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Title: The Bible of Nature : Or, The Principles of Secularism. A Contribution to the Religion of the Future
Author: Oswald, Felix L.
Language: English
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THE
BIBLE OF NATURE;
PRINCIPLES OF SECULARISM.
A Contribution to the Religion of the Future.
BY
FELIX L. OSWALD.
“Light is help from Heaven.”—G. E. Lessing.
New York:
THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY,
28 LAFAYETTE PLACE.
TO
THE MEMORY OF
BENEDICT SPINOZA,
THIS WORK IS REVERENTLY DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS.
PAGE.
Introduction, 9
PHYSICAL MAXIMS.
CHAP.
I. Health, 18
II. Strength, 33
III. Chastity, 45
IV. Temperance, 56
V. Skill, 73
MENTAL MAXIMS.
VI. Knowledge, 85
VII. Independence, 95
VIII. Prudence, 106
IX. Perseverance, 116
X. Freethought, 124
MORAL MAXIMS.
XI. Justice, 137
XII. Truth, 148
XIII. Humanity, 160
XIV. Friendship, 172
XV. Education, 182
OBJECTIVE MAXIMS.
XVI. Forest Culture, 194
XVII. Recreation, 203
XVIII. Domestic Reform, 212
XIX. Legislative Reform, 221
XX. The Priesthood of Secularism, 231
THE BIBLE OF NATURE; OR, THE PRINCIPLES OF SECULARISM.
INTRODUCTION.
From the dawn of authentic history to the second century of our
chronological era the nations of antiquity were beguiled by the fancies
of supernatural religions. For fifteen hundred years the noblest
nations of the Middle Ages were tortured by the inanities of an
antinatural religion. The time has come to found a Religion of Nature.
The principles of that religion are revealed in the monitions of our
normal instincts, and have never been wholly effaced from the soul of
man, but for long ages the consciousness of their purpose has been
obscured by the mists of superstition and the systematic inculcation of
baneful delusions. The first taste of alcohol revolts our normal
instincts; nature protests against the incipience of a ruinous
poison-vice; but the fables of the Bacchus priests for centuries
encouraged that vice and deified the genius of intemperance. Vice
itself blushed to mention the immoralities of the pagan gods whose
temples invited the worship of the heavenly-minded. Altars were erected
to a goddess of lust, to a god of wantonness, to a god of thieves.
That dynasty of scamp-gods was, at last, forced to abdicate, but only
to yield their throne to a celestial Phalaris, a torture-god who
cruelly punished the gratification of the most natural instincts, and
foredoomed a vast plurality of his children to an eternity of horrid
and hopeless torments. Every natural enjoyment was denounced as sinful.
Every natural blessing was vilified as a curse in disguise. Mirth is
the sunshine of the human mind, the loveliest impulse of life’s truest
children; yet the apostle of Antinaturalism promised his heaven to the
gloomy world-despiser. “Blessed are they that mourn.” “If any man will
come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily.” “Be
afflicted, and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned to mourning
and your joy to heaviness.” “Woe unto you that laugh.” “If any man come
to me and hate not his father and mother, his wife and children, his
brothers and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my
disciple.”
The love of health is as natural as the dread of pain and decrepitude.
The religion of Antinaturalism revoked the health laws of the Mosaic
code, and denounced the care even for the preservation of life itself.
“Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall
drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” “Bodily exercise
profiteth but little.” “There is nothing from without a man that,
entering him, can defile him.”
The love of knowledge awakens with the dawn of reason; a normal child
is naturally inquisitive; the wonders of the visible creation invite
the study of every intelligent observer. The enemies of nature
suppressed the manifestations of that instinct, and hoped to enter
their paradise by the crawling trail of blind faith. “Blessed are they
that do not see and yet believe.” “He that believeth and is baptized
shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.” “He that
believeth not is condemned already.”
The love of freedom, the most universal of the protective instincts,
was suppressed by the constant inculcation of passive resignation to
the yoke of “the powers that be,” of abject submission to oppression
and injustice. “Resist not evil.” “Of him that taketh away thy goods
ask them not again.” “Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with
him twain.” “Submit yourselves to the powers that be.”
The love of industry, the basis of social welfare, that manifests
itself even in social insects, was denounced as unworthy of a true
believer: “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? what shall we
drink? or wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things
do the gentiles seek.” “Take no thought of the morrow, for the morrow
shall take thought for the things of itself.” “Ask and it shall be
given you,” i.e., stop working and rely on miracles and prayer.
The hope for the peace of the grave, the last solace of the wretched
and weary, was undermined by the dogmas of eternal hell, and the
preördained damnation of all earth-loving children of nature: “He that
hateth not his own life cannot be my disciple.” “The children of the
kingdom shall be cast out into utter darkness, there shall be weeping
and gnashing of teeth.” “They shall be cast into a furnace of fire,
there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” “They shall be tormented
with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the
presence of the Lamb.” “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth
forever and ever, and they have no rest day nor night.”
For fifteen centuries the pilot of the church lured our forefathers to
a whirlpool of mental and physical degeneration, till the storms of the
Protestant revolt enabled them to break the spell of the fatal eddies,
and, like a swimmer saving his naked life, mankind has struggled back
to the rescuing rocks of our mother earth. Lured by the twinkle of
reflected stars, we have plunged into the maelstrom of Antinaturalism,
and after regaining the shore, by utmost efforts, it seems now time to
estimate the expenses of the adventure.
The suppression of science has retarded the progress of mankind by a
full thousand years. For a century or two the Mediterranean peninsulas
still lingered in the evening twilight of pagan civilization, but with
the confirmed rule of the church the gloom of utter darkness overspread
the homes of her slaves, and the delusions of that dreadful night far
exceeded the worst superstitions of pagan barbarism. “The cloud of
universal ignorance,” says Hallam, “was broken only by a few glimmering
lights, who owe almost the whole of their distinction to the
surrounding darkness. We cannot conceive of any state of society more
adverse to the intellectual improvement of mankind than one which
admitted no middle line between dissoluteness and fanatical
mortifications. No original writer of any merit arose, and learning may
be said to have languished in a region of twilight for the greater part
of a thousand years. In 992 it was asserted that scarcely a single
person was to be found, in Rome itself, who knew the first elements of
letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain, about the age of
Charlemagne, could address a common letter of salutation to another.”
In that midnight hour of unnatural superstitions every torch-bearer was
persecuted as an enemy of the human race. Bruno, Campanella, Kepler,
Vanini, Galilei, Copernicus, Descartes, and Spinoza had to force their
way through a snapping and howling pack of monkish fanatics who beset
the path of every reformer, and overcame the heroism of all but the
stoutest champions of light and freedom. From the tenth to the end of
the sixteenth century not less than 3,000,000 “heretics,” i.e.,
scholars and free inquirers, had to expiate their love of truth in the
flames of the stake.
The systematic suppression of freedom, in the very instincts of the
human mind, turned Christian Europe into a universal slave-pen of
bondage and tyranny; there were only captives and jailers, abject serfs
and their inhuman masters. Freedom found a refuge only in the
fastnesses of the mountains; in the wars against the pagan Saxons the
last freemen of the plains were slain like wild beasts; a thousand of
their brave leaders were beheaded on the market square of Quedlinburg,
thousands were imprisoned in Christian convents, or dragged away to the
bondage of feudal and ecclesiastic slave farms where they learned to
envy the peace of the dead and the freedom of the lowest savages. “One
sees certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and
female, scattered over the country and attached to the soil, which they
root and turn over with indomitable perseverance. They have, as it
were, an articulate voice; and when they rise to their feet they show a
human face. They are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens,
where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men
the labor of plowing, sowing, and harvesting, and, therefore, deserve
some small share of the bread they have grown. Yet they were the
fortunate peasants—those who had bread and work—and they were then the
few” (while half the arable territory of France was in the hands of the
church). “Feudalism,” says Blanqui, “was a concentration of all
scourges. The peasant, stripped of the inheritance of his fathers,
became the property of ignorant, inexorable, indolent masters. He was
obliged to travel fifty leagues with their carts whenever they required
it; he labored for them three days in the week, and surrendered to them
half the product of his earnings during the other three; without their
consent, he could not change his residence or marry. And why, indeed,
should he wish to marry, if he could scarcely save enough to maintain
himself? The Abbot Alcuin had twenty thousand slaves called serfs, who
were forever attached to the soil. This is the great cause of the rapid
depopulation observed in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious
multitude of convents which sprang up on every side. It was doubtless a
relief to such miserable men to find in the cloisters a retreat from
oppression; but the human race never suffered a more cruel outrage;
industry never received a wound better calculated to plunge the world
again into the darkness of the rudest antiquity. It suffices to say
that the prediction of the approaching end of the world, industriously
spread by the rapacious monks at this time, was received without
terror.”
The joy-hating insanities of the unnatural creed blighted the lives of
thousands, and trampled the flowers of earth even on the bleak soil of
North Britain, where the children of nature need every hour of respite
from cheerless toil. “All social pleasures,” says Buckle, “all
amusements and all the joyful instincts of the human heart, were
denounced as sinful. The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in
themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life
was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the
senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere
fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”
The dogma of exclusive salvation by faith made forcible conversion
appear an act of mercy, and stimulated those wars of aggression that
have cost the lives of more than thirty millions of our fellow-men. In
the Crusades alone five millions of victims were sacrificed on the
altar of fanaticism; the extermination of the Moriscos reduced the
population of Spain by seven millions; the man-hunts of the
Spanish-American priests almost annihilated the native population of
the West Indies and vast areas of Central and South America, once as
well-settled as the most fertile regions of Southern Europe. The horrid
butcheries in the land of the Albigenses, in the mountain homes of the
Vaudois, and in the Spanish provinces of the Netherlands exterminated
the inhabitants of whole cities and districts, and drenched the fields
of earth with the blood of her noblest children.
The neglect of industry and the depreciation of secular pursuits proved
the death-blow of rational agriculture. The garden-lands of the Old
World became sand-wastes, the soil of the neglected fields was scorched
by summer suns and torn by winter floods till three million square
miles of once fruitful lands were turned into hopeless deserts. “The
fairest and fruitfulest provinces of the Roman empire,” says Professor
Marsh—“precisely that portion of terrestrial surface, in short, which
about the commencement of the Christian era was endowed with the
greatest superiority of soil, climate, and position, which had been
carried to the highest pitch of physical improvement—is now completely
exhausted of its fertility. A territory larger than all Europe, the
abundance of which sustained in bygone centuries a population scarcely
inferior to that of the whole Christian world at the present day, has
been entirely withdrawn from human use, or, at best, is thinly
inhabited.... There are regions, where the operation of causes, set in
action by man, has brought the face of the earth to a state of
desolation almost as complete as that of the moon; and though within
that brief space of time which we call the historical period, they are
known to have been covered with luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and
fertile meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be reclaimable by
man, nor can they become again fitted for his use except through great
geological changes or other agencies, over which we have no control....
Another era of equal improvidence would reduce this earth to such a
condition of impoverished productiveness as to threaten the
depravation, barbarism, and, perhaps, even the extinction of the human
species” (Man and Nature, pp. 4, 43).
The experience of the Middle Ages has, indeed, been bought at a price
which the world cannot afford to pay a second time. The sacrifices of
fifteen centuries have failed to purchase the millennium of the
Galilean Messiah, and the time has come to seek salvation by a
different road.
The Religion of the Future will preach the Gospel of Redemption by
reason, by science, and by conformity to the laws of our
health-protecting instincts. Its teachings will reconcile instinct and
precept, and make Nature the ally of education. Its mission will seek
to achieve its triumphs, not by the suppression, but by the
encouragement of free inquiry; it will dispense with the aid of pious
frauds; its success will be a victory of truth, of freedom, and
humanity; it will reconquer our earthly paradise, and teach us to
renounce the Eden that has to be reached through the gates of death.
I.—PHYSICAL MAXIMS.
CHAPTER I.
HEALTH.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by a marvelous system of
protective intuitions. The sensitive membrane of the eye resents the
intrusion of every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of discomfort
announces every injurious extreme of temperature. To the unperverted
taste of animals in a state of nature wholesome food is pleasant,
injurious substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found that only
the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of the Arctic coastlands to
touch spoiled meat. In times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian
mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an unerring faculty
enables them to distinguish from the poisonous varieties. The
naturalist Tschudi mentions a troop of half-tamed chamois forcing their
way through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in the stifling
atmosphere of a goat stable.
Man in his primitive state had his full share of those protective
instincts, which still manifest themselves in children and
Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of
those savages are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers Park,
Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville, and Brehm agree that the
first step on the road to ruin is always taken in deference to the
example of the admired superior race, if not in compliance with direct
persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal highlands shuddered at the first
taste of alcohol, but from a wish to conciliate the good will of their
visitors hesitated to decline their invitations, which subsequently,
indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness
unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric
poisons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin, the Circassian war
chief, whose iron constitution had endured the vicissitudes of
thirty-four campaigns, pathetically protested against the pest air of
his Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless his
dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them responsible for the guilt
of his suicide. I have known country boys to step out into a shower of
rain and sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of a city
workshop, and after a week’s work in a spinning mill return to the
penury of their mountain homes, rather than purchase dainties at the
expense of their lungs.
The word frugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet
of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten
children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to
the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to
the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our
dress-reformers are anticipated in the sensible garments of many
half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can
dispense with the advice of the hydropathic school. They delight in
exercise; they laugh at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and
the perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They would cast their
vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit of hundreds of occupations which
custom, rather than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages of
indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of arboreal vegetation has
been recognized by the ablest pathologists of modern times; avenues of
shade trees have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of many a
grimy city, and the eminent hygienist, Schrodt, holds that, as a
remedial institution, a shady park is worth a dozen drug stores. But
all these lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too often
suppressed, instinct of our young children: their passionate love of
woodland sports, their love of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of
forest life in all its forms. Those who hold that “nature” is but a
synonym of “habit” should witness the rapture of city children at first
sight of forest glades and shady meadow brooks, and compare it with the
city dread of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods boy,
sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large manufacturing town. A
thousands years of vice and abnormal habits have not yet silenced the
voice of the physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path of
Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her laws unwarned.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined to the negative
advantage of escaping the discomforts of disease. In the pursuit of
countless competitive avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret
of success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives are mostly
half-told tales. Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to
ripen their fruit; before their day’s work is done our toilers are
overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would
undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of
longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the
apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and
compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes
of life. For millions of our fellow-men an increase of health and
longevity would suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health
lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its
possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness almost proof against the
frowns of fortune and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley cakes
and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a
shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence
to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all
the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has
banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be
computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest
treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but in the homes of frugal
thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. The sweetness
of health reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and wins
friends where the elegance of studied manners gains only admirers.
Health is also a primary condition of that clearness of mind the
absence of which can be only partially compensated by the light of
learning. Health is the basis of mental as of bodily vigor;
country-bred boys have again and again carried off the prizes of
academical honors from the pupils of refined cities, and the foremost
reformers of all ages and countries have been men of the people;
low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy rustics and
mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and
Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.
C.—PERVERSION.
Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a
consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to
the inhospitable climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to adopt
abnormal modes of life which, in the course of time, hardened into
habits. Man, like all the varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a
native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors
was, in all probability, frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and
edible herbs and gums. But the first colonists of the winter lands were
obliged to eke out an existence by eating the flesh of their
fellow-creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the habitual and,
in many countries, almost the exclusive diet of the nomadic
inhabitants.
Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the avarice of a cruel master
may have forced his slaves to quench their thirst with fermented must
or hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first
reluctant victims of intoxication learned to prefer spoiled to fresh
grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are
apt to engender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and even
habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere may at last become a
second nature, characterized by a morbid dread of fresh air. The slaves
of the Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-like
dungeons, and may have contracted the first germ of that mental disease
known as the night-air superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark
the vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is preferable to the
balm of the cooling night wind.
In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has
stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus
indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the
public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires
compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the
heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire
bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the
goal of the promised land of ease and independence—a goal reached only
by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down
wayworn and exhausted.
But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the
anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating
infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a
curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised
nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah
actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in
decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a
persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the
human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic
history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the
interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was
enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving
recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were
encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly
neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic
orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages
upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to
the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to
weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep
was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which
often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation
for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the
permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the
same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a
mouthful of digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic
beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern
beer-swiller.
The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the
attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a
hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic
disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to
end—nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the
wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and
self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such
illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots
and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.
Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity.
Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the
reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the
golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the
slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to
acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism,
but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public
baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are
scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom
of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river.
Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who
turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown
their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are deprived of every
healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with
penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day
when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for
recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the
paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a
Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew
ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer
to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the
introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an
attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important
topics.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of
supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from
the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical
conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which
no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of
the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to
scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and
the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical
hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously
unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers
took long journeys to try the efficacy of a king’s touch, as recorded
by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the
still current term of a sovereign remedy. A long foot-journey, with its
opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of
diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to
their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse,
and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to
the “mysterious dispensation” of a Providence which obstinately refused
to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the
physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench,
nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests
upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of
Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their
natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor,
or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of
the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.
The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to
the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the
ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were
taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from
which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and
millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the
attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of
Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The
cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable
abundance, craving admission and offering them the aid which Nature
grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a
miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was
enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: “If any man is
sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them
pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” “And
the prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him
up.”
Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for “meekness of spirit”
continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and
thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless
propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer,
assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of
his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single
meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a
repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended
“like the hide of a drowned dog.” The “Love of Enemies,” “forgiveness
and meekness,” were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of
meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous
saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity
would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar Borgia,
the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly
training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have
combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a
hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties, in order
to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared
neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even
by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon
companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three
of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of
hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers.
He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in
order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made
repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother
of his mother and his own father, the pope.
The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the
poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as
well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern
seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday
excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his
community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the
arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of
physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an
opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the
helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the
late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying
to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation—a privilege to be
reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the
seventh harvest the fruits of other men’s labor. But epidemics refuse
to recognize such distinctions, and the vomit of yellow fever will
force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the
tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can
wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual
vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of
abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of
mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter
half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny
themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the
sweltering city, and toil and save “for the sake of our dear children,”
have received Nature’s verdict on the wisdom of their course in the
premature death of those children.
E.—REDEMPTION.
It has often been said that the physical regeneration of the human race
could be achieved without the aid of a miracle, if its systematic
pursuit were followed with half the zeal which our stock-breeders
bestow upon the rearing of their cows and horses. A general observance
of the most clearly recognized laws of health would, indeed, abundantly
suffice for that purpose. There is, for instance, no doubt that the
morbid tendency of our indoor modes of occupation could be counteracted
by gymnastics, and the trustees of our education fund should build a
gymnasium near every town school. As a condition of health, pure air is
as essential as pure water and food, and no house-owner should be
permitted to sow the seeds of deadly diseases by crowding his tenants
into the back rooms of unaired and unairable slum-prisons. New cities
should be projected on the plan of concentric rings of cottage suburbs
(interspersed with parks and gardens), instead of successive strata of
tenement flats.
In every large town all friends of humanity should unite for the
enforcement of Sunday freedom, and spare no pains to brand the Sabbath
bigots as enemies of the human race. We should found Sunday gardens,
where our toil-worn fellow-citizens could enjoy their holidays with
outdoor sports and outdoor dances, free museums, temperance drinks,
healthy refreshments, collections of botanical and zoölogical
curiosities. Country excursions on the only leisure day of the laboring
classes should be as free as air and sunshine, and every civilized
community should have a Recreation League for the promotion of that
purpose.
In the second century of our chronological era the cities of the Roman
empire vied in the establishment of free public baths. Antioch alone
had fourteen of them; Alexandria not less than twelve, and Rome itself
at least twenty, some of them of such magnificence and extent that
their foundations have withstood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many
of those establishments were entirely free, and even the Thermæ, or
luxurious Warm Baths, of Caracalla admitted visitors for a gate-fee
which all but the poorest could afford. Our boasted civilization will
have to follow such examples before it can begin to deserve its name;
and even the free circus games (by no means confined to the combats of
armed prize-fighters) were preferable to the fanatical suppression of
all popular sports which made the age of Puritanism the dreariest
period of that dismal era known as the Reign of the Cross.
The preservation of health is at least not less important than the
preservation of Hebrew mythology; and communities who force their
children to sacrifice a large portion of their time to the study of
Asiatic miracle legends might well permit them to devote an occasional
hour or two to the study of modern physiology. We should have health
primers and teachers of hygiene, and the most primitive district school
should find time for a few weekly lessons in the rudiments of sanitary
science, such as the importance of ventilation, the best modes of
exercise, the proper quality and quantity of our daily food, the
significance of the stimulant habit, the use and abuse of dress, etc.
Such text-books would prepare the way for health lectures, for health
legislation and the reform of municipal hygiene. The untruth that “a
man can not be defiled by things entering him from without” has been
thoroughly exploded by the lessons of science, and should no longer
excuse the neglect of that frugality which in the times of the pagan
republics formed the best safeguard of national vigor. Milk, bread, and
fruit, instead of greasy viands, alcohol, and narcotic drinks, would
soon modify the mortality statistics of our large cities, and we should
not hesitate to recognize the truth that the remarkable longevity of
the Jews and Mohammedans has a great deal to do with their dread of
impure food.
CHAPTER II.
STRENGTH.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Bodily vigor is the basis of mental and physical health. Strength is
power, and the instinctive love of invigorating exercise manifests
itself in the young of all but the lowest brutes. The bigot who
undermines the health of his children by stinting their outdoor sport
as “worldly vanity,” and “exercise that profiteth but little,” is
shamed by animals who lead their young in races and trials of strength.
Thus the female fox will train her cubs; the doe will race and romp
with her fawn, the mare with her colt. Monkeys (like the squirrels of
our northern forests) can be seen running up and down a tree and
leaping from branch to branch, without any conceivable purpose but the
enjoyment of the exercise itself; dogs run races, young lions wrestle
and paw each other in a playful trial of prowess; even birds can be
seen sporting in the air, and dolphins on the play-fields of the ocean.
In nearly all classes of the vertebrate animals the rivalry of the
males is decided by a trial of strength, and the female unhesitatingly
accepts the victor as the fittest representative of his species.
Normal children are passionately fond of athletic sports. In western
Yucatan I saw Indian girls climb trees with the agility of a
spider-monkey, and laughingly pelt each other with the fruits of the
Adansonia fig. The children of the South-sea Islanders vie in aquatic
gymnastics. Spartan girls joined in the foot-races of their brothers,
and by the laws of Lycurgus were not permitted to marry till they had
attained a prescribed degree of proficiency in a number of athletic
exercises. Race-running and wrestling were the favorite pastimes of
young Romans in the undegenerate age of the republic; and, in spite of
all restraints, similar propensities still manifest themselves in our
school-boys. They pass the intervals of their study-hours in
competitive athletics, rather than in listless inactivity, and brave
frosts and snowstorms to get the benefit of outdoor exercise even in
midwinter. They love health-giving sports for their own sake, as if
instinctively aware that bodily strength will further every victory in
the arena of life.
The enthusiasm that gathered about the heroic games of Olympia made
those festivals the brightest days in the springtime of the human race.
The million-voiced cheers that hailed the victor of the pentathlon have
never been heard again on earth since the manliest and noblest of all
recreations were suppressed by order of a crowned bigot. The rapture of
competitive athletics is a bond which can obliterate the rancor of all
baser rivalries, and still unites hostile tribes in the arena of pure
manhood: as in Algiers, where the Bedouins joined in the gymnastic
prize-games of their French foemen: the same foemen whose banquets they
would have refused to share even at the bidding of starvation. In
Buda-Pesth I once witnessed a performance of the German athlete
Weitzel, and still remember the irrepressible enthusiasm of two
broad-shouldered Turks who crowded to the edge of the platform, and,
with waving kerchiefs, joined in the cheers of the uncircumcised
spectators.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The “survival of the fittest” means, in many important respects, the
survival of the strongest. In a state of nature weakly animals yield to
their stronger rivals; the stoutest lion, the swiftest tiger, has a
superior chance of obtaining prey; the stouter bulls of the herd defy
the attack of the wolves who overcome the resistance of the weaker
individuals; the fleetest deer has the best chance to escape the
pursuit of the hunter.
A state of civilization does only apparently equalize such differences.
The invention of gunpowder has armed the weak with the power of a
giant; but the issue of international wars will always be biased by the
comparative strength of sinew and steadiness of nerve of the men that
handle those improved weapons. In the last Franco-Prussian war the
French were favored by an undoubted superiority of arms, but they were
utterly beaten by a nation whose sons had devoted their youth to
gymnastics. The arms of the Gothic giants were of the rudest
description: hunting-spears and clumsy battle-axes; but those axes
broke the ranks of the Roman legionaries, with their polished swords
and elaborate tactics. For the last two thousand years the wars that
decided the international rivalries of Asia, Europe, and North America
nearly always ended with the victory of a northern nation over its
southern neighbors. The men of the north could not always boast a
superiority in science or arms, nor in number, nor in the advantage of
a popular cause; but the rigor of their climate exacts a valiant effort
in the struggle for existence, and steels the nerves even of an
otherwise inferior race. “Fortis Fortuna adjuvat,” said a Roman
proverb, which means literally that Fortune favors the strong, and
which has been well rendered in the paraphrase of a modern translator:
“Force begets fortitude and conquers fortune.” Nor is that bias of fate
confined to the battles of war. In the contests of peace, too, other
things being equal, the strong arm will prevail against the weak, the
stout heart against the faint. Bodily strength begets self-reliance.
