In this liberation I am
aware of no sudden break in my belief from its crude acceptance of
miraculous conversion and eternal damnation for the unconverted, but a
slow opening of my eyes to larger truths. If any individual influence
other than those I have named came in, it would have been the reading
of Swedenborg, which gave me a comprehension of what spiritual life
was and must be; but Swedenborg himself had never been emancipated
from the anthropomorphic conception of Deity. He was a seer, not a
philosopher. Emancipation from ignorance will never be complete, and
ignorance and even superstition have their divine uses as infancy has.
Once the idea of evolution as the law of life is accepted, the logical
conclusion is the reign of law and the rejection of all miraculous
interposition, and the perception of this fact by the clever schemers
at the Vatican underlies the implacable hostility they show to science
and evolution. If they could, they would have burned Darwin as they
burned Giordano Bruno. They are, and they must ever be, as the
condition of keeping up the existence and power of the Vatican and its
peculiar institutions, the enemies of mental emancipation. It is not
ignorance which is the enemy of wisdom, but the passion of domination.
The Roman Catholic Church with its hypothetical succession of Peter
will exist forever, because the necessity of seeing through forms and
of obedience to authority will endure as long as humanity endures, for
certain orders of mind and certain temperaments; but the political
problem of the existence of the Vatican in a free and united Italy,
progressive and maintaining her place amongst the European powers,
is one the solution of which I shall await with great interest, not
regarding the triumph of the Vatican as possible according to its
hopes, but not sure that the internecine struggle may not end in the
ruin of both contestants, since the Italians have not the courage or
the patriotism to accept the only safe measure, formal and complete
suppression of all civic privileges for the Pope and his bishops--the
relegation of religion to a place outside the organization of
government.
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