Syracuse University Library
Special Collections Research Center
Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection

Gerrit Smith to William Lloyd Garrison.

Smith, Gerrit, 1797-1874.

Digital Edition.

This digitization project was supported by Regional Bibliographic Databases and Interlibrary Resources Sharing Program funds, awarded by the New York State Library.

Call number: Smith 530

GERRIT SMITH TO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.

THE THEOLOGIES THE GREAT ENEMIES OF RELIGION.
THE THEOLOGIES THE GREAT HINDERANCES TO JUSTICE AND REFORM.
THE THEOLOGIES THE GREAT CURSE OF MANKIND.

PETERBORO February 22d 1865.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, Boston,

MY DEAR FRIEND,

I see in the Newspapers a Bill of Sale of "two negro slaves, which slaves were lately the proper goods of the said Jonathan Edwards deceased." It is subscribed by Timothy Dwight Jr. and Timothy Edwards, the Executors. This Jonathan Edwards was the celebrated elder President Edwards, and this Timothy Edwards was his son.

Of the President's purchase and treatment of the black boy Titus you have doubtless often heard. Mrs. Mason Whiting of Binghamton, daughter of the aforesaid Timothy, has twice told the particulars. The last time, only sixteen months ago, I wrote them as they came front her lips. This excellent lady, although 85 years old, is still blest with a healthy body and a healthy brain.

Titus was eight years old when the President bought him, and fifteen when the President died and left him still in slavery. The President allowed him no education. Mrs. Whiting's father, who inherited him, allowed him none. Although he lived to old age, poor Titus could never read. He was however remarkable for his good sense and integrity.

Now, how can it be explained that President Edwards was a slaveholder? - was this unqualified, unmitigated, unrelenting slaveholder ?

1st. It was not because he was a man of weak intellect. A stronger one there was not perhaps in all America.

2d. It was not because he was an ignorant man - for he abounded in learning.

3d. It was not because his conscience was dull. No man had a more wakeful or tender one.

4th. It was not because he had a shallow sense of justice. Who had a deeper ?

For none of these reasons was it that he stood in this guilty relation. He stood in it solely because his theology called for or permitted the relation, and because with him the claims of theology were paramount to all other claims. Had his theology forbidden slavery, he would have been an intensely earnest abolitionist. I, of course, speak of his theology as he, and not as others, viewed its teachings at this point. His son, the younger President Edwards, was such an abolitionist. But he would have been as pro-slavery as was his father had he interpreted his theology to be pro-slavery. For the son, like the father, set theological above natural obligations, and was devoted to theological rather than to natural justice. Both of them, like the great mass of religionists, confounding theology with religion, made it the supreme work of life to wrest nature into conformity with religion instead of letting religion grow into conformity with nature. Or rather, I might say, instead of being intent on that true religion which is obedience to nature, they were intent on one, which, like every other false religion, is antagonistic to her.

Edwards' theology was his justification for being a slaveholder. The curse upon Canaan, or the permission to buy bondmen and bondmaids, or something else in his theology he construed into such justification. Calvin's theology was his justification for consenting to the burning of Servetus. Her theology made it the duty of the Church to condemn Galileo. It was their theology that prompted the managers of the Inquisition to kill scores of thousands and torture hundreds of thousands. Earnest and conscientious and sublime souls were Edwards and Calvin and also many of these managers. I cannot join with those, who pass upon them an unqualified and sweeping condemnation. Their errors, although so horrible, were nevertheless far more of the head than of the heart. They were educated to set theology above nature, and to enforce theological justice at whatever expense to natural justice; and, alas! they were but too faithful to their education. Thus kindly too would I judge my neighbors, my countrymen, and, in short, the people of both christendom and heathendom for the vast majorities of them have been taught the supreme obligation of their theologies. Their belief in miracles shows that they set their theologies above nature - for miracles are the greatest possible outrage upon nature. Drownings in the Ganges and crushings under the wheels of Juggernaut come of theologies, which war upon nature. So too do the denying of equal rights to woman, and the allowing of polygamy and slavery. And emphatically unnatural is the doctrine that another can relieve us of the penalty of our own transgressions; - tho obvious doctrine of nature at this point being: "The soul that sinneth it shall die." Others may suffer for the sinner: but he too must suffer.