“Blest are the strong, for they shall possess the kingdom of the
earth,” would be an improved variation of the gospel text. The Germanic
nations (including the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon) who have most
faithfully preserved the once universal love of manly sports, have
prevailed against their rivals in the arena of industry and science, as
well as of war.
An American manufacturer, who established a branch of his business at
Havre, France, hired American and British workmen at double wages,
maintaining that he found it the cheapest plan, since one of his
expensive laborers could do the work of three natives. In the seaport
towns, even of South America and Southern Europe, a British sailor is
always at a premium. American industry is steadily forcing its way
further south, and may yet come to limit the fields of its enterprise
only by the boundaries of the American continent. From the smallest
beginnings, a nation of iron-fisted rustics has repeatedly risen to
supremacy in arms and arts. Two hundred years before the era of Norman
conquests in France, Italy, and Great Britain, the natives of Norway
were but a race of hardy hunters and fishermen. A century after the
battle of Xeres de la Frontera, the half-savage followers of Musa and
Tarik had founded high schools of science and industry. And, as the
fairest flower springs from the hardy thorn, the brightest flowers of
art and poetry have immortalized the lands of heroic freemen, rather
than of languid dreamers. The same nation that carried the banners of
freedom through the battle-storm of Marathon and Salamis, adorned its
temples with the sculptures of Phidias and its literature with the
masterpieces of Sophocles and Simonides.
Physical vigor is also the best guarantee of longevity. Nature exempts
the children of the south from many cares; yet in the stern climes of
the higher latitudes Health seems to make her favorite home; in spite
of snowstorms and bitter frosts the robust Scandinavian outlives the
languid Italian. In spite of a rigorous climate, I say, for that his
length of life is the reward of hardy habits is proved by the not less
remarkable longevity of the hardy Arab and the manful Circassian, in
climes that differ from that of Norway as Mexico and Virginia differ
from Labrador. Men of steeled sinews overcome disease as they brave the
perils of wars and the hardships of the wilderness; hospital-surgeons
know how readily the semi-savages of a primitive borderland recover
from injuries that would send the effeminate city-dweller to the land
of the shades. Toil-hardened laborers, too, share such immunities. On
the 25th of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of a number of
laborers employed at the night-shift of the Croton Aqueduct, fell to
the bottom of the pit, a distance of ninety-five feet, and was drawn up
in a comatose condition, literally drenched in his own blood. At the
Bellevue Hospital (city of New York) the examining surgeon found him
still alive, but gave him up for lost when he ascertained the extent of
his injuries. Both his arms were broken near the shoulder, both thighs
were fractured, his skull was horribly shattered about the left temple
and frontal region, six of his ribs were broken and their splinters
driven into the lungs. There seemed no hope whatever for him, and,
after the administration of an anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left
alone to die. To the utter surprise of the attending surgeon, the next
morning found the mass of broken bones still breathing. His fever
subsided; he survived a series of desperate operations, survived an
apparently fatal hemorrhage, and continued to improve from day to day,
till about the middle of June he recovered his complete consciousness,
and was able to sit up and answer the questions of the medical men who,
in ever increasing numbers, had visited his bedside for the last three
weeks. As a newspaper correspondent sums up his case: “His strong
constitution had repulsed the assaults of death, till finally the grim
monster went away to seek a less obstinate victim.” And, moreover, the
exercise of athletic sports lessens the danger of such accidents: a
trained gymnast will preserve his equilibrium where a weakling would
break his neck.
According to the mythus of the Nature-worshiping Greeks, the darling of
Venus was a hunter (not a tailor or a hair-dresser), and the gift of
beauty is, indeed, bestowed on the lovers of health-giving sports, far
oftener than on the votaries of fashion. Supreme beauty is
country-bred; the daughters of peasants, of village squires, of
fox-hunting barons, have again and again eclipsed the galaxies of court
belles. Country boys have won hearts that seemed proof against the
charm of city gallants. “I have seen many a handsome man in my time,”
says old Mrs. Montague in Barry Cornwall’s “Table Talk,” “but never
such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his
beautiful brow.” “Women will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,”
says Arthur Schopenhauer; “they will pardon rudeness, egotism, and
intellectual poverty; they will forgive even homeliness sooner than
effeminacy. Instinct seems to tell them that in the result of marriage
a mother’s influence can neutralize any defect but that.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The history of Antinaturalism is the history of a persistent war
against the manlier instincts of the human race. Buddha and his
Galilean disciples considered the body the enemy of the soul. According
to their system of ethics, Nature and all natural instincts are wholly
evil; the renunciation of earth and all earthly hopes is their price of
salvation, and the chief endeavor of their insane zeal is directed
against the interests of the human body. The gospel of Buddha
Sakiamuni, and its revamp, the “New Testament” of the Galilean messiah,
abound with the ravings of an anti-physical fanaticism as unknown to
the ethics of the manly Hebrews as to the philosophy of the
earth-loving Greeks and Romans. The duty of physical education and
health-culture was entirely ignored in the gospel of the life-despising
Nazarene. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” was the ideal of the
Grecian philosopher. A world-renouncing mind in a crushed body, was the
ideal of the Christian moralists. The sculptors and painters of the
Middle Ages vied in the representation of cadaverous saints,
hollow-eyed devotees, and ghastly self-torturers. Physical training was
tolerated as a secular evil indispensable for such purposes of the
militant church as the hunting of heretics and the invasion of
Mussulman empires; but its essential importance was vehemently
disclaimed; the superior merit of sacrificing health to the interests
of a body-despising soul was constantly commended, and the founders of
the monastic orders that superseded the pagan schools of philosophy did
not hesitate to enforce their dogmas by aggressive measures; the
wretched convent slaves had to submit to weekly bleedings and
strength-reducing penances; their novices were barbarously scourged for
the clandestine indulgence of a lingering love for health-giving
sports—wrestling in the vacant halls of their cloister-prison, or
racing conies on their way to their begging-grounds. The Olympic
festivals were suppressed by order of a Christian emperor. The fathers
of the church lost no opportunity to inveigh with rancorous invectives
against the pagan culture of the manly powers, “so inimical to true
contriteness of spirit and meek submission to the yoke of the gospel.”
The followers of Origenes actually practiced castration as the most
effectual means of taming the stubborn instincts of unregenerate boys.
Their exemplar, who had recommended that plan for years, came at last
to suspect the necessity of eradicating a germ of worldliness in his
own mind, and proceeded to accomplish that purpose by emasculating
himself. The anti-physical principle of European Buddhism manifests
itself likewise in the fanaticism of the Scotch ascetics who raged
against the scant physical recreations of a people already sufficiently
afflicted by climatic vicissitudes and the parsimony of an indigent
soil. It still survives in the bigotry of those modern zealots who
groan at sight of a horse-race or wrestling-match, and would fain
suppress the undue worldliness of ball-playing children. Manly pastimes
were banished from the very dreams of a world to come; and while the
heroes of Walhalla contest the prizes of martial sports, and the guests
of Olympus share in the joyful festivals of the gods, the saints of our
priest-blighted heaven need the alternative of an eternal hell to enjoy
the prospect of an everlasting Sabbath-school.
Trials of strength and of skill,
Rewarded by festive assemblies,
Feasts in the halls of gods, where the voice of the muses
Answered in songs to the ravishing lyre of Apollo,
quotes a German poet from the Vulgata, “when suddenly,” he adds, “a
gaunt, blood-streaming Jew rushed in with a crown of thorns on his head
and a huge wooden cross on his shoulder, which cross he dashed on the
banquet table of the appalled gods, who turned paler and paler till
they finally faded away into a pallid mist. And a dreary time then
began; the world turned chill and bleak. The merry gods had departed;
Olympus became a Golgotha, where sickly, skinned, and roasted deities
sneaked about mournfully, nursing their wounds and chanting doleful
hymns. Religion, once a worship of joy, became a whining worship of
sorrow.”
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
But Nature had her revenge, and the despisers of their own bodies
became so truly contemptible that in comparison the rudest barbarians
of antiquity seemed respectable men. The neglect of physical exercise
avenged itself in loathsome diseases, the perverted instincts exploded
in vices; the monkish self-abasers became caricatures of manhood:
bloated, whining, mean, and viciously sensual wretches, the
laughing-stock of foreign nations and the curse and disgrace of their
own. Physically, mentally, and morally, the earth-despising convent
drone represented the vilest type of degeneration to which the manhood
of our race has ever been degraded, and the enforced veneration of such
monsters, as exemplars of perfection, has perverted the ethical
standards of mankind to a degree for which our present generation is as
yet far from having wholly recovered. The love of athletic recreations
is still smirched with the stigma of the Middle Ages; “respectability”
is too often mistaken for a synonym of pedantry and conventional
effeminacy; parents still frown upon the health-giving sports of their
children; vice still sneaks in the disguise of saintliness and
world-renouncing aversion to physical recreations.
The degeneration of many once manful races has reached an incurable
phase: the listless resignation to physical abasement and decrepitude.
Earth has spurned her despisers; millions of priest-slaves in southern
Europe have lost the inheritance of their fathers, and have to till the
soil for aliens and despots. The arbitrament of war has made them taste
the lowest dregs of national humiliation; the life-long worshipers of
whining saints appealed in vain to the God of Battles, and were forced
to eat dust at the feet of the despised Infidel and heretic. The ships
of the Spanish Armada were consecrated by a chorus of ranting priests
commending them to the miraculous protection of heaven; and heaven’s
answer came in the blast of the hurricane that buried their fleet in
the depths of the sea. The same nation once more invoked the aid of the
saints for the protection of an armament against the great naval powers
of the nineteenth century. The ships were ceremoniously baptized with
the most fulsomely pious names: “The Holy Savior of the World,” “Saint
Maria,” “Saint Joseph,” “The Most Holy Trinity,” and sent forth in full
reliance on the protection of supernatural agencies. But in the
encounter with Nelson’s self-relying veterans the sacred bubble at once
collapsed. St. Joseph’s impotence howled in vain for the assistance of
the Holy Ghost. The Savior of the World could save himself only by a
shameful flight, and the Most Holy Trinity succumbed to a decided
surplus of holes.
E.—REDEMPTION.
In the work of physical regeneration Nature meets the reformer more
than half-way. Our children need but little encouragement to break the
fetters of the fatuous restraint that dooms them to a life of physical
apathy. They ask nothing but time and opportunity to redeem the coming
generation from the stigma of unmanliness and debility. Physical and
intellectual education should again go hand in hand if we would promote
the happiness of a redeemed race on the plan that made the age of
Grecian philosophy and gymnastics the brightest era in the history of
mankind. Physical reform should be promoted by the systematic
encouragement of athletic sports; every township should have a free
gymnasium, every village a free foot-race park; by prize-offers for
supremacy in competitive gymnastics wealthy philanthropists could turn
thousands of boy topers into young athletes. We should have athletic
county meetings, state field-days, and national or international
Olympiads.
Educational ethics should fully recognize the rights of the body. We
should admit the unorthodox, but also undeniable, truth that an upright
and magnanimous disposition is a concomitant of bodily strength, while
fickleness, duplicity, and querulous injustice are the characteristics
of debility. We should teach our children that a healthy mind can dwell
only in a healthy body, and that he who pretends to find no time to
take care of his health is a workman who thinks it a waste of time to
take care of his tools.
CHAPTER III.
CHASTITY.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided by the plain and
emphatic monitions of a physical conscience, developed partly with the
primordial evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary
experience transmitted during the social development of our species.
The guardians of our prevailing system of ethics, too, have enforced
the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently
justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis of those
regulations strikingly illustrates the perils of abandoning the plain
path of Nature, to follow the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists.
The Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time, selection,
and circumstantial restrictions. The control of our clerical moralists
ignores the first and second law of modification, while their
recognition of the third involves a large number of irrelevant and
irrational precepts.
In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate in the
prevention of sexual precocity. Active exercise furnishes a vent to
those potential energies which physical sloth forces to explode in
sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of vertebrate animals
fiercely resent the encroachments of immature rivals. Savages postpone
their nuptials to a period of life when the possession of property or
prestige enables them to undertake the adequate support of a family. In
countries where both sexes spend a large portion of their time in
outdoor occupations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the pastoral
highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria, Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys
and girls meet only at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements
apart, the girls in dances and singing-picnics; the boys in
shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain excursions. A lad under
eighteen caught in flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier
pastimes, while girls even more jealously guard the exclusiveness of
their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive bachelor as promptly
as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus fixes the marriageable age of a groom at
thirty years, of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths thirty
and twenty-five years were the respective minima.
The importance of limiting the license of precocious passion has never
been directly denied, but the significance of the instinct of sexual
selection seems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages
without the sanction, and even against the direct protest, of that
instinct are constantly encouraged. “Love matches,” in the opinion of
thousands of Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the
characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of the stage. The
overpowering sway of a passion which asserts its claims against all
other claims whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the importance of
its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake which treats its appeals
as a matter of frivolous fancy.
And, in fact, only the universality of that passion transcends the
importance of its direction. For, while the sexual instinct, per se,
guarantees the perpetuation of the species, the instinct of selection
refers to the composition of the next generation, of which it thus
determines the quality as the other determines the quantity. And just
as the vital powers of the individual organism strive back from disease
to health, the genius of the species seeks to reëstablish the
perfection of the type, and to neutralize the effects of degenerating
influences. We accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek
the complement of their own defects. Small women prefer tall men;
fickle men worship strong-minded women; dark grooms select fair brides;
practical business men are attracted by romantic girls; city belles
admire a rustic Hercules, and vice versa. Exceptional intensity of
mutual passion denotes exceptional fitness of the contemplated union,
or rather the results of that union; for, here as elsewhere, Nature, in
a choice of consequences, will sacrifice the interests of individuals
to the interests of the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever
ready to attain its purpose at the price of the temporary advantages of
life, nay, of life itself; and the voluntary renunciation of such
advantage is, therefore, in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the
benefit of posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the welfare
of the species. In spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical
standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth
in the popular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher law
when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest or caste restrictions.
In their hearts, the very flatterers condemn the decision of a bride
who has sacrificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental
mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged moralists.
In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself, however, will often
voluntarily withdraw its claim. Hopeless inequality of station,
disease, and irremediable disabilities will extinguish the flame of a
passion that would have defied time and torture. A lover struck with a
cureless malady will shrink from transmitting his affliction; a proud
barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his
humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a
sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of
an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by
magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the
patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been
transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of
continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis)
states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten
different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of
period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both
increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list.
The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every
genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons.
In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship
has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development
rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success
in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That
strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the
chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny
found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest
females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while
precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and
disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of
Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only
is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”
And if marriages are planned in heaven, that heaven manifests its will
in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or
expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured
against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted
that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long
run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love
will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and
the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a
union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.
C.—PERVERSION.
The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they
could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted
in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by
the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the
Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute
abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of
“unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion;
mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also
practiced as an à-priori safeguard against the awakening of the sexual
instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational
leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the
consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces
the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never
wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were
undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism of Buddha Sakiamuni. The
Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior
merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of
heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in
marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and
Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a
compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue
should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman;
nevertheless to avoid ...,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit
in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in
aberrations à la Origenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural
vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.
In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind
were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for
yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of
cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the
nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a
small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but
howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with
gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian
parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their
children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In
Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen;
nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy
old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria millions of mutually
reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the
decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the
cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer,
are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the
shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct
were suppressed in the name of morality.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly
the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The
penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case
of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of
helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal
consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural
agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s
laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred
million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical
sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their
parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature
intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism
and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive
generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of
southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has
assumed proportions which partly counteract the evil by the sternest of
Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with
the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee,
instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature
prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know
neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the
victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—
Losing their beauty and their native grace,
with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier
occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of
even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens
of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities
of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal
Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the
British convents as an absolute ne plus ultra of imaginable corruption.
The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of
immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era.
The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications
that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up
the secret of such aberrations:
Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.
(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)
The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in
speculative opinions were for centuries enforced with all the
truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a
Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even
clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with
barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves
of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even
Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early
marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in
thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature
on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every
marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations
of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years
of unavailing regrets.
E.—REFORM.
Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must
promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of
the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic
functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense
its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of
conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel
the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working
deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the
interests of a clerical dogma.
Like the seductions of Intemperance, the temptations of precocious
Incontinence may be counteracted by more abundant opportunities of
diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian
myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the
adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best
preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent.
Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy, active mode of life, as
that of hunters, trappers, and backwoodsmen. The stigma of public
opinion alone would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of
premature marriages; for, in the island of Corsica, where the
recognition of their baneful tendency is based on purely economical
considerations (the perils of over-population), the dread of social
ostracism has proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and
starvation.
In a community of Reformants (as the German philosopher Schelling
proposed to call the friends of reform) twenty-five and thirty years
should be accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and the
teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity to plead the cause of
Nature against the usurpations of priestcraft and conventionalism.
Public opinion should be trained to the recognition of the truth that
the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and bigotry is a crime
against the genius of mankind, and that a marriage, vetoed by the
verdict of Nature, cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest.
CHAPTER IV.
TEMPERANCE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Instinct is hereditary experience. The lessons derived from the
repetition of pleasant or painful impressions have been transmitted
from an infinite number of generations, till impending dangers have
come to proclaim themselves by instinctive dread, opportune benefits by
instinctive desire. The shudder that warns us to recede from the brink
of a steep cliff is felt even by persons who have never personally
experienced the peril of falling from the rocks of a precipice.
Mountain breezes are more attractive than swamp odors; the fumes of a
foul dungeon warn off a child who has had as yet no opportunity to
ascertain the danger of breathing contaminated air. A few years ago I
bought a pet fox, with a litter of cubs, who were soon after orphaned
by the escape of their mother. They had to be fed by hand; and, among
other proceeds of a forage, my neighbor’s boy once brought them a
bundle of lizards, and a dead rattlesnake. For the possession of those
lizards there was at once an animated fight, but at sight of the
serpent the little gluttons turned tail and retreated to the farther
end of their kennel. They were not a month old when I bought them, and
could not possibly have seen a rattlesnake before or known the effects
of its bite from personal experience; but instinct at once informed
them that an encounter with a reptile of that sort had brought some of
their forefathers to grief.
The vegetable kingdom, that provides food for nine-tenths of all living
creatures, abounds with an endless variety of edible fruits, seeds, and
herbs, but also with injurious and even deadly products, often closely
resembling the favorite food-plants of animals; which in a state of
Nature are nevertheless sure to avoid mistake, and select their food by
a faculty of recognizing differences that might escape the attention
even of a trained botanist. The chief medium of that faculty is the
sense of smell in the lower, and the sense of taste in the higher
animals. In monkeys, for instance, the olfactory organs are rather
imperfectly developed, and I have often seen them peel an unknown fruit
with their fingers and then cautiously raise it to their lips and rub
it to and fro before venturing to bring their teeth into play. The
preliminary test, however, always sufficed to decide the question in a
couple of seconds. The Abyssinian mountaineers who catch baboons by
fuddling them with plum brandy have to disguise the taste of the liquor
with a large admixture of syrup before they can deceive the warning
instincts of their victims. Where copper mines discharge their drainage
into a water-course, deer and other wild animals have been known to go
in quest of distant springs rather than quench their thirst with the
polluted water.
That protective instincts of that sort are shared even by the lowest
animals is proved by the experiment of the philosopher Ehrenberg, who
put a drop of alcohol into a bottle of pond water, and under the lens
of his microscope saw a swarm of infusoria precipitate themselves to
the bottom of the vessel.
Animals in a state of Nature rarely or never eat to an injurious
excess; the apparent surfeits of wolves, serpents, vultures, etc.,
alternate with long fasts, and are digested as easily as a hunter,
after missing his breakfast and dinner, would be able to digest an
abundant supper. Instinct indicates even the most propitious time for
indulging in repletion. The noon heat of a midsummer day seems to
suspend the promptings of appetite; cows can be seen resting drowsily
at the foot of a shade-tree; deer doze in mountain glens and come out
to browse in moonlight; panthers cannot afford to miss an opportunity
to slay their game at noon, but are very apt to hide the carcass and
come back to devour it in the cool of the evening.
The products of fermentation are so repulsive to the higher animals
that only the distress of actual starvation would tempt a monkey to
touch a rotten apple or quench his thirst with acidulated grape-juice.
Poppy fields need no fence; tobacco leaves are in no danger of being
nibbled by browsing cattle. Nature seems to have had no occasion for
providing instinctive safeguards against such out-of-the-way things as
certain mineral poisons; yet the taste of arsenic, though not violently
repulsive (like that of the more common, and therefore more dangerous,
vegetable poisons), is certainly not attractive, but rather insipid,
and a short experience seems to supplement the defects of instinct in
that respect. Trappers know that poisoned baits after a while lose
their seductiveness, and old rats have been seen driving their young
from a dish of arsenic-poisoned gruel.
Certainly no animal would feel any natural inclination to seek arsenic
or alcohol for its own sake, and there is no reason to suppose that
man, in that respect, differs from every known species of his
fellow-creatures. Our clerical temperance lecturers rant about “the
lusts of the unregenerate heart,” the “weakness of the flesh,” the
“danger of yielding to the promptings of appetite,” as if Nature
herself would tempt us to our ruin, and the path of safety could be
learned only from preternatural revelation. But the truth is that to
the palate of a child, even the child of a habitual drunkard, the taste
of alcohol is as repulsive as that of turpentine or bitterwood. Tobacco
fumes and the stench of burning opium still nauseate the children of
the habitual smoker as they would have nauseated the children of the
patriarchs. The first cigar demonstrates the virulence of nicotine by
vertigo and sick headaches; the first glass of beer is rejected by the
revolt of the stomach; the fauces contract and writhe against the first
dram of brandy. Nature records her protest in the most unmistakable
language of instinct, and only the repeated and continued disregard of
that protest at last begets the abnormal craving of that poison-thirst
which clerical blasphemers ascribe to the promptings of our natural
appetites. They might as well make us believe in a natural passion for
dungeon air, because the prisoners of the Holy Inquisition at last lost
their love of liberty and came to prefer the stench of their
subterranean black-holes to the breezes of the free mountains.
The craving for hot spices, for strong meats, and such abominations as
fetid cheese and fermented cabbage have all to be artificially
acquired; and in regard to the selection of our proper food the
instincts of our young children could teach us more than a whole
library of ascetic twaddle. Not for the sake of “mortifying the flesh,”
but on the plain recommendation of the natural senses that prefer
palatable to disgusting food, the progeny of Adam could be guided in
the path of reform and learn to avoid forbidden fruit by the symptoms
of its forbidding taste.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
There is a tradition that the ancient Thessalians made it a rule that
the guests of their banquets must get drunk on pain of expulsion. To
let anyone remain sober, they argued, would not be just to the
befuddled majority, of whose condition he might be tempted to take all
sorts of advantage. If the evils of drunkenness were undeserved
afflictions, it would certainly be true that sobriety would give an
individual an almost unfair advantage over the rest of his fellow-men.
He would be an archer trying his skill against hoodwinked rivals, a
runner challenging the speed of shackled competitors. There is not a
mechanical or industrial avocation in which sobriety does not give a
man the advantage which health and freedom confer over crippling
disease. For the baneful effects of intemperance are by no means
limited to the moments of actual intoxication, but react on the
half-lucid intervals, and even on the after years of the reformed
toper. Temperance, in the widest sense, of abstinence from unfit food
and drink, would be the best gift which the fairies could bestow on a
favorite child, for the blessing of frugal habits includes almost all
other blessings whatever. Spontaneous gayety, the sunshine of the
unclouded soul, is dimmed by the influence of the first poison-habit,
and the regretful retrospects to the “lost paradise of childhood” are
founded chiefly on the contrast of poison-engendered distempers with
the moral and physical health of earlier years. Temperance prolongs
that sunshine to the evening of life. By temperance alone the demon of
life-weariness can be kept at bay in times of fiercest tribulation:
Undimmed eyes can more easily recognize the gleam of sunshine behind
the cloudy. The prisoners of the outlawed Circassian insurgents
admitted that, in spite of hunger, hardships, and constant danger,
their captors contrived to enjoy life better than their enemies in the
brandy-reeking abundance of their headquarters. The myth of the
Lotos-eaters described a nation of vegetarians who passed life so
pleasantly that visitors refused to leave them, and renounced their
native lands. The religion of Mohammed makes abstinence from
intoxicating drinks a chief duty of a true believer, and that law alone
has prevented the physical degeneration of his followers. With all
their mental sloth and the enervating influence of their harem life,
the Turks are still the finest representatives of physical manhood. At
the horse fairs of Bucharest I saw specimens of their broad-shouldered,
proud-eyed rustics, whose appearance contrasted strangely with that of
the sluggish boors and furtive traffickers of the neighboring natives.
