“The tree is known by its fruit.” “Do men gather grapes of thorn, or figs of thistles? Even so, every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” These words are said to have been uttered by a man who is reputed to have lived some nineteen hundred years ago and to have been named Jesus. This man is claimed by Christians to have been divine and to have founded their sect. If the rule that he is said to have laid down, that “the tree is known by its fruit,” is sound, it is only fair to both Jesus and Christianity to admit the probable validity of the claim that the two stand to each other in the relation of parent and offspring. In fact, there seems to be no ground for reasonable doubt, for when we read certain other aphorisms attributed to Jesus, when we take into consideration his ominous silence on some occasions, and then study the history of the subsequent ages, as faintly outlined in this volume, it is difficult to escape the conviction that the spirit of Jesus’ teachings harmonized well with the acts of the men who for hundreds of years turned Europe and part of America into slaughter-houses. “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” What an echo of this was heard in the words of Philip II of Spain of abhorred memory when, at auto-da-fe at Vallodolid on the 8th of October, 1559, the young noble, Carlos de Sessa, said to the king as he passed the throne on the way to the stake, “How can you thus look on and permit me to be burned?” The Most Christian king answered, “I would carry the wood to burn my own son withal, were has as wicked (that is, as unorthodox) as you.” Is it unreasonable or unfair to affirm that Philip could legitimately have justified his reply by the words of Jesus, last quoted? The same thought, in another form, found expression in the exclamation of the Catholic Count Egmont, a few hours before the death to which he had been condemned by the vindictiveness and treachery of the same Philip - “Alas! how miserable and frail is our nature, that, when we should think of God only, we are unable to shut out the images of wife and children.” If Jesus (God incarnated) was right, if he should be obeyed, what warrant had a dying disciple of his to waste thought on earthly loved ones?
        The failure of Jesus to condemn slavery, to set the seal of his disapproval on witchcraft, was responsible for an amount of human suffering that no man or woman can compute. Whether he is now viewed as a god or as a man, the effect is the same, still the tree is known by its fruits. As a man, so far as these two vital matters are concerned, certainly he was not in advance of his time, and so it is useless to plead, as now many who are Christian but in name do plead, that slavery and witchcraft persecutions were un-Christian. Neither had been put under ban by Jesus, and for long ages they had the unqualified sanction of all who called themselves Christians - how, then, can either the superstition and the persecutions growing out of it or the institution fairly and logically be called un-Christian? But Jesus was supposed to be God, or at the least, and essential third of godhead, and when that supposition is abandoned, Christianity ceases to be anything but a human development, in the eyes of its adherents, precisely as in the eyes of Rationalists it is only a human development. Those Christians who cling to the divinity of Jesus (and they constitute all but a handful of professing Christendom) in effect say that their God knew what construction would be placed on his words by his followers, and in the light of that knowledge yet uttered them; that he knew just what his followers would do in attempting to force the world to accept his words, and in the light of that knowledge yet uttered them, and that with the Infinite what is foreknown must be designed and foreordained. Still in the face of all this they calmly assert that their godman or man-god, and his father, with whom they say he was co-existent, are not responsible for the ghastly crimes with which Christians have crimsoned the earth in their endeavor to secure obedience to God’s commands as they understood them!
Can there be intellectual and moral confusion worse than this?
        Granted that all these crimes against humanity have their primary roots in human weakness, in the passions of hate and revenge, in the lack of sympathy, in delight in inflicting pain, in reckless lust, in greed for wealth, and fame, and domination - granted all this, and yet what has the Theist gained? Is Man not still, according to his fundamental concept, the child of God, fashioned by him as the vessel of clay is fashioned by the potter, his deeds during every instant of the life of the race known down to their minutest detail by the Creator before the first man breathed, and therefore, if known to the Infinite Wisdom and Power, intended and ordered by the Infinite Wisdom and Power from the first to the last item of human action? Yea, more, if ordered by the Creator, done by the Creator, for his infinity must include man, and therefore, again, man being but an expression of God, what man seems to do God does.
        Granted again, that man’s weakness and ferocity made the Inquisition and the holy wars and all that accompanied and supplemented them, and what plea in extenuation will that admission enable the believer to make for Christianity? The question then comes instantly, Why did not Christianity do more - if it did anything - to make this weakness strength and to tame this ferocity? If Christianity was from God and if God hated this hideous reign of torture and murder, why, as a rule, was the fiendishness of the torture and murder in a direct ration with the perpetrators’ fervency of faith in Christ and God? But if Christianity is purely a human evolution, what warrant is there for the assumption that it was a potent influence for good in that ages of which this book treats? Is there any evidence to show that, upon the whole, it gave wise strength to man and transformed his ferocity into gentleness? Such evidence is conspicuously lacking.
