Part 12
I will not insist much on the romance of the alleged Pope St. Clement, who calls himself the first successor of St. Peter. I will note only that Simon Barjona and he met an old man, who complained of the unfaithfulness of his wife, who had lain with his servant. Clement asks how he learned it. “By my wife’s horoscope,” said the good man, “and from my brother, with whom she wished to lie, but he would not.” From these words Clement recognised his father in the old man.[60] From Peter Clement learned that he was of the blood of the Cæsars. On such romances, Romans, was the papal power set up!
_Seventh Chief Imposture_
_On the Supposed Pontificate of Simon Barjona, Called Peter_
Who was the first to say that Simon, the poor fisherman, came from Galilee to Rome, spoke Latin there (though he could not possibly know more than his native dialect), and in the end was pope of Rome for twenty-five years? It was a Syrian named Abdias, who lived about the end of the first century, and is said to have been bishop of Babylon (a good bishopric). He wrote in Syriac, and we have his work in a Latin translation by Julius the African. Listen well to what this intelligent writer says. He was an eye-witness, and his testimony is irrefragable.
Simon Barjona Peter, having, he says, raised to life Tabitha, or Dorcas, the sempstress of the apostles, and having been put in prison by the orders of King Herod (though there was no King Herod at the time); and an angel having opened the doors of the prison for him (after the custom of angels), met, in Cæsarea, the other Simon, of Samaria, known as the Magician (Magus), who also performed miracles. They began to defy each other. Simon the Samaritan went off to the Emperor Nero at Rome. Simon Barjona followed him, and the emperor received them excellently. A cousin of the emperor had died, and it was a question which of them could restore him to life. The Samaritan has the honour of opening the ceremony. He calls upon God, and the dead man gives signs of life and shakes his head. Simon Peter calls on Jesus Christ, and tells the dead man to rise; forthwith he does rise, and embraces Peter. Then follows the well-known story of the two dogs. Then Abdias tells how Simon flew in the air, and his rival Simon Peter brought him down. Simon the Magician broke his legs, and Nero had Simon Peter crucified, head downwards, for breaking the legs of the other Simon.
This harlequinade was described, not only by Abdias, but by some one named Marcellus, and by a certain Hegesippus, whom Eusebius often quotes in his history. Pray notice, judicious Romans, how this Simon Peter may have reigned spiritually in your city for twenty-five years. He came to it under Nero, according to the earliest writers of the Church; he died under Nero; and Nero reigned only thirteen years.
Read the _Acts of the Apostles_. Is there any question therein of Peter going to Rome? Not the least mention. Do you not see that, when the fiction began that Peter was the first of the apostles, it was thought that the imperial city alone was worthy of him? See how clumsily you have been deluded in everything. Is it possible that the son of God, nay God himself, should have made use of a play on words, a ridiculous pun, to make Simon Barjona the head of his Church: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock [petra] I will build my Church.” Had Barjona been called Pumpkin, Jesus might have said to him: “Thou art Pumpkin, and Pumpkin shall henceforward be the king of the fruits in my garden.”[61]
For more than three hundred years the alleged successor of a Galilean peasant was unknown to Rome. Let us now see how the popes became your masters.
_Eighth Imposture_
No one who is acquainted with the history of the Greek and Latin Churches can be unaware that the metropolitan sees established their chief rights at the Council of Chalcedon, convoked in the year 451 by the order of the Emperor Marcian and of Pulcheria [his wife], and composed of six hundred and thirty bishops. The senators who presided in the emperor’s name had on their right the patriarchs of Alexandria and Jerusalem, on their left the patriarch of Constantinople and the deputies of the patriarch of Rome. It was in virtue of the canons of this Council that the episcopal sees shared the dignities of the cities in which they were situated. The bishops of the two imperial cities, Rome and Constantinople, were declared to be the first bishops, with equal prerogatives, by the celebrated twenty-eighth canon:
“The fathers have justly granted prerogatives to the see of ancient Rome, as to a reigning city, and the 150 bishops of the first Council of Constantinople, very dear to God, have for the same reason given the same privileges to the new Rome; they have rightly thought that this city, in which the Emperor and Senate reside, should be equal to it in all ecclesiastical matters.”
The popes have always contested the authenticity of this canon; they have twisted and perverted its whole meaning. What did they do at length to evade this equality and gradually to destroy all the titles of subjection which placed them under the emperors like all other men? They forged the famous donation of Constantine, which has been for many centuries so strictly regarded as genuine that it was a mortal and unpardonable sin to doubt it, and whoever did so incurred the greater excommunication by the very fact of doubting.