After twelve hundred years of exhaustive wars, alternating with periods
of luxury and tempting wealth, the descendants of the Arabian
conquerors are still a hardy, long-lived race, physically far superior
to the rum-drinking foreigners of their coast towns. For more than six
hundred years the temperate Moriscos held their own in war and peace
against all nations of Christendom. Their Semitic descent gave them no
natural advantage over their Caucasian rivals; but they entered the
arena of life with clear eyes and unpalsied hearts, and in an age of
universal superstition made their country a garden of science and
industry. Their cities offered a refuge to the scholars and
philosophers of three continents, and in hundreds of pitched battles
their indomitable valor prevailed against the wine-inspired heroism of
their adversaries.
Frugality has cured diseases which defied all other remedies. For
thousands of reformed gluttons it has made life worth living, after the
shadows of misery already threatened to darken into the gloom of
approaching night. Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman of the sixteenth
century, had impaired his health by gastronomic excesses till his
physicians despaired of his life, when, as a last resort, he resolved
to try a complete change of diet. His father, his uncles, and two of
his brothers had all died before the attainment of their fiftieth year;
but Luigi determined to try conclusions with the demon of unnaturalism,
and at once reduced his daily allowance of meat to one-tenth of the
usual quantity, and his wine to a stint barely sufficient to flavor a
cup of Venetian cistern-water. After a month of his new regimen he
regained his appetite. After ten weeks he found himself able to take
long walks without fatigue, and could sleep without being awakened by
nightmare horrors. At the end of a year all the symptoms of chronic
indigestion had left him, and he resolved to make the plan of his cure
the rule of his life. That life was prolonged to a century—forty years
of racking disease followed by sixty years of unbroken health, undimmed
clearness of mind, unclouded content. Habitual abstinence from
unnatural food and drink saves the trials of constant self-control and
the alternative pangs of repentance. “Blessed are the pure, for they
can follow their inclinations with impunity.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The poison-habit, as we might call the craving for the stimulus of
unnatural diet, is the oldest vice, and in some of its forms has been
practiced by almost every nation known to history or tradition.
Thousands of years before Lot got drunk on home-made wine, the
ancestors of the Brahmans fuddled with soma-juice; Zoroaster enacts
laws against habitual intoxication; the art of turning grape-juice from
a blessing into a curse seems to have been known to the nations of
Iran, to the Parsees, and to the first agricultural colonists of the
lower Nile. Nunus, the Arabian Noah, is said to have planted vineyards
on the banks of the Orontes; the worship of Bacchus was introduced into
Asia Minor several centuries before the birth of Homer. The origin of
the opium habit antedates the earliest records of Chinese history; for
immemorial ages the Tartars have been addicted to the use of Koumis
(fermented mare’s milk), the Germanic nations to beer, the natives of
Siam to tea and sago-wine. Intoxication and the excessive use of animal
food were prevalent vices, especially in the larger cities, of pagan
Greece and Rome.
Yet the ancients sinned with their eyes half open. Their recognition of
dietetic abuses was expressed in the word frugality, which literally
meant subsistence on tree fruits—or, at least, vegetable products—in
distinction from the habitual use of flesh-food. The advantages of
temperate habits were never directly denied; the law of Pythagoras
enjoins total abstinence from wine and flesh, and the name of a
“Pythagorean” became almost a synonym of “philosopher.” In all but the
most depraved centuries of Imperial Rome, wine was forbidden to
children and women. The festival of the Bona Dea commemorated the fate
of a Roman matron who had yielded to the temptation of intoxicating
drink, and was slain by the hand of her stern husband. Lycurgus
recommends the plan of letting the pupils of the military
training-schools witness the bestial conduct of a drunken Helot, in
order to inspire them with an abhorrence of intoxication. The bias of
public opinion always respected the emulation of patriarchal frugality
and frowned upon the excesses of licentious patricians.
But the triumph of an anti-physical religion removed those safeguards.
Mistrust in the competence of our natural instincts formed the keystone
of the Galilean dogma. The importance of physical welfare was
systematically depreciated. The health-laws of the Mosaic code were
abrogated. The messiah of Antinaturalism sanctioned the use of
alcoholic drinks by his personal example—nay, by the association of
that practice with the rites of a religious sacrament. The habit of
purchasing mental exaltation—even of a fever-dream—at the expense of
the body, agreed perfectly with the tendencies of a Nature-despising
fanaticism, and during the long night of the Middle Ages monks and
priests vied in an unprecedented excess of alcoholic riots. Nearly
every one of the thick-sown convents from Greece to Portugal had a
vineyard and a wine cellar of its own. The monastery of Weltenburg on
the upper Danube operated the largest brewery of the German empire. For
centuries spiritual tyranny and spirituous license went hand in hand,
and as the church increased in wealth, gluttony was added to the
unnatural habits of the priesthood, and only the abject poverty of the
lower classes prevented intemperance from becoming a universal vice. As
it was, the followers of the Nature-despising messiah lost no
opportunity to drown their better instincts in alcohol. They could
plead the precedence of their moral exemplars, and vied in sowing the
seeds of bodily diseases which their system of ethics welcomed as
conducive to the welfare of a world-renouncing soul.
Among the slaves of the Scotch kirk-tyrants the long-continued
suppression of all healthier pastimes contributed its share to the
increase of intemperance. On the day when the laboring classes found
their only chance of leisure, outdoor sports were strictly prohibited.
Dancing was considered a heinous, and on the Sabbath almost an
unpardonable, sin. The tennis-halls were closed from Saturday night to
Monday morning. Bathing was sinful. Mountain excursions, strolls along
the beach, or in the open fields, were not permitted on the day of the
Lord. Dietetic excesses, however, escaped control, and thus became the
general outlet for the cruelly suppressed craving for a diversion from
the deadly monotony of drudgery and church-penance. For “Nature will
have her revenge, and when the most ordinary and harmless recreations
are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences
which no moralist would be willing to condone, ... and the strictest
observance of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations
was found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but
unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not
cheer” (Saturday Review, July 19, 1879). “Everyone,” says Lecky, “who
considers the world as it really exists, must have convinced himself
that in great towns public amusements of an exciting order are
absolutely necessary, and that to suppress them is simply to plunge an
immense portion of the population into the lowest depths of vice.”
Clerical despotism is still a potent ally of intemperance. In hundreds
of British and North American cities the dearth of better pastimes
drives our workingmen to the pot-house. They drink to get drunk, as the
only available means of escaping tedium and the consciousness of their
misery. Nature craves recreation, and the suppression of that instinct
has avenged itself by its perversion.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Dietetic abuses have contributed more to the progress of human
degeneration than all other causes taken together. Our infants are
sickened with drastic drugs. The growth of young children is stunted
with narcotic beverages; the suppression of healthier pastimes drives
our young men to the rum-shop; intemperance has become the Lethe in
which the victims of social abuses seek to drown their misery. The
curse of the poison-habit haunts us from the cradle to the grave, and
for millions of our fellow-men has made the burdens of life to outweigh
its blessings. There is a doubt if the “years” of Genesis should be
understood in the present meaning of the word; but historians and
biologists agree that the average longevity of our race has been
enormously reduced within the last twenty centuries, and intemperance
is the chief cause of that decrease. Our average stature has been
reduced even below that of the ancient natives of an enervating
climate, like that of the lower Nile, as proved by D’Arnaud’s
measurements of the Egyptian mummy-skeletons. On our own continent,
outdoor life in the struggle with the perils of the wilderness has
somewhat redeemed our loss of physical manhood; but what are the men of
modern Europe compared with their iron-fisted ancestors, the athletic
Greeks, the world-conquering Romans, the Scandinavian giants, the
heroic Visigoths? Like a building collapsing under the progress of a
devouring fire, the structure of the human body has shrunk under the
influence of the poison-habit; and there is no doubt that the moral
vigor of our race has undergone a corresponding impairment—appreciable
in spite of the recent revival of intellectual activity and the
constant increase of general information.
The tide is turning; the victims of anti-physical dogmas are awakening
to the significance of their delusion; the power of public opinion has
forced the dupes of the alcohol-brewing Galilean to join the crusade of
the temperance movement; diet-reform has become a chief problem of
civilization; but the upas-tree of the poison-habit is too deeply
rooted to be eradicated in a single generation, and the task of
redemption will be the work of centuries. As yet the probing of the
wound has only revealed the appalling extent of the canker-sore. The
statistics of the liquor traffic have established the fact that the
value of the resources wasted on the gratification of the poison-vice
far exceeds the aggregate amount of the yearly expenditure for
educational, charitable, and sanitary purposes—nay, that the abolition
of that traffic would save a sum sufficient for all reforms needed to
turn earth into a physical and social paradise. And yet that waste
expresses only the indirect and smaller part of the damage caused by
the curse of the poison-habit. The loss in health and happiness cannot
be estimated in coin; but if the sum thus expended in the purchase of
disease were devoted to the promotion of arson and robbery, the utmost
possible extent of the consequent mischief would probably fall short of
the present result. The stimulant habit in all its forms clouds the
sunshine of life like an all-pervading poison-vapor. Alcohol undermines
the stamina of manhood; narcotic drinks foster a complication of
nervous diseases; opium and tobacco impair the vigor of the cerebral
functions. The excessive use of animal food, too, avenges itself in all
sorts of moral and physical disorders. It inflames passions which no
prayer can quench. “Alas! what avails all theology against a diet of
bull-beef?” Father Smeth wrote from the Sioux missions; and the almost
exclusive use of flesh food has, indeed, afflicted our Indians with the
truculence of carnivorous beasts. The same cause has produced the same
effects in western Europe. The carnivorous saints of medieval Spain
delighted in matanzas and heretic-hunts, as their carnivorous ancestors
in the butcher sports of the circus, and their British contemporaries
in bear-baits and Tyburn spectacles.
E.—REFORM.
The consequences of intemperance have at all times provoked protests
against the more ruinous forms of the poison-habit, but the advance
from special to general principles is often amazingly slow; and even
now the cause of temperance is hampered by the shortsightedness of
reformers who hope to eradicate the Upas-tree by clipping and hacking
its more prominent branches. They would limit prohibition to the more
deadly stimulants, not dreaming that the fatal habit is sure to
reproduce its fruit from the smallest germs; that the poison-vice, in
fact, is infallibly progressive, ever tending to goad the morbid
craving of the toper to stronger and stronger poisons or to a constant
increase in the quantity of the wonted stimulant: from cider to brandy,
from laudanum to morphine, from tonic bitters to rum, from a glass of
wine to a dozen bottles, from beer and tobacco to the vilest tipples of
the dram-shop. “Principiis obsta” (Resist the beginnings) was a Latin
maxim of deep significance. The cumulative tendency of the stimulant
vice may be resisted, but only by constant vigilance, constant
self-denial, constant struggles with the revivals of a morbid
appetency, all of which might be saved by the total renunciation of all
abnormal stimulants whatever, for only in that sense is it true that
“abstinence is easier than temperance.”
We must accustom our boys to avoid the poison-vice as a loathsome
disease, rather than as a forbidden luxury which could ever be indulged
without paying the penalty of Nature in a distressing reaction, far
outweighing the pleasures of the morbid and momentary exaltation. We
must teach them that the artifice by which the toper hopes to cheat
Nature out of an access of abnormal enjoyment is under all
circumstances a losing game, which at last fails to produce, even for
the moment of the fever-stimulus, a glimpse of happiness at all
comparable to the unclouded sunshine of temperance.
But before we can hope to redeem the victims of the poison-vender, we
must learn to make virtue more attractive than vice. We must counteract
the attractions of the rum-shop by inviting reforming topers, not to
the whining conventicles of a Sabbath-school, but to temperance
gardens, resounding with music (dance music, if “sacred concerts”
should pall) and the jubilee of romping children, and shortening summer
days with free museums, picture galleries, swings, ball grounds, and
foot-race tracks. The gods of the future will contrive to outbid the
devil.
It would be unfair, though, to depreciate the services of the Christian
ministers who in a choice between dogma and reform have bravely sided
with Nature, and, defying the wrath both of spiritual and spirituous
poison-mongers, of rum-sellers and heretic-hunters, are trying their
utmost to undo the mischief of their antinatural creed, by frankly
admitting that a man can be defiled by “things that enter his mouth,”
and that the sacrament of eucharistic alcohol should be abandoned to
the rites of devil-worshipers.
But the religion which pretends to inculcate a peace-making spirit of
meekness has been strangely remiss in opposing the excessive use of a
diet which is clearly incompatible with the promotion of that virtue.
In Christians, as in Turks, Tartars, and North American Redskins, a
chiefly carnivorous diet engenders the instincts of carnivorous beasts,
and a Peace Congress celebrating its banquets with sixteen courses of
flesh food might as well treat a vigilance committee to sixteen courses
of opium. “Frugality” should again be promoted in the ancient sense of
the word; in a community of reformants temperance and vegetarianism
should go hand in hand. Or rather, the word “temperance” should be used
in the extended sense that would make it a synonym of Abstinence from
all kinds of unnatural food and drink; and Dr. Schrodt’s rule should
become the canon of every dietetic reform league. “Avoid,” he says,
“all drinks and stimulants repulsive to the palate of an unseduced
child, but also all comestibles that need artificial preparation to
make them palatable.” The first part of that rule would exclude opium,
tobacco, alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee, absinthe, fetid cheese, and
caustic spices. The second would abolish many kinds of animal food, but
sanction milk, butter, eggs, honey, and other “semi-animal” substances,
condemned by the extreme school of vegetarians. “From the egg to the
apple,” is an old Latin phrase which proves that the frugality of the
ancient Romans never went to such extremes. Milk, eggs, and vegetable
fats, in their combination with farinaceous dishes, might amply replace
the flesh food of the northern nations, and, considering the infinite
variety of fruits and vegetables known to modern horticulture, there
seems no reason why a vegetarian diet should necessarily be a
monotonous one. The Religion of Nature will require the renunciation of
several deep-rooted prejudices, but its path of salvation will in no
sense be a path of thorns.
CHAPTER V.
SKILL.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously
adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures
the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift.
The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision. The
young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper
building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or
distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour
after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as
well as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in
steering its way through the maze of a tangled forest.
Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such accomplishments by
long practice. Instead of driving them back to their nests, their
parents encourage their attempts at longer and longer flights, and seem
to know that occasional mishaps will prove a useful lesson for future
emergencies. The mother fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow
and sets her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best runner to
monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens practice mouse-catching by
playing with balls; puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels
play at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A
British naturalist, who had domesticated a young beaver, one day caught
his pet building a dam across the floor of his study. The little
engineer had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood,
etc., and piled them up to best advantage, placing the heavier volumes
in the bottom stratum and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out
the interspaces with letters and journals. Every now and then he would
“stand off” to scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to
mend a misarrangement here and there.
Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two
or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels,
or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of
breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a
plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are
too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal American boy
a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet copy of Doré’s
Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with
self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law which required the son
of a yeoman to practice archery for three hours a day was probably the
most popular statute of the British code. On new railroads, bridges,
etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open air, are generally
surrounded by crowds of young rustics, who forego the pleasures of
nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipulations of
a new handicraft. Even in after years the instinct of constructiveness
frequently breaks the shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates
have defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of tools and
passing whole days in the retirement of an amateur workshop. The
emperor Henry I. invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and
bird-traps. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his
own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred
watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the
construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter
of his empire.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The English word king, like Danish kong and German König, are derived
from können (practical knowledge), and the first ruler was the most
skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill, whether
in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness, established
the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many
respects a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme physical
dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in war, in the sports of
princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of
travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and on the
sea, as well as in smithies and workshops. Conscious skill and agility
form the basis of a kind of self-reliance which wealth can only
counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I once
overheard a controversy on the comparative value of protective weapons.
Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found
clever advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark of an old
sea-captain, who had faced danger in four different continents.
“There’s a use for all that, no doubt,” said he, “but, I tell you,
mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick
fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, depends to a large
degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling
being as unprofitable as the library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is
often only the outcome of such expertness, and in sudden emergencies
theories are shamed by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war
the issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the
superior constructiveness of an army that could bridge a river while
their opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of
Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a
plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the
Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turkish
engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased planks, as an
overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention of the chain
grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean from
Carthage to Rome.
Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of
mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work
gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft
even an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving
exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular
system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains
the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the
disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet Goethe, whose intuitions
of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the
opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical by-trade in
order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental as well as physical
debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of Nature which no
cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a school of practical
wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the English language happily
expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and
mechanics far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.
Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth could
dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best safeguard
against the chief bane of wealth: ennui, with its temptations to folly
and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the example of Carlo
Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his philanthropic life in
practical landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren
lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum
filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be
less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators,
and the benefits of his plan would extend to emergencies for which
fashionable accomplishments afford only a dubious safeguard. “A
mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques Rousseau, “is the best basis of
safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical scholarship may go
begging, where technical skill finds its immediate reward. A distressed
savant may recover his loss in the course of years; a skilful mechanic
need only enter the next workshop and show a sample of his handiwork.
‘Well, let’s see you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch
in.’”
Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against numberless
perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by keeping him at home
and guarding him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets that
her apron-strings cannot guide him through the perils of after years;
and a better plan was that of Cato, the statesman, warrior, and
philosopher, who, in the midst of his manifold duties, found time to
instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers,
in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be
permanently avoided.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the
direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect
tendency of that caste spirit which has for ages fostered the
antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient
Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children
of toil that a Sudra was not permitted to approach a priest without
ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The
temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers.
The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to
such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.
The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of
body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast
by constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and
occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical
creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular
work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the
military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce
respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of
the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers;
peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many
respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable
master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a
little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any
manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would
have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of
Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French
nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the
secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him?
You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The
manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of
employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a
chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a
foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an
incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the same
Ritter who would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had
no hesitation in eking out an income by highway robbery. The princes of
the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept
sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing
and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a
vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey
the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for
secular concerns.
That sort of other-worldliness still seems to bias our plans of
education. Colleges that would fear to lose prestige by devoting a few
minutes a week to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens of
hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical miracle-monger.
Mechanical mastership (after all, the basis of all science) is denied a
place among the honorable “faculties” of our high-schools. Fashionable
parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of a boy who should visit
joiner-shops and smithies, instead of following his aristocratic
friends to the club-house. They would bewail the profanation of his
social rank, if he should accept an invitation to impart his skill to
the pupils of a mechanical training-school; but would connive at the
mental prostitution of a young sneak who should try to reëstablish a
sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers
of a mythology-school.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Neglected development, either of physical or mental faculties, avenges
itself in ennui, modified, for the benefit of the poor, by the less
monotonous afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of
emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is
a wholly abnormal condition, as unknown to the children of the
wilderness, who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties, as to
the truly civilized man, who finds means to satisfy that craving.
Unemployed muscles, like idle talents, rebel against continued neglect
and goad the sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of vice,
and the father who thinks it a waste of money to invest a dollar in a
tool-box may have to spend hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and
gambling debts.
Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were rather rare in the
prime of the North American republic, when nearly every colonist was a
farmer, and every farm a polytechnicum of home-taught trades; but
European luxuries introduced European habits, and our cities now abound
with plutocrats who are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers
laid the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred the vices
faster than the refinements of wealth, and have become acquainted with
ennui—
We lack the word but have the thing;
and thousands who would fail to find relief on the classical
hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might imitate his landlord, who
practiced sharp-shooting with a medieval hunting-bow till he could
challenge the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison. In a
choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is, indeed, clearly
preferable to games of chance; but to that last resort of inanity the
traditional aversion to manual employments has actually driven
thousands of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never sunk to the
abject effeminacy of European cities, where physical apathy has become
a test of good breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments a
stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently, social prestige has to
be purchased at the price of practical helplessness, of dependence in
all mechanical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of
hirelings.
Life-endangering accident may now and then illustrate the disadvantages
of physical incapacity; a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that
the saving influence of a swimming-school might compare favorably with
that of the baptismal miracle tank; but the survivors will persist in
relying on the vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest
illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity avenges itself in
every waking hour, even of the wealthiest weakling, while the
guardian-spirit of Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to the
playground and follows them over mountains and seas.
E.—REFORM.
The growing impatience with the dead-language system of our monkish
school-plan will soon lead to a radical reform of college education,
and a fair portion of the time gained should be devoted to the culture
of mechanical arts. For boys in their teens the “instinct of
constructiveness” would still prove to retain enough of its native
energy to make the change a decidedly popular one, as demonstrated by
the success of the mechanical training schools that have attracted many
pupils who have to find the requisite leisure by stinting themselves in
their recreations. “Applied gymnastics” (riding, swimming, etc.) would
be still more popular, and greatly lessen the yearly list of accidents
from the neglect of such training.
The bias of fashion would soon be modified by the precedence of its
leaders, as in Prussia, where the royal family set a good example by
educating their princes (in addition to the inevitable military
training) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplishment (carpentry,
sculpture, bookbinding, etc.), the choice of handicraft being optional
with the pupil. No model residence should be deemed complete without a
polytechnic workshop, furnished with a panoply of apparatus for the
practice of all sorts of amateur chemical and mechanical pursuits—a
plan by which the Hungarian statesman-author, Maurus Jockar, has
banished the specter of ennui from his hospitable country seat. His
private hobby is Black Art, as he calls his experiments in recondite
chemistry, but any one of his guests is welcome to try his hand at
wood-carving, glass-painting, metallurgy, or any of the more primitive
crafts, for which the laboratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus.
Private taste might, of course, modify the details of that plan, and
even without regard to eventual results, its proximate benefits if once
known would alone insure its general adoption in the homes of the
ennui-stricken classes. The educational advantages of mechanical
training, though, can, indeed, hardly be overrated. A scholar with
nerveless arms and undextrous hands is as far from being a complete man
as a nimble savage with an undeveloped brain.
II.—MENTAL MAXIMS.
CHAPTER VI.
KNOWLEDGE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
In the arena of life animal instinct triumphs over the elemental forces
of Nature, as human intelligence triumphs over instinct, and the secret
of that superiority is knowledge. Skill is well-directed force.
Prudence is well-applied reason. The efficiency of that directing
faculty depends on experience, as we call the accumulation of
recollected facts. Knowledge is stored light, as helpful in the
narrowest as in the widest sphere of conscious activity, and the
instinctive appreciation of that advantage manifests itself in the
lowest species of vertebrate animals, nay, perhaps even in the winged
insects that swarm in from near and far to explore the mystery of a
flickering torch. Curiosity, rather than the supposed love of rhythm,
tempts the serpent to leave its den at the sound of the conjurer’s
flute. Dolphins are thus attracted by the din of a kettledrum,
river-fish by the glare of a moving light. Where deer abound, a
pitchwood fire, kindled in a moonless night, is sure to allure them
from all parts of the forest. Antelope hunters can entice their game
within rifle-shot by fastening a red kerchief to a bush and letting it
flutter in the breeze. When the first telegraph lines crossed the
plateau of the Rocky Mountains, herds of bighorn sheep were often seen
trotting along the singing wires as if anxious to ascertain the meaning
of the curious innovation. Every abnormal change in the features of a
primitive landscape—the erection of a lookout-tower, a clearing in the
midst of a primeval forest—attracts swarms of inquisitive birds, even
crows and shy hawks, who seem to recognize the advantage of
reconnoitering the topography of their hunting-grounds. In some of the
higher animals inquisitiveness becomes too marked to mistake its
motive, as when a troop of colts gathers about a new dog, or a pet
monkey pokes his head into a cellar-hole, and wears out his
finger-nails to ascertain the contents of a brass rattle.
For the intelligence of children, too, inquisitiveness is a pretty sure
test. Infants of ten months may be seen turning their eyes toward a new
piece of furniture in their nursery. Kindergarten pets of three years
have been known to pick up a gilded pebble from the gravel road and
call their teacher’s attention to the color of the abnormal specimen.
With a little encouragement that faculty of observation may develop
surprising results. The wife of a Mexican missionary of my
acquaintance, who had taken charge of an Indian orphan boy, and made a
point of answering every pertinent question of the bright-eyed
youngster, was one day surprised to hear him usher in a stranger and
invite him to a seat in the parlor. “How could you know it was not a
tramp?” she asked her little chamberlain after the visitor had left.
“Oh, I could tell by his clean finger-nails,” said Master Five-years,
“and also by his straight shoes. Tramps always get their heels
crooked!”
The shrewd remarks of boy naturalists and girl satirists often almost
confirm the opinion of Goethe that every child has the innate gifts of
genius, and that subsequent differences are only the result of more or
less propitious educational influences. And in spite of most
discouraging circumstances, the love of knowledge sometimes revives in
after years with the energy almost of a passionate instinct. On the
veranda of a new hotel in a railroad town of southern Texas, I once
noticed the expression of rapt interest on the face of a young hunter,
a lad of eighteen or nineteen, who here for the first time came in
contact with the representatives of a higher civilization and with
breathless attention drank in the conversation of two far-traveled
strangers. “If they would hire me for a dog-robber (a low menial), I
would do it for a dime a day,” he muttered, “just for the chance to
hear them talk.”
“But if they should take you to some smoky, crowded, big city?”
