WCP2498

[1]^{1, 2}

Ponce, P[uer]to. Rico, 1914

To the Editor of the Review of the Reviews,

London.

Dear Sir:

In your review of the "World of Life" given in your valuable magazine for January, appear some curious deductions & assertions. Amongst others the divine beneficence of the mosquito is a thumper! On the same principle the Tse-Tse fly, the horrid Ticks, the bacillus of the sleeping sickness & hundreds of other calamities are divine blessings. I have never been near the Arctic Circle, so I cannot speak of the mosquito there, but I know something about them in this & other more or less tropical countries. In this, birds are few and far between, & mosquitos abound. Moreover, shun the sun, & during daylight seek the shade & dark corners of vegetation, dwellings & outhouses, &, like other beasts of prey, these pests leave their lairs after sundown & make the life of both man & beast, where not protected by artificial means, simply unbearable. Birds, here & in other countries, go to bed at sundown, so that they get no good from the beneficently created mosquitoes. To get the idea that, the mosquito, or any of the hundreds of other pests that tend to make a Hell of some parts of the world, are beneficent creations, requires not only a powerful imagination, but also a more or less diseased one. Imaginations that find comfort & hope in the witch & wizard methods of Spiritualism, may account for many absurdities. This recalls me that, in the same number of the Review of the Reviews, you have a mild fling at Christian Science.

"Faith, fanatic faith once wedded fast"

"To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last."

These lines cut both ways, & can be applied to Spiritualism just as well as to Mrs Eddy's teachings, with this difference, that the last, however mistakenly based, really do good, cures ARE made, money is also made, churches built, charities carried out & the lives of many needy families improved. Something similar may be said of the Virgin of Lourdes, the Antoinists &others. All these work in the full glare of the sun, in this, & the good they really accomplish, differ such from Spiritualism, which neither cures nor heals, & like the "beneficent mosquito" shuns the sun light & works more or less in shady places. Yet all these "dear falsehoods" & many others, such as mormonism[sic], bigamy, robbery, rape & murder, can be proved "divine" out of that wonderful book, the Bible.

As ^a scotch presbyterian[sic] I know something about the Bible, in my earlier years I knew little of anything else, & as a boy, a youth, a man & now in my eig-[2] eighth decade, I have often marveled[sic] why so many people of high & low degree, of great & small intellect, can pin their faith on that book of fables. We are told in that book of the roaming about of the Lord "hardening the hearts" of individuals & peoples, so that they might give an excuse to his chosen people to steal the land (of hardened hearts)[,] the oxen, the asses &c., murder the men & old women, but to keep the virgins, & reserve a tithe of the spoil for the use of the Lord. Just fancy a beneficent creator first, creating millions of beings & then choosing a small lot of them to be his pets &, second, inciting these to rob, ravage & murder others. The beneficent mosquito is bad enough, but the Bible goes one better, or worse.

No, my friend, before the theory of a BENEFICENT Creator can be accepted as real, by common sense & sane intellects, great or small, the immense amount of suffering, misery, cruelty & injustice that has existed since the world as known to humanity began, must be explained in some other way than that such suffering is good for the suffer^ers, & the present state of such miserable conditions eliminated all together. Given a BENEFICENT CREATOR with the powers he is credited with, & thousands of ministering angels you mention, it should not be a difficult matter to make life a little more bearable for the millions of suffering creatures in this world. The wisest men the world has yet known get lost entirely when they go beyond the limits of positive, practical science. Imaginations combined with powerful minds sometimes revel in realms vast, poetic & visionary, but outside of the pleasure that may be realized by such flights, nothing practical or useful is accomplished. Speculation regarding a First Cause always has a lead, & apparently always will lead to chaos. The Bible, which so many consider divine, helps not at all, & the title tatle [sic] of "Julia" & other spirits privileged enough to communicate with SOME mortals, still less. Horace Greely is said to have remarked after a conversation with the spirit of his father, that he was astonished to find that ten years amongst the spirits had turned his father into such an idiot. The greatest intellects of Huxley & Darwin are still supreme. They saw & understood, amongst many other things, the great evils existing in this world, but their reason never descended to excuse them by any such untenable theories as a BENEFICENT Creator with millions of ministering angels acting as department managers, or by assuring the millions of beings under the ban of misery, cruelty & injustice, that their sufferings [3] are all meted out for their good.

To devise some plan to eliminate the sufferings referred to will give ample work to all great minds, without getting lost hunting after a First Cause, which, whatever that may be, evidently it is not interested in promoting equitable conditions of life in this "Vale of Tears" of ours.

By the time you get this far (if you do) I can fancy you sitting in your "Bureau" & consulting with your friend "Julia" as to whether the Lord has not been at his ancient tricks, & has "hardened the heart" of the writer for his undoing here & hereafter, & I fear that neither the style nor the contents of this letter will merit as a whole or partially, a place in your very interesting & instructive Review of Reviews.

Tamen: DUM NI SPIRAS NI ESPERAS.

Yours very truly | Robert Graham.

Ponce, Puerto Rico, February 1911.