WHAT IS RELIGION? 227 



century by Christians. It is fetishism ivitliout a fetish, 

 idolatry ivithout an idol, or if there is a fetish it is 

 the Bible. 1 The ignorant who believe in idols and 

 fetishes, punish their gods when they do not act 

 in the way desired ; we, because our God is not 

 tangible, cannot do this, but we do the next thing in 

 conceiving another ideal, the devil, whose business it 

 is to control, oppose and punish God ! And so all our 

 wrong-doings are the works of a devil. What a satire 

 all this is on human intelligence ! 



But the chief virtues required are of the lickspittle denomination 

 what is called a humble and contrite heart. When a Christian sins 

 as a man, he makes compensation as a courtier. When he has in- 

 jured a fellow-creature, he goes to church with more regularity, he 

 offers up more prayers, he reads a great number of chapters in the 

 Bible, and so he believes that he has cleared off the sins that are laid 

 to his account. This, then, is the immorality of religion as it now 

 exists. It creates artificial virtues and sets them off against actual 

 vices." (" The Martyrdom of Man," Winwood Reade, 1890, p. 533.) 

 1 " To the evolution of science, there was developed something in 

 many respects more destructive ; and this was the influence of mystic 

 theology, penetrating, permeating, vitiating, sterilizing nearly every 

 branch of science for hundreds of years. Among the forms taken by 

 this development in the earlier Middle Ages we find a mixture of 

 physical science with a pseudo-science obtained from texts of Scrip- 

 ture. In compounding this mixture, Jews and Christians vied with 

 each other. In this process the sacred books were used as a fetich ; 

 every word, every letter, being considered to have a divine and hidden 

 meaning. By combining various scriptural letters in various abstruse 

 ways, new words of prodigious significance in magic were obtained, 

 and among them the great word embracing the seventy- two mystic 

 names of God the mighty word ' Scliemliamplwras.'' Why should 

 men seek knowledge by observation and experiment in the book of 

 Nature, when the book of Revelation, interpreted by the Kabbalah, 

 opened such treasures to the ingenious believer?" ("A History of 

 the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom," A. D. White, 

 1896, vol. i. p. 395.) 



Q 2 