Within the last few weeks there have been in the adjoining County of Oneida a couple of very lamentable instances of the subordination, or rather sacrifice, of nature to theology, of natural right to conventional right. A State Temperance Meeting was asked to set its face against all use of alcoholic liquor as a drink, such use doing more than every thing else to drench all christendom in tears, if not indeed in blood also. But it failed to do so. Theology plead for its continued use at the Lord's Supper - for its continued use there, where the sacredness of the occasion makes the practice of the occasion a sacred and powerful example. Theology plead success fully, however silently. In a word, theology triumphed; and nature and temperance and truth went to the wall. The other instance to which I refer is connected with a libel suit. Avery poor man in that County has for many years employed himself in writing books, hoping that he might in this wise, both serve the cause of truth and add to his scanty means for supporting his very large and helpless family. Although all his books are on religion, and although he is not only a very learned but a very pure and pious man, an influential sectarian newspaper of the City of New York held up one of them, and in that one virtually all of them, as "composed entirely of balderdash and twaddle," and its author as "a renegade infidel." The reckless and atrocious libeller was prosecuted. But inasmuch as it was proved on the trial that the book, though written in the kind, candid, truthloving, christian spirit of the author, is nevertheless at disagreement with some of the dogmas of the current theology, it was held that he was not entitled to a verdict. The law of natural justice, which the libelled dad not at all, and which the libeller had grossly, violated, called for a very heavy verdict. But, as the law of theological and artificial justice was paramount with the jury, so the author, having studied to conform

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his books to the claims of natural and real justice, was left to pay the costs of the suit. The doctrine prevailed that a man, in expressing his doubts of any of the dogmas in question, does thereby make himself an outlaw. You may, with entire impunity, vilify and belie, to whatever extent you please, the books in which he expresses such doubts. You may, as did the libeller in this case, hold up the books as marked with lunacy, and you may, as did his eminent counsel help along the libel at this point by putting in open Court the cruelly offensive question to the libelled whether he did not think himself to be a lunatic. Nay, you may blacken the libelled with the worst epithets you can find in the dictionary. The shield of law is no longer over his head - but the condemnation of atheology. The trial in this case was nominally the trial of the libeller by the laws of the land, which are the laws of natural justice; but really it was the trial of the libelled by the laws of theology - laws which not only do not harmonize with, but are at utter war with, the laws of natural justice.

Oh, ye well-meaning but misled jurors, what a pity it is that when it was argued before you that it is no more than established usage to call the doubters of these dogmas "infidels" and "renegades", and no more than recognized liberty to call their writings "balderdash and twaddle" - what a pity it is that you had not been manly enough to resolve that you would do what you could by your verdict to put an end to such an absurd usage and to such a wicked liberty! Alas, that you too should, however undesignedly, have helped to dishearten this poor, toil-wore, good and noble man, and to encourage this unjust and cruel man who was crushing him!

By the way, has it never occurred to you that the theologies are largely responsible for the currency and success which attend tale-bearing, slanders, libels and lies ? Receiving a theology without proof (,and all the popular theologies are destitute of proof,) prepares the way for receiving other things without proof. If, in the important matter of embracing a theology, we can ignore the laws of evidence, how natural that we should make but too little account of them in interior matters! Why should I wonder, when I hear that people believe I have been guilty of oppression here, and fraud there, and falsehood elsewhere? For that I have been guilty of all this, or that you have been guilty of the thousand things said against yourself, is not a millionth part as improbable as the fish story and some other theological stories, which people believe. As long as the theologies obtain, you and I must not wonder at the popular credulity in regard to any stories about ourselves or others, be they how ever big or however false. What the people of every land need is to be lifted up out of their superstitious credulity into a healthy skepticism - out of the habit of believing without adequate evidence into the habit of exacting such evidence. This better habit created, and they would laugh at the baseless theologies, and be as slow as they are now quick to open their ears to scandal.

I may be thought unfair for having spoken in the same connexion of the wrongs to which theology prompts in our day, and of those far greater ones of which Calvin and others were guilty in former days. But why is it that the theological wrongs of our day are less heinous ? It is mainly because of that outside pressure and restraint upon the Church which has come of a more general enlightenment and of a higher civilization. Is it said that the Church has reformed herself ? I answer that no moral reforms are to be looked for at the hands of the Church until she is rid of the incubus of the theologies. The theologies being the work of the past, necessarily keep the face of the Church toward the past. Her very life being in the past and in the preservation of the past, she is intensely conservative. Change is the dread of Protestantism as well as Catholicism; and will be the death of both.

The Church, in her branches which retain their theological stiffness, is as intolerant to-day as she ever was toward departures from her theology; and holds to as severe a punishment for them as she ever did. For instance, she still holds that doubts of the popular view of the Atonement or of the Divinity of Christ deserve a never-ending damnation. Formerly, when she had earthly sway, her own bloody hands would add to the punishment; would add punishment in this life to that in the life to come; would add a temporal hell to the eternal hell. I am willing to admit that now, when she has for so long a time lost the power to make this addition, she has quite naturally lost much of her disposition to make it. But the Pope's late Encyclical is only one of in numerable evidences that the disposition would revive with the power. The Pope, by the way, is the mouth piece as well of Protestantism as of Catholicism. Both, it is true, are anxious to draw a line of separation between themselves. Nevertheless they are essentially one, and must continue to be, so long as they continue to be ruled by theologies which are essentially one.

