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Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries
hence--stuffed and in a museum. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of
Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth
was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced
against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been
opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic
culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion
was born.
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 AI image created by Barbara Schmidt |
| One of the most astonishing things that
have yet fallen under our observation is the exceedingly small portion of
the earth from which sprang the now flourishing plant of Christianity. The
longest journey our Saviour ever performed was from here to Jerusalem -
about one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles. The next longest was
from here to Sidon - say about sixty or seventy miles. Instead of being
wide apart - as American appreciation of distances would naturally suggest
- the places made most particularly celebrated by the presence of Christ
are nearly all right here in full view, and within cannon-shot of Capernaum.
Leaving out two or three three short journeys of the Saviour, he spent his
life, preached his gospel, and performed his miracles within a compass no
larger than an ordinary county in the United States. It is as much as I
can do to comprehend this stupefying fact. - The Innocents Abroad |
 AI image created by Barbara Schmidt |
| For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian &
German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep
it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ
comes again--which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before. - Letter to William D. Howells, 25 January 1900 I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled,
besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria,
South Africa, and the Philipines, with her soul full of meanness, her
pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her
soap and towel, but hide the looking glass. Patriotism is a high and holy thing. It will remain a high and holy thing,
and jointly admirable and praiseworthy, Christianity will never change
it. Its noble doctrine of universal brotherhood is for the angels, if
for anybody -- it is not possible for men. Christianity cannot teach a
fish to fly nor aliens to love each other. We can not even imagine a heaven
where there are no frontiers -- where all foreigners -- including Satan's
people -- are brothers, and Patriotism is a vice unknown. ... By the law
of his religion a Christian must labor for the breaking down of all walls
that interrupt the fusion of the race into a common brotherhood, and one
of the most formidable of these is Patriotism; it marches with every frontier
in the world. There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him--early. |
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