “The fate of every man have we bound round his neck.”  As is well known, fatalism as a practical doctrine of life has passed into all Mohammedan society.  “Kismet” (it is fated) is the exclamation of despair with which a Moslem succumbs to adversity and often dies without an effort to recover.  In times of pestilence missionaries in Syria have sometimes found whole villages paralyzed with despair.  Yielding to the fatalism of their creed, the poor mountaineers have abandoned all means of cure and resigned themselves to their fate.  The same fatal paralysis has affected all liberty of thought, all inventiveness and enterprise, all reform of evils, all higher aspiration of the oppressed people.

With the lower forms of religious belief, fetishism, animism, serpent worship, demon worship, the case is still worse.  The only deities that are practically recognized in these rude faiths are generally supposed to be malevolent beings, who have not only fixed an evil fate upon men, but whose active and continued function it is to torment them.  Though there is a lingering belief in a Supreme Being who created all things, yet he is far off and incomprehensible.  He has left his creatures in the hands of inferior deities, at whose mercy they pass a miserable existence.  Looking at the dark facts of life and having no revelation of a merciful God they form their estimates of Deity from their trials, hardships, fears, and they are filled with dread; all their religious rites have been devised for appeasing the powers that dominate and distress the world.  And yet a pronounced agnostic has asked us to believe that even this wide-spread horror, this universal nightmare of heathen superstition, is more humane than the Calvinistic creed.