Page:Witchcraft In Christian Countries.pdf/5

Rh have demonstrated the incompetency of God as a writer; but the salaries are still drawn and the sermons still droned. If you were to take a cart and proceed to demolish it by breaking the shafts, smashing the axle, knocking in the splash-board, and shattering the wheels, would you still have a cart? The wheels, the axle, and the shafts of Christianity are broken; but it has still the effrontery to call itself Christianity, and occasionally to declare that Science is its handmaid. Well, if Science be Religion's handmaid, the handmaid has broken the back of her mistress.

But Christianity never acknowledges itself wrong-oh, dear, no. It insists that the Bible has always taught what science now affirms. Of course the Bible alleges that the world was created in six days; but days are not days, but tremendously long periods of time. Yet days were always days till geology proved that the Bible lied. The sun used to revolve round the earth, and once stood still at the command of a Jewish cut-throat; but now it does not revolve round the earth, it only seems to do it; and it did not stand still, it only seemed to stand still. The stars and moon were originally stuck in the firmament to give light to the earth, and the firmament had originally windows, which could be opened that water might be poured out of them to drown the earth below. But the Christian priest has some way of quibbling out of all this and hundreds of other monstrous absurdities and old-world ignorances, which Science has stripped naked and whipped through the streets before the intelligence of the civilised world. The revulsion of popular feeling makes it now impossible to burn any one as a witch; and so Theology, with an effrontery which is absolutely appalling, now discovers that the Bible never taught that witches should be put to death. It is now discovered that the Hebrew word chasaph, like the word veneficus, by which it is rendered in the Latin version of the Septuagint, does not mean a witch at all. I never feel more bitter contempt for priestcraft than when it betakes itself to this miserable word-conjuring and verbal jugglery to cast the dust of its learned jargon in the eyes of the people. A word has a certain fixed and irrefragible meaning till it is inconvenient for theology that it should retain that meaning any longer, and then