        No man of good sense, not driven into a logical corner by the exigencies of an inherited or carelessly accepted false position, would seriously essay to defend the proposition that this religion of exclusive salvation could be aught but a persecuting religion. Make a man’s assumed eternal happiness or misery depend upon acceptance of a set of dogmas; teach him that he and those who believe as he does are loved of God and will bask forever in the light of his smile, and that those who believe otherwise are hated of God and will agonize forever in the shadow of his frown; convince him - and starting from this basis nothing is easier - that those who teach the “false doctrines” are jeopardying the eternal happiness of those he loves, and you have made it almost inevitable that the shall become the enemy of the earthly peace of his fellow-men. Given this opportunity to ostracize and persecute, and nine times in ten he will ostracize and persecute. Unless he learns the lesson, which comparatively few do, that persecution, if it stops short of total destruction, strengthens rather than weakens that which is persecuted, he must persecute and he does persecute. No matter how much bitterness and cruelty he may, with seemingly gratuitous savagery, import into this crusade against “false” religions, those crusades, at bottom, are defensive measures. Better that millions of men and women die in agony now than that one soul - perhaps that of his child - roast in the fires of hell through all eternity. He is logically bound to make the heretic pay the temporal premium upon the eternal insurance policy of those who are dear to him.
        In the light of these indisputable facts, it is clear that those kindred-renouncing words laid at the door of Jesus, which have been already quoted, have in them the germs of persecution and that those germs will spring into noxious active life whenever the word-seeds drop into the soil rich with the manure of credulity and uneducated zeal. If we turn from them to other utterances credited to the Nazerene, we find more and even stronger provocatives to hatred and slaughter. “And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” (Mark xvi., 15, 16). Bitter, bitter, bitter and bloody, is all the fruit that this tree has borne through all the Christian ages. It is not a valid defense to say now that the “oldest Greek manuscripts, and some other authorities” omit these words; if the Bible is God’s book, as all but a few Christians still claim, he permitted the mistranslation to stand until 1881, and all its horrible results to accrue; if, on the other hand, and as all rationalists hold, the Bible is wholly human in its genesis and effects, its relation to the events that have occurred in the Christian world since it was written is just as much to be carefully considered, and is the most important factor among all the factors that make-up historical Christianity. It is just as true from this point of view as it was from the old point of view, that the tree is known by its fruits. “But those (“howbeit these,” version of 1881) mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me” (Luke xix., 27). It has been objected that Jesus was not speaking here for himself, nor for his ‘father’, but was merely narrating the story of a certain nobleman. These objectors forget that Jesus taught by parables, and that the context shows that, as usual, he intended his hearers to see in the actions of the nobleman an anticipation of his own or of God’s under like circumstances. However, this is immaterial, so far as orthodox Christians are concerned; if, as they contend, God wrote or inspired the writing of the Bible, it was his desire and intention that this passage should be interpreted as it was interpreted, and so all the torture and death caused by the misinterpretations, if it was misinterpreted, were parts of his scheme of government. And the tree is known by its fruits.
        Turning from Jesus to Paul, we find, “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.” (Gal. I., 8, 9). “A man that is an heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject; knowing that he that is such, is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself” (Titus iii., 10, 11). Here we have the common delusion that one cannot differ from our views and be sincere. “I would they were even cut off which trouble you” (Gal. v., 12). Who shall truthfully say that Christians, when they have had the power to obey the Great Apostle, have been found disobedient? Has not the tree been known by its fruit?
        In the Old Testament there is no lack of warrant for all the slaughterings which have stained the lands of Christianity. All are familiar with the terrible command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” It needs not the slightest argument to show the direct and vital connection of this text with the awful witchcraft persecutions feebly described on the pages of history. Another proscriptive command, not quite so well known, is this: “And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death” (Lev. xxiv., 16). And here is another, still less equivocal: “If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thing own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the end of the earth; thou shalt not consent unto him; nor hearken unto him; neither shall thin eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: but thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die” (Deut. xiii., 6 to 10). Has there ever lived a persecutor who would need to ask for more explicit authorization to murder for opinion’s sake than the Christian tyrants and torturers found here in the sacred book of their church? And was not the fruit they gathered the fit product of the tree upon which it grew?