Dying Like A Christian by Chapman Cohen (February 1927) Reprinted from +quot;Essays on Fre

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                  Dying Like A Christian

                     by Chapman Cohen

                      (February 1927)
 
 
Reprinted from "Essays on Freethinking," Vol. 1, published 
by American Atheist Press, Austin, Texas. 
 
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     Chapman Cohen (1868-1954) was the third president of 
the National Secular Society, Britain's largest Atheist 
organization. He was a noted orator and writer on behalf 
of the Atheist cause. 
 
                          * * * * * 




     There was published in the newspapers the other day, a
story by Bishop Welldon, which most Christian readers will
take as renewed evidence of the excellence of Christianity.
A man was lying in Durham gaol condemned to death. One day,
Bishop Welldon received a note from the governor of the
prison, saying that there was a man there who wished to be
confirmed before his death. Naturally, the Bishop went. The
man, he says,


      "spoke as a Christian man should speak on the
     threshold of death. He knew he was guilty. He did not
     asked to be spared; but said that he felt happy after
     being confirmed. We had a little talk together, and
     then he put his face to mine. I kissed him. I believe
     he turned, as the dying thief turned, to his saviour;
     and I hope I shall meet him in heaven."


     Judging from the published accounts of such deaths, we
should say that the chances of Bishop Welldon "meeting him
in heaven" are much greater than if the man had met the
death of a simple citizen, dying in his own home, with his
family around him, and nothing but the undistinguished life
of the ordinary person to look back upon. There is at least
one blessing Christianity has brought the human race. It
has provided a pedestal for the man who has distinguished
himself by committing a murder; or who has a lengthy list
of scoundrelisms to his credit, which is not forthcoming
for him who has, monotonously, discharged each duty as it
arose. The latter *may* get to heaven. If there is any
logic in Christian reasoning, and any value in clerical
assurances, the former is *certain* as to his destination. 


     "He spoke as a Christian man should"! This is the
thing that struck the Bishop. "He did not ask to be
spared"; which is, really, not much; because so many people
who are condemned to death, recognizing the hopelessness of
any such request, do not make it. The point is that his
speech and bearing were those of a Christian man. And, as I
do not imagine the Bishop would argue that the man became a
Christian, and so made certain of meeting Bishop Welldon in
heaven, because he committed a murder, it is only fair to
assume that he was a Christian when he committed the crime.
His Christianity did not prevent him committing the murder;
but it provided him with comfort after he had done it.
Christ is powerful to save -- the criminal. He is obviously
powerless to prevent the commission of the wrong. Thieves,
wife-beaters, burglars, all the riffraff of the human
world, may come with confidence to Christ. It is his
business to save them from the consequences of their
offences. It is not his business to prevent them committing
these offence; if it were, each criminal would stand as
testimony to his failure. Teachers, such as Socrates, did
not come to save sinners at the cheap price of a mere act
of belief. They came to teach people to lead a straight
life from the outset; to teach parents and governors so to
organize the State that right conduct would inevitably
follow. And all Socrates would have said to the convicted
murderer would have been: "You have committed the crime;
you must pay the price; in paying it, do so with all the
fortitude possible; and, if regret will be of any avail to
those who have suffered by your crime, that way is open to
you." In any case, he would have said that salvation must
come from personal development, not from a mere profession
of belief in someone else. To teachers and governors, he
would have used the fact of the crime, and the nature of
the criminal, as material for a wiser ordering of life. It
was left for Christianity to provide for the criminal, as a
consequence of his crimes, a sense of security, and of
heavenly felicity, of which no good man could feel quite
certain. "He spoke as a Christian man." Certainly. He had
gone the way, which so many have gone, to become one. 


