Page:Is Christianity a Success (Annie Besant).pdf/7

 by Christians; of the shocking revenge taken by English Christians after the Indian Mutiny; of the cruel stamping out of aboriginal populations by Christian settlers; we remember the tale of God's "chosen people", of their ravaging whole regions with sword and fire, of the brutal cry: "The Lord is a man of war; the Lord of hosts is his name". When we read of diseases decimating populations; of physicians punished as magicians; of processions of saints' images and relics to avert the Divine wrath; we remember that both in the Old and New Testaments disease is represented as the scourge of God; that a king was punished because he sought physicians instead of Jahveh; that Christians are to heal the sick by laying on of hands and anointing with oil, not by science and curative drugs. And so we come to recognise that man's ignorance has been perpetuated, man's brutality fostered, man's progress retarded, by the very agency which claimed to elevate, to purify, to moralise him.

General immorality has been still further increased by the Christian doctrine of the vicarious atonement made by Jesus Christ. His outrageous doctrine that the repentant sinner caused more joy in heaven than the "just persons" has been the fruitful mother of crime. The granting of indulgences was a perfectly logical deduction from the teaching of Jesus, and the Pope who pardoned crime to the son of the Church but followed in the steps of Paul, who declared that salvation was by faith without works. The story of the dying thief, to whom Jesus promised immediate Paradise, bore fruit in hundreds of death-bed repentances; criminals, when death was inevitable and when the power to sin had gone, "repented", received absolution, and were sealed for heaven. Even now the most brutal of murderers is "washed in the blood of the lamb" between his sentence and his execution, and poses as a dying saint in the columns of the Christian press. In fact the surest way to heaven is viâ the gallows, for time is always given to the murderer to make his "peace with God", and he is given no opportunity of starting a new quarrel.

Verily Christianity is condemned by its failure. Its God, its heaven, its hell, all fail as motives to good conduct. The policeman influences the thief more than God does; worldly prosperity is a surer bait than heaven; the gaol is a more efficacious threat than hell. The wrath of