Now, does not this tend to
subvert all belief in the utility of teaching the Christian religion to
youth at all? Certainly, it is a broad and bold denial of such utility.
To say that the evil resulting to youth from the differences of sects
and creeds overbalances all the benefits which the best education can
give them, what is this but to say that the branches of the tree of
religious knowledge are so twisted, and twined, and commingled, and all
run so much into and over each other, that there is therefore no remedy
but to lay the axe at the root of the tree itself? It means that, and
nothing less! Now, if there be any thing more derogatory to the
Christian religion than this, I should like to know what it is. In all
this we see the attack upon religion itself, made on its ministers, its
institutions, and its diversities. And that is the objection urged by
all the lower and more vulgar schools of infidelity throughout the
world. In all these schools, called schools of Rationalism in Germany,
Socialism in England, and by various other names in various countries
which they infest, this is the universal cant. The first step of all
these philosophical moralists and regenerators of the human race is to
attack the agency through which religion and Christianity are
administered to man. But in this there is nothing new or original. We
find the same mode of attack and remark in Paine's "Age of Reason." At
page 336 he says: "The Bramin, the follower of Zoroaster, the Jew, the
Mahometan, the Church of Rome, the Greek Church, the Protestant Church,
split into several hundred contradictory sectaries, preaching, in some
instances, damnation against each other, all cry out, 'Our holy
religion!'"
We find the same view in Volney's "Ruins of Empires.
Pages:
1383
1384
1385
1386
1387
1388
1389
1390
1391
1392
1393
1394
1395
1396
1397
1398
1399
1400
1401
1402
1403
1404
1405
1406
1407