A very pretty thing was this donation of Constantine to Bishop Sylvester.
“We,” says the Emperor, “with all our satraps and the whole Roman people, have thought it good to give to the successors of St. Peter a greater power than that of our serene majesty.” Do you not think, Romans, that the word “satrap” comes in very well there?
With equal authenticity, Constantine goes on, in this noble diploma, to say that he has put the Apostles Peter and Paul in large amber caskets; that he has built the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul; that he has given them vast domains in Judæa, Greece, Thrace, Asia, etc. (to maintain the luminary); that he has given to the pope his Lateran palace, with chamberlains and guards; and that, lastly, he gives him, as a pure donation for himself and his successors, the city of Rome, Italy, and all the western provinces; and all this is given to thank the Pope Sylvester for having cured him of leprosy, and having baptised him--though, in point of fact, he was baptised only on his death-bed, by Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia.
Never was there a document more ridiculous from one end to the other, yet more accredited in the ignorant ages in which Europe was so long detained after the fall of your empire.
_Ninth Imposture_
I pass over the thousand and one little daily impostures to come at once to the great fraud of the Decretals.
These false Decretals were spread everywhere in the time of Charlemagne. In these, Romans, the better to rob you of your liberty, the bishops are deprived of theirs; it is decreed that the bishop of Rome shall be their only judge. Certainly, if he is the sovereign of the bishops, he should soon be yours; and that is what happened. These false Decretals abolished the Councils, and even abolished your Senate, which became merely a court of justice, subject to the will of a priest. Here is the real source of the humiliation you have suffered. Your rights and privileges, so long maintained by your wisdom, could be wrested from you only by untruth. Only by lying to God and men did they succeed in making slaves of you; but they have never extinguished the love of liberty in your hearts. The greater the tyranny, the greater is that love. The sacred name of liberty is still heard in your conversations and gatherings, and in the very antechamber of the pope.
ARTICLE IX.
Cæsar was but your dictator; Augustus was content to be your general, consul, and tribune; Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero left you your elections, your prerogatives, and your dignities; even the barbarians respected them. You maintained your municipal government. Not by the authority of your bishop, Gregory III., but of your own decision, you offered the dignity of patrician to the great Charles Martel, master of his king, conqueror of the Saracens in the year 741 of our faulty vulgar era.
Believe not that it was the Bishop Leo III. who made Charlemagne emperor; it is an absurd romance of the secretary Eginhard, a vile flatterer of the popes, who had won him. By what right and in what way could a subject bishop make an emperor? Emperors were created only by the people, or by the armies that took the place of the people.
It was you, people of Rome, who used your rights; you who would no longer depend on a Greek emperor, who gave you no aid; you who appointed Charlemagne, or he would have been a usurper. The annalists of the time agree that all was arranged by Carolo and your leading officers, as is, indeed, most probable. Your bishop’s only share in it was to conduct an empty ceremony and receive rich presents. The only authority he had in your city was that of the prestige attaching to his mitre, his clergy, and his ability.
But while you gave yourselves to Charlemagne, you retained the election of your officers. The police was in your hands; you kept possession of the mole of Adrian, so absurdly called in later times the Castello Sant’ Angelo; and you were not wholly enslaved until your bishops seized that fortress.
They made their way step by step to that supreme greatness, so expressly forbidden them by him whom they call their God, and of whom they dare to call themselves the vicars. They had never any jurisdiction in Rome under the Othos. Excommunication and intrigue were their sole arms; and even when, in an age of anarchy, they became the real sovereigns, they never dared to assume the title. I defy the astutest of those fabricators of titles who abound in your court to find a single one in which the pope is described as prince by the grace of God. A strange princedom, when one fears to avow it!
The imperial cities of Germany, which have bishops, are free; and you, Romans, are not. The archbishop of Cologne has not even the right to sleep in that city; and your pope will hardly allow you to sleep in your own. The sultan of the Turks is far less despotic at Constantinople than the pope has become at Rome.
You perish miserably in the shade of superb colonnades. Your noble and faded paintings, and your dozen gems of ancient sculpture, bring you neither a good dinner nor a good bed. The opulence is for your masters: the indigence is for you. The lot of a slave among the ancient Romans was a hundred times better than yours. _He_ might acquire a large fortune; _you_ are born serfs, you die serfs, and the only oil you have is that of the Last Anointing. Slaves in body and in soul, your tyrants do not even allow you to read, in your own tongue, the book on which they say your religion is founded.