“I don’t care,” said he, with an oath, “I would let them lock me up in
a jail, if I could get an education like theirs.”
It would, indeed, be a mistake to suppose that the thirst for mental
development is the exclusive product of advanced culture. In the thinly
settled highlands of our western territories, miners and herders have
been known to travel ten miles a day over rough mountain roads to get
the rudiments of a school education. Missionaries who have mastered the
language of a barbarous tribe have more than once been followed by
converts whom the charm of general knowledge (far more than any special
theological motive) impelled to forsake the home of their fathers and
follow the white stranger to the land of his omniscient countrymen.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Knowledge is power, even in the contests of brutes. Superior
topographical knowledge enables the chasing wolf to intercept the
flight of his game; a well-chosen ambush makes the tiger the master of
his would-be slayer. Familiarity with the habits of enemies and rivals
decides success in the struggle for existence.
The advantage of superior knowledge is not limited to the prestige of
superlative scholarship, but asserts itself in the chances of every
competitive pursuit, so infallibly, indeed, as to justify Diderot’s
paradox that there is no need of any such thing as love of science for
its own sake, since all knowledge repays its acquisition by collateral
benefits. A farmer’s boy studying statute law, a lawyer collecting
market reports, will sooner or later find a chance to profit by their
study. The infinite interaction of human affairs connects the interests
of all branches of human knowledge, and makes the humblest handicraft
amenable to scientific improvement. Knowledge has never hindered the
successful pursuit of any manual vocation. Fifty years ago several
states of the American Union made it a penal offense to teach a slave
reading and writing; and if the planter valued his laborers in
proportion to their canine submissiveness, he was perhaps right that
“education spoils a nigger.” It qualified his servility, and by making
him a better man, made him perhaps a less available dog. But with that
single exception, ignorance is a disadvantage, and knowledge an
advantage, both to its possessor and his employers. In the solitudes of
the Australian bush-land, Frederick Gerstäcker found a herdsman reading
Aristophanes in the original. Neither the sheep nor their owners were
any the worse for that incidental accomplishment of the poor shepherd,
who found his study a sufficient source of pastime, while his comrades
were apt to drown their ennui in bad rum. James Cook, the greatest of
modern maritime discoverers, served his apprenticeship on board of a
coal-barge and employed his leisure in studying works on geography and
general history. The knowledge thus acquired might seem of no direct
advantage, but three years after, on board of the Eagle frigate, the
erudition of the brawny young sailor soon attracted the attention of
two intelligent officers whose recommendations proved the
stepping-stones of his successful career. Mohammed Baber Khan, the
emperor of the Mogul empire, owed his triumphs to his topographical
studies of a region which afterward became the battleground of his
great campaigns. Mohammed the Prophet gained the confidence of his
first employer by his familiarity with the commercial customs of
neighboring nations. Superior knowledge compels even an unwilling
recognition of its prestige. In the Middle Ages, when Moslems and
Trinitarians were at daggers drawn, Christian kings sent respectful
embassies to solicit the professional advice of Ibn Rushd (“Averroes”),
the Moorish physician. During the progress of the life-and-death
struggle of France and Great Britain, the discoveries of Sir Humphrey
Davy impelled the Academie Française to send their chief prize to
England. The benefits of great inventions are too international to
leave room for that envy that pursues the glory of military heroes, and
the triumphs of science have often united nations whom a unity of
religion had failed to reconcile.
C.—PERVERSION.
There is a tradition that a year before the conversion of Constantine
the son of the prophetess Sospitra was praying in the temple of
Serapis, when the spirit of his mother came over him and the veil of
the future was withdrawn. “Woe to our children!” he exclaimed, when he
awakened from his trance, “I see a cloud approaching, a great darkness
is going to spread over the face of the world.” That darkness proved a
thirteen hundred years’ eclipse of common sense and reason. There is a
doubt if the total destruction of all cities of the civilized world
could have struck a more cruel blow to Science than the dogma of
salvation by faith and abstinence from the pursuit of free inquiry. The
ethics of the world-renouncing fanatic condemned the love of secular
knowledge as they condemned the love of health and the pursuit of
physical prosperity, and the children of the next fifty generations
were systematically trained to despise the highest attribute of the
human spirit. Spiritual poverty became a test of moral worth;
philosophers and free inquirers were banished, while mental castrates
were fattened at the expense of toiling rustics and mechanics; science
was dreaded as an ally of skepticism, if not of the arch-fiend in
person; the suspicion of sorcery attached to the cultivation of almost
any intellectual pursuit, and the Emperor Justinian actually passed a
law for the “suppression of mathematicians.”
When the tyranny of the church reached the zenith of its power, natural
science became almost a tradition of the past. The pedants of the
convent schools divided their time between the forgery of miracle
legends and the elaboration of insane dogmas. The most extravagant
absurdities were propagated under the name of historical records;
medleys of nursery-tales and ghost-stories which the poorest village
school-teacher of pagan Rome would have rejected with disgust were
gravely discussed by so-called scholars. Buckle, in his “History of
Civilization,” quotes samples of such chronicles which might be
mistaken for products of satire, if abundant evidence of contemporary
writers did not prove them to have been the current staple of medieval
science.
When the gloom of the dreadful night was broken by the first gleam of
modern science, every torch-bearer was persecuted as an incendiary.
Astronomers were forced to recant their heresies on their bended knees.
Philosophers were caged like wild beasts. Religious skeptics were burnt
at the stake, as enemies of God and the human race. It was, indeed,
almost impossible to enunciate any scientific axiom that did not
conflict with the dogmas of the revelation-mongers who had for
centuries subordinated the evidence of their own senses to the rant of
epileptic monks and maniacs. And when the sun of Reason rose visibly
above the horizon of the intellectual world, its rays struggled
distorted through the dense mist of superstition which continued to
brood over the face of the earth, and was only partially dispersed even
by the storms of the Protestant revolt.
The light of modern science has brought its blessings only to the
habitants of the social highlands; the valley dwellers still grope
their way through the gloom of inveterate superstitions and prejudices,
and centuries may pass before the world has entirely emerged from the
shadow of the life-blighting cloud which the son of Sospitra recognized
in the rise of the Galilean delusion.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Of all the sins of Antinaturalism, the suppression of human reason has
brought down the curse of the direst retribution. It is the
unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. The actual extinction of
their local sunshine could hardly have entailed greater misery upon the
slaves of the Christian church. The victims of a permanent Egyptian
darkness might have taken refuge in the Goshen of their neighbors, in
the sunny garden-homes of the Parsees and Spanish Moriscos, but the
jealousy of the clerical tyrants closed every gate of escape, and for
thirteen centuries the nations of Christian Europe suffered all the
horrors of enforced ignorance and superstition. The history of that
dismal night is, indeed, the darkest page in the records of the human
race, and its horrors bind the duties of every sane survivor to a war
of extermination upon the dogmas of the insane fanatic whose priests
turned the paradise of southern Europe into a hell of misery and
barbarism.
The battle against the demon of darkness became a struggle for
existence, in which the powers of Nature at last prevailed, but for
millions of our fellow-men the day of deliverance has dawned too late;
spring-time and morning returned in vain for many a once fertile land
where the soil itself had lost its reproductive power, where the
outrages of Antinaturalism had turned gardens into deserts and freemen
into callous slaves. The storm that awakened the nations of northern
Europe from the dreams of their poison-fever could not break the spell
of a deeper slumber, and the moral desert of the Mediterranean
coast-lands remains to warn the nations of the future, as the bleaching
bones of a perished caravan remain to warn the traveler from the track
of the simoom.
The religion of Mohammed, with its health-laws and encouragements to
martial prowess, has produced no ruinous results of physical
degeneration, but the entire neglect of mental culture has not failed
to avenge itself in the loss of national prestige. For after the
northern nations of Christendom had broken the yoke of their spiritual
tyrants, the children of Islam remained faithful to the task-masters of
their less grievous bondage, but also to its total indifference to
secular science, and from that day the crescent of the prophet became a
waning moon.
E.—REFORM.
The experience of the Middle Ages has made the separation of church and
state the watchword of all true Liberals. But the divorce of church and
school is a duty of hardly less urgent importance. While many of our
best Freethinkers waste their time in hair-splitting metaphysics,
Catholic and Protestant Jesuits coöperate for a purpose which they have
shrewdly recognized as the main hope of obscurantism: The perversion of
primary education by its re-subjection to the control of the clergy.
The definite defeat of those intrigues should be considered the only
permanent guarantee against the revival of spiritual feudalism. A
perhaps less imminent, but hardly less serious, danger to the cause of
Science is the stealthy revival of mysticism. Under all sorts of
nomenclatural modifications, the specter-creed of the ancient Gnostics
is again rearing its head, and menacing reason by an appeal to the
hysterical and sensational proclivities of ignorance.
In the third place, there is no doubt that under the present
circumstances of educational limitations the adoption of female
suffrage would prove a death-blow to intellectual progress and re-doom
mankind to the tutelage of a clerical Inquisition; but rather than
perpetuate a twofold system of oppression, we should complete the work
of emancipation by admitting our sisters to all available social and
educational advantages, as well as to the privilege of the polls. From
the suffrage of educated women we have nothing to fear and much to
hope.
It has long been a mooted question if the progress of knowledge can be
promoted by arbitrary encouragement, such as prize offers and
sinecures, but the preponderance of logic seems on the side of those
who hold that science should be left to its normal rewards, and that
the proper sphere of legislation does not extend beyond the duty of
securing the full benefit of those rewards by the removal of absurd
disabilities and unfair discriminations in support of worm-eaten
dogmas. Reason may be safely left to fight its own battle, if the arms
of Un-reason cease to be strengthened by statutes which enable every
village ghost-monger to silence the exponents of science by an appeal
to medieval heretic-laws.
CHAPTER VII.
INDEPENDENCE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
If the scale of precedence in the mental development of our
fellow-creatures can be determined by any single test, that test is the
instinctive love of Independence. Many of the lower animals may
surprise us by constructive achievements that rival the products of
human science, but their instinct of freedom is quite imperfectly
developed. The caterpillar of the silk-moth will spin its satin
winter-gown in a box full of mulberry leaves as skilfully as in the
freedom of the tropical forests. In the hive of their captor a swarm of
wild bees will continue to build hexagons and store up honey as
diligently as in the rocks or hollow trees of the wilderness. Captive
river-fish will eat and pair a day after their transfer to a fishpond.
Birds, on the other hand, mourn their lost liberty for weeks. During
the first half-month of its captivity, a caged hawk rarely accepts any
food; sea-birds and eagles starve with a persistence as if they were
thus trying to end an affliction from which they see no other way of
escape. Wild cows can be domesticated in a month; wild elephants hardly
in a year. Several species of the larger carnivora can be trained only
if caught in their cub-hood, as in after years they become almost
wholly untamable. The lower varieties of quadrumana, the Brazilian
capuchin monkeys and East Indian macaques, seem almost to invite
capture by the frequency of their visits to the neighborhood of human
dwellings, while the apes proper are, without any exception, the shyest
creatures of the virgin woods. The gorilla is so rarely seen in the
vicinity of human settlements that its very existence was long
considered doubtful. Sir Stamford Raffles asserts that at the distant
sound of an ax the orang of Sumatra at once abandons its favorite
haunts in the coast jungles. On the west coast of Borneo a large orang
was once surprised by the crew of an English trading-vessel, but fought
with a desperation that obliged its would-be captors to riddle it with
rifle-balls, though they knew that a living specimen of that size would
be worth its weight in silver.
That same resolution in defense of their liberties has always
distinguished the nobler from the baser tribes of the human race. The
natives of the Gambia Valley have no hesitation in selling their
relatives to the Portuguese slave-traders, while the liberation of a
single countryman (whom the enemy had determined to hold as a hostage)
impelled the Circassian highlanders to risk their lives in a series of
desperate assaults upon the ramparts of a Russian frontier post. The
hope of covering the retreat of their fleeing wives and children
inspired the heroes of Thermopylæ to make a stand against
six-thousandfold odds. The crimps of the Christian church-despots found
no difficulty in foisting their yoke upon the former vassals of the
Roman empire, but when they attempted to cross the border of the Saxon
Landmark, the kidnappers were slain like rabid wolves; and when the
neighboring ruffian-counts, and at last Charlemagne in person, marched
to the support of the clerical slave-hunters, they met with a
resistance the record of which will forever remain the proudest page in
the chronicle of the Germanic races. Cornfields were burnt, villages
were leveled with the ground; for hundreds of miles the means of human
subsistence were utterly destroyed; but the council of the Saxon
chieftains refused to submit, and when the homes of their forefathers
were devastated, they carried their children to the inaccessible wilds
of the Harz highlands, where they grimly welcomed the aid of the winter
snows, and defied frost and starvation, rather than crawl to cross (zu
Kreuze kriechen), as their vernacular stigmatized the cowardice of
their crucifix-kissing neighbors. And when the Frankish autocrat had
shackled their land with a chain of forts, they thrice rebelled with
persistent disregard of consequences; nay, after the loss of the last
murderous battle, the prisoners of war refused to accept the ultimatum
of the conqueror, and rather than crawl to cross four thousand of their
captive noblemen mounted the scaffold of the executioner on the
market-square of Quedlinburg. The bodies of the heroes were thrown to
the birds of the wilderness; but their deathless spirits revived in the
philippics of Martin Luther and the battle-shout of Lützen and
Oudenaarde, and will yet ride the storm destined to hurl the last cross
from the temples of the Germanic nations.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Since the dawn of history the lands of freedom have produced fruits and
flowers that refused to thrive on any other soil. For several centuries
civilization was confined to a small country of republics: Attic and
Theban Greece. “Study the wonders of that age,” says Byron to his
friend Trelawney, “and compare them with the best ever done under
masters.” Switzerland, in spite of its rocky soil, has for centuries
been the happiest, as well as the freest, country of Europe. The
prosperity of the United States of America, since the establishment of
their independence, stands unparalleled in the history of the last
eighteen hundred years; and, moreover, the degree of that prosperity
has been locally proportioned to the degree of social freedom, and has
begun to become general only since the general abolition of slavery.
Freedom blesses the poorest soil, as despotism blights the most
fertile, and it is only an apparent exception from that rule that Italy
continued to flourish during the first two centuries of the empire. The
change in the form of government was at first nominal, rather than
real, and under the rule of Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and the
Antonines, Rome enjoyed more real liberty than many a so-called
republic of modern times. When despotism became a systematic and
chronic actuality, the sun of fortune was soon eclipsed, and the social
climate became as unfavorable to art and literature as to valor and
patriotism.
Personal independence is a not less essential condition of individual
happiness. Bondage in any form, and of silken or gilded, as well as of
iron, fetters, is incompatible with the development of the highest
mental and moral faculties. The genius of Poland and modern Italy has
produced its best fruit in exile. The progress of modern civilization
dates only from the time when knowledge once more flourished in a
Republic of Letters; and for a thousand years the monastery system of
medieval literature produced hardly a single work of genius. Within the
period of the last three or four generations the sun of freedom has
ripened better and more abundant fruit in any single decade than the
dungeon-air of despotism during a series of centuries. All foreign
travelers agree in admiring (or condemning) the early mental
development of American children, who have a chance to exercise their
intellectual faculties in an area untrammeled by the barriers of caste
divisions and social restraints. They may yield to the pupils of the
best European colleges in special branches of scholarship, but in
common sense, general intelligence, general information, in
self-respect, in practical versatility and self-dependence, an American
boy of twelve is, as a rule, more than a match for a
continental-European boy of sixteen; and the same holds good of the
average intelligence and self-dependence of our country population.
With the rarest exceptions the political economists of our Southern
states agree that the agricultural negro as a freeman is a more
valuable laborer than as a slave, and that emancipation, in the long
run, has benefited the planter as well as his serf. I venture even to
add the verdict of Professor Hagenbeck, the founder of the great
zoölogical supply depot, that menagerie-trainers of the least despotic
methods are the most successful. Turf-men know that the best horses do
not come from the unequaled perennial pastures of the lower Danube, but
from England and Araby, where pet colts enjoy almost the freedom of a
pet child.
C.—PERVERSION.
The ethics of Anti-naturalism include the Buddhistic doctrine of
self-abasement, as an indispensable condition of salvation. That
salvation meant extinction, the utter renunciation of earthly hopes and
desires, the mortification of all natural instincts, including the
instinct of freedom. Abject submission to injustice, the subordination
of reason to dogma, the sinfulness of rebellion against the “powers
that be,” were inculcated with a zeal that made the church an
invaluable ally of despotism. For centuries a scepter combining the
form of a cross and a bludgeon was the significant emblem of tyranny.
With the aid, nay, in the name, of the Christian hierarchy, the despots
of the Middle Ages elaborated a system of subordination of personal
freedom to autocratic caprices, which, by comparison, makes the tyranny
of the Cæsars a model of liberalism. Every important function of social
and domestic life was subjected to the control of arbitrary
functionaries, armed with irresponsible power or with a system of
oppressive penal by-laws. Censors suppressed every symptom of visible
or audible protest. Every school was a prison, every judgment-seat a
star-chamber. Peasants and mechanics had no voice in the councils of
their rulers. The merit of official employees was measured by the
degree of their flunkeyism. But the ne-plus-ultras of physical and
moral despotism were combined in the slavery of the monastic convents.
The attempt of reviving the outrages which abbots for centuries
practiced on the unfortunates whom a rash vow (or often the mandate of
a bigoted parent) had submitted to their power, would certainly expose
the manager of a modern convent to the risk of being mobbed and torn
limb from limb. Novices were subjected to all sorts of wanton tortures
and arbitrary deprivation of his scant privileges; they were compelled
to perform shameful and ridiculous acts of self-abasement, all merely
to “break their worldly spirit,” i.e., crush out the last vestige of
self-respect and life-love, in order to prepare them for the
consolations of other-worldliness. The moral emasculation of the human
race seems, indeed, to have been the main purpose of the educational
policy which the priests of the Nature-hating Galilean pursued wherever
the union of Church and State put children and devotees at the mercy of
their dogmatists.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Voluntary slavery means voluntary renunciation of the chief privilege
of human reason: the privilege of self-control. The spendthrift divests
himself of external advantages; the miser yields up his life-blood for
gold; but he who surrenders his personal liberty has sold his soul, as
well as his body. Bondage circumscribes every sphere of activity.
Political despotism impedes the progress of industry as galling fetters
impede the circulation of the blood. Enterprising autocrats of the
Frederic and Peter type have as utterly failed in the attempt of
enforcing a flourishing state of commerce, as they would have failed in
the attempt of enforcing the growth of a stunted tree by the tension of
iron chains. In free America a voluntary pledge of abstinence has
accomplished what in medieval Europe the most Draconic temperance and
anti-tobacco laws failed to achieve.
The educational despotism of moral pedants has ever defeated its own
purpose, and succeeded only in turning frank, merry-souled children
into hypocrites and sneaks. The idea that a barbarous system of
military discipline could develop model warriors has been refuted on
hundreds of battle-fields, where the machine-soldiers of despotic kings
were routed by the onset of enthusiastic patriots, half-trained,
perhaps, and ill-armed, but assembled by an enlistment of souls as well
as of bodies. The unparalleled intellectual barrenness of the Middle
Ages was well explained by the indictment of a modern English poet.
“The bondage of the Christian doctrine,” says Percy Shelley, “is fatal
to the development of originality and genius.” The curse of mediocrity
has, indeed, for ages rested upon every literary product devoted to the
promotion of clerical interests. The Muses refuse to assemble on
Golgotha. Pegasus declines to be yoked with the ass of the Galilean
ascetic. Outspoken skepticism is almost as rare as true genius, and it
is not possible to mistake the significance of the fact that the great
poets and philosophers of the last seven generations were, almost
without an exception, persistent and outspoken skeptics. Rousseau,
Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Holbach, Leibnitz, Lessing, Kant,
Fichte, Hegel, Schiller, Heine, Schopenhauer, Humboldt, Pope, Hume,
Byron, Shelley, Keats, Gibbon, Buckle, and Darwin have all inscribed
their names in the temple o! Liberalism; and Wolfgang Goethe, the
primate of European literature, was at once the most consistent and the
most anti-Christian of modern thinkers. “His personal appearance,” says
Heinrich Heine, “was as harmonious as his mind. A proudly erect body,
never yet bent by Christian worm-humility; classic features, never
distorted by Christian contrition; eyes that had never been dimmed by
Christian sinner-tears or the apathy of monkish resignation.”
That resignation was for centuries enforced as the first of moral
duties; but Nature has had her revenge, and even the fallen hierarchy
would hesitate to recover the loss of their prestige by a return to the
moral desert which for ages marked the empire of a mind-enslaving
dogma.
E.—REFORM.
Not all slaves can be freed by breaking their shackles; the habit of
servitude may become a hereditary vice, too inveterate for immediate
remedies. The pupils of Freedom’s school may be required to unlearn, as
well as to learn, many lessons; the temples of the future will have to
remove several aphoristic tablets to make room for such mottoes as
“Self-Reliance,” “Liberty,” “Independence.” Victor Jacquemont tells a
memorable story of a Hindoo village, almost depopulated by a famine
caused by the depredations of sacred monkeys, that made constant raids
on the fields and gardens of the superstitious peasants, who would see
their children starve to death rather than lift a hand against the
long-tailed saints. At last the British stadtholder saw a way to
relieve their distress. He called a meeting of their sirdars and
offered them free transportation to a monkeyless island of the Malay
archipelago. Learning that the land of the proposed colony was fertile
and thinly settled, the survivors accepted the proposal with tears of
gratitude; but when the band of gaunt refugees embarked at the mouth of
the Hooghly, the stadtholder’s agent was grieved to learn that their
cargo of household goods included a large cageful of sacred monkeys.
“They are beyond human help,” says the official memorandum, “and their
children can be redeemed only by curing them of the superstition that
has ruined their monkey-ridden ancestors.”
At the end of the fifteenth century, when southern Europe was in danger
of a similar fate from the rapacity of esurient priests and monks,
Providence, by means of an agent called Christoval Columbus, offered
the victims the chance of a free land of refuge; but when the host of
emigrants embarked at the harbor of Palos, philosophers must have been
grieved to perceive that their cargo of household-pets comprised a
large assortment of ecclesiastics. “They are beyond human help,”
Experience might sigh in the words of the British commissioner, “and
their children can be redeemed only by curing them of the superstition
that has proved the ruin of their priest-ridden ancestors.”
In regions of our continent where colonists might live as independent
as the birds of their primeval forests, bondage has been imported in
the form of an intriguing hierarchy, working its restless bellows to
forge the chains of their pupils—of the rising generation, who as yet
seem to hesitate at the way-fork of Feudalism and Reform. A timely word
may decide their choice, and, by all the remaining hopes of Earth and
Mankind! that word shall not remain unspoken.
CHAPTER VIII.
PRUDENCE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The first germs of animal life have been traced to the soil of the
tropics, and in the abundance of a perennial summer the instincts of
pleasure and pain may long have sufficed for the protection of mere
existence. But when the progress of organic development advanced toward
the latitude of the winter-lands, the vicissitudes of the struggle for
existence gradually evolved a third instinct: The faculty of
anticipating the menace of evil and providing the means of defense. The
word Prudence is derived from a verb which literally means fore-seeing,
and that faculty of Foresight manifests itself already in that curious
thrift which enables several species of insects to survive the long
winter of the higher latitudes. Hibernating mammals show a similar
sagacity in the selection of their winter quarters. Squirrels and
marmots gather armfuls of dry moss; bears excavate a den under the
shelter of a fallen tree; and it has been noticed that cave-loving bats
generally select a cavern on the south side of a mountain or rock.
Beavers anticipate floods by elaborate dams. Several species of birds
baffle the attacks of their enemies by fastening a bag-shaped nest to
the extremity of a projecting branch. Foxes, minks, raccoons, and other
carnivora generally undertake their forages during the darkest hour of
the night. Prowling wolves carefully avoid the neighborhood of human
dwellings and have been known to leap a hundred fences rather than
cross or approach a highway.
Young birds, clamoring for food, suddenly become silent at the approach
of a hunter; and Dr. Moffat noticed with surprise that a similar
instinct seemed to influence the nurslings of the Griqua Hottentots.
Ten or twelve of them, deposited by their mothers in the shade of a
tree, all clawing each other and crowing or bawling at the top of their
voices, would abruptly turn silent at the approach of a stranger, and
huddle together behind the roots of the tree—babies of ten months as
quietly cowering and as cautiously peeping as their elders of two or
three years. Young savages, and often the children of our rustics, show
an extreme caution in accepting an offer of unknown delicacies. I have
seen a toddling farmer’s boy smelling and nibbling an orange for hours
before yielding to the temptation of its prepossessing appearance. Only
the distress of protracted starvation will induce the Esquimaux to
touch their winter stores before the end of the hunting season; and the
supposed improvidence of savages is often due to the influence of a
hereditary disposition once justified by the abundance which their
forefathers enjoyed for ages before the advent of their Caucasian
despoilers.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Civilization has partially healed the wounds of that Millennium of
Madness called the Rule of the Cross, and of all the insanities of the
Middle Ages the Improvidence Dogma has perhaps been most effectually
eradicated from the mental constitution—at least, of the
North-Caucasian nations. Instead of relying on the efficacy of prayers
and ceremonies, the dupes of the Galilean miracle-monger at last
returned to the pagan plan of self-help, and it would not be too much
to say that the progress thus achieved in the course of the last
fourteen decades far exceeds that of the preceding fourteen centuries.
