Guy A. Aldred Archive
Written: 1913.
Source: PDF's from Marxists.org and OCR/Editing from RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
Although oppressed with an ever-widening antagonism to the entire Christian scheme of salvation, and a deepening sense of the absurdity of belief in an infallible Bible, I continued Christian missionary work down to February, 1903. On the 2nd of this month I withdrew from the Holloway Mission, and definitely rejected the Christian religion in a letter addressed to my former pastor, the Rev. S. Buss, LL.B.
I had now learned to look upon life more spiritually than I had known now to do as a Christian. God had become a living and affectionate father. He was no longer the fiend who-created and allowed to come to life a soul which he foreknew would be damned eternally. Had he been, he deserved of such a monster. Fear he might inspire in the minds of others, but not in mine. For I had been born anew in the spirit of truth, and had accordingly come to despise all professions of belief inspired by fear. I was a sincere Theist for sure. But I did not dread any material punishment attendant on ignoring the authority of a deity conceived in the image of barbaric tyranny. My attitude towards such a being was definitely anti-Theistic. A God not pleased with the soul that worshiped at the altar of Truth, not cognizant of his responsibility to man, had ceased to charm one who could be won by affection where he could not be coerced by fear. Besides, as an intelligent being, I required but one God instead of three. Such a change of inward attitude was of tremendous import, and meant more than those who have not been brought up in faith of Christendom can ever hope to realize. But it was only the first step on the heretic’s path; and there was a great distance still to be traversed in my search for truer conceptions of the universe and man’s relation thereto.
At the moment I was passing through a frankly anti-Theistic state of mind, thus escaping from placing even a temporary trust in the illogical and doctrineless Christianity of Unitarianism. This term is used to describe the doctrine of “Churches free in their constitution, and open to the laws of natural change.” How delightfully inappropriate its employment for this purpose seemed I What relation, one was tempted to inquire, could “Unitarianism” possibly have to “Churches free in their constitution, and open to the laws of natural change?" Did it not rather suggest a settled philosophic conception of the workings of the universe, and a fixed belief as to the nature of the universe, and the underlying reality? If so, what reason, I asked myself, was there to suppose that “the laws of natural change” that had upset so many of our fore-fathers’ views should refuseto mete out an equal share of iconoclastic fatalism to the cherished convictions of the disciple of Lindsey or Priestley?
Unitarianism was a definite term affirming the unity of God, and of existence in God. This implied a certain philosophic faith, and permitted of no change in primary conceptions. Consequently it could only be synonymous with £1 non-subscription to creeds and formularies within the limitations of Theism and a backboneless Christianity. Why, I asked, if Truth is always first in the consideration of the Unitarian, is it always measured by the Theistic standard? Theism should be judged in the light of Truth, not Truth in the light of Theism. It was the former and not the latter estimate which was according to “the laws of natural change.”
I wished above all things for something definite and certain. One cannot be impartial in the struggle between truth and error, righteousness and iniquity. And if Unitarianism meant only freedom of discussion, it seemed, and still seems to me, that all limitations to its philosophic employment should be swept away, and the word relegated for doctrinal purposes to the realm of the senseless. Either this, or its exact philosophic meaning made clear, so that its relations to modem thought might be the better apprehended.
Priestley, Martineau, Lindsey, and Drummond were all Unitarians. To so describe them was to label their religious sentiments as definitely as if one said they were those of all sensible men. For “the religion of all sensible men" varies as the individual varies, and the Unitarianism of the four famous scholars mentioned did likewise.
All four would deny all claim to infallibility either on behalf of the Church or the Bible; yet Martineau's conception and eulogy of Christ as his “Captain of Faith” was only compatible with a belief in Christ’s divinity and impeccability. All four also held—with the possible but not certain exception of Priestley—that their view of a personal creator behind the phenomena of the universe was an infallible truism.
This was the cardinal inconsistency of Unitarianism, to our mind. About it centered many others. The majority of Unitarians called themselves Christians, for example. Yet they disputed the doctrines of the “Trinity,” the “Deity of Christ," the “Atonement,” and the “Incarnation,” as orthodoxly understood. These doctrines they repudiated as inconsistent teachings, and accepted as uncertain traditions with the other orthodox ideas of “Redeemer" and “Salvation of Christ." Having intellectually explained them away, they incorporated them, as Theodore Parker once observed, in their piety with other pieces of damaged phraseology. They enjoined good works as the one test of true religion, and preached up noble character as the only proof of salvation. Truth and science had no terrors for them; it was only the doctrine of infallibility, that cannot be improved or advanced upon that they detested—the ecclesiasticism that tortured the bodies in order to weaken the spirits of heretics. But one sought in vain for the Unitarian who was sufficiently strong in his advocacy of freedom of thought to frankly recognize the unsatisfactory nature of placing Jesus in the seats of the deities whilst strenuously maintaining for his human character only; or, as I should now add, who was honest and logical enough to note that the postulated existence of a personal god is no solution of the enigma of existence?
Unitarians had been foremost in attacking the trustworthy nature of the four Gospel records. With these impeached, all supernatural belief in the abnormal greattness and unique character of Christ, was robbed of its foundations, yet Unitarian scholarship clung to this fetish as earnestly as orthodox “faith.” I marveled at this, no less than at the truth-seeking which coupled the denial of Christ’s divinity with the practice of both adult and infant baptism.
Of course, now as then, I fully understand and appreciate the courage that is required to renounce the doctrines of one’s childhood, and to surrender, as being but “a man of straw," the faith of one’s dear ones. Nevertheless, if one must break with the traditions of the past in order to worship at the altar of Truth, one should do so with the thoroughness that the situation both demands and deserves. Far better for the sincere soul to find its faith mistaken, and to learn how to face fearlessly the teachings of the future, than to be tossed about on the billows of Unitarian doubt, distrust, and uncertainty. Truth cannot be arrived at by a mistaking of conventional piety for religious aspirations. Nor yet by the confounding of Theistic speculations with man's consciousness of a something in nature that defies ultimate analysis.
Religion, as I understood and still understand it, signifies life or action that embodies depth of devotion and lofty aspiration. Its Chinese equivalent means Education and Instruction i.e., the drawing out, in the sense of cultivation, of the inspirational part of man's character, whereby men are led to forget the limitations of their material environments in their realization of their oneness with all phenomena. This fact realized, the human intelligence cannot but revolt at the self-contradictory postulation of a personal deity that not only does not explain existence, but rises up, as it were, an ugly obstruction in the philosophic sky serving only to detract from the perfect unity of working that is everywhere visible to the scientific truth-seeker's vision. For nature’s harmony expresses only some unmoral principle of existence that trusts not of the sufferings of sentient life. It has no room to admit of the capricious interference of a personal creator. But this is to anticipate later development.