ADDRESS TO CHRISTIANS.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 10, 1 July 1884, Page 14

ADDRESS TO CHRISTIANS.

Why do you prefer the collection of books commencing with Genesis and ending with Revelation to the books called Chou-King-Ta-hio and Lun-yu? In plain terms, why do you prefer the reflex of the barbarous Hebrews to the higher cultivation of the Chinese ? You may tell me that your Bible is the oldest book in the world ; but you have nothing of real evidence, in favour even of the Old Testament, earlier than Ezra, or about 450 years before the Christian era ; while the book Chou-King was compiled by Confucius at least 100 years earlier, from documents claiming an extremely high antiquity amongst written records. Pauthier says that the documents utilised in the Chou-King are the most ancient the world knows. Depicting a civilisation dating back 2,600 years before Christ, you have the Chinese author dealing with astronomy as a science ; anticipating in some degree modern meteorology, and

marking the universe as open for study: while your book of Genesis affirms, arbitrarily, statements which science has since flatly contradicted, but which for centuries rendered the progress of European science difficult, because its teachings were always in hostility to orthodox Christianity. Chapter three of Chou-King says : " Virtue is the foundation for a good government. Such a government should first seek to enable the people to procure the means of sustenanceviz., water, fire, metals, wood, lands, and corn. It is necessary to think how to render the people virtuous, and to utilise for them these possessions." What have you like this in Genesis?

Why do you teach Genesis to your children in schools ? Why not Chou-King ? Genesis is Hebrew now, but its origin is unknown. Chou-King is Chinese: why has the one a preference with you over the other ? The same chapter of Chou-King says: "When it is necessary to punish, the penalty ought not to extend from the fathers to the children." Your Hebrew book Deuteronomy says : " I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." Which is the more humane, the Chinese or the Hebrew ? If it be said that the passage in Deuteronomy does not refer to an actual punishment to be inflicted by God, but only to the hereditary transmission of health or disease, the reply is that Deuteronomy pretends the punishment to be the direct act of Deity. The fourth chapter of Chou-King recommends that only wise men should be chosen as public functionaries, and defines as a wise man one who knows how to combine enjoyment with restraint, firmness with honesty, gravity with frankness, deference with great talents, straightforwardness and exactitude with mildness, wit with gentleness, and power with equity. Chou-King declares that a generous and benevolent prince, having men of this character for ministers, will make himself loved by his people. Have you anything like this in the early part of Hebrew kings, as given in the first dozen books of the Bible ? Yet you compel your children to read this Hebrew book, and you do not teach them Chou-King. The Confucian books are none of them perfect. No books are. They are the echoes of the ages out of which they spring; more or less accurate according to the ability or honesty of the writer whose pen transmits us this echo of the past. Men once claimed infallibility for the Bible ; now they abandon its chronology, and admit that its Judaic enactments are inappropriate to modern requirements. Yet your children have to read it in schools without qualification, and commence by accquiring ideas which are utterly inaccurate ideas respecting the texts they read. What advantage can there be in teaching your little girls to read the story of the visit of the angels to Sodom, of Lot and his daughters, of Judah and Tamar, or of Amnon and Tamar ? The Bible has many parts worth examining ; but, as a whole, it as much belongs to yesterday as do the Antiquities of Josephus. Even if more modern in date, it is less humane in spirit than the Iliad, full as is the expression in this of the ferocity of the war-loving Greek. It is not all false, but its early geography is childishly incorrect, its chronology is unworthy serious refutation, its astronomy would do credit to Munchausen, and its history, prior to Solomon, but a complication of romance, remarkable chiefly for its brutality of detail. Charles Bradlaugh.