Earth has once more become a fit dwelling-place for her noblest
children. Pestilential swamps have been drained. Domestic hotbeds of
disease have been expurgated. Airy, weather-proof buildings have taken
the place of the reeking hovels that housed the laborers of the Middle
Ages. Farmers no longer live from hand to mouth. The price of the
necessities and many luxuries of life has been brought within the
resources of the humblest mechanic. Affluence is no longer confined to
the palaces of kings. There is no doubt that the cottage of the average
modern city tradesman contains more comforts than could be found in the
castle of a medieval nobleman. Prudence, in the sense of economic
foresight, has become almost a second nature with the industrial
classes of the higher latitudes, and the benefits of such habits can be
best appreciated by comparing the homes of the thrifty
Northlanders—Scotch and Yankees—with those of the Spanish-American
priest-dupes: here deserts tilled into gardens, there gardens wasted
into deserts. In natural resources, South America, for instance, excels
New England as New England excels the snow-wastes of Hudson’s Bay
Territory; yet industrial statistics demonstrate the fact that the
financial resources of Massachusetts alone not only equal but far
surpass those of the entire Brazilian empire.
The contrast between Prussia and Spain is not less striking, and that
climatic causes are insufficient to explain that contrast is proved by
the curious fact that within less than five centuries Spain and North
Germany have exchanged places. Two hundred years before the conquest of
Granada the fields of Moorish Spain had been brought to a degree of
productiveness never surpassed in the most favored regions of our own
continent, while Catholic Prussia was a bleak heather. Since the
expulsion of the Moors from Spain, and the monks from northern Germany,
Prussia has become a garden and Spain a desert; the contrasting results
of prudence and superstition. While the Prussians were at work the
Spaniards were whining to their saints, or embroidering petticoats for
an image of the holy Virgin. While the countrymen of Humboldt studied
chemistry, physiology, and rational agriculture, the countrymen of
Loyola conned oriental ghost stories; while the former placed their
trust in the promises of nature, the latter trusted in the promises of
the New Testament. Prudence, rather than military prowess, has
transferred the hegemony of Europe from the Ebro to the Elbe, and
prudence alone has smoothened even the path of exile which ill-fated
Israel has pursued now for more than a thousand years. For, with all
the Spiritualistic tendency of their ethics, the children of Jacob have
long ceased to deal in miracles, and train their children in lessons of
secular realism which effectually counteract the influence of their
school-training in the lessons of the past, and as a result famine has
been banished from the tents of the exiles. Like the Corsicans and the
prudent Scots, they rarely marry before the acquisition of a
competency, but the tendency of that habit does not prevent their
numerical increase. Their children do not perish in squalor and hunger;
their patriarchs do not burden our alms-houses.
C.—PERVERSION.
There is a story of an enterprising Italian who increased the patronage
of an unpopular mountain resort by effecting an inundation of the
lowlands; and if the apostles of other-worldliness had tried to enhance
the attractions of their hereafter on the same plan, they could
certainly not have adopted a more effective method for depreciating the
value of temporal existence. The vanity of work, of thrift, of economy,
and the superior merit of reliance on the aid of preternatural
agencies, were a favorite text of the Galilean messiah. “Take no
thought of the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things
of itself.” “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? what shall we
drink? or wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these do the
gentiles seek.” “Ask and it shall be given you.”
Secular foresight was depreciated even in the form of a prudent care
for the preservation of physical health; the selection of clean in
preference to unclean food was denounced as a relic of worldliness; and
in mitigating the consequences of such insults to nature, prayer and
mystic ceremonies were recommended as superior to secular remedies. “If
any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church,
and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the
Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall
raise him up.” “And when he had called unto him his twelve disciples,
he gave them power against unclean spirits to cast them out, and to
heal all manner of disease.”
If such instructions had been followed to the letter, the human race
would have perished in a hell of madness and disease. As it was, a
thousand years’ purgatory of half insanity cured the world of its
delusion; and the sinners against the laws of common sense escaped with
the penalty of a millennium of barbarism, a barbarism which, in the
most orthodox countries of the fourteenth century, had sunk deep below
the lowest ebb of pagan savagery. The untutored hunters of the primeval
German forest were at least left to the resources of their animal
instincts; they were illiterate, but manly and generous, braving
danger, and prizing health and liberty above all earthly blessings.
Their children were dragged off to the bondage of the Christian
convents and doomed to all the misery of physical restraint, not for
the sake of their intellectual culture, not with a view of purchasing
the comforts of after years by temporal self-denial, but to educate
them in habits of physical apathy and supine reliance on the aid of
interposing saints—a habit which at last revenged itself by its
transfer to the principles of ethics, and encouraged malefactors to
trust their eternal welfare to the same expedient to which indolence
had been taught to confide its temporal interests. Where was the need
of rectitude if iniquity could be compromised by prayer? Where was the
need of industry if its fruits could be obtained by faith? Where was
the need of sanitary precautions if the consequences of their neglect
could be averted by ceremonies?
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The consequences of that dogma refuted its claims by lessons which
mankind is not apt to forget for the next hundred generations. From the
day when the doctrine of Antinaturalism succeeded in superseding the
lingering influence of pagan philosophy, progressive industry waned,
and at last almost ceased to supply even a reduced demand; commerce
lingered, and the sources of subsistence were wholly confined to the
produce of a more and more impoverished soil. With the exception of
(still half pagan) Italy, not one of the many once prosperous countries
of Christian Europe had anything like a profitable export trade. On the
international markets of the Byzantine empire the products of skilled
labor—fine clothes, fine fruits, perfume, and jewelry—were sold by
oriental merchants, while the Christian buyers had little to offer in
exchange but the spontaneous products of Nature: timber, salt, amber,
and perhaps hides and wool. Medical science had become such a medley of
vagaries and barbarisms that even the princes of Christendom could not
boast of a competent family physician, and in critical cases had to
trust their lives to the skill of Moorish or Persian doctors. Abderaman
el Hakim, a king of Moorish Spain, had so many applications for the
services of his court-doctor that he often jestingly called him the
“Savior of Christian Europe.” The prevalence of the militant type
should certainly have encouraged the manufacture of warlike implements;
yet not one of the twelve heavy-armed countries of Trinitarian Europe
had preserved the art of tempering a first-class sword, and proof-steel
had to be imported from Damascus. The traditions of architecture were
limited to the fantastic elaboration of religious edifices; peasants
dwelt in hovels, and citizens in dingy stone prisons, crowded into
crooked and cobble-paved alleys.
The unspeakable filth of such alleys produced epidemics that almost
depopulated the most orthodox countries of medieval Europe. Under the
stimulus of clerical theories, those epidemics in their turn produced
outbreaks of fanatical superstition, which in pagan Rome would
certainly have been ascribed to the influence of a contagious mental
disease. Diseases, according to a doctrine which it was deemed
blasphemy to doubt, could be averted by prayer and self-humiliation. In
spite of a diligent application of such prophylactics, diseases of the
most virulent kind became more prevalent. The logical inference seemed
that prayer had not been fervent and self-abasement not abject enough.
Hordes of religious maniacs roamed the streets of the plague-stricken
cities, howling like hyenas and lacerating their bodies in a manner too
shocking to describe. After exhausting the available means of
subsistence, the blood-smeared, wretches would invade the open country,
and by frantic appeals frighten thousands of peasants into joining
their ranks, and in carrying the seeds of mental and physical contagion
to a neighboring country. In Germany and Holland the total number of
“Flagellants” were at one time estimated at three hundred and fifty
thousand; on another occasion at more than half a million. If the
disease had exhausted its fury, the self-torturers would claim the
reward of their services by falling like hungry wolves upon the homes
of the sane survivors. If the plague refused to abate, the leading
fanatics would ascribe the failure to their followers’ want of zeal,
and enforce their theory by an indiscriminate application of a rawhide
knout, till the dispute was referred to the arbitrament of cold steel,
and the ranks of the howling maniacs were thinned by mutual slaughter.
E.—REWARDS.
The world has trusted in the doctrine of miracle-mongers till
skepticism became a condition of self-preservation, and the benefits of
open revolt are now conspicuous enough to impress even the
non-insurrected slaves of the church. With all their hereditary bias of
prejudice the victims of the miracle dogma cannot help contrasting
their lot with that of the industrial skeptic. They cannot help seeing
self-reliant science succeeds where prayer-relying orthodoxy fails. The
prosperity of Protestantism, its physical, intellectual, political, and
financial superiority to Conservatism, with the aid of all its saints,
are facts too glaringly evident to ignore their significance, and our
ethical text-books might as well plainly admit that this universe of
ours is governed by uniform laws and not by the caprice of ghosts—at
all events not of ghosts that can be influenced by rant and ceremonies.
Whatever may be the established system of other worlds, in this planet
of ours Nature has not trusted our welfare to the whims of tricksy
spooks, but has endowed our own minds with the faculty of ascertaining
and improving the conditions of that welfare; and the time cannot come
too soon when well-directed labor shall be recognized as the only
prayer ever answered to the inhabitants of this earth.
The philosophic author of the “History of Morals” remarks that the
medieval miracle-creed still lurks in the popular explanation of the
more occult phenomena. While the natural sequence of cause and effect
is, for instance, freely admitted in such plain cases as the stability
of a well-built house and the collapse of a rickety structure, the
phenomena of health and disease, of atmospheric changes or of the
(apparent) caprices of fortune in war or games of chance are still
ascribed to the interference of preternatural agencies. That bias is
undoubtedly at the bottom of the still prevalent mania for hazardous
speculation and the reckless disregard of the laws governing the
condition of our physical health.
Unconfessed, and perhaps unknown, to themselves the grandchildren of
orthodox parents are still influenced by the hope that in such cases
the event of an imprudent venture might be modified by the interceding
favor of “providence.”
Secularism should teach its converts that the most complex as well as
the simplest effect is the necessary consequence of a natural cause;
that the “power behind phenomena” acts by consistent laws, and that the
study and practical application of those laws is the only way to bias
the favor of fortune.
“Pray and you shall receive,” says Superstition. “Sow if you would
reap,” says Science. The Religion of Nature will teach every man to
answer his own prayers, and Prudence will be the Providence of the
Future.
CHAPTER IX.
PERSEVERANCE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
In the course of evolution from brute to man some of our organs have
been highly developed by constant use, while others have been stunted
by habitual disuse. In special adaptations of the sense of touch and
sight, for instance, man surpasses all his fellow-creatures, most of
whom, in turn, surpass him in the acuteness of their olfactory organs.
An analogous result seems to have been produced by the exercise or
neglect of certain mental faculties and dispositions. The instinct of
enterprise, for instance, has been developed from rather feeble germs
of the animal soul, while the instinct of perseverance appears to have
lost something of its pristine energy. The African termite ant rears
structures which, in proportion to the size of the builders, surpass
the pyramids as a mountain surpasses the monuments of the
mound-builders. By the persistent coöperation of countless generations
the tiny architect of the coral reefs has girt a continent with a
rampart of sea-walls. The prairie wolf will follow a trail for half a
week. The teeth of a mouse are thinner and more brittle than a darning
needle, yet by dint of perseverance gnawing mice manage to perforate
the stoutest planks. Captive prairie dogs have been known to tunnel
their way through forty feet of compact loam.
An instinct, which one might be tempted to call a love of perseverance
for its own sake, seems sometimes to influence the actions of young
children. There are boys whose energies seem to be roused by the
resistance of inanimate things. I have seen lads of eight or nine years
hew away for hours at knotty logs which even a veteran woodcutter would
have been pardoned for flinging aside. There are school boys, not
otherwise distinguished for love of books, who will forego their recess
sports to puzzle out an arithmetical problem of special intricacy.
Our desultory mode of education hardly tends to encourage that
disposition which, nevertheless, is now and then apt to develop into a
permanent character trait. There are young men who will act out a
self-determined programme of study or business with persistent
disregard of temporary hardships, and pursue even minor details of
their plan with a resolution only strengthened by difficulties. The
moral ideals of antiquity seem to have been more favorable to the
development of that type of character, which also manifests itself in
the national policy of several ancient republics, and the inflexible
consistency of their legal institutions.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The advantages of perseverance are not too readily admitted by the
numberless victims of that facile disposition that loves to ascribe its
foibles to the “versatility of genius,” or a high-minded “aversion to
pedantic routine;” yet now, as in the days of yore, life reserves its
best rewards for the most persistent competitors. Singleness of
purpose, like a sharp wedge, forces its way through obstacles that
resist many-sided endeavors. The versatile poets and philosophers of
Athens have wreathed her memory with unrivaled laurels, yet in the
affairs of practical life her merchants were out-traded, her
politicians out-witted, and her generals beaten by men whose nations
had steadfastly followed a narrower but consistent policy. “Aut non
tentaris aut perfice,” “either try not, or persevere,” was a Roman
proverb that made Rome the mistress of three continents. In the Middle
Ages the dynasty of the Abbassides, as in modern times the house of the
Hohenzollern, attained supremacy by persistent adherence to an
established system of political tactics. Even questionable enterprises
have thus been crowned with triumph, as the ambitions of the Roman
pontiffs, and the projects of Ignatius Loyola. The chronicles of war,
of industry, and of commerce abound with analogous lessons. Patient
perseverance succeeds where fitful vehemence fails. In countless
battles the steadiness of British and North German troops has prevailed
against the enthusiasm of their bravest opponents. The quiet
perseverance of British colonists has prevailed against the bustling
activity of their Gallic rivals, on the Mississippi and St. Lawrence,
as well as on the Ganges and Indus. Steady-going business firms,
consistently-edited journals, hold their own, and ultimately absorb
their vacillating competitors. Dr. Winship, the Boston Hercules, held
that the chances of an athlete “depend on doggedness of purpose far
more than on hereditary physique.” Even the apparent caprices of
Fortune are biased by the habit of perseverance. “In the Stanislaus
mining-camp,” says Frederic Gerstaecker, “we had a number of experts
who seemed to find gold by a sort of sixth sense, and came across
‘indications’ wherever they stirred the gravel of the rocky ravines. We
called them ‘prospectors,’ and the brilliancy of their prospects was,
indeed, demonstrated by daily proofs. But at the first frown of Fortune
they would get discouraged, and remove their exploring outfit to
another ravine. Most of the actual work was done by the ‘squatters,’ as
we called the steady diggers, who would take up an abandoned claim and
stick to it for weeks. Bragging was not their forte, but at the end of
the season the squatter could squat down on a sackful of nuggets, while
the prospector had nothing but prospects.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The ambition of the ancients was encouraged by the conviction that life
is worth living, and that all its social and intellectual summits can
be reached by the persistent pursuit of a well-chosen road. But the
basis of that confidence was undermined by a doctrine which denied the
value of earthly existence, and made the renunciation of worldly
blessings the chief purpose of moral education. The pilgrim of life who
had been taught to spurn earth as a vale of tears, and turn his hopes
to the promises of another world, was not apt to trouble himself about
a consistent plan of secular pursuits, which, moreover, he had been
distinctly instructed to trust to the chances of the current day: “Take
no thought for the morrow;” “Take no thought for your life, nor yet for
your body ... for after all these things do the gentiles seek.”
Indecision, inconsistency, fickleness of purpose, vitiated the politics
of the Christian nations through-out the long chaos of the Middle Ages,
and in their features of individual character there is a strange want
of that moral unity and harmony which the consciousness of an
attainable purpose gave to the national exemplars of an earlier age.
The Rationalistic reaction of the last two centuries has greatly
modified the moral ideals of the Caucasian nations; the legitimacy of
secular pursuits is more generally recognized, but still only in a
furtive, hesitating manner, and the glaring contrast of our daily
practice with the theories of a still prevalent system of ethics cannot
fail to involve contradictions incompatible with true consistency of
principles and action.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
For thirteen hundred years the importance of perseverance in the
pursuit of earthly aims was depreciated by the ethics of
Antinaturalism, and the word Failure is written in glaring letters over
the record of the physical, mental, and moral enterprises of all that
period. The nations of northern Europe, whom the prestige of Rome
surrendered to the power of popish priests, were giants in stature and
strength, and the love of physical health was too deeply rooted in the
hereditary constitution of those athletes to be at once eradicated by
the machinations of spiritual poison-mongers. Yet the poison did not
fail to assert its virulence. Athletic sports were still a favorite
pastime of all freemen; but the gospel of the Nature-hating Galilean
insisted on the antagonism of physical and moral welfare; penances and
the worship of cadaverous saints perverted the manlier ideals of the
masses, the encouragement of ascetic habits and the enforced inactivity
of convent life undermined the stamina of the noblest nations, and in
the course of a few orthodox generations the descendants of the
herculean hunter-tribes of northern Europe became a prey to a multitude
of malignant diseases.
The love of knowledge still fed on the literary treasures of antiquity;
the flame of philosophy was now and then rekindled at the still glowing
embers of pagan civilization; but the doctrine of other-worldliness
denounced the pursuit of worldly lore, and science degenerated into a
medley of nursery-legends and monkish fever-dreams. Men walked through
life as Sindbad walked through the perils of the spirit-vale, in
constant dread of spectral manifestations, in constant anticipation of
ghostly interference with their earthly concerns, the pursuit of which
all but the wisest undertook only in a desultory, tentative way,
haunted by the idea that success in worldly enterprises could be bought
only at the expense of the immortal soul.
And how many thousand wanderers of our latter-day world have thus been
diverted from the path of manful perseverance, and almost directly
encouraged in the habit of palliating inconstancy of purpose with that
“dissatisfaction and weariness of worldly vanities,” which the ethics
of their spiritual educators commend as a symptom of regeneration! The
voices of re-awakened Nature protest, but only with intermittent
success, and the penalty of vacillation is that discord of modern life
that will not cease till our system of ethics has been thoroughly
purged from the poison of Antinaturalism.
E.—REFORM.
That work of redemption should include an emphatic repudiation of the
natural depravity dogma. Our children should be taught that steadfast
loyalty to the counsels of their natural reason is sufficient to insure
the promotion of their welfare in the only world thus far revealed to
our knowledge. The traditional concomitance of perseverance and
mediocrity should be refuted by the explanation of its cause. For a
long series of centuries the predominance of insane dogmas had actually
made science a mere mockery, and application to the prescribed
curriculum of the monastic colleges a clear waste of time—clear to all
but the dullest minds. The neglect of such studies, of the disgusting
sophistry of the patristic and scholastic era, was, indeed, a proof of
common sense, since only dunces and hypocrites could muster the
patience required to wade through the dismal swamp of cant, pedantry,
and superstition which for thirteen centuries formed the mental pabulum
of the priest-ridden academics. During that era of pseudo-science and
pseudo-morality, of fulsome rant centered on a monstrous delusion, the
eccentricity of genius was more than pardonable, being, in fact, the
only alternative of mental prostitution. The ideas of waywardness and
mental superiority became thus associated in a way which in its results
has wrought almost as much mischief as in its cause. The delusions of
that idea have wrecked as many promising talents as indolence and
intemperance.
The pupils of Secularism should be instructed to observe the benefits
of perseverance in the pursuit of minor projects, and encouraged to
apply that experience to the higher problems of life. Perseverance
should be recognized as the indispensable ally of loftiest genius as
well as of the lowliest talent.
Failure in secular enterprises should cease to be regarded as a symptom
of divine favor; and for those who insist on claiming the protection of
supernatural agencies, Goethe’s grand apostrophe to the Genius of
Manhood [1] should be condensed in the motto that “Heroic perseverance
invokes the aid of the gods.”
CHAPTER X.
FREETHOUGHT.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The Brahmans have a legend that the first children of man ascended
Mount Gunganoor, to visit the castle of Indra and inquire into the
secret of their origin. Speculations on the source of life, on the
mystery of creation, the cause of good and evil, and similar problems
which we might sum up under the name of religious inquiries, seem,
indeed, to have occupied the attention of our ancestors at a very early
period. An irrepressible instinct appears to prompt the free discussion
of such questions, and in a normal state of social relations the
attempt to suppress that instinct would have appeared as preposterous
as the attempt to enforce silence upon the inquirers into the problems
of health or astronomy. A thousand years before the birth of Buddha,
the Sakyas, or ethic philosophers, of northern Hindostan visited the
mountain-passes of Himalaya to converse with travelers and seek
information on the religious customs and traditions of foreign nations.
The book of Job, probably the oldest literary product of the Semitic
nations, records a series of free and often, indeed, absolutely
agnostic discussions of ethical and cosmological problems.
“Canst thou by searching find out God?” says Zophar. “It is as high as
heaven: what canst thou do? It is deeper than hell: what canst thou
know?”
“Is it good unto thee that thou shouldst oppress the work of thy own
hand?” Job asks his creator; “thine hands have made me; why dost thou
destroy me? Thou huntest me like a fierce lion. Wherefore, then, hast
thou brought me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had given up the
ghost and no eye had seen me! I should have been as though I had not
been; I should have been carried from the womb to the grave. Are not my
days few? Cease, then, and let me alone, that I may take comfort a
little, before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of
darkness and the shadow of death.”
And again: “Man dieth and wasteth away; man giveth up the ghost, and
where is he? As the waters fall from the sea and the flood dryeth up:
so man lieth down and riseth not; till the heavens be no more he shall
not awake nor be raised out of his sleep.”... “If a man die, shall he
live again?” “Wherefore is light given unto them that are in misery,
and life unto the bitter in soul? who long for death, but it cometh
not; who rejoice exceedingly and are glad when they can find the
grave?”
Or Elihu’s interpellation: “Look up to heaven and see the clouds which
are higher than thou: If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? If
thou be righteous, what givest thou to him, or what can he receive of
thine hand?”
Could a committee of modern skeptics and philosophers discuss the
problems of existence with greater freedom?
For a series of centuries the monkish custodians of the literary
treasures of Greece and Rome expurgated the writings of the bolder
Freethinkers, and for the sake of its mere parchment destroyed more
than one work that would have been worth whole libraries of their own
lucubrations; yet even the scant relics of pagan literature furnish
abundant proofs of the ethical and metaphysical liberty which the
philosophers of the Mediterranean nations enjoyed for nearly a thousand
years. The marvelous development of Grecian civilization in art,
science, politics, literature, and general prosperity coincided with a
period of almost unlimited religious freedom. Speculations on the
origin of religious myths were propounded with an impunity which our
latter-day Freethinkers have still cause to envy. The possibility of
all definite knowledge of the attributes of the deity was boldly denied
two thousand years before the birth of Emmanuel Kant. The Freethinker
Diagoras traveled from city to city, propagating his system of
Agnosticism with a publicity which seems to imply a degree of tolerance
never yet re-attained in the progress of the most intellectual modern
nations. The skeptic Pyrrho ridiculed the absurdity of all our modern
Secularists would include under the name of other-worldliness. A Roman
actor was applauded with cheers and laughter for quoting a passage to
the effect that “if the gods exist, they seem to conduct their
administration on the principle of strict neutrality in the affairs of
mankind!”
Democritus, Euhemerus, Anaxagoras, Epicurus, Aristotle, Libanius,
Pliny, Lucretius, and the latter Pythagoreans, almost entirely ignored
the doctrines of Polytheism, which, indeed, never assumed an aggressive
form, the attempted suppression of the Christian dogmatists being an
only apparent exception, dictated by motives of political
apprehensions, rather than by religious zeal; for at the very time when
the followers of the life-hating Galilean were persecuted as “enemies
of mankind,” a large number of other oriental religions enjoyed
privileges bordering on license. The Grecian colonists of Asia Minor
never interfered with the religious customs of their new neighbors.
They studied and discussed them as they would study the curiosities of
other social phenomena; and a purely naturalistic system of education
would undoubtedly lead to analogous results. Intelligent children often
evince a remarkable tact in avoiding certain topics of conversation,
such as allusions to personal or national defects, scandals, the arcana
of sexual relations, private affairs, etc., and the experience of after
years may confirm such habits of discretion; but no conceivable motive
but deference to an arbitrary precept could dictate a similar reticence
in the discussion of purely metaphysical topics, or of dogmas which by
their very pretense to a mission of extreme importance should justify
an extreme frankness in debating the basis of their claims.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Religious liberty guarantees every other kind of freedom, as every form
of slavery walks in the train of priestly despotism. In America
religious emancipation led the way to the Declaration of Independence,
and still continues to make this continent the chosen home of thousands
of Liberals whom the material prosperity of the New World would have
failed to attract. It is possible that a policy of intolerance would
have averted or postponed the fate of the Moorish empire, which was
ultimately overthrown by the fanatics of a creed which the followers of
a more rational faith had permitted to survive in their midst; yet it
is not less certain that for nearly five hundred years religious
tolerance made the realm of the Spanish caliphs the one bright Goshen
in a world of intellectual darkness. In northern Europe the history of
civilization begins only with the triumph of Rationalism.
