On
the third day, about noon,
it was found that a fly and
been left behind. The return
voyage turned out to be long
and difficult, on account of
the lack of chart and compass,
and because of the changed
aspects of all coasts, the
steadily rising water having
submerged some of the lower
landmarks and given to higher
ones an unfamiliar look; but
after sixteen days of earnest
and faithful seeking, the fly
was found at last, and received
on board with hymns of praise
and gratitude, the Family standing
meanwhile uncovered, our of
reverence for its divine origin.
It was weary and worn, and
had suffered somewhat from
the weather, but was otherwise
in good estate. Men and their
families had died of hunger
on barren mountain tops, but
it had not lacked for food,
the multitudinous corpses furnishing
it in rank and rotten richness.
Thus was the sacred bird providentially
preserved.
Providentially.
That is the word. For the fly
had not been left behind by
accident. No, the hand of Providence
was in it. There are no accidents.
All things that happen, happen
for a purpose. They are foreseen
from the beginning of time,
they are ordained from the
beginning of time. From the
dawn of Creation the Lord had
foreseen that Noah, being alarmed
and confused by the invasion
of the prodigious brevet fossils,
would prematurely fly to sea
unprovided with a certain invaluable
disease. He would have all
the other diseases, and could
distribute them among the new
races of men as they appeared
in the world, but he would
lack one of the very best --
typhoid fever; a malady which,
when the circumstances are
especially favorable, is able
to utterly wreck a patient
without killing him; for it
can restore him to his feet
with a long life in him, and
yet deaf, dumb, blind, crippled,
and idiotic. The housefly is
its main disseminator, and
is more competent and more
calamitously effective than
all the other distributors
of the dreaded scourge put
together. And so, by foreordination
from the beginning of time,
this fly was left behind to
seek out a typhoid corpse and
feed upon its corruptions and
gaum its legs with germs and
transmit them to the re-peopled
world for permanent business.
From that one housefly, in
the ages that have since elapsed,
billions of sickbeds have been
stocked, billions of wrecked
bodies sent tottering about
the earth, and billions of
cemeteries recruited with the
dead.
It
is most difficult to understand
the disposition of the Bible
God, it is such a confusion
of contradictions; of watery
instabilities and iron firmness;
of goody-goody abstract morals
made out of words, and concreted
hell-born ones made out of
acts; of fleeting kindness
repented of in permanent malignities.
However,
when after much puzzling you
get at the key to his disposition,
you do at last arrive at a
sort of understanding of it.
With a most quaint and juvenile
and astonishing frankness he
has furnished that key himself.
It is jealousy!
I
expect that to take your breath
away. You are aware -- for
I have already told you in
an earlier letter -- that among
human beings jealousy ranks
distinctly as a weakness; a
trade-mark of small minds;
a property of all small
minds, yet a property which
even the smallest is ashamed
of; and when accused of its
possession will lyingly deny
it and resent the accusation
as an insult.
Jealousy.
Do not forget it, keep it in
mind. It is the key. With it
you will come to partly understand
God as we go along; without
it nobody can understand him.
As I have said, he has openly
held up this treasonous key
himself, for all to see. He
says, na�vely, outspokenly,
and without suggestion of embarrassment: "I
the Lord thy God am a jealous
God."
You
see, it is only another way
of saying, "I the Lord thy
God am a small God; a small
God, and fretful about small
things."
He
was giving a warning: he could
not bear the thought of any
other God getting some of the
Sunday compliments of this
comical little human race --
he wanted all of them for himself.
He valued them. To him they
were riches; just as tin money
is to a Zulu.
But
wait -- I am not fair; I am
misrepresenting him; prejudice
is beguiling me into saying
what is not true. He did not
say he wanted all of the adulations;
he said nothing about not being
willing to share them with
his fellow gods; what he said
was, "Thou shalt have no other
gods before me."
It
is a quite different thing,
and puts him in a much better
light -- I confess it. There
was an abundance of gods, the
woods were full of them, as
the saying is, and all he demanded
was that he should be ranked
as high as the others -- not
above any of them, but not
below any of them. He was willing
that they should fertilize
earthly virgins, but not on
any better terms than he could
have for himself in his turn.
