A Legacy to the Friends of Free Discussion: Principal Historical Facts and Personages of the Books Known as The Old and New Testament; With Remarks on the Morality of NatureOffen, Benjamin
Religion
A Legacy to the Friends of Free Discussion: Principal Historical Facts and Personages of the Books Known as The Old and New Testament; With Remarks on the Morality of Nature
Offen, Benjamin
Bible -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
To the reader, then, I recommend attention to the hints here given; and
in order to form a correct judgment how he should perform the duties
which he owes to himself, and also to his fellow mortals, to study and
always appeal to the laws of his organization. Let him bring every
action to that never-failing index of his nature, the love of happiness
and the aversion to pain. Let him sum up every day his moral accounts by
this unerring rule, and this mode will never fail to make his moral path
as clear as light; for as he knows that, according to the laws of his
nature, he is compelled to love happiness, and to shrink from pain, so
also, is every one that has life, governed by the laws of pleasure and
pain. The laws of our organization, and the voice of reason united,
proclaim to every human being, that the whole of man’s duty towards his
fellow man consists at all times, and in all places, in increasing his
happiness, and reducing his pain.
To know this, so easy to be known, and strictly to practise it, is all
the revelation which man requires. But pretended revelation has either
obscured moral light, or held out lights that are false and delusive.
The false light presented to man, called revealed religion, instead of
conducting him safely into the haven of happiness, has continually
tossed him, without rudder or compass, on the roaring billows of
theology, on which troubled ocean he has met with little else than
robbers and pirates.
Never, then, let us forget, that the best men or women are they, whose
whole lives are directed to the promotion of the permanent happiness of
every thing having life and feeling, and to the reduction of misery
wherever it may be found; and that whoever shall thus act, will be not
only the best, but also the happiest, of the human race.
THE END.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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