The Coming Religion

Gerald Massey
I've been reading the works of Gerald Massey (1828-1907) recently. Described as 'Chartist, Poet, Radical, Freethinker', he was an autodidact who became something of a self-styled expert in Egyptology. He claimed that the Christian story was poached from Egyptian mythology, a theory which, although receiving no support from academia, has influenced contemporary avant garde thinkers such as Acharya S., Tom Harpur, and the author of the Zeitgeist video. In one of his essays, he considers what the religion of the future will be like. I think most of this will appeal to Unitarians. Here's the final paragraph. The rest, along with a biography and numerous other essays can be found at











Possibly my Coming Religion may suggest a coming revolution?  I should not wonder if it does.  Anyway, we mean to do our own thinking, and to have absolute freedom of thought and expression.  We mean to rescue our Sunday from the sacerdotal ring.  But we do not mean that the day of rest and recreation shall fall into the hands of the capitalists.  We mean to try and rescue this world from the clutches of those who profess to have the keys and the keeping of the other—they who hold up the other world in front of that beast of burden, the producer, as a decoying lure, like the bunch of carrots before the donkey's nose, in order that the suggestion of plenty in paradise may induce him to forego his common right to grazing-ground on earth.  We mean to have a day of reckoning with the unjust stewards of the earth.  We mean to have the national property restored to the people, which the churches and other bodies have withheld from the people.  We mean that the land, with its inalienable right of living, its mineral wealth below the soil and its waters above, shall be open to all.  We mean to have our banking done by the State, and our railways worked for the benefit of the whole people.  We mean to temper the terror of rampant individualism with the principles of co-operation.  We mean to show that the wages' system is a relic of barbarism and social serfdom.  That under it labour must remain a slave in the prison-house of property.  We mean for woman to have perfect equality with man, social, religious, and political, and her fair share in that equity which is of no sex.  We mean also that the same standard of morality shall apply to the woman as to the man.  In short, we intend that the redress of wrongs and the righting of inequalities, which can only be rectified in this world, shall not be put off and postponed to any future stage of existence.  The religion of the future has got to include not only Spiritualism, but the salvation of humanity for this life—any other may be left to follow hereafter.  It has to be a sincerity of life, in place of pretended belief.  A religion of science, in place of superstition.  Of joy, instead of sorrow.  Of man's Ascent, instead of his Fall.  A religion of fact in the present, and not of mere faith for the future.  A religion in which the temple reared to God will be in human form, instead of being built of brick or stone.  A religion of work, rather than worship; and, in place of the deathly creeds, with all their hungry parasites of prey, a religion of life—life actual, life here, life now, as well as the promise of life everlasting!

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