     The Bishop also spoke as a Christian bishop should
speak. As such, he was bound to ignore the difference
between a good life and a bad life, once a profession of
faith in Jesus Christ was made. That penitence and belief
are everything, and conduct nothing, is of the very essence
of Christian teaching. The whole story of the thieves on
the Cross is based on this. Like Bishop Welldon's prisoner,
all that the one thief did was profess belief in Jesus; and
the reward was "This day shalt thou be with me in
paradise." The thousands of stories of wrongdoers converted
on their deathbeds teach the same lesson. There is no time
for redress; no time for improvement in character; nothing,
but the simple act of faith, and a ticket for heaven is
secured. "There never was a doubt in the Church," said the
great Dr. Pusey, "that all who die in a state of grace,
although, one minute before, they were not in a state of
grace, are saved." And, similarly, the great Charles Haddon
Spurgeon declared: "If thou wilt trust Christ, thou shalt
be saved from all thy sin in a moment . . . You great
sinners shall have as much love as the best . . . You shall
be near to Christ . . . Thirty years of sin shall be
forgiven; and it shall not take thirty minutes to do it."
That is of the very essence of Christian teaching; it
remains the stock-in-trade of evangelistic preaching today.
It does not matter how bad you are -- the worse the better
-- the greater the value of the capture. Nothing like this
appears in any of the Greek or Latin moralists. In their
blindness, they were impressed by the belief that morality
was a social product; that its value and its application
had to do with human society, here. "The heathen in his
blindness" also assumed that character is not to be
transformed in a moment; but that it is a consequence of
education, of training, of the slow formation of better
habits. They would not have dreamed of placing the
murderer, just because he had professed belief in this or
that god, on a level with the really good man. It was left
for Christianity to wipe out practically the distinction
between good and bad; to place the thief on the cross on
the same level as Marcus Aurelius. 


     I do not wonder -- I never have wondered -- that
sinners flock to Jesus. I have only wondered that good men
and women should go there. Then I have wondered what the
devil they were doing in that galley! But, given the fact
of belief in Christ, the foot of the cross seems quite a
natural place for the long train of wrongdoers who, through
the whole of Christian history, have been found there.
Observe, as with the case of the prisoner of Durham gaol,
there has not resulted from this a decrease of crime. Per
population, there were not fewer thieves and murderers in
Rome Christian than there were in Rome pagan. The
comparison would, in fact, have been rather in favour of
pagan Rome. Take any century one pleases, there is not the
slightest evidence that the prevalence of Christian belief
had any material effect on the volume of crime. Certain
offence waned; and others took their place; but there was
no waning of the belief in the saving blood of Jesus. It is
only within the past three or four generations that
disbelief in the saving blood of Jesus has existed over a
wide area, and with all classes of society. It is during
this period that there has been a very marked decrease in
crime in general. And that is because, in our degeneracy,
we have, as the clergy lament, become more pagan. We have
sunk so low as again to treat conduct as a special part of
sociology; and to realize that the formation of character
is the great thing to aim at; that we should not worry
about securing immortal salvation for the hopelessly
antisocial unit. I do not wonder the clergy regard this
development with disfavour. If character building becomes
the aim of good men and women, and if morality is
recognized as a department of sociology, what, on earth, is
going to become of the medicine man with his eleventh-hour
salvation by the hocus-pocus of the Christian cross? In a
society of decent and intelligent men and women,
Christianity would have no place at all. When people live
*on* the square, there will be no need to live *by* the
cross. 


     In Fielding Hall's "Soul of a People," there is told a
story which I venture to commend to Bishop Welldon. The
author tells how puzzled he was, fresh from the customs of
Christian priests, to observe that Buddhism had none of the
"consolations" for the dying which Christianity held out.
So he went to a Burmese magistrate, a Buddhist, and said to
him: "When a man is dying what do you say to comfort him? .
. . Do you speak to him of what may happen to him after
death?" The Buddhist replied: "No one can tell what will
happen after death; it depends on a man's life, whether he
has done good or evil, what his next existence will be,
whether he will go a step nearer to the Peace. When the man
is dying, no monk will come, truly; but an old man, an old
friend, father, perhaps, or an elder of the village; he
will talk to the dying man. He will say: `Think of your
good deeds; think of all that you have done well in this
life; think of your good deeds.' " Fielding Hall sums up
the Buddhist attitude thus: "A man cannot escape from his
life, even in death. In our acts of today, we are
determining what our death will be; if we have lived well,
we shall die well; and if not, then not. As a man lives so
shall he die, is the teaching of Buddhism." Of course,
there is not much, here, for Bishop Welldon's convicted
murderer, brought up under the nerve destroying influence
of Christian teaching. For the aim of Buddhism -- whether
it succeeds in its aim or not -- is not to place the
believing murderer on a level with the genuinely good man.
Its aim is not to cheer up the criminal at his last gasp,
with the promise of immortal salvation; nor is it to
provide openings for priests to live upon the fears that
their own teaching has gathered round the bed of death. Its
aim is to teach men to *live* aright; not to falsify human
experience; not to insult human intelligence by the
monstrous doctrine of the penitent thief, or the murderer
crawling to Jesus under the shadow of the scaffold.

 
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