5
THE TORCH OF REASON, SILVERTON, OREGON, JUNE 1, IS99.
'd take that position unless he nothing at rest, nothing stationary.
w sincere. Nobody deliberately To affrm, therefore, that govern-
. - i ds to be bad. But the idea mental institutions require no re-
*f his being president of the bu- j formation, that social systems need
, n,. society is simply prepos- no alteration, is just as absurd as
to say that the man shall wear the
terous.
i j».
j I
With his idea about the whip- swaddling clothes which befitted
j - post he might join a society of his infancy, and be pleased in
hyenas for the cultivation of feroc maturity with the rattle which
ity, for certainly nothing short of charmed his childhood.—[Occas
that would do justice to his bill. I ional Thoughts.
have too much confidence in the
Superstition.
legislature of the state —and maybe
ruv confidence rests in the fact that ;
I do not know them—to think the
Whatever weakens or disorders
pipage of such a bill possible. If the internal frame, promotes the
it were'passed, I think I would be interests ot superstitiou; and
iu-tified in using the language of nothing is more destructive to
¡he old Marylander, who said: “I them than a manly, steady virtue,
have lived in Maryland fifty years, which either preserves us from dis-
but I have never counted them, astrous, melancholy accidents, or
and my hope is that God won’t.”— teaches us to bear them. During
[Robert G. Ingersoll, in New York such calm sunshine of the mind
j ournal.
"
these spectres of false divinity ¿Ito
never make their appearance. On
the other hand, while we abandon
Society.
ourselves to the natural undisci-
Were man a stationary being, plined suggestions of our timid and ...
like the beasts and birds by which anxious heart, every kind of bar-
he is surrounded—had he a fixed barity is ascribed to the Supreme k'Aj
and unchangeable instinct, instead Being, from the terrors with which
of a progressive and improvable we are agitated, and every kind of
reason—any change in his social caprice, from the methods which
institutions would be unnecessary, we embrace in order to appease
Society would have been the same him.
at the beginning as it is at present,
Barbarity, caprice, these quali-
and it would continue one uniform ties, however nominally disguised,
state as long as man should exist, we may universally perceive, form
Bat man is not thus stationary; he the ruling character of the Deity in
is a reasoning, and therefore a pro- popular religions. Even puests,
gressive, being. The knowledge instead of correcting those de-
and experience of one generation praved ideas of mankind, have
can he transmitted to the next; often been found ready to foster - a »
°nd as man at forty years of age and encourage them. The more
iust possess more knowledge than tremendous the Deity is represent-
e did at twenty, so also must the ed, the more tame and submissive
vorld at large possess a greater ac do men become to his ministers,
umulation of knowledge, at the and the more unaccountable the
nd of four thousand years from measures of acceptance required by
he creation of man, than was pos- him, the more necessary does it
essed at the end of four hundred., become to abandon our natural
knowledge is simply an accumula- reason and yield to their ghostly
ion of facts, and wisdom is the art guidance ar.d direction.—[Hume.
•f applying such knowledge to i
t
s
-----------------
rue purpose—the promotion of
Shakespeare’s Irreligion.
niinan happiness. Although men
nay have much knowledge and no
It is hard, indeed, to say whether
visdom, there can only be little he had any religious belief or no.
visdom where there is but little The religious phrases which are
¡nowledge. The ¡»resent genera- thinly scattered over his works are
ion have the accumulated knowl- little more than expressions of a
<lge and experience of four thous- distant and imaginative reverence,
md years to work upon, and there- Rut on the deeper grounds of re-
ore they have it in their power to ligious faith his silence is signifi-
ict wiser in respect to the estab- cant. He is silent, and the doubt
ishment of social and political in- of Hamlet deepens his silence
titutions than any generation that about the after-world. ‘‘To die,” it
las preceded them.
may be, was to him as it was to
Such being the nature of man Claudio—“to go we know not
id such his powers, the considers- whither.” Often as his question
'»n of a social change need excile ings turn to the riddle of life and
i more surprise or apprehension death, he leaves it a riddle to the
>an a simple political movement last without heeding the common
a social change be a gigantic theological solutions around him.
ie, so, likewise, are the evils [J. R. Green,
ighty which require to be rc-
oved. Throughout the whole
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