A Freethinker Takes On the Pulpit in Olympia

At Liberal Hall last Sunday afternoon, P. D. Moore discoursed on “What shall we do to be saved?” and reviewed Rev. Mr. Diven’s sermon on “Law,” as it appeared in these columns. He said that it was not from the wrath of God, or eternal punishment, that man needs to be saved. The God we worship—the God of nature and Father of all mankind—is a God of love and not of wrath, and is too wise, too good and too powerful to suffer his children to be lost or to eternally suffer; neither is there any power—call it devil or what you will—that can defeat his purposes conceived in infinite wisdom, or cause him to repent that He made man. Omnipotent wisdom, love and power rules, and always will rule, the Universe, not by arbitrary and capricious power, but by a system of natural laws that are at once wise and divine.

The desperate fallacy which has occupied and bewildered the Christian mind consists in thinking that it is our business, or anybody’s business, to “convert” or “redeem” the world. In our judgment, what the world needs is not “conversion” but culture, not “redemption” but knowledge of its own needs and capacities. If we believed “man to be the father of God,” we should address ourselves to the task of bringing our disobedient son back to his allegiance, but believing “God is our Father,” we think it more rational to return to our allegiance, and ask what he would have us to do. Is it rash to imagine him as saying to us in reply to such a question: “My children, give up your conceit; fret yourselves no more about the world which I have made; fear not that it will go to ruin unless I make it conform to your views; vex not your souls with efforts to rectify the conditions I have established. Rather study those conditions with a purpose to conform to their requirements; learn what the laws of salvation or health are, and try to get them obeyed.” In a word, our business is to HELP AND NOT HINDER—to help by considering ourselves as members of the world’s organism, and not repairers of it; to become students of the will of God, as expressed in the laws of Nature—physical, mental and moral—with an earnest purpose to conform thereto.

After showing the necessity of salvation from ignorance, superstition, idolatry, injustice, selfishness, immorality and discord; in other words, from sin and misery in its manifold forms, by an acquaintance and compliance with the laws of Nature, he referred to the published sermon of Rev. Mr. Diven on “Law,” and after complimenting the reverend gentleman on his intelligence and gentle human nature, said: Our good brother Diven took for his text, “Whosoever shall keep the whole law and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty of all,” Jas. 2:10, and it seems to me he places himself and his subject in an awkward plight by trying to affirm and maintain two diametrically opposite and inconsistent positions. Moreover the text does not commend itself to the reason and experience of mankind.

He quoted St. John approvingly that all transgression of law is sin, and yet he holds that a certain class of persons (which he describes as born of God, or as being Christians) do not sin. He certainly cannot reasonably or truthfully assume that there are any that do not in some way—physically, mentally or morally—transgress law, but he maintains that those who are born of God, or Christians, nevertheless do not sin. This is a most palpable contradiction, viewed in any light you please. The fact is, no person can wholly avoid transgressing law—I mean the law of nature—in some department, and as a consequence, no person can wholly avoid sinning, however many times he has been born, unless he has reached perfection, and that no man has done. Brother Diven has a good deal to say regarding human rules and enactments—dignifying the same by the term “law”—fearfully mixing and confounding the same with the physical and moral laws of our nature. He says: “The state makes great provision to prevent and punish transgression of its law. But man is soon taught that laws are conceived in wisdom; that they proceed from benevolent being (Query: Does he mean to include the fugitive slave law and the laws enacted by our legislature?) and are the way to perfection of character and blessedness.” But after he has said all this he insists that the people cannot make laws; that all real laws come from God, and adds that “God wrote his laws on human minds and hearts and built them into human nature.” This last is a true and noble sentiment, evincing the man rather than the theologian, and proves him vastly better than his creed. ’Tis true he has something to say of faith as being able to make sin count for righteousness to those who are Christians, and his whole sermon is an exhibition of “rowing with one hand and backing with the other,” or of “being all things to all men.” But I commend to you a genuine and living faith—not belief in or acceptance of dogmatism, or unreasonable and unnatural authority, although such authority claim to be supernatural and divine revelation, attested by miracle and promulgated by the church; but faith in human nature, with its capacities and possibilities by virtue of the laws of education and development; such faith constituting the natural religion of a good heart and a clear, wise head; a religion unecclesiastical, undogmatic, unsectarian, but spiritual, sympathetic, just and reasonable, as well as scientific and progressive.

“Let man serve law for man; Live for friendship, live for love, For Truth’s and Harmony’s behoof: The church may follow how it can, As Olympus follows Jove.”