On another subject, too, Mr. Owen has spoken plainly. He says, “The love of truth is an instinct of human nature which would be always exercised in simplicity, were not individuals praised and blamed for particular feelings,” p. 11. The Bible tells us that “man goeth astray from the womb, speaking lies.” Now, which is to be believed, Robert Owen, or God?
But I ought to beg Robert Owen’s pardon; according to his doctrine, there is no personal God: this is his language: “The error respecting this law of human nature, viz., the 14th, has led man to create a personal Deity, author of all good; and a personal devil, author of all evil. * * * * And yet, when the mind can be relieved from the early prejudices which have been forced into it on these subjects, it will be discovered that there is not a single fact known to man, after all the experience of the past generations, to prove that any such personalities exist, or ever did exist; and, in consequence, all the mythology of the ancients, and all the religions of the moderns, are mere fanciful notions of men, whose imaginations have been cultivated to accord with existing prejudices, and whose judgments have been systematically destroyed from their birth.” (Book of the New Moral World, p. 46.) And his idea on this awful subject he explains, when he says, “Without a shadow of a doubt, that truth is nature, and nature God; that ‘God is truth, and truth is God,’ as so generally expressed by the Mohammedans,” p. 65; and yet he tells us that “man is a wonderful and curiously contrived being;” and that, “in the formation of man and woman there is the most evident harmony and unison of design,” p. 70. How truth, which is an abstract quality, can be a power, can contrive and create, is what I do not understand; but, no doubt, Robert Owen, who, if persons will take his testimony, and follow his notions, can perform much more wonderful feats than this, will be able to explain it; especially as he tells us that “it is only now, for the first time, in the known history of mankind, that the mind has been permitted to examine facts, in order to discover truth, upon the subjects which have the greatest influence upon the human race.”