Protestantism, in that wider sense which made the revolt of the
Germanic nations an insurrection against the powers of superstition,
has laid the foundation of national prosperity in Great Britain, in the
Netherlands, and in the rising empire of northern Germany. The real
founder of that empire was at once the greatest statesman and the
boldest Freethinker of the last fourteen centuries. His capital became
a city of refuge for the philosophers of Christian Europe. The eastern
provinces of his kingdom were colonized by refugees from the tyranny of
clerical autocrats. His absolute tolerance protected even the Jesuits,
expelled by the Catholic rulers of France and Spain. During the reign
of that crowned philosopher the religious and political dissenters of
Prussia expressed their views with a freedom which in semi-republican
England would have involved them in a maze of endless lawsuits. Among
the fruits of that freedom were products of science and philosophy
which have made that period the classic age of German literature.
“Before the appearance of Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’” says
Schopenhauer, “the works of duly installed government professors of
philosophy were mostly medleys of sophisms, pretending to reconcile
science and dogma, or reason and despotism. Here, at last, a state
university could boast of a man who lived at once by and for the
service of Truth—a phenomenon made possible only by the circumstance
that, for the first time since the days of the great Aurelius and the
greater Julian, a Freethinker had mounted the throne of an independent
monarchy.”
The protection of Freethought is likewise the best safeguard against
that virus of hypocrisy that has undermined the moral health of so many
modern nations.
“What an incalculable advantage to a nation as well as to its ruler,”
says a modern philosopher, “to know that the pillars of state are
founded on the eternal verities, on natural science, logic, and
arithmetic, instead of casuistry and immaculate conceptions!”
The consciousness of that advantage has more than once upheld the
birthland of Protestantism in its struggles against the allied powers
of despotism, and should uphold our republic in the inevitable struggle
against the allied despots of the twentieth century.
C.—PERVERSION.
The experience of the last sixteen centuries has made priestcraft
almost a synonym of intolerance; and yet it would be a mistake to
suppose that the interests of Freethought are incompatible with the
survival of any system of supernatural religion. The myths of
polytheism were for ages accepted as the basis of a creed enjoying all
the prerogatives and emoluments of an established religion, but the
priests of that religion had no need of protecting their prestige by
the butchery of heretics. With all their absurdities, the rites of
their creed were essentially a worship of Nature, naturally attractive
to all lovers of earth and life, and by their harmlessness conciliating
the favor of philosophers who might have studied the baneful tendencies
of a different creed—a creed which could propagate its dogmas only by
an unremitting war against the natural instincts of the human race, and
by constant intrigues against the protests of human reason. “The
Nature-worshiping Greeks repeated the harmless myths and practiced the
merry rites of their creed for centuries without troubling themselves
about the myths and rites of their neighbors. Their superstition
differed from that of the church as the inspired love of Nature differs
from the ecstatic fury of her enemies, as the day-dream of a happy
child differs from the fever-dream of a gloomy fanatic. ‘Procul
Profani!’ was the cry of the Eleusinian priests. They had more
followers than they wanted. Their joy-loving creed could dispense with
autos-da-fé. The Hebrews, in stress of famine, conquered a little strip
of territory between Arabia and the Syrian desert, and then tried their
best to live in peace with heaven and earth, and their sects contented
themselves with metaphorical rib-roastings. The Saracens spread their
conquests from Spain to the Ganges, but their wars had a physical,
rather than metaphysical, purpose. They needed land, and made a better
use of it than the former occupants. They contented themselves with
assessing dissenters, and did not deem it necessary to assassinate
them. But the Galilean pessimists could not afford to tolerate an
unconverted neighbor. To the enemies of Nature the happiness of an
earth-loving, garden-planting, and science-promoting nation was an
intolerable offense: reason had to be sacrificed to faith, health and
happiness to the cross, and earth to heaven” (The Secret of the East,
p. 62).
And even in the modified form of Protestant Christianity, that creed
remains the rancorous enemy of Freethought. The doctrine of the
Galilean Buddhist is essentially a doctrine of pessimism, of
other-worldliness and Nature-hating renunciation of human reason and
earthly prosperity, and therefore wholly irreconcilable with the
promotion of progressive science and secular happiness. Philosophers
have for centuries assembled their scholars undisturbed by the songs
and dances of pagan festivals; the exponents of secular science have
enjoyed the good-will of health-loving Hebrews and Mohammedans, and
will find a modus vivendi with the Spiritualists and Theosophists of
the future; but Secularism, “the Science of Happiness on Earth,” can
never hope to conciliate the dogmatists of a creed that denies the
value of life itself, and wages war against Nature as well as against
the claims of natural science.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Wherever Reason surrenders to Dogma, the exponents of that dogma will
claim unreasonable prerogatives. Irresponsible dogmatists have never
failed to pursue the interests of their creed at the expense of the
interests of mankind. The lessons of Science could not be reconciled
with the doctrines of Antinaturalism, and in the interest of that
doctrine the spiritual taskmasters of medieval Europe suppressed
Science by methods that have retarded the progress of mankind for
thirteen hundred years. The suppression of Freethought enabled the
enemies of Nature to complete their triumph by the suppression of
social and political liberty; and for ages the church has been the
faithful ally of Despotism. The priest-ridden rulers of the expiring
Roman empire and the priest-ridden rabble of the Roman provinces
assisted in the persecution of Freethought, and that crime against
reason was avenged by the development of a system of spiritual tyranny
which at last forced even princes to kiss the dust of Canossa and
degraded the lot of peasants beneath that of savages and wild beasts.
The war against natural science avenged itself in the neglect of
agriculture, and the enormous spread of deserts, which the priests of
the Galilean miracle-monger proposed to reclaim by prayer-meetings. The
surrender of Freethought to faith sealed the fate of millions of
heretics and “sorcerers,” who expiated an imaginary crime in the
agonies of the stake. Not the abrogation of civil rights, not the
intimidation of princes and commoners, but the eradication of
Freethought, enabled the priests of an unnatural creed to enforce their
hideous superstitions upon the prisoners of the numberless monasteries
which for a series of centuries combined all the conditions for the
systematic suppression of moral, intellectual, and personal freedom.
“I am not come to bring peace but the sword,” said the ingenuous
founder of a creed which could not fail to produce an irrepressible
conflict between the delusions of its doctrines and the inspirations of
nature and science—and, of course, also between the would-be followers
of its own preposterous precepts—and neither the lust of conquest nor
the jealousy of rival nations has ever stained this earth with the
torrents of blood shed by the bigots of that creed after its triumph
over the protests of Freethought. The fatuous attempt to crush out
dissent by substituting a roll of parchment for the book of Nature
avenged itself by murderous wars about the interpretation of those same
parchments. The dogmatists who had tried to perpetuate their power by
the murder of modest rationalists, were assailed by hordes of their own
irrationalists, raging about the ceremonial details of the wafer-rite
and the immersion rite. The bigots who had refused to heed the
pleadings of Bruno and Campanella were forced to acknowledge the
battle-axe logic of the Hussites.
E.—REFORM.
Truth that prevails against error also prevails against half truths,
and the recognition of just claims cannot be furthered by unjust
concessions. Uncompromising right is mightiest, and Freethinkers would
have served their cause more effectually if they had contended, not for
the favor to enjoy a privilege, but the right to fulfil a duty. The
ministry of reason imposes obligations to posterity, and to the memory
of its bygone martyrs, as well as to our help-needing contemporaries;
and the defense of its rights is a truer religion than submission to
the yoke of a mind-enslaving dogma. The Rishis, or sainted hermits of
Brahmanism, used to devote themselves to the service of a forest
temple, and guard its sanctuary against vermin and reptiles; and the
believers in a personal God cannot devote their lives to a nobler task
than by guarding his temples against the serpent of priestly despotism.
The disciples of Secularism should learn to value the right of
Freethought as the palladium of their faith, as the basis of all other
blessings—moral and material, as well as intellectual. They should
learn to revere the memory of the martyrs of their faith, and recognize
the importance of their services to the cause of modern civilization
and its sacred principles; but they should also learn to recognize the
magnitude of the remaining task. It is no trifle that the prevalent
system of ethics and the temporal and eternal hopes of millions of our
brethren are still based on a lie. It is no trifle that the health and
happiness of millions of our fellow-men are still sacrificed on the
altar of that untruth by the suppression of public recreations on the
only day when a large plurality of our working-men find their only
chance of leisure. It is no trifle that honest men are still branded as
“Infidels,” “renegades,” and “scoffers,” for refusing to kneel in the
temple of a nature-hating fanatic. The struggle against the spirits of
darkness is by no means yet decided in Italy, where the arch-hierarch
is spinning restless intrigues to regain the power which for ages made
Europe a Gehenna of misery and despotism. Nor in Spain, where a swarm
of clerical vampires is still sucking the life-blood of an impoverished
nation. Nor in Austria and southern Germany, where the alliance of
church and state remains a constant menace to the scant liberties of
the people.
Freethinkers need not underrate the influence of individual efforts to
recognize the superior advantage of organized coöperation, so urgently
needed for the reform of Sabbath laws, of press laws, and the
educational system of the numerous colleges still intrusted to the
control of the Jesuitical enemies of science. The strength-in-union
principle should encourage the oft-debated projects for the
establishment of Freethought colleges (as well as Freethought
communities); but still more decisive results could be hoped from that
union of the powers of knowledge and of moral courage which has never
yet failed to insure the triumph of social reforms. We should cease to
plead for favors where we can claim an indisputable right. We should
cease to admit the right of mental prostitutes to enforce the penalties
of social ostracism against the champions of science; but we, in our
turn, should deserve the prestige of that championship by scorning the
expedients of the moral cowardice which strains at gnats and connives
at beams, attacking superstition in the harmless absurdities of its
ceremonial institutions, and sparing the ruinous dogmas that have
drenched the face of earth with the blood of her noblest children, and
turned vast areas of garden-lands into hopeless deserts. The skeptics
who scoff at the inconsistencies of a poor clergyman who tries in vain
to reconcile the instincts of his better nature with the demands of an
anti-natural creed, should themselves be consistent enough to repudiate
the worship of the fatal founder of that creed, and not let the hoary
age of the Galilean doctrine palliate the tendencies of its
life-blighting delusions.
III.—MORAL MAXIMS.
CHAPTER XI.
JUSTICE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Moral philosophers have long conjectured the distinction between
natural and conventional duties; and only the full recognition of that
distinction can reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of
ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the theory of “Intuitive
Morality” claim the existence of an innate moral conscience, common to
all nations and all stages of social development, while, on the other
hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that the standards of virtue
are mere standards of expedience, and vary with circumstances as
fashions vary with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for
instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort of factitious
conscience, shrinking from the mere idea of devoting the seventh day of
the week to physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-loving
gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to celebrate their holidays
with festive revels. Marriage between persons of adventitious
relationship (such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law) is
prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not only sanctioned, but
distinctly enjoined, by those of another. Speculative dogmas that would
deeply shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in
Constantinople and venerated in Rome.
But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our
attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who
would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god,
would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and
benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and
spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The
innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by
selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of
Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by
refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians,
Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted
to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations
that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of
taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be
found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The
“instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice,
has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A
state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength,
and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of
manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts”
naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social
intercourse. Those contracts need not always be specified by written
laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their
obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of
social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man
his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are
international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social
instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of
preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea
Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to
exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost
equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial
fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An
islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common
pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before
the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had
about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in
trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were
overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that
third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of
Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which
former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to
the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among
the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of
San Salvador received their Spanish invaders with respectful
hospitality, and scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even
touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a similar reception
welcomed their arrival in Cuba and San Domingo, the natives being
apparently unable to conceive the idea that their guests could repay
good with evil. “Fair play” is the motto of boyish sports in the kraals
of Kaffir-land, not less than on the recess-ground of Eton College. A
rudimentary sense of justice manifests itself even among social
animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is
liable to get mobbed by the whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to
beat an immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked by all the
winged neighbors and relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure
the most inhuman methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of
gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to a system of
consistent severity, but refuse to submit to evident injustice.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable
crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior
strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do
unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,”
says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the
rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from
heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks,
but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is
not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the justest
of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more
than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of
incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private
citizens, the arbiters of nations.
King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike
neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn
Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to
decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of
an “honorable,” i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of
Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices,
and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge
from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.
The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than
once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It
biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it
enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus,
and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A
just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the
value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is
apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict
adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small
states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is
restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression.
Belgium, Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national
independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central
Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has
proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly
pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division
of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have
again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised
“heathen.”
The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the
proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs
of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best
policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to
promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy
knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and
ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in
direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may
miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of
prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.
C.—PERVERSION.
Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and
too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of
Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in
the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was
recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every
nation makes its gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though,
happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the
object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of
the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd
propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the
extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as
well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God.
According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the
administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral
perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have
hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the
Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and
moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish
with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those
instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own
bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of
loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a
moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the
Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as
an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The
most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the
supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny,
but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic
Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the
cruel murder of a god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The
doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and
rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination
distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits,
but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine
favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of
woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the
guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh
hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay,
newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the
Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few
spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which
the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and
at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply
impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more
than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at
the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of
passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the
appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why
should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who
doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters,
naturally had no hesitation in assailing the bodies of their
unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with
favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the
sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful
square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was
the only measure of his right; the Faust-Recht, the “first law” of
iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the
Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic
courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in
the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and
ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive
submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were
assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen.
Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in
that code of revealed ethics.
Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the
Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the
outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the
inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by
being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.
“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the
Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is
disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the
intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last
experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. There, too, the
despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the
strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many
generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and
princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts
learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were
mangled by the fangs of those beasts.
The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice
for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the
consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly
every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his
conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars
starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His
successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and
clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign
protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last
distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that
the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern
Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made
those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled
by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran
to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.
E.—REFORM.
The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an antinatural
creed is still glaringly evident in the prevailing notions of natural
justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern Crœsus who
deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a Christian to
contribute an ample subvention to the support of an orthodox seminary,
has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated income by reducing
the wages of a hundred starving factory children and taking every
sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of helpless tenants and
dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neighbors to an
earthly Gehenna and premature death by depriving them of every chance
for healthful recreation, lavish their luxuries and their endearments
on the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renouncing the
vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting about the bliss of the New
Jerusalem. The bank cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the
hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin
of such secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few
hundred widows and orphans.
Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of
departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common
honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men.
Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral
reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious
atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for
his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims
of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism
should insist on a truth not unknown to the moralists of antiquity,
that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue,
and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by
failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and
endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.
CHAPTER XII.
TRUTH.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The enemies of Nature have for ages based the favorite arguments of
their creed on the doctrine of Natural Depravity. According to the
theories of that tenet the natural instincts of the human heart are
wholly evil, and its every nobler impulse is due to the redeeming
influence of theological education. The baseness of the “unregenerate
soul” is their favorite antithesis of “holiness by grace;” and the best
test of that dogma would be a comparison of the moral characteristics
of a young child of Nature with the moral results of theological
training. We need not adduce the extreme case of a child like Kaspar
Hauser or the ape-nursed foundling of Baroda, whose propensities had
been modeled in communion with solitude or the dumb denizens of the
wilderness. For, even in the midst of “Christian civilization,”
thousands of peasants and mechanics are practically pure Agnostics, and
ignore the absurdities of the New Testament as persistently as their
deer-hunting ancestors ignored the absurdities of pagan mythology. At
the end of his sixth or seventh year the offspring of such parents
would still represent a fair specimen-child of unregenerate Nature, and
the normal bias of that Nature is revealed in the honesty, the trusting
innocence, the purity, and the cheerfulness of the young Agnostic, and
the absence of every appreciable germ of the secret vices, the
rancorous spites, and the joy-hating bigotries of the representative
Christian convent-slave.
But the most characteristic features of that contrast would perhaps be
the double-tongued hypocrisy of the old Jesuit and the artless candor
of the young peasant boy. The truthfulness of young children antedates
all moral instruction. Its motives are wholly independent of
theological, or even abstract-ethical, influences, and are based merely
on a natural preference for the simplest way of dealing with the
problems of intellectual communication. Truth is uniform, falsehood is
complex. Truth is persistent and safe; falsehood is unstable, fragile,
and precarious. Children instinctively recognize the difficulties of
plausibly maintaining the fictions of deceit, and dread the risk of
incurring the suspicion of habitual insincerity. Hence their
uncompromising loyalty to facts; their innocence of artifice and mental
reservation; hence also their extreme reluctance in conforming to the
conventional customs of social hypocrisy and polite prevarication.
“Are you not glad Mrs. D. is gone?” Master Frank once asked his mother
in my presence. “Well, yes, I am.” “Then what’s the use asking her to
call again and stay for supper? She could not help seeing that we were
tired of her gabble.” “Well, it wouldn’t do to insult her, you know.”
“Oh, no, but what’s the use telling her something she cannot believe?”
That last remark, especially, recurs to my memory whenever the
expedience of hypocrisy is defended by the conventional sophisms of
Christian civilization. That prevarications are unprofitable as well as
unpardonable is a truth which Jesuitry has shrouded with a veil of its
choicest cant, but the clear vision of childhood penetrates that cant,
and the “natural depravity” of unregenerate souls may reach the degree
of doubting the merit of simulation even in the interest of an orthodox
creed, as the reverend dogmatist might ascertain by happening to
overhear the recess comments of our American Sabbath-school youngsters.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The Utilitarians hold that motives of enlightened self-interest would
be sufficient to make a man perfectly virtuous. With the conventional
definition of “virtue,” that tenet might require certain
qualifications; but it is more than probable that perfect prudence
would insure a voluntary devotion to perfect truthfulness. In its most
aggressive form the hatred of falsehood may imperil the temporary
interests of the aggressor, but in every other sense the path of truth
is the path of safety. All the ultimate tendencies of the moral and
physical universe conspire to vindicate truth and discredit fraud.
Assertions based on fact stand erect, upheld by the evidence of
experience as an upright building by the law of gravity; deception,
with all its props of plausible sophisms, is tottering like a wall out
of plumb, or a rotten tree upheld by artificial supports which in their
turn must yield to the test of time.
Even from a standpoint of purely secular considerations, truth, like
honesty, is in the long run the best policy. Abstinence from insidious
poisons is easier than temperance, and the lessons of experience have
at all times convinced the most clear-sighted of our fellow-men that
consistent abstinence from the vice of hypocrisy is preferable to any
compromise with the interests of imposture. The non-clerical, and
almost Agnostic, education of the American wilderness seems to favor
that type of moral teetotalism, and among the hardy hill-farmers of our
New England highlands, and Southern mountain states, one may find men
almost constitutionally incapable of conscious deceit in deed or word,
and practicing veracity without the least pretense to superior
saintliness, in a quite untheological and often, indeed, decidedly
profane medium of speech. They stick to truth from habit, rather than
from moral principles, yet among their simple-hearted neighbors they
enjoy a respect withheld from unctuous hypocrisy, and in emergencies
can always rely on the practical value of a life-long reputation for
candor. Their word is sufficient security; their denial of slanderous
imputations is accepted without the aid of compurgators.
The simple religion of Mohammed has favored the development of a
similar disposition, and on the Austrian-Turkish frontier the word of a
Mussulman generally carries the weight of a casting vote. On the Indian
ocean, too, the verdict of international opinion favors a preference
for Unitarian testimony. “Wish to heaven we could fall in with some
Acheen fishermen,” Captain Baudissin heard his pilot mutter among the
reefs of the Sunda Islands, “it’s no use asking such d—— liars as those
Hindoos and Chinese.”
The love of truth compels the respect even of impostors and of
professional hypocrites, as in the case of that curate mentioned by the
German Freethinker, Weber (author of the philosophical cyclopedia,
“Democritus”). Professor Weber passed his last years in the retirement
of a small south-German mountain village, where his undisguised
skepticism made him the bugbear of the local pharisees; yet on moonless
evenings he was more than once honored by the visits of a neighboring
village priest, who risked censure, and, perhaps, excommunication, for
the sake of enjoying the luxury of a respite from the sickening cant of
his colleagues, and devoting a few hours to intellectual communion with
a champion of Secular science.
Lessing’s allegory of “Nathan” is founded on something more than
fiction, and there is no doubt that even in the midnight of the Middle
Ages the gloomy misery of the Hebrew pariahs was often cheered by the
secret visits of some intelligent Christian whom the thirst for truth
impelled to defy the vigilance of the heretic-hunter, and to prefer an
intellectual symposium in the garret of a Jewish slum alley to a feast
in the banquet hall of a Christian prelate.
“It is lucky for you that your opponents have not learned to utilize
the advantage of truth,” Mirabeau replied to the taunt of an insolent
Jesuit; and in logic that advantage can, indeed, hardly be overrated.
“They find believers who themselves believe,” and, as the philosopher
Colton observes, a sort of instinct often enables the simplest
countryman to distinguish the language of honest conviction from the
language of artful sophistry. “Our jurymen seem to appreciate a
first-class lie only from an artistic standpoint,” confessed a lawyer
of my acquaintance, “for some of them privately hinted that they could
tell it every time.”
Others, no doubt, lack that degree of acumen; but first-class orators,
as well as first-class authors, have always recognized the wisdom of
not relying on such mental defects of the public. Charles Darwin’s
works, for instance, owe their popularity to their erudition and their
grace of style, hardly more than to the absolute candor of the author,
who reviews the evidence for and against his theories with the fairness
of a conscientious judge, and by that very impartiality has succeeded
in prevailing against the partisan arguments of his adversaries. For
similar reasons our “Christian” temperance societies can date their
triumphs only from the time when they frankly repudiated the sophisms
of their predecessors, who hoped to reconcile the lessons of science
with the teachings of the alcohol-brewing Galilean. For truth prevails
against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth.
C.—PERVERSION.
Since the dawn of rationalism perhaps no other literary product of
Freethought has provoked the enemies of Nature to that degree of
rancorous fury excited by the appearance of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.” The
hero of that famous drama is an old pharisee whose resolve to renounce
the “vanities of earth” is constantly tripped by the promptings of his
physical instincts, and who resorts to all kinds of ludicrous sophisms
to palliate the antagonism of two ever irreconcilable principles:
Le ciel défend, de vrai, certain contentements,
Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements—
and the drama never failed to attract a jubilant audience; but the
French priesthood moved heaven and earth to stop the performance, and
can, indeed, hardly be blamed for rejecting the apologies of the
author’s friends; for the irony of Tartuffe ridicules the shams, not
only of the Catholic clergy, but of their creed and the creed of their
Protestant colleagues: it is, in fact, a scathing satire on the
absurdities of Christian Antinaturalism. The impossibility of
reconciling the demands of Nature with the precepts of a
world-renouncing fanatic has, indeed, made the worship of that fanatic
a systematic school of hypocrisy and subverted the moral health of its
victims as effectually as the unnatural restraints of convent life
subverted the basis of physical health.
God is paid when man receiveth;
To enjoy is to obey;
says Nature with the poet of reason. “God delights in the self-torture
of his creatures—crucify your flesh, despise your body, disown the
world; renounce! renounce!” croaks the chorus of Christian dogmatists,
and can silence protest only by turning health into disease or candor
into hypocrisy.
The dogma of salvation by faith offers an additional premium on mental
prostitution. By punishing honest doubt as a crime and inculcating the
merit of blind submission to the authority of reason-insulting
doctrines, the defenders of those doctrines struck a deadly blow at the
instinct of free inquiry, and for a series of generations actually
succeeded in eradicating that instinct from the mental constitution of
their victims.
“The persecutor,” says W. H. Lecky, “can never be certain that he is
not persecuting truth rather than error, but he may be quite certain
that he is suppressing the spirit of truth. And, indeed, it is no
exaggeration to say that the doctrines I have reviewed represent the
most skilful and at the same time most successful conspiracy against
that spirit that has ever existed among mankind. Until the seventeenth
century, every mental disposition which philosophy pronounces to be
essential to a legitimate research was almost uniformly branded as a
sin, and a large proportion of the most deadly intellectual vices were
deliberately inculcated as virtues.... In a word, there is scarcely a
disposition that marks the love of abstract truth and scarcely a rule
which reason teaches as essential for its attainment that theologians
did not for ages stigmatize as offensive to the Almighty.”
And those perversions culminated in the miracle-mongery of the wretched
superstition. If the material universe was at the mercy of witches and
tricksy demons, no man could for a moment trust the evidence of his own
senses and was naturally driven to complete his mental degradation by
an absolute surrender of common sense to dogma. The history of
Christian dogmatism is the history of an eighteen hundred years’ war
against Nature and Truth.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of once fertile empires
still attests the physical consequences of a thousand years’ reign of
Antinaturalism, but, happily, the time has already come when many of
our fellow-men almost fail to credit the degree of mental abasement
realized during the most orthodox centuries of that reign. It would be
no overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred years the priests
of the Galilean miracle-monger persuaded a plurality of the Caucasian
nations to risk their lives in defense of dogmas the mere profession of
which would start a modern Christian on a galloping trip to the next
lunatic asylum.
Decapitated saints were believed to have emerged from their tombs and
paid their respects to a newly appointed bishop; flying dragons
descended through the air to snatch the bodies of unbelievers and
disappeared with screams that frightened orthodox neighbors to take
refuge in their cellar-holes; swarms of angels carried bones, crosses,
and whole buildings from Bethlehem to Loretto; King Philip the Second
paid a thousand doubloons for a skeleton of St. Laurentius, and having
been informed that a complete skeleton of the same saint was for sale
in the south of Italy, he at once ratified the bargain and blessed
heaven for having favored him with a duplicate of the precious relic.
