Flowers of Freethought (Second Series)Foote, G. W. (George William)
Religion
Flowers of Freethought (Second Series)
Foote, G. W. (George William)
Free thought
Mr. Hughes is brave enough--in the absence of a critic--to start with
Jesus Christ as the first cosmopolitan. "He came of the Jewish stock,"
we are told, "and yet he had no trace of the Jew in him." Of course
not--in Christian sermons and Christian pictures, preached and painted
for non-Jewish, and indeed Jew-hating nations. But there is a very
decided "trace of the Jew in him" in the New Testament. To the Canaanite
woman he said, "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of
Israel." To the twelve he said, "Go not into the way of the Gentiles,
and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel." It was Paul who, finding he could
not make headway against the apostles who had known Jesus personally,
exclaimed, "Lo, we turn to the Gentiles." That exclamation was a turning
point. It was the first real step to such universalism as Christianity
has attained. No wonder, therefore, that Comte puts Paul instead of
Jesus into the Positivist calendar, as the real founder of Christianity.
Even in the case of St. Paul, it is perfectly idle to suppose that his
cosmopolitanism extended beyond the Roman empire. A little study and
reflection would show Mr. Hughes that the very fact of the Roman empire
was the secret of the cosmopolitanism. Moral conceptions follow in the
wake of political expansion. The morality of a tribe is tribal; that
of a nation is national; and national morality only developes into
international morality with the growth of international interests and
international communication. Now the Roman empire had broken up the
old nationalities, and with them their local religions. The human mind
broadened with its political and social horizon. And the result was
that a cosmopolitan sentiment in morals, and a universal conception in
religion, naturally spread throughout the territory which was dominated
by the Roman eagles. Christianity itself was at first a Jewish sect,
which developed into a cosmopolitan system precisely because the
national independence of the Jews had been broken up, and all the roads
of a great empire were open to the missionaries of a new faith.
But let us return to Mr. Hughes's statements. He tells us that the
solidarity of mankind was "revealed to the human race through St.
Paul"--which is a great slur upon Jesus Christ, and quite inconsistent
with what Mr. Hughes affirms of the Nazarene. It is also inconsistent
with the very language of St. Paul in that sermon of his to the
Athenians; for the great apostle, in enforcing his argument that all men
are God's children, actually reminds the Athenians that "certain also of
your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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