THE HOLY CROSS:
“I take this book, as its contents show, to be meant for the
instruction of very young children. I find, in one of the pages of
it, the statement that between the ages of six and six and a half
years would be the proper time for the inculcation of the teaching
which is to be found in the book. Now, six to six and a half is
certainly a very tender age, and to these children I find these
statements addressed in the book:
“‘It is to the priest, and to the priest only, that the child must
acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him.’
“I hope and trust the person, the three clergymen, or however many
there were, did not exactly realise what they were writing; that
they did not mean to say that a child was not to confess its sins to
God direct; that it was not to confess its sins, at the age of six,
to its mother, or to its father, but was only to have recourse to
the priest. But the words, to say the least of them, are rash.
Then comes the very obvious question:
“‘Do you know why? It is because God, when he was on earth, gave to
his priests, and to them alone, the Divine Power of forgiving men
their sins. It was to priests alone that Jesus said: “Receive ye
the Holy Ghost.” … Those who will not confess will not be
cured. Sin is a terrible sickness, and casts souls into hell.’
“That is addressed to a child six years of age.
“‘I have known,’ the book continues, ‘poor children who concealed
their sins in confession for years; they were very unhappy, were
tormented with remorse, and if they had died in that state they
would certainly have gone to the everlasting fires of hell.’” …
Now here is something against nature, something that I have seen
time after time in the faces and bearing of priests and heard in
their preaching. It is a distinct lust. Much nobility and devotion
there are among priests, saintly lives and kindly lives, lives of
real worship, lives no man may better; this that I write is not of
all, perhaps not of many priests. But there has been in all ages
that have known sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest;
priestcraft and priestly power release an aggressive and narrow
disposition to a recklessness of suffering and a hatred of liberty
that surely exceeds the badness of any other sort of men.
8. THE CHILDREN’S GOD
Children do not naturally love God. They have no great capacity for
an idea so subtle and mature as the idea of God. While they are
still children in a home and cared for, life is too kind and easy
for them to feel any great need of God. All things are still
something God-like… .
The true God, our modern minds insist upon believing, can have no
appetite for unnatural praise and adoration. He does not clamour
for the attention of children. He is not like one of those senile
uncles who dream of glory in the nursery, who love to hear it said,
“The children adore him.” If children are loved and trained to
truth, justice, and mutual forbearance, they will be ready for the
true God as their needs bring them within his scope. They should be
left to their innocence, and to their trust in the innocence of the
world, as long as they can be. They should be told only of God as a
Great Friend whom some day they will need more and understand and
know better. That is as much as most children need. The phrases of
religion put too early into their mouths may become a cant,
something worse than blasphemy.
Yet children are sometimes very near to God. Creative passion stirs
in their play. At times they display a divine simplicity. But it
does not follow that therefore they should be afflicted with
theological formulae or inducted into ceremonies and rites that they
may dislike or misinterpret. If by any accident, by the death of a
friend or a distressing story, the thought of death afflicts a
child, then he may begin to hear of God, who takes those that serve
him out of their slain bodies into his shining immortality. Or if
by some menial treachery, through some prowling priest, the whisper
of Old Bogey reaches our children, then we may set their minds at
ease by the assurance of his limitless charity… .
With adolescence comes the desire for God and to know more of God,
and that is the most suitable time for religious talk and teaching.
9. GOD IS NOT SEXUAL
In the last two or three hundred years there has been a very
considerable disentanglement of the idea of God from the complex of
sexual thought and feeling. But in the early days of religion the
two things were inseparably bound together; the fury of the Hebrew
prophets, for example, is continually proclaiming the extraordinary
“wrath” of their God at this or that little dirtiness or
irregularity or breach of the sexual tabus. The ceremony of
circumcision is clearly indicative of the original nature of the
Semitic deity who developed into the Trinitarian God. So far as
Christianity dropped this rite, so far Christianity disavowed the
old associations. But to this day the representative Christian
churches still make marriage into a mystical sacrament, and, with
some exceptions, the Roman communion exacts the sacrifice of
celibacy from its priesthood, regardless of the mischievousness and
maliciousness that so often ensue. Nearly every Christian church
inflicts as much discredit and injustice as it can contrive upon the
illegitimate child. They do not treat illegitimate children as
unfortunate children, but as children with a mystical and an
incurable taint of SIN. Kindly easy-going Christians may resent
this statement because it does not tally with their own attitudes,
but let them consult their orthodox authorities.
One must distinguish clearly here between what is held to be sacred
or sinful in itself and what is held to be one’s duty or a nation’s
duty because it is in itself the wisest, cleanest, clearest, best
thing to do. By the latter tests and reasonable arguments most or
all of our institutions regulating the relations of the sexes may be
justifiable. But my case is not whether they can be justified by
these tests but that it is not by these tests that they are judged
even to-day, by the professors of the chief religions of the world.
It is the temper and not the conclusions of the religious bodies
that I would criticise. These sexual questions are guarded by a
holy irascibility, and the most violent efforts are made—with a
sense of complete righteousness—to prohibit their discussion. That
fury about sexual things is only to be explained on the hypothesis
that the Christian God remains a sex God in the minds of great
numbers of his exponents. His disentanglement from that plexus is
incomplete. Sexual things are still to the orthodox Christian,
sacred things.
Now the God whom those of the new faith are finding is only
mediately concerned with the relations of men and women. He is no
more sexual essentially than he is essentially dietetic or hygienic.
The God of Leviticus was all these things. He is represented as
prescribing the most petty and intimate of observances—many of
which are now habitually disregarded by the Christians who profess
him… . It is part of the evolution of the idea of God that we
have now so largely disentangled our conception of him from the
dietary and regimen and meticulous sexual rules that were once
inseparably bound up with his majesty. Christ himself was one of
the chief forces in this disentanglement, there is the clearest
evidence in several instances of his disregard of the rule and his
insistence that his disciples should seek for the spirit underlying
and often masked by the rule. His Church, being made of baser
matter, has followed him as reluctantly as possible and no further
than it was obliged. But it has followed him far enough to admit
his principle that in all these matters there is no need for
superstitious fear, that the interpretation of the divine purpose is
left to the unembarrassed intelligence of men. The church has
followed him far enough to make the harsh threatenings of priests
and ecclesiastics against what they are pleased to consider impurity
or sexual impiety, a profound inconsistency. One seems to hear
their distant protests when one reads of Christ and the Magdalen, or
of Christ eating with publicans and sinners. The clergy of our own
days play the part of the New Testament Pharisees with the utmost
exactness and complete unconsciousness. One cannot imagine a modern
ecclesiastic conversing with a Magdalen in terms of ordinary
civility, unless she was in a very high social position indeed, or