Thousands of unfortunates were tried and executed on a charge of having
taken an aerial excursion on a broomstick or a black he-goat; of having
caused a gale by churning a potful of froth and water; of having turned
themselves into foxes, wolves, and tomcats.
The instinct of recognizing the absurdity of even the most glaring
superstitions seems to have become wholly extinct in the minds of the
forty generations from the middle of the tenth to the end of the
fourteenth century; and during that millennium of madness the
suppression of free inquiry encouraged thousands of pious tract-mongers
to devote their lives to the wholesale forgery of saintly biographies
and miracle legends, and disseminate under the name of historical
records insanities too extravagant even for the readers of a modern
nursery-tale.
The war against Truth was carried to the length of suppressing not only
the skeptical inferences of science, but science itself; chemists,
astronomers, physiologists, mathematicians, and bona fide historians
could pursue their inquiries only at the risk of an inquisitorial
indictment; and a cloud of ignorance, which in the days of Horace and
Pliny would have been thought disgraceful to the obscurest hamlet of
the Roman empire, brooded for ages over the face of the entire
Christian world.
For a series of centuries the encouragement of credulity and imposture
almost annulled the value of contemporary records. Travelers and
chroniclers, as well as biographers, accommodated the popular taste by
dealing, not in marvels only, but in miracles; witchcraft anecdotes,
preternatural resurrections, prodigies of skill and physical prowess,
giants, dragons, were-wolves, and no end of spectral manifestations. It
is no exaggeration to say that for a period of more than nine hundred
years the dogma of the Galilean antinaturalist systematically favored
the survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution
and making common sense a capital crime.
E.—REFORM.
The triumph of the Protestant revolt has ushered in a dawn which, in
comparison with the preceding night, may justly vaunt its era as an Age
of Reason; but the thousand years’ perversion of our moral instincts
has not been wholly redeemed by the educational influences of a short
century. For even eighty years ago the educational reforms of the
Protestant nations attempted little more than a compromise between
reason and dogma, while their southern neighbors revolted against the
political influence, rather than against the dogmatical arrogance, of
their priesthood. Nay, even at present the fallacies of the compromise
plan still hamper the progress of reform in manifold directions. As an
American Freethinker aptly expresses it: “Truth is no longer kept under
lock and key, but is kindly turned loose to roam at large—after being
chained to a certain number of theological cannon-balls.” Evolution may
pursue its inquiries into specific phases of organic development, but
must not question the correctness of the Mosaic traditions;
rationalists may inveigh against the insanities of the Middle Ages, but
must pretend to overlook the fact that the doctrine of the New
Testament contains the germs of all those insanities; the science of
health may denounce modern fallacies, but must beware to mention the
anti-physical precepts of the body-despising Galilean; Materialists
must attack the hobgoblins of the Davenport brothers, but ignore the
hog-goblins of Gadara; historical critics may call attention to the
inconsistencies of Livy and Plutarch, but must not mention the
self-contradictions of the New Testament.
Yet logic and philosophy will be little more than a farce till the
axiom of a great biologist can be applied to the pursuit of every human
science. “Inquiries of that sort” (the “Descent of Man”), he says,
“have nothing whatever to do with personal tastes or vested interests,
but only with facts. We should not ask: ‘Will it be popular?’ ‘Will it
seem orthodox?’ but simply, ‘Is it true?’”
And in just as much as the theory of moral duties deserves the name of
a science, the exponents of that science would gain, rather than lose,
by the adoption of the same maxim. “Religion,” in the traditional sense
of the word, needs to be purged from an enormous percentage of spurious
elements, before its ministers can be acquitted from the guilt of
tempting their disciples to associate the ideas of Ethics and
Imposture, and thus reject the basis of morality together with the
basis of an Asiatic myth. “Truth is the beginning of Wisdom,” “Justice
is Truth,” “Mendacity is the Mother of Discord,” would be fit mottoes
for the ethical Sunday-schools of the Future. “What is Truth?” asks
Pilate; yet even in religious controversies the fury of sectarian
strife could be obviated if we would truthfully admit the uselessness
of disputes about the unknowable mysteries of supernatural problems.
Still, we cannot hope to eradicate the roots of discord unless we
resolve with equal frankness to reject the interference of
Supernaturalism with the knowable problems of secular science. Evident
Truth can dispense with the indorsement of miracle-mongers, and
“evident Untruth,” in the words of Ulrich Hutten, “should be exposed
whether its teachers come in the name of God or of the devil.”
CHAPTER XIII.
HUMANITY.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The wanton disposition of young children, like the mischievousness of
our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests,
has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to
an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the
exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome child, like a playful monkey,
is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than
construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous
malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys
or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders
are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural
disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even
their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are,
in fact, almost invariably intended as a protest against acts of
injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number of
babuinos hasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand
in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to
the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded
fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never
fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking
excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse
of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or
rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources
of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is
nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that
menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest
species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant
fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco
Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar
long-drawn wail of a young capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry
spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of
the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to
succor a distressed fellow-creature.
That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition
of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or
six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror
from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes
the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number
of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to
the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of
Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and
execrations for having killed a young Roussette—some sort of
frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with
shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The
traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a
Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”
“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors,
inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of
the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some
act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives
themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to
settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by
wrestling and pummeling each other, and then shaking hands again. A
similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern
Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a
number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the
barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo
Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity
of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the
natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by
joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles.
Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the
Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of
the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of
our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed
that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to
death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a
fellow-creature.
A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing
those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled
to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North
American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet
has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the
next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agricultural Indios of
Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their
Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in
contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the
frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the
human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the
distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless
virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include
Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of
enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming an other-worldly
chance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.
But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to
dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets
good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets
ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved
disguise of polite formalities.
A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his
dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his
tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while
habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits.
Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel
disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice
the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual
attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a
spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial
monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian, mentally perhaps
the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most
astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his
cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular
hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not
save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el
Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of
science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews and
Moriscos in an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements
of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his
Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant
tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.
Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied
to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle
of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors
and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the
prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation.
A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact
that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a
benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of
her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest
possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural
inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were,
with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the
harmony of Nature.
C.—PERVERSION.
The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a
strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean
prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine
aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul.
“Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has
been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the
self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to their
afflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has
demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal
practice of altruism (i.e., the subordination of personal to alien
interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition
of that result would have been only an additional motive in
recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the
Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the
purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,”
was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce!
renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to
mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not
in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide
your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness,
in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all earthly interests
whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his
enemies also bids him hate his father, mother, sister, brother, and
friends.
“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid
everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once the rationale
and the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome
sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if
precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too
literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding
hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be
told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But
even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was
anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical
enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not
apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of
tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was
systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors
for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly
calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few
children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The
exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts
of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for
the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous
excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance, acts which are,
in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed
to the devil.”
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand
years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be
called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the
greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval
dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of
the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective
system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a
given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have
never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class
interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor,
and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare
of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged
opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages
inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They
inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against
happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of
sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,”
says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship
the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the
promotion of human misery in all its forms, the catechism of such a
religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic
colleges.”
Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their
spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel,
death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.
“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural
affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous
instincts of the human heart were sinful.... The clergy looked on all
comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts.
The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction.
Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a
man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was
natural was wrong.”
The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation
of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth
with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove
thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of
perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition
culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its
converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of
escape from the horrors of existence.
E.—REFORM.
The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosophical friends, directed
the keenest shafts of their logic against the doctrine of eternal
punishment, and never wearied of repeating that the belief in a
merciless God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless bigots.
“How insignificant,” they argued, “the occasional sufferings of a
transient life on earth must appear to the converts of John Calvin, who
held that about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed to an
eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures. How absurd they must deem
the complaints of a life-weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look
back to the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness of a
lost Eden.” The Universalists are fond of enlarging on the moral of
that theme, yet from a wider point of view their objections might be
extended to the entire doctrine of other-worldliness, since Holbach’s
argument might find its exact analogue in the dogma of post mortem
compensation. “His soul will be the gainer,” thought the Crusader who
had demonstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a Moorish skull,
“and if he should die his spirit will enter the gates of the New
Jerusalem.” “Oh, the ingratitude,” actually said a priest of the
Spanish-American land robbers, “the ingratitude of the wretches who
grudge us the territories of their base earthly kingdoms and forget
that our gospel offers them a passport to the glorious kingdom of
heaven!” “The ingratitude!” repeats the modern pharisee, “the base
ingratitude of those factory children who grudge me the privileges of
my position, and clamor for an increase of wages to gratify their
worldly desires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should not the rich
promises of the gospel compensate such temporal inconveniences, and
have I not founded a Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of
their unregenerate souls?”
Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher acquainted us with the
verdict of his countrymen on the “gospel of love” that sends its
missionaries on ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by
armadas for the demolition of seaports that might refuse to admit the
cargo of spirituous and spiritual poisons.
Secularism, the religion of Nature, should teach our brethren that
their highest physical and their highest moral welfare can be only
conjointly attained, and that cramping misery stunts the soul, as well
as the body of its victim. It should preach the solidarity of human
interests which prevents the oppressor from enjoying the fruits of his
inhumanity, and makes the curses of his dependents, nay, even the mute
misery of his starving cattle, react on the happiness of a cruel
master. It should expose the business methods of the humanitarians who
propose to silence the clamors of their famished brethren with
consecrated wafers and drafts on the bank of the New Jerusalem.
The Christian duty of transferring our love from our friends to our
enemies may be one of those virtues that have to await their recompense
in a mysterious hereafter, but natural humanity can hope to find its
reward on this side of the grave.
CHAPTER XIV.
FRIENDSHIP.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Philosophers of the utilitarian school have begun to reëstablish the
long-forgotten truth that Materialism is the indispensable root of the
plant which bears its flowers in spiritual aspirations. The consequence
of universal practice is the best test of a dogma, and if all men were
to divest themselves of their earthly possessions and devote their
lives to the hyperphysical vagaries of the Galilean messiah, there
would soon be neither crops to harvest nor bread to eat, and unworldly
saints would starve as surely as ungodly sinners. “Ideality” may be the
crown of the brain, as the brain is of the body, but the organs of the
mind cannot dispense with the aid of the alimentary organs; the
pinnacle of the social fabric needs intermediate supports. Education
has to secure the welfare of the body before it can successfully
cultivate the faculties of the mind; and it is not less certain that a
man has to be a good patriot before he can be a worthy cosmopolitan,
and a good friend before he can be a good patriot.
In the progress of individual development the instinct of friendship
asserts itself at a very early period. Its recollection hallows the
memory of the poorest childhood. The shepherd-boys of the upper Alps
travel dozens of miles over cliffs and rocks to meet their friends at a
salt-spring; on the shores of the Baltic the boys of the lonely
fishermen’s cabins frequent their trysting-places in spite of wind and
weather. Early friendships throw the charm of their poetry even over
the dreary prosa of grammar-school life; the fellowship of
school-friends forever endears the scenes of their sports and rambles,
and for many a poor office-drudge the recollection of such hours “holds
all the light that shone on the earth for him.” True friendship
smoothens the rough path of poverty, while friendlessness, even in the
gilded halls of wealth, is almost a synonyme of cheerlessness:
Ich wüsste mir keine grössre Pein,
Als wär’ ich im Paradies allein,
says Goethe. “To be alone in paradise would be the height of misery.”
Friendship will assert itself athwart the barriers of social
inequality, and its germs are so deeply rooted in the instincts of
primitive nature that, in default of a communion of kindred souls, the
bonds of sympathy have often united saints and sinners, nay, even men
and brutes. The traditions of Grecian antiquity have preserved the
possibly apocryphal legend of a dolphin that became attached to the
company of a young fisherman, and after his death left the sea in
search of its friend, and thus perished; but the story of Androcles was
confirmed by the experience of Chevalier Geoffroy de la Tour, a
crusader of the thirteenth century, who was charmed, but finally
distressed, by the affection of a pet lion that followed him like his
shadow, and at last fell a victim to his attachment by trying to swim
after the ship that conveyed his master from Damascus to Genoa. The
traveler Busbequius mentions a lynx that set his heart on escorting a
camp-follower of a Turkish pasha; and Sir Walter Scott vouches for the
touching episode of the Grampian Highlands, where a young hunter met
his death by falling from a steep cliff, and was found, months after,
half covered by the body of his favorite deerhound, who had followed
his friend to the happy hunting-grounds by starving to death at the
feet of a corpse.
Among the ancestors of the Mediterranean nations the betrayal of a
friend was deemed an act of almost inconceivable infamy; friends and
friends engaged in a pledge of mutual hospitality, which was held
sacred even in times of war; and among the natives of the South Sea
Islands a similar brotherhood of elective affinities existed in the
society of the Aroyi, or oath-friends, who held all property in common,
and in times of danger unhesitatingly risked their own lives in defense
of their ally’s. Professor Letourneau has collected many curious
anecdotes of that devotion, which should leave no doubt that altruism
in its noblest form can dispense with the hope of post-mortem
compensation, and, indeed, with all theological motives whatever.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Unselfishness is the soul of true friendship, yet it nevertheless
remains true that all instincts are founded on the experience of
benefits or injuries. During the rough transition period from beasthood
to manhood, when our uncivilized ancestors roamed the forests of the
foreworld, it must have been an incalculable advantage to the
individual hunter or herder to secure the coöperation of a trusty
companion, whose watchful eye would double his chance of finding food
or avoiding danger, whose stout arm might parry a blow which unaided
strength would have failed to avert. As in other circumstances of
natural selection, those who most successfully availed themselves of
such advantages had a superior chance of survival and consequently of
transmitting their disposition to subsequent generations, and the habit
of friendship thus became a hereditary instinct.
The social system of civilized life has since devised manifold
substitutes for the coöperation of elective affinities, but various
unalienable advantages of the primitive plan have been more or less
clearly recognized by all nations, especially by the manful and
nature-abiding nations of pagan antiquity. The benefits secured by the
mutual aid of sympathizing friends are not limited to the guarantee of
civil rights, but extend to the realization of individual hopes and the
indulgence of personal inclination and predilections, as well as to the
higher privileges of a mental communion for which the panders of
selfish wealth have as yet devised no equivalent. The power of
approbativeness, the main stimulus of ambition, is infinitely
intensified by the emulation of noble friendship, which, in the words
of an ancient philosopher, “inspires to deeds heroic, and makes labor
worth the toils that lead to success.” Such friendship inspired the
heroism of Theseus and Pyrithous, of Harmodius and Aristogiton, of
Nisus and Euryalus, and recorded its experience in proverbs which have
few parallels in the languages of the Christianized nations: “Solem e
mundo qui amicitiam e vita tollunt”—“They deprive the world of sunshine
who deprive life of friendship.” “Amicum perdere damnorum est
maximum”—“To lose a friend is the greatest of losses.” “Amicus magis
necessarius quam ignis aut aqua”—“A friend is more needful than fire or
water.”
In times of tribulation, when the fury of party-strife overrode all
other restraints, friendship has more than once proved its saving power
by averting otherwise hopeless perils. Diagoras was thus saved from the
rage of allied bigots, Demetrius from the dagger of a wily assassin,
the elder Cato from the rancor of political rivals. Without the aid of
a friend Cicero would never have survived the intrigues of Catiline.
Epaminondas made the approval of friends the sole reward of his heroic
life, and vanquished the enemies of his country by the enthusiasm of
the “sacred legion” of mutually devoted and mutually inspiring friends.
Mohammed the Second yielded to the prayer of a humble companion what he
refused to the united threats of foreign embassadors, and Simon
Bolivar, the liberator of South America, often confessed that he owed
his triumphs to the counsel of private friends rather than to the
suggestions of his official advisers.
C.—PERVERSION.
The blessing of friendship, “doubling the joys of life and lessening
its sorrows,” could not fail to be specially obnoxious to the moralists
of a creed that seeks to lure its converts from earth to ghostland, and
depreciates the natural affections of the human heart. The gloomy
antinaturalism of the Galilean prophet has been glossed over by the
whitewashing committee of the revised Bible, but is too shockingly
evident in the less sophisticated version of the original text to
mistake its identity with the moral nihilism of the world-renouncing
Buddha. The phil’adelphia, or “brother-love,” of the New Testament, is,
in fact, merely a “fellowship in Christ”—the spiritual communion and
mutual indoctrination of earth-renouncing bigots. With the joys and
sorrows of natural friendship their prophet evinces no sympathy
whatever. “I am come,” says he, “to set a man at variance against his
father, and the daughter against her mother, ... and a man’s foes shall
be those of his own household.” “He who hates not his father and
mother, his brothers and sisters, cannot be my disciple.” “And the
brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son.”
By that test of moral merit the obligation of natural affection counted
as nothing compared with the duty of theological conformity. “Verily, I
say unto you, there is no man that has left brethren or sisters or
father and mother for my sake and the gospels’, but he shall receive a
hundredfold,” etc. “He that loveth father and mother more than me is
not worthy of me.” “And another of his disciples said unto him: Lord,
suffer me first to go and bury my father. But Jesus said unto him:
Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.” “For if you love them
which love you, what reward have ye?”
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The conversion of Rome, which theologians are fond of representing as
the crowning miracle of Christianity, was a natural consequence of its
pessimistic tendencies, which could not fail to recommend themselves to
the instincts of a decrepit generation. “Worn-out sensualists consoled
themselves with the hope of a better hereafter. Cowards pleased
themselves with the idea of fulfilling the duty of meek submission to
the injustice of the ‘powers that be.’ Monastic drones denounced the
worldliness of industrial enterprises. Physical indolence welcomed the
discovery that ‘bodily exercise profiteth but little.’ Envious
impotence insisted on the duty of self-abasement. Transgressors against
the health-laws of Nature relied upon the efficacy of the prayer-cure.
Stall-fed priests sneered at the lean philosopher who wasted his time
upon laborious inquiries, while he might wax fat on faith and the
sacrifices of the pious. The demon-dogma was a godsend to the spiritual
poverty of the elect. The so-called scholars of the Galilean church,
who could not encounter the pagan philosophers on their own ground,
found it very convenient to postulate a spook for every unknown
phenomenon.... Despots before long recognized the mistake of
persecuting a creed which inculcated the duty of passive submission to
oppressors” (Secret of the East, p. 54).
They also recognized the advantage of a spiritual excuse for the infamy
of their ingratitude to the secular benefactors of mankind. Cæsar and
Trajan treated the humblest centurion as a friend rather than as a
servant. Constantine and Justinian treated the ablest ministers like
slaves who can be forced to toil, and turned out to starve after having
worn out their strength in the service of the Lord’s anointed.
Belisarius, after repeatedly saving his master from well-deserved ruin,
was sacrificed to the spite of a crowned harlot, and left to beg his
bread in the streets of the city which his valor alone had for years
protected from the rage of hostile armies. Aetius, who had saved all
Europe by stemming the torrent of Hunnish conquest, was treated like a
rebellious slave for refusing to betray his brave allies, and the
stipulated pay of his veterans was squandered on pimps and clerical
parasites. Charles Martel, whose heroism turned the scales against the
power of the invading Moriscos, was openly reviled by the very priests
who owed him the preservation of their lives, as well as of their
livings; his image was dragged in the mire, his soul consigned to the
pit of torment—all for having defrayed the costs of his campaign by
tithing prelates as well as laymen. Columbus was loaded with chains by
the pious prince whose castles he had filled with the treasures of a
new world; the philosopher Vanini was betrayed to death by a Christian
spy who had for years enjoyed his confidence and his hospitality. John
Huss was surrendered by the imperial priest-slave whose own hand had
signed the document of his safe-conduct. The earl of Stafford was
sacrificed by the crowned Jesuit who divided his time between prayers
for the theological interests of his subjects and plots for the
subversion of their political liberties. The dogma of self-denial has
not prevented our financial pharisees from amassing fortunes that would
dwarf the spoils of a Roman triumphator; but the hospitality of Mæcenas
has not survived the religion of Nature. Our philosophers have to study
the problems of life in a personal struggle for existence; our poets
have to choose between starvation and hypocrisy. Patriots are left to
the consoling reflection that virtue is its own reward. The endowers of
theological seminaries seem to rely on the mercy of Christ to cancel
the odium of their shortcomings in the recognition of secular merit.
Kepler, Campanella, and Spinoza perished in penury. Locke and Rousseau,
the recognized primates of the intellectual world, were left to
languish in exile, admired and neglected by a host of
“friends”—Christian friends—in every city of the civilized world.
Schubert, Buerger, and Frederick Schiller, the idols of a poetry-loving
nation, were left to fight the bitter struggle for existence to an
extreme of which all the records of pagan antiquity furnish only a
single parallel. Anaxagoras, the founder of a philosophic school
counting its disciples by thousands, was left to languish in exile,
till the rumor of his extreme distress brought the most illustrious of
those disciples to the sick-bed of his neglected teacher. “Do not, do
not leave us!” he cried, in an agony of remorse; “we cannot afford to
lose the light of our life!”
“O Pericles,” said the dying exile, “those who need a lamp should take
care to supply it with oil!”
But how many lights of our latter-day lives have thus been extinguished
before their time! Not one of the plethoric British aristocrats who
spiced their leisure with the sweets of poetry ever dreamed of
relieving the cruel distress of Robert Burns, or of cutting the knot of
the financial embroglio that strangled out the life of Sir Walter
Scott.
E.—REFORM.
Time is the test of truth; and the fallacies of the “Brotherhood in
Christ” plan have been abundantly demonstrated by their consequences.
Instead of being a bond of union, the doctrine of renunciation has been
found to be a root of discord and rancor, and in times of need the
fellowship of its converts has proved a most rotten staff. Even the
wretches who betrayed their friends to the spies of the Holy
Inquisition had no difficulty in palliating the infamy of their conduct
with the sanction of scriptural precepts. For centuries the appeals of
martyrs to the cause of freedom and Freethought have been answered with
the advice of Christian submission to the “powers that be,” and our
modern pharisees rarely fail to reprove the “worldliness” of a poor
neighbor’s lament for the loss of his earthly possessions.
The founder of “Positivism,” the Religion of Humanity, proposes to
dedicate the days of the year to the leaders of progress, and inscribe
our places of worship with the names of discoverers, reformers, and
philosophers rather than of bigots and world-despising saints. And for
the sake of those who would not wish to repeat the mistake of
sacrificing the present to the past, the builders of those sanctuaries
should add a temple of Friendship. From the adoration of self-torturing
fanatics, from the worship of sorrow and the love of enemies, mankind
will at last revert to the ancestral plan of elective affinities, and
the dread of preferring natural to theological duties will not much
longer prevent our fellow-men from recognizing their obligations to
their earthly benefactors.
CHAPTER XV.
EDUCATION.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The doctrine of Pythagoras, the philosophic Messiah of Paganism,
included the strange tenet of metempsychosis. After death, held the
confessors of that dogma, the souls of men and brutes would reappear in
new forms, higher or lower, according to the character-traits of the
dying individual. Thus the soul of a wealthy glutton might be reborn in
a pig-sty, that of a high-minded peasant perhaps on the throne of a
king. Death and rebirth are the upper and lower spokes of a wheel that
turns and turns forever, and in the persons of their neighbors the
Pythagoreans saw wanderers that might have walked this earth thousands
of years ago.
The strangeness of such a theory is still increased by the circumstance
that its teacher was an eminent astronomer, an accomplished
mathematician, and the leader of a memorable hygienic reform. Our
astonishment is not lessened by the well-established fact that, under
some form or other, the doctrine of soul-migration has for ages been
the accepted creed of a large plurality of our fellow-men. It is well
known, however, that to his trusted disciples Pythagoras imparted an
esoteric or explanatory version of his dogmas; and if we learn that the
great philosopher attached a special importance to the influence of
hereditary dispositions, the truth at last dawns upon us that the
doctrine of metempsychosis referred to the reappearance of individual
types, passions, and dispositions in the bodily and mental
characteristics of the next generation. “Parents live in their
children.” The instinctive recognition of that truth reconciles our
dumb fellow-creatures to the prospect of death. At the end of summer
the night-moth carefully deposits her eggs in a silver cradle, hidden
safe in the crevice of some sheltering nook, where they will survive
the rigor of the winter and answer the first summons of spring. Having
thus, as it were, insured the resurrection of her type, the parent moth
quietly resigns herself to the fate of sleeping her own winter-slumber
in the arms of death. On the Orinoco wounded river-turtles will use
their last strength to climb the slope of some bush-hidden sand-bank,
and after intrusting their eggs to the protection of the deep drift
sand, will reënter the water and quietly float off with the seaward
currents. In the virgin-woods of Southern Mexico, where the harpy-eagle
fills the maws of her hungry brood by incessant raids on the small
denizens of the tree-tops, the traveler D’Armand once witnessed a
curious scene. An eagle had pounced upon a nursing mother monkey, who
at first struggled desperately to free herself from the claws of the
murderer; but, finding resistance in vain, she loosened her grasp on
the branches, and, just as the eagle carried her off, she disengaged
the arm of her baby from her neck, and shaking off the little creature
with a swing of her arm, she deliberately flung it back into the
sheltering foliage of the tree-top, thus taking the last possible
chance of surviving in her child.