What can prevent the recurrence of these theological wrongs ? Nothing but the throwing away of the theologies. These wrongs, now greater, now less, restrained in one age and breaking through all restraints in another, are the necessary fruit of the theologies. Safe from these wrongs none will be, so long as men are held amenable to theologies. Safe, indeed, from no wrongs will men be, so long as they shall be judged by any other standard than reason and nature. The libelled man, in the case I have referred to, was judged by the theological standard; and was therefore sent forth to get along as well as a heretic without property and with a libel blasted reputation can get along in a theology-bound world. The Temperance Reformation too must do the best it can under the calamity of having theology stop the wheels of that beneficent and blessed Reformation at the very point where they should turn the swiftest. So also astronomers and geologists must lay their account with the disadvantage of having their discoveries come into collision with an infallible and inexorable theology.

But it will be asked - "What shall we do for religion if we throw away the theologies ?" I answer that they never were religion, nor any part of it; and that they never stood in any other relation to it than that of its greatest hinderance and mightiest enemy. Were the theologies of the whole world cast aside, the religion of reason and nature would quickly bless the whole world. Were the historical and traditional religion cast aside, and were there in its place the religion of a present consciousness-the religion of the present voice of God to the soul and of the present voice of the soul to itself - men would not need to go from earth to find heaven.

I have often thought of your great change in these things. You were brought up in a strict Calvinistic theology. You have lost your theology, but your religion remains. God and His Spirit and Jesus and prayer and the bible and the law of goodness and the hope of immortality are certainly no less dear to you than they were when you dwelt in your theological prison, and assumed that you must dwell in it all your days. But, though you have not lost your religion, there is, judging from my own experience, one thing you have lost. This one thing is the certainty of the objects of your faith. Once we could say with the orthodox: "I know whom I have believed," &c.; "By two immutable things," &c. "We have also a more sure word of prophecy," &c. But now we find ourselves remitted to all the conscious uncertainty of human reasonings. Nevertheless we would not, if we could, buy back this lost certainty. The price would be too great. It would be no less than ignoring the revelations of science and the laws of evidence, and turning our backs upon reason and nature, and again picking up and prizing the bundle of fictions and fancies and follies, which our convictions had compelled us to throw away.

For one, however great the comfort which may proceed from this certainty, I deny the right of any man to the comfort, because I deny the right of any man to the certainty. Such certainty is begotten of ignorance and superstition; and only the ignorant and superstitious have it. God does not give it to men. But He gives them powers in the constant exercise of which they may be constantly travelling toward such certainty. Instead of telling men what is truth, he leaves them to learn for themselves what is truth. Instead of treating them as

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machines he treats them as free agents. The machine runs its round of necessity. The beaver and the bee do their work unerringly because instinctively and from the necessity of their nature. But man is left to choose his course and to reason out his duty and his destiny: and this implies the grandeur and responsibility of his nature, and his infinite superiority to the other orders of earthly creation.

That God makes these direct revelations, which theology claims He does, is contrary to all analogy. In order to know and supply the wants of the body and the brain we must be ever studying and toiling and so must we to know and supply the wants of the soul.

Alas, that men should so generally cling to this cheap way of getting religious knowledge and advancing in the religious life! Alas that they should so generally believe that God has prepared to their hands what He has but given them hands to prepare for themselves!

These preachers of the assumed certainties of a religion of miracles and magic remind one of the quack doctors, who with their specifies and panaceas promise to cure the patient by a single dose. Empiricism is as much out of place in religious as in medical science.

I spoke of the loss of our certainty in regard to the objects of religious faith. And yet I am slow to believe that this entire certainty, which there are no reasons to justify, can afford as much comfort to its possessor as the measure of certainty which is built up on reasons. Moreover, might we not rightly expect that, if men would throw away the things, which have come down from the superstition of the ages to their own superstition - such as the remarkably accommodating disposition of the Sun and Moon toward a band of slaughterers, the transmutation of Mrs. Lot into a pillar of salt, and God's hating an unborn child - and would set themselves, in the exercise of their reason, to learn more and more of Him and of their relations to time and eternity - I say, might we not then rightly expect that they would thereby rapidly accumulate a fund of knowledge, which would fall but little, if any, short of absolute certainty ? And, for our encouragement in this connection, we must remember that his dear Spirit that never works with superstition, does ever work with reason.

With great regard,

your friend,

GERRIT SMITH.