Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

scattered laths, and to put them in the form of a cross, under her body; two blocks of wood are pnt under her feet; then she orders to fetch nails, and as they are brought she bids them to drive the nails to her hands, elbows, breast and feet. They do so. As she was fastened, thus, to the cross, she bade Ursula Kundig to dispatch her wholly. Her brother had to help her. While both knocked in the skull of the Saint, she cried: "Rejoice with me, God also rejoices in Heaven with you; it is necessary that the souls be saved which long enough have been in the thraldom of Satan." She had, under the strokes, expired in a few moments. This horror happened in the night of the 15th of March, in 1823.

As the Saint and her sister did not rise on the third day, her father went to the parsonage, and reported the news of their death. Eleven of the culprits were sentenced to the penitentiary. It was easy work for the State Attorney to convince the Court that all had suffered from disorder of mind. The house of Peter was demolished, and forbidden to erect another building on its place. The corpses were buried in Zurich.

But the true sinner, who had made all these people insane, freely evaded; it was a Mr. Ganz who had first studied theology, than joined a sect, and met Barbara on by-ways. At the time of the crucifixion of the sisters he stopped in Basel.

OLD AND NEW FAITH.

A PERSONAL GOD.

According to the old Faith, God is a personal being; he acts like any man, an oriental monarch. He looks for Adam, and calls him; he does not know, where he stays; he kneads the first man from clay; he walks, in

the evening, in the cool garden, converses with Adam This notion of God They enlarged it;

and Eve, makes them coats etc. was prevalent among the Jews, they attributed to their Jehovah jaw-bones and powerful teeth, with which he crushes his adversaries, and let him move along, in the tempest, upon the wings of the Cherubim. The Christians split his substance in three parts which they called father, son and holy ghost, but imagined that these parts form one totality. They belived and still believe that a son to the father was born, whom not himself, but the holy ghost had generated, that the mother of his son, after the conception, continued to be a virgin; that the God-son was crucified and killed, yet after three days revived, and ascended to Heaven.

Modern thinkers assert that man cannot form an idea of the lat cause of the existing things, because, otherwise, he himself must be God. They teach: All human knowledge is derived from experience and Nature, but eternal, unalterable laws govern Nature upon which all phenomena depend. The universe is eternal and infinite; its matter and forces can only develop and change, but not perish. How it exists is a mystery which the human mind never will find out.

ORIGIN OF THE WORLD.

Concerning the origin of the world, the ancient opin ion was that God created all things in six days. Geology (a modern science) teaches that earth by degrees developed, that millions of years may have passed away till she arrived at her present state; that animals and plants were not created, but unfolded from cells; that first, animals originated which live in water; later, plant-eaters made their appearance; that whenever the surface of the earth experienced a new, general change,

most of the existing organisms perished, and more perfect ones took their place.

AGE OF MANKIND AND OF THE UNIVERSE.

Geology teaches also that mankind is much older than the followers of the old faith believe, that what the monuments of architecture, sculpture, painting and the hieroglyphs prove which were found in Egypt, Babylon and India, and since more than five thousand years are extant. And in regard to the age of the universe generally, it is asserted that it never was created, but exists from eternity, which opinion also Greek and Roman philosophers confessed.

DIVINE PROVIDENCE.

With regard to the conservation and government of the universe, the views of ancient and modern times also differ much. According to the former, God conserves and governs all things, and his Providence especially takes care of his believers; and Jesus Christ taught his followers: "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or drink; nor get for your body, what ye shall put on. Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your Heavenly father feedeth them."-Matthew vi, 25-26. But modern view is different; it does not believe in wouders, but in unvariable laws of Nature which permit no exceptions, but work as thousands of years before, always in the same way. It does not believe that God, for the sake of his darlings, annuls some of those laws, it teaches that man must make use of the faculties which Nature granted to him in order to conserve himself. "Help yourself, and God will help you," says the American proverb. It asserts that prayers for

lengthening life, for health, riches, a good harvest, victories, and other blessings are useless and foolish.

THE BIBLE.

One time the Bible was considered to be the revelation of God, nay some Christians went so far as to believe that every word, every letter of this book was dictated to its authors, by the holy ghost. This opinion prevailed till to the epoch of Reformation, and as the Reformers contested the authority of the popes and Councils, they took hold so much closer of the faith in the Bible, for this book was, since, the only fountain of their faith. By and by the natural sciences awoke from their deep sleep; men of learning commenced to study botany, zoology, geology, chemistry, astronomy and the oriental languages; the Protestants investigated assiduously the Bible, because they were directed to it alone, discovered contradictions, in it, against the natural sciences, and began to doubt its divine origin. Already towards the end of the last century, the miracles of the old and new Testament, especially, puzzled them. First they tried to reconcile the contradictions between them and the sciences which they met with. The theologians who tried this method, and their followers were called Rationalists. But not satisfied with this compromise, the opponents of the Biblical wonders grew bolder, till Dr. David Strauss (about 1830) proved that their tales are nothing than pious myths which deserve no more credit than those of the Greek and Reman religion. The result of all these efforts was the new view that the Bible, like other books, must submit to be examined and criticised according to the rules of historic criticism, and even run the risk that, by such a proceeding, some weak sides and errors against the doctrine of the empirical sciences should be

discovered in it. Thereby the prestige of its divine origin was undone.

MAN.

The origin of man is, in the Bible, related in this way: God took a piece of clay, formed a human body of it, and blew his breath into it. So the first man was created. The origin of the first woman, Eve, occurred otherwise. Jehovah let Adam fall asleep, took a rib, during his sleep, from his body, filled up the empty place with flesh, and molded the woman out of the rib. This silly story was repudiated by science, long ago, and the greatest naturalists of our age incline toward the opinion that man must have originated in a similar way as other animals, and very likely, descends from a class of animals which, in perfection, was next to him, but became extinct long ago.

HUMAN MIND.

That breath which God blew into the first man, was, once, called soul. Namely, people believed that man consists of two parts, one, the material, which is called the body, and an immaterial, the soul. Death separates this from that one, and the soul is either taken to Heaven and eternal bliss, or to hell and everlasting torment. In conformity with modern doctrine, the sensual organs and the brain are the notions, feelings and actions of man. pecially, the abode of human mind. human body is imperishable like the material of the universe; not the smallest particle of the body perishes; so far man is immortal. But is the human mind also immortal? This question is, since the middle of our century, decidedly denied by many prominent philosophers; others think that there cannot any decisive ar

medums of all The brain is, esThe matter of the

« AnteriorContinuar »