The “dread of annihilation” reveals itself in the instincts of a dying
philosopher as plainly as in the instincts of a wounded animal; but, on
self-examination, that fear would prove to have but little in common
with a special solicitude for the preservation of material forms or
combinations—conditions which the process of organic change constantly
modifies in the cradle as well as in the grave. It is rather the type
of the body and its correlated mental dispositions which the hope of
resurrection yearns to preserve, and even childless men have often
partly realized that hope by impressing the image of their soul on a
younger mind, and transmitting their cherished projects and theories
through the medium of education. In the consciousness of that
accomplished task Socrates could as calmly die in the arms of his
disciples as the Hebrew patriarch in the arms of his children and
grandchildren. “You kill a sower,” cried St. Adalbert under the clubs
of his assassins, “but the seed he has planted will rise and survive
both his love and your hatred.”
Even the influence of a great practical example has often impressed the
mental type of a reformer or patriot on a series of subsequent
generations. The Buddhist Calanus, preaching the doctrine of
renunciation to an audience of scoffers, deeply affected the most
thoughtless of his witnesses by proving his personal convictions in the
flames of a funeral pile. “I leave no sons,” were the last words of
Epaminondas, “but two immortal daughters, the battles of Leuctra and
Mantinea.” Rousseau smiled when he learned the intrigues of his enemies
who were trying their utmost to enlist the coöperation of a violent
pulpit-orator. “They are busy recruiting their corps of partisans,”
said he, “but Time will raise me an ally in every intelligent reader of
the next generation.”
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
In the simple lives of the lower animals every day may bring the
sufficient reward of its toil; but the problem of progress, even from
the first dawn of civilization, involves tasks too apt to extend beyond
the span of individual existence. The forest-clearing husbandman, the
state-founding patriot, the scientific inquirer, all risk to receive
the summons of night before the completion of their labor. Before
reaching the goal of their hopes their earthly pilgrimage may end at
the brink of the unknown river, and education alone can bridge that
gulf, and make every day the way-station, of an unbroken road. Children
or children’s children will take up the staff from the last
resting-place of their pilgrim father; and, moreover, all progress is
cumulative. Every laborer works with the experience of his forefathers,
as well as his own; every son stands on the shoulders of his father.
Even the failure of individual efforts contributes a helpful lesson to
the success of the next attempt:
Freedom’s brave battle, once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Though often baffled, e’er is won.
Persistent adherence to the programme of a traditional policy has often
made the work of successive centuries the triumphant execution of a
single plan. The empire of Islam sprung from the seed which the prophet
of Mecca had planted in the soil of his native land. The storm of the
Protestant revolt rose from the anathemas of a poor Wittenberg friar;
the unquenchable fire of the French Revolution was kindled by the
burning indignation of a Swiss recluse, and his fervid appeals:
Those oracles that set the world aflame,
Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more;
and the vast fabric of our republican federation was founded by the
poor colonists who sought independence in the freedom of the
wilderness, and combined against the power of a selfish despot.
Education sows a seed which may sprout even during the life-time of the
sower, and bless individual life with the sweets of a guaranteed
triumph over the power of death. Resurgam, “I shall live after death,”
expresses the significance of that triumph, and of the “esoteric
doctrine of Pythagoras.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The Christian church has constantly perverted the purpose of education,
but has never yet deserved the reproach of having neglected its means.
From the very beginning the sect of the apostle-training Galilean has
been a sect of assiduous educators. They were not satisfied with
founding schools and opening their doors to all comers, but went forth
in quest of new converts, and pursued their aim with a persistence of
zeal and a versatility of skill that could not fail to accomplish its
purpose. As soon as a sufficient increase of power enabled them to
control the institutes of primary instruction they turned their chief
attention to the dogmatical education of the young. They derived no aid
from the attractiveness and still less from the plausibility of their
doctrine, but they realized Schopenhauer’s remark that “there is in
childhood a period measured by six, or at most by ten years, when any
well-inculcated dogma, no matter how extravagantly absurd, is sure to
retain its hold for life.” And though the propagation of an unnatural
creed is not favored by natural fertility, the naturally barren
doctrine of renunciation was thus successfully propagated by a system
of incessant grafting. By the skilful application of that process the
most dissimilar plants were made subservient to its purpose. The
“Worship of Sorrow” with its whining renunciation of worldly
enjoyments, and its indifference to health and physical education, was
grafted on the manful naturalism of the Hebrew law-giver.
Saint-worship, the veneration of self-torturing fanatics, was grafted
on a stem of pagan mythology, and dozens of Christian martyrs have thus
usurped the honor and the sacrifices of pagan temples. Christian
holidays were grafted on the festivals of the nature-loving Saxons. But
persuasion failing, the missionaries of the cross did not hesitate to
resort to more conclusive measures. Like refractory children cudgeled
along the path of knowledge, the obstinate skeptics of northern Europe
were harassed with fire and sword till they could not help admitting
the dangers of unbelief. The garden-lands of the Albigenses were wasted
till they found no difficulty in yearning for the peace of a better
world. Philosophers were tortured in the prisons of the Holy
Inquisition till the sorrows of life favored the renunciation of its
hopes.
For thirteen centuries the sunshine of millions of human hearts was
ruthlessly sacrificed to promote the task of luring mankind from life
to ghost-land, and during all those ages education was systematically
turned from a blessing into an earth-blighting curse.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
There is a story of a Portuguese slave-dealer who carried a private
chaplain on his pay-roll, and frequently expressed his solicitude for
the spiritual welfare of his shackled captives. A very similar kind of
spiritual duty has for centuries been made the excuse for an almost
total neglect of secular education. Divorced from the control of common
sense, religion soon degenerated into mere ceremonialism. A priest who
would travel twenty miles through a snow-storm to supply a dying man
with a consecrated wafer had no sympathy with the needs of the living.
He would extort the last penny of his tithes at the risk of starving a
village full of needy parishioners. He would groan at the sight of an
unbaptized child, but had not a drop of water to cool the brows of
burning Moors or Jews. He would rave about the cruelty of a prince who
had deprived the clergy of their mass-shillings, but had no ear for the
laments of the exiled Moriscos or the curses of starving serfs.
Such was the morality which arrogated the right of suppressing that
system of physical and intellectual education which had filled the
homes of the Mediterranean nations with all the blessings of health,
science, and beauty. Theological training had failed to kindle the dawn
of a supernatural millennium, but had thoroughly succeeded in
extinguishing the light of human reason. Not absolute ignorance only,
but baneful superstition—worse than ignorance by just as much as poison
is worse than hunger—was for centuries the inevitable result of all
so-called school-training; and the traditions of that age of
priest-rule have made religion almost a synonyme of cant. It also gave
book-learning its supposed tendency to mental aberration. Can we wonder
at that result of an age when the literary products of Christian Europe
were confined almost exclusively to ghost-stories and manuals of
ceremony? Can we wonder that delusions of the most preposterous kind
assumed the virulence of epidemic diseases? Maniacs of self-mutilation,
of epileptic contortions, of were-wolf panics, traversed Europe from
end to end. Men gloried in ignorance, and boasted their neglect of
worldly science till the consequences of that neglect avenged its folly
in actual madness.
The saddest of all the sad “it might have beens” is, perhaps, a reverie
on the probable results of earlier emancipation—of the employment of
thirteen worse than wasted centuries in scientific inquiries,
agricultural improvements, social and sanitary reforms. We might have
failed to enter the portals of the New Jerusalem, but we would probably
have regained our earthly paradise.
E.—REFORM.
The days of the Holy Inquisition are past; but the restless propaganda
of Jesuitry still shames the inactivity of Rationalism. Our friends sit
listless, relying on the theoretical advantages of their cause, while
the busy intrigues of our enemies secure them all practical advantages.
Even in our model republic only primary education stands neutral, while
private enterprise has made nearly every higher college a stronghold of
dogmatism. And even the semi-secularism of primary instruction is more
than offset by the ultra-orthodoxy of “Sunday-schools.” Millions of
factory children have to sacrifice their only day of leisure at the
bidding of their dogmatic task-master and with the timid connivance of
their parents. “We cannot row against the stream,” I have heard even
Freethinkers say. “Let the youngsters join the crowd; if it does them
no good, it can do no harm.” But it will do harm, even beyond the waste
of time and the wasted opportunities for health-giving exercise. The
process of dogmatic inoculation may fail to serve its direct purpose,
but the weekly repetition of the experiment is sure to contaminate the
moral organism with unsound humors which may become virulent at
unexpected times and, likely enough, undermine that very peace of the
household which a short-sighted mother hoped to promote by driving her
boys to Sunday-school, as she would drive troublesome cattle to a
public pasture.
The Freethinkers of every community should combine to engage a teacher,
or at least facilitate home instruction by collecting text-books of
Secularism, such as Voltaire’s “Philosophical Cyclopedia;” Rousseau’s
“Emile;” Hallam’s “History of the Middle Ages;” Ingersoll’s pamphlets;
Paine’s “Age of Reason;” Lecky’s “History of Rationalism” and “History
of Morals;” Lessing’s “Nathan;” Goethe and Schiller’s “Xenions;”
Darwin’s “Descent of Man;” Plutarch’s Biographies; Trelawney’s “Last
Days of Shelley and Byron;” McDonnell’s Freethought novels; Parker
Pillsbury’s “Review of Sabbatarian Legislation;” Reade’s “Martyrdom of
Man;” Bennett’s “Gods and Religions of Ancient and Modern Times;”
Gibbon’s “History of Christianity;” Keeler’s “Short History of the
Bible;” “Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions;”
“Supernatural Religion;” Greg’s “Creed of Christendom;” Lord Amberley’s
“Analysis of Religious Belief;” “Religion Not History.”
We should have Freethought colleges and Secular missions, and even
isolated Liberals might do better than “drift with the stream.” They
might let their children pass their Sundays in the freedom of the
forests and mountains to worship the God of Nature in his own temple,
and learn a lesson from the parental devotion of their dumb
fellow-creatures. She-wolves, deprived of their whelps, have been known
to enter human habitations at night to suckle their young through the
bars of a heavy cage. Thrushes and fly-catchers will enter an open
window to feed or rescue their captive nestlings, and with a still
wider sympathy a Liberal friend of mine tries to aid his neighbors’
children, as well as his own. Renouncing the hope of abolishing
Sabbatarianism, he conceived the idea of controlling it, and induced
his neighbors to send their children to a “Sunday Garden” with a free
museum of pictures and stuffed birds, gymnastic contrivances, and a
little restaurant of free temperance refreshments—apples, peanuts, and
lemonade. He defrays the expenses of the establishment, which his
neighbors consider a sort of modified kindergarten; and under the name
of “Sunday books” circulates a private library of purely secular
literature.
“If life shall have been duly rationalized by science,” says Herbert
Spencer, “parents will learn to consider a sound physical constitution
as an entailed estate, which should be transmitted unimpaired, if not
improved;” and with a similar recognition of social obligations
Freethinkers should endeavor to transmit to their children a bequest of
unimpaired common sense. Loyalty to their Protestant ancestors, loyalty
to posterity, and to the majesty of truth herself, should prompt us to
stand bravely by our colors and train our children to continue the
struggle for light and independence.
By the far-reaching influence of education Secularists should bridge
the chasm which orthodoxy hopes to cross on the wings of faith.
Secularism shall preach the gospel of immortality on earth.
IV—OBJECTIVE MAXIMS.
CHAPTER XVI.
FOREST CULTURE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
It is wonderful how often instinct has anticipated the practical
lessons of science. Long before comparative anatomy taught us the
characteristics of our digestive organs the testimony of our natural
predilections indicated the advantages of a frugal diet. Long before
modern hygiene pointed out the perils of breathing the atmosphere of
unventilated dormitories the evidence of our senses warned us against
the foulness of that atmosphere. And ages before the researches of
agricultural chemistry began to reveal the protective influence of
arboreal vegetation, an instinct which the child of civilization shares
with the rudest savage revolted against the reckless destruction of
fine woodlands, and sought to retrieve the loss by surrounding private
homes with groves and parks. The love of forests is as natural to our
species as the love of rocks to the mountain-goat. Trees and tree-shade
are associated with our traditions of paradise, and that the cradle of
the human race was not a brick tenement or a wheat-farm, but a
tree-garden, is one of the few points on which the genesis of Darwin
agrees with that of the Pentateuch. The happiest days of childhood
would lose half their charm without the witchery of woodland rambles,
and, like an echo of the foreworld, the instincts of our forest-born
ancestors often awake in the souls of their descendants. City children
are transported with delight at the first sight of a wood-covered
landscape, and the evergreen arcades of a tropical forest would charm
the soul of a young Esquimaux as the ever-rolling waves of the ocean
would awaken the yearnings of a captive sea-bird. The traveler Chamisso
mentions an interview with a poor Yakoot, a native of the North
Siberian ice-coast, who happened to get hold of an illustrated magazine
with a woodcut of a fine southern landscape: a river-valley, rocky
slopes rising toward a park-like lawn with a background of wooded
highlands. With that journal on his knees the Yakoot squatted down in
front of the traveler’s tent, and thus sat motionless, hour after hour,
contemplating the picture in silent rapture. “How would you like to
live in a country of that kind?” asked the professor. The Yakoot folded
his hands, but continued his reverie. “I hope we shall go there if we
are good,” said he at last, with a sigh of deep emotion.
The importance of hereditary instincts can be often measured by the
degree of their persistence. Man is supposed to be a native of the
trans-Caucasian highlands—Armenia, perhaps, or the terrace-lands of the
Hindookoosh. Yet agriculture has succeeded in developing a type of
human beings who would instinctively prefer a fertile plain to the
grandest highland paradise of the East. Warfare has in like manner
engendered an instinctive fondness for a life of perilous adventure, as
contrasted with the arcadian security of the Golden Age. There are men
who prefer slavery to freedom, and think pallor more attractive than
the glow of health, but a millennium of unnaturalism has as yet failed
to develop a species of human beings who would instinctively prefer the
dreariness of a treeless plain to the verdure of a primeval forest.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The love of forest-trees is a characteristic of the nature-abiding
nations of the North, and has rewarded itself by an almost complete
reversion of the original contrast between the garden lands of the
South and the inhospitable wilderness of the higher latitudes. Forest
destruction has turned Southern Europe into a desert, while the
preservation of forests has made the homes of the hyperborean hunters
an Eden of beauty and fertility. “One-third to the hunter, two-thirds
to the husbandman,” was the rule of Margrave Philip in his distribution
of forest and fields, and expresses the exact proportion which modern
science indicates as most favorable to the perennial fertility of our
farm-lands. In a single century the forest-destroying Spaniards turned
many of their American colonies from gardens into sand-wastes, while,
after fourteen hundred years of continuous cultivation, the fields of
the Danubian Valley are still as fertile as in the days of Trajan and
Tacitus. Along the river-banks and half-way up the foot-hills the
arable land has been cleared, but higher up the forest has been spared.
All the highlands from Ratisbon to Buda-Pesth still form a continuous
mountain park of stately oaks and pines, and, as a consequence, springs
never fail; crops are safe against winter floods and summer drouths;
song-birds still return to their birthland, and reward their protectors
by the destruction of noxious insects; meadows, grain-fields, and
orchards produce their abundant harvest year after year; famine is
unknown, and contagious diseases rarely assume an epidemic form. In
Switzerland and Prussia the preservation of the now remaining woodlands
is guaranteed by strict protective laws; Scandinavia requires her
forest-owners to replant a certain portion of every larger clearing; in
Great Britain the parks of the ancient mansions are protected like
sacred monuments of the past, and landowners vie in lining their
field-trails with rows of shade-trees. The fertility of those lands is
a constant surprise to the American traveler disposed to associate the
idea of eastern landscapes with the picture of worn-out fields.
Surrounded by Russian steppes and trans-Alpine deserts, the homes of
the Germanic nations still form a Goshen of verdure and abundance.
Forest protectors have not lost their earthly paradise.
C.—PERVERSION.
Sixteen hundred years ago the highlands of the European continent were
still covered with a dense growth of primeval forests. The
healthfulness and fertility of the Mediterranean coastlands surpassed
that of the most favored regions of the present world, and the
dependence of those blessings on the preservation of the
spring-sheltering woodlands was clearly recognized by such writers as
Pliny and Columella, though their own experience did not enable them to
suspect all the ruinous consequences of that wholesale forest
destruction, which modern science has justly denounced as the ne plus
ultra folly of human improvidence. Practical experiments had, however,
demonstrated such facts as the failing of springs on treeless slopes,
and the violence of winter floods in districts unprotected by
rain-absorbing forests, and tree culture was practiced as a regular
branch of rational husbandry. But with the triumph of the Galilean
church came the millennium of unnaturalism. Rational agriculture became
a tradition of the past; the culture of secular science was fiercely
denounced from thousands of pulpits; improvidence, “unworldliness,” and
superstitious reliance on the efficacy of prayer were systematically
inculcated as supreme virtues; the cultivators of the soil were treated
like unclean beasts, and for a series of centuries the garden regions
of the East were abandoned to the inevitable consequences of neglect
and misculture.
Millions of acres of fine forest lands passed into the hands of
ignorant priests, who, in their greed for immediate gain, and their
reckless indifference to the secular welfare of posterity, doomed their
trees to the ax, entailing barrenness on regions favored by every
natural advantage of soil and climate. Drouths, famines, and
locust-swarms failed to impress the protest of nature. Her enemies had
no concern with such worldly vanities as the study of climatic
vicissitudes, and hoped to avert the consequences of their folly by an
appeal to the intercession of miracle-working saints.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Yet the saints failed to answer that appeal. The outraged laws of
nature avenged themselves with the inexorable sequence of cause and
effect, and in spite of all prayer-meetings the significance of their
crime against the fertility of their Mother Earth was brought home to
the experience of the ruthless destroyers. In their net-work of moss
and leaves forests absorb the moisture of the atmosphere, and thus
nourish the springs which in their turn replenish the brooks and
rivers. When the highlands of the Mediterranean peninsulas had been
deprived of their woods the general failing of springs turned rivers
into shallow brooks, and brook-valleys into arid ravines. Summer rains
became too scarce to support the vegetation of the farm lands; the
tillers of the soil had to resort to irrigation and eat their bread in
a harder and ever harder struggle for existence, till vast areas of
once fertile lands had to be entirely abandoned, and the arable
territory of this planet was yearly reduced by the growth of an
artificial desert. And while the summer drouths became more severe,
winter floods became more frequent and destructive. From the treeless
slopes of the Mediterranean coastlands winter rains descended like
waterfalls, turning once placid rivers into raging torrents, and
depriving the fields of their small remnant of fertile mould. Hillsides
which in the times of Virgil had furnished pastures for thousands of
herds were thus reduced to a state of desolation almost as complete as
that of a volcanic cinder-field; their dells choked with rock debris,
their terraces rent by a chaos of gullies and clefts, while the soil,
swept from the highlands, was accumulated in mudbanks near the mouth of
the river. Harbors once offering anchorage for the fleets of an empire
became inaccessible from the ever-growing deposits of diluvium. Yearly
mud inundations engendered climatic diseases and all-pervading gnat
swarms. Insectivorous birds, deprived of their nest shelter, emigrated
to less inhospitable lands, and the scant produce of tillage had to be
shared with ever-multiplying legions of destructive insects. Along the
south coasts of Italy the shore-hills for hundreds of miles present the
same dreary aspect of monotonous barrenness. Greece is a naked rock;
forests have almost disappeared from the plains of Spain and Asia
Minor; in northern Africa millions of square miles, once teeming with
cities and castles, have been reduced to a state of hopeless aridity.
The Mediterranean, once a forest-lake of paradise, has become a Dead
Sea, surrounded by barren rocks, and sandy or dust clouded plains.
According to a careful comparison of the extant data of statistical
computations, the population of the territory once comprised under the
jurisdiction of the Cæsars has thus been reduced from 290,000,000 to
less than 80,000,000, i.e., from a hundred to less than thirty per
cent. In other words, an average of seventy-eight in a hundred human
beings have been starved out of existence, and the same area of ground
which once supported a flourishing village, at present almost fails to
satisfy the hunger of a small family. For we must not forget that
modern industry has devised methods of subsistence undreamed of by the
nations of antiquity, and that the religion of resignation has taught
millions to endure degrees of wretchedness which nine out of ten pagans
would have refused to prefer to the alternative of self-destruction. A
whole tenement of priest-ridden lazaronis now contrive to eke out a
subsistence on a pittance which a citizen of ancient Rome would have
been too proud to ask a woman to share; yet with all their talent for
surviving under conditions of soul and body degrading distress, only
eight children of the Mediterranean coastlands can now wring a sickly
subsistence from the same area of soil which once sufficed to supply
twenty-nine men with all the blessings of health and abundance.
E.—REFORM.
The discovery of two new continents has respited the doomed nations of
the Old World, but the rapid colonization of those land supplements
will soon reduce mankind to the alternative of tree-culture or
emigration to the charity-farm of the New Jerusalem. In the words of a
great German naturalist, “We shall have to work the world over again.”
On a small scale the practicability of that plan has already been
conclusively demonstrated. By tree-culture alone arid sand-wastes have
been restored to something like tolerable fertility, if not to anything
approaching their pristine productiveness. In the lower valley of the
Nile (the ancient Thebaïd) Ibrahim Pasha set out thirty-five million
Circassian forest-trees, of which one-third at least took root, and by
their growth not only reclaimed the sterility of the soil but increased
the average annual rainfall from four to fifteen inches. In the Landes
of western France a large tract of land has been reclaimed from the
inroads of the coast sand by lining the dunes with a thick belt of
trees, and some fifteen hundred square miles of once worthless fields
have thus been restored to a high degree of productiveness. In the
Austrian Karst, a sterile plateau of limestone cliffs and caves has
been dotted with groves till the valleys have been refreshed with the
water of resuscitated springs; and pasture-lands, long too impoverished
even for the sustenance of mountain goats, once more are covered with
herds of thriving cattle.
The experience of the next three or four generations will not fail to
make every intelligent farmer a tree-planter. Our barren fields will be
turned into pine plantations, every public highway will be lined with
shade-trees. The communities of the next century will vie in the
consecration of township groves, in the founding of forestry clubs, in
the celebration of arbor days and woodland festivals. The barren
table-lands of our central states will be reclaimed, and before the end
of the twentieth century the work of redemption will be extended to the
great deserts of the Eastern continents. And as a hundred years ago
armies of tree-fellers were busy wresting land from the primeval
forest, in a hundred years more armies of tree-planters will be busy
wresting land from the desert. The men that will “work the world over
again” will not be apt to forget the terms of their second lease.
In turning up the soil of the reclaimed desert they will unearth the
foundations of buried temples, temples once sacred to the worship of
gods whose prophets drenched the world with blood to enforce the
observance of circumcision rites, wafer rites, and immersion rites, and
filled their scriptures with minute instructions for the ordinances of
priests and the mumbling of prescribed prayers. In musing over the
ruins of such temples, the children of the future will have a chance
for many profitable meditations—the reflection, for instance: From what
mistakes those alleged saviors might have saved the world if their
voluminous gospels had devoted a single page to an injunction against
the earth-desolating folly of forest-destruction!
CHAPTER XVII.
RECREATION.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The indoor occupations of civilized life imply the necessity of
providing artificial substitutes for the opportunities of physical
exercise, which men in a state of nature can find abundantly in the
course of such healthful pursuits as hunting, fishing, and primitive
agriculture. For similar reasons civilization ought to compensate the
lost chance of outdoor sports which only the favorites of fortune can
afford to combine with the exigencies of city life. To the children of
nature life is a festival; outdoor recreations, exciting sports, offer
themselves freely and frequently enough to dispense with artificial
supplements; but the dreariness of workshop life makes those
substitutes a moral as well as physical necessity. Under the influence
of unalloyed drudgery the human soul withers like a plant in a sunless
cave, and weariness of heart reacts on the body in a way analogous to
the health-undermining effect of sorrow and repeated disappointment. To
the unbiased judgment of our pagan forefathers the necessity of
providing city dwellers with opportunities for public recreation
appeared, indeed, as evident as the necessity of counteracting the
rigors of the higher latitudes with contrivances for a supply of
artificial warmth. The cities of ancient Greece had weekly and monthly
festivals, besides the yearly reunions of competing athletes and
artists, and once in four years the champions of the land met to
contest the prize of national supremacy in the presence of assembled
millions. Hostilities, even during the crisis of civil war, were
suspended to insure free access to the plains of Corinth, where the
Olympic Games were celebrated with a regularity that made their period
the basis of chronological computation for a space of nearly eight
hundred years. When Rome became the capital of the world, the yearly
disbursements for the subvention of free public recreations equaled the
tribute of a wealthy province. There were free race courses, gymnasia,
music halls, and wrestling-ring; free public baths and magnificent
amphitheaters for the exhibition of free dramatic performances,
gladiatorial combats, and curiosities of art and natural history. Every
proconsul of a foreign province was instructed to collect wild animals
and specimens of rare birds and reptiles; every triumphator devoted a
portion of his spoils to a celebration of free circenses—“circus
games”—by no means limited to the mutual slaughter of prize fighters,
but including horse races, concerts, trials