He wanted to be held their
equal. This he insisted upon,
in the clearest language: he
would have no other gods before him.
They could march abreast with
him, but none of them could
head the procession, and he
did not claim the right to
head it himself.
Do
you think he was able to stick
to that upright and creditable
position? No. He could keep
to a bad resolution forever,
but he couldn't keep to a good
one a month. By and by he threw
aside and calmly claimed to
be the only God in the entire
universe.
As
I was saying, jealousy is the
key; all through his history
it is present and prominent.
It is the blood and bone of
his disposition, it is the
basis of his character. How
small a thing can wreck his
composure and disorder his
judgement if it touches the
raw of his jealousy! And nothing
warms up this trait so quickly
and so surely and so exaggeratedly
as a suspicion that some competition
with the god-Trust is impending.
The fear that if Adam and Eve
ate of the fruit of the Tree
of Knowledge they would "be
as gods" so fired his jealousy
that his reason was affected,
and he could not treat those
poor creatures either fairly
or charitably, or even refrain
from dealing cruelly and criminally
with their blameless posterity.
To
this day his reason has never
recovered from that shock;
a wild nightmare of vengefulness
has possessed him ever since,
and he has almost bankrupted
his native ingenuities in inventing
pains and miseries and humiliations
and heartbreaks wherewith to
embitter the brief lives of
Adam's descendants. Think of
the diseases he has contrived
for them! They are multitudinous;
no book can name them all.
And each one is a trap, set
for an innocent victim.
The
human being is a machine. An
automatic machine. It is composed
of thousands of complex and
delicate mechanisms, which
perform their functions harmoniously
and perfectly, in accordance
with laws devised for their
governance, and over which
the man himself has no authority,
no mastership, no control.
For each one of these thousands
of mechanisms the Creator has
planned an enemy, whose office
is to harass it, pester it,
persecute it, damage it, afflict
it with pains, and miseries,
and ultimate destruction. Not
one has been overlooked.
From
cradle to grave these enemies
are always at work; they know
no rest, night or day. They
are an army: an organized army;
a besieging army; an assaulting
army; an army that is alert,
watchful, eager, merciless;
an army that never relents,
never grants a truce.
It
moves by squad, by company,
by battalion, by regiment,
by brigade, by division, by
army corps; upon occasion it
masses its parts and moves
upon mankind with its whole
strength. It is the Creator's
Grand Army, and he is the Commander-in-Chief.
Along its battlefront its grisly
banners wave their legends
in the face of the sun: Disaster,
Disease, and the rest.
Disease!
That is the main force, the
diligent force, the devastating
force! It attacks the infant
the moment it is born; it furnishes
it one malady after another:
croup, measles, mumps, bowel
troubles, teething pains, scarlet
fever, and other childhood
specialties. It chases the
child into youth and furnishes
it some specialties for that
time of life. It chases the
youth into maturity, maturity
into age, age into the grave.
With
these facts before you will
you now try to guess man's
chiefest pet name for this
ferocious Commander-in-Chief?
I will save you the trouble
-- but you must not laugh.
It is Our Father in Heaven!
It
is curious -- the way the human
mind works. The Christian begins
with this straight proposition,
this definite proposition,
this inflexible and uncompromising
proposition: God is all-knowing,
and all-powerful.
This
being the case, nothing can
happen without his knowing
beforehand that it is going
to happen; nothing happens
without his permission; nothing
can happen that he chooses
to prevent.
That
is definite enough, isn't it?
It makes the Creator distinctly
responsible for everything
that happens, doesn't it?
The
Christian concedes it in that
italicized sentence. Concedes
it with feeling, with enthusiasm.
Then,
having thus made the Creator
responsible for all those pains
and diseases and miseries above
enumerated, and which he could
have prevented, the gifted
Christian blandly calls him
Our Father!
It
is as I tell you. He equips
the Creator with every trait
that goes to the making of
a fiend, and then arrives at
the conclusion that a fiend
and a father are the same thing!
Yet he would deny that a malevolent
lunatic and a Sunday school
superintendent are essentially
the same. What do you think
of the human mind? I mean,
in case you think there is
a human mind. |