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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 1

3. I Impeach Christianity in the Name of the Human Heart—

3. I Impeach Christianity in the Name of the Human Heart

Because it recognizes no sanctity in natural human affections, but requires that all these shall be subordinated to an unnatural love of Christ as the Savior of souls. "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." "If any man hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

Because it extends over myriads of sensitive minds the blackness and gloom of a horrible theology, tortures them with a morbid self-reproach for unreal transgressions, and fills them with excruciating doubts of their final escape from hell,—thus destroying their happiness, and robbing their life of its natural beauty and charm.

Because it commands supreme love to a God whose character is utterly unlovely—a God whose wrath against his own children is a "consuming fire," and who plunges the vast majority of them into eternal agony. It thus degrades the very idea of fatherhood, by teaching the "Fatherhood" of a God whose character and acts are as unfatherly as they are incredible.

Because it proclaims a "Brotherhood of Man" which denies the natural equality essential to all genuine brotherhood—which perverts the natural sentiment of good-will towards all men into an artificial and exclusive bond among Christians themselves, and into a thoroughly unnatural condescension or pity towards all others—which is in fact consistent page 5 with the harshest injustice and the most frightful cruelty towards those who reject the Christian creed. It thus degrades and lowers the very idea of brotherhood, by calling that the "Brotherhood of Man" which is simply a fellowship of Christian believers, and which has been too often in history a fellowship of thieves and murderers.