Awake, Romans, at the call of liberty, truth, and nature. The cry rings over Europe. You must hear it. Break the chains that bind your generous hands--the chains forged by tyranny in the den of imposture.
THE SERMON OF THE FIFTY
Fifty cultivated, pious, and reasonable persons have, for a year past, met every Sunday in a large commercial town. They have prayers, and then a member of the society gives a discourse. They afterwards dine, and a collection for the poor is made after dinner. Each presides in turn, and it is the duty of the president to offer the prayer and give the sermon. Here are one of the prayers and one of the sermons.
If the seed of these words fall on good soil, it will assuredly bear fruit.
PRAYER
God of all the globes and stars, the one prayer that it is meet to offer to you is submission. How can we ask anything of him who arranged and enchained all things from the beginning? Yet if it is permitted to expose our needs to a father, preserve in our hearts this feeling of submission and a pure religion. Keep from us all superstition. Since there are those who insult you with unworthy sacrifices, abolish those infamous mysteries. Since there are those who dishonour the divinity with absurd fables, may those fables perish for ever. If the days of the prince and the magistrate were not numbered from all eternity, give them length of days. Preserve the purity of our ways, the friendship of our brethren for each other, their goodwill towards all men, their obedience to the laws, and their wisdom in private life. Let them live and die in the worship of one God, the rewarder of good, the punisher of evil; a God that could not be born or die, nor have associates, but who has too many rebellious children in this world.
SERMON
My brethren, religion is the secret voice of God speaking to men. It ought to unite men, not divide them; hence every religion that belongs to one people only is false. Ours is, in principle, that of the whole universe; for we worship a supreme being as all nations do, we practise the justice which all nations teach, and we reject all the untruths with which the nations reproach each other. At one with them in the principle which unites them, we differ from them in the things about which they are in conflict.
The point on which all men of all times agree must be the centre of truth, and the points on which they all differ must be standards of falsehood. Religion must conform to morality, and, like it, be universal; hence every religion whose dogmas offend against morality is certainly false. It is under this twofold aspect of perversity and falseness that we will, in this discourse, examine the books of the Hebrews and of those who have succeeded them. Let us first see if these books conform to morality; we shall then see if they have any shade of probability. The first two points will deal with the Old Testament; the third will discuss the New.
_First Point_
You know, my brethren, what horror fell on us when we read together the writings of the Hebrews, confining our attention to those features which offend against purity, charity, good faith, justice, and reason--features which one not only finds in every chapter, but, unhappily, one finds consecrated in them.
First, to say nothing of the extravagant injustice which they venture to ascribe to the supreme being, in endowing a serpent with speech in order to seduce a woman and her innocent posterity, let us run over in succession all the historical horrors which outrage nature and good sense. One of the patriarchs, Lot, the nephew of Abraham, receives in his house two angels disguised as pilgrims; the inhabitants of Sodom entertain impure desires of these angels; Lot, who had two daughters promised in marriage, offers to abandon them to the people instead of the two strangers. These young women must have been strangely familiar with evil ways, since the first thing they do after the destruction of their town by a rain of fire, and after their mother has been changed into a pillar of salt, is to intoxicate their father on two consecutive nights, in order to sleep with him in succession. It is an imitation of the ancient Arabic legend of Cyniras and Myrrha. But in this more decent legend Myrrha is punished for her crime, while the daughters of Lot are rewarded with what is, in Jewish eyes, the greatest and dearest blessing: they become the mothers of a numerous posterity.
We will not insist on the falsehood of Isaac, the father of the just, who says that his wife is his sister; whether he was merely repeating the falsehood of Abraham, or Abraham was really guilty of taking his sister to wife. But let us dwell for a moment on the patriarch Jacob, who is offered to us as a model man. He compels his brother, who is dying of hunger, to give up his birthright for a dish of lentils. He afterwards deceives his aged father on his death-bed. After deceiving his father, he deceives and robs his father-in-law Laban. Not content with wedding two sisters, he lies with all his servants; and God blesses this licentiousness and trickery. Who are the children of such a father? His daughter Dinah pleases a prince of Sichem, and it is probable that she loves the prince, since she lies with him. The prince asks her in marriage, and she is promised on condition that he and all his people are circumcised. The prince accepts the condition; but as soon as he and his people undergo this painful operation--which, nevertheless, leaves them strong enough to defend themselves--Jacob’s family murder all the men of Sichem and enslave their women and children.
We have in our infancy heard the story of Pelopæus. This incestuous abomination is repeated in Judah, the patriarch and father of the first tribe. He lies with his daughter-in-law, and then wishes to have her killed. The book declares that then Joseph, a child of this vagabond family, is sold into Egypt, and that, foreigner as he is, he is made first minister as a reward for explaining a dream. What a first minister he was, compelling a whole nation to enslave itself, during a time of famine, to obtain food! What magistrate among us would, in time of famine, dare to propose so abominable a bargain, and what nation would accept it? Let us not stay to examine how seventy members of the family of Joseph, who settled in Egypt, could in two hundred and fifteen years increase to six hundred thousand fighting men, without counting the women, old men, and children, which would make a total of more than two millions. Let us not discuss how it is that the text has four hundred and thirty years, when the same text has given two hundred and fifteen. The infinite number of contradictions, which are the seal of imposture, is not the point which we are considering. Let us likewise pass over the ridiculous prodigies of Moses and of Pharaoh’s magicians, and all the miracles wrought to give the Jewish people a wretched bit of poor country, which they afterwards purchase by blood and crime, instead of giving them the fertile soil of Egypt, where they were. Let us confine ourselves to the frightful iniquity of their ways.
Their God had made a thief of Jacob, and he now makes thieves of the entire people. He orders his people to steal and take away with them all the gold and silver vessels and utensils of the Egyptians. Behold these wretches, to the number of six hundred thousand fighting men, instead of taking up arms like men of spirit, flying like brigands led by their God. If their God had wished to give them a good country, he might have given them Egypt. He does not, however; he leads them into a desert. They might have fled by the shortest route, yet they go far out of their way to cross the Red Sea dry-foot. After this fine miracle Moses’ own brother makes them another god, and this god is a calf. To punish his brother Moses commands certain priests to kill their sons, brothers, and fathers; and they kill twenty-three thousand Jews, who let themselves be slain like cattle.
After this butchery it is not surprising to hear that this abominable people sacrifices human victims to its god, whom it calls Adonai, borrowing the name of Adonis from the Phœnicians. The twenty-ninth verse of chapter xxvii. of _Leviticus_ expressly forbids the redemption of those who are destined for sacrifice, and it is in virtue of this cannibalistic law that Jephthah, some time afterwards, offers up his own daughter.
It was not enough to slay twenty-three thousand men for a calf; we have again twenty-four thousand sacrificed for having intercourse with idolatrous women. It is, my brethren, a worthy prelude and example of persecution on the ground of religion.
This people advances in the deserts and rocks of Palestine. Here is your splendid country, God says to them. Slay all the inhabitants, kill all the male infants, make an end of their married women, keep the young girls for yourselves. All this is carried out to the letter, according to the Hebrew books; and we should shudder at the account, if the text did not add that the Jews found in the camp of the Midianites 675,000 sheep, 62,000 cattle, 61,000 asses, and 32,000 girls. Happily, the absurdity undoes the barbarism. Once more, however, I am not concerned here with what is ridiculous and impossible; I select only what is execrable. Having passed the Jordan dry-shod, as they crossed the sea, we find our people in the promised land.
The first person to let in this holy people, by an act of treachery, is Rahab, a strange character for God to associate with himself. He levels the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpet; the holy people enters the town--to which it had no right, on its own confession--and slays the men, women, and children. Let us pass over the other carnages, the crucifixion of kings, the supposed wars against the giants of Gaza and Ascalon, and the murder of those who could not pronounce the word “Shibboleth.”
Listen to this fine story.
A Levite, with his wife, arrives on his ass at Gibeah, in the tribe of Benjamin. Some of the Benjamites, who are bent on committing the sin of sodomy with the Levite, turn their brutality upon the woman, who dies of the violence. Were the culprits punished? Not at all. The eleven tribes slaughtered the whole tribe of Benjamin; only six hundred men escaped. But the eleven tribes are afterwards sorry to see a tribe perish, and, to restore it, they exterminate the inhabitants of one of their own towns in order to take from it six hundred girls, whom they give to the six hundred Benjamites who survive to perpetuate this splendid race.
How many crimes committed in the name of the Lord! We will give only that of the man of God (Ehud). The Jews, having come so far to conquer, are subject to the Philistines. In spite of the Lord, they have sworn obedience to King Eglon. A holy Jew, named Ehud, asks permission to speak in private with the king on the part of God. The king does not fail to grant the audience. Ehud assassinates him, and his example has been used many times by Christians to betray, destroy, or massacre so many sovereigns.