“The sum of all is that what is right should be sought for its own sake, because it is right, and not because it is enacted.”  It does not even now venture to say with Philo Judaeus, “The good man seeks the day for the sake of the day, and the light for the light’s sake; and he labours to acquire what is good for the sake of the good itself, and not of anything else.”  So far for the egotism, naive and unconscious, of Christianity, whose burden is, “Do good to escape Hell and gain Heaven.”

A no less defect in the “School of Galilee” is its low view of human nature.  Adopting as sober and authentic history an Osirian-Hebrew myth which Philo and a host of Rabbis explain away, each after his own fashion, Christianity dwells, lovingly as it were, upon the “Fall” of man[FN#325] and seems to revel in the contemptible condition to which “original sin” condemned him; thus grovelling before God ad majorem Dei gloriam.  To such a point was and is this carried that the Synod of Dort declared, Infantes infidelium morientes in infantia reprobatos esse statui mus; nay, many of the orthodox still hold a Christian babe dying unbaptised to be unfit for a higher existence, and some have even created a “limbo” expressly to domicile the innocents “of whom is the kingdom of Heaven.”  Here, if any where, the cloven foot shows itself and teaches us that the only solid stratum underlying priestcraft is one composed of L s. d.

And I never can now believe it, my Lord! (Bishop) we come to this earth Ready damned, with the seeds of evil sown quite so thick at our birth, sings Edwin Arnold.[FN#326] We ask, can infatuation or hypocrisy—­for it must be the one or the other—­go farther?  But the Adamical myth is opposed to all our modern studies.  The deeper we dig into the Earth’s “crust,” the lower are the specimens of human remains which occur; and hitherto not a single “find” has come to revive the faded glories of

          Adam the goodliest man of men since born (!)
          His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.

Thus Christianity, admitting, like Judaism, its own saints and santons, utterly ignores the progress of humanity, perhaps the only belief in which the wise man can take unmingled satisfaction.  Both have proposed an originally perfect being with hyacinthine locks, from whose type all the subsequent humans are degradations physical and moral.  We on the other hand hold, from the evidence of our senses, that early man was a savage very little superior to the brute; that during man’s millions of years upon earth there has been a gradual advance towards perfection, at times irregular and even retrograde, but in the main progressive; and that a comparison of man in the xixth century with the caveman[FN#327] affords us the means of measuring past progress and of calculating the future of humanity.