Retrospection political and personal Author:Hubert Howe Bancroft Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II UTOPIAN DREAMS IT was an age of altruistic ideals, though it had not yet occurred to the apostles for the betterment of the race the impossible ... more »in relation to disinterested benevolence. The disciples of John Knox and Jonathan Edwards were taught to draw satisfaction from the doctrine of election, provided they were of the elect. It was bliss for the believer, the thought of sitting in heaven and complacently regarding the agonies of the doomed below, and so long as her own little ones were safe the New England housewife still might blithely sing as she went about her work, though assured by her spiritual teacher that millions of innocents, born of other mothers, must suffer forever. Here as elsewhere in those days, in its many diverse and oppugnant forms, there was an all-pervading spirit of proselyting throughout Christendom, which broke out occasionally into fierce spasms of regeneration. The ethics of Jesus come to us in words, with a subconscious influence to the refining of the race; all the same the attendant deeds are diabolical. Some centuries ago had been promulgated the order to go forth into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Obedience to which mandate led the sanctified into strange ways. Saint Peter went forth to preach, and detecting Ananias in a very little lie he straightway slew him, and poor Sapphira also, forgetting the great falsehood he himself had so lately perpetrated, receiving therefor no punishment whatever. Pagan Rome preached the Christians into the catacombs; the Christians in their turn preached the pagan world into dungeons and torture-chambers. Persecution was quick to become an aid to proselyting; so that when the tidings of peace on earth good will to men reached the New World, the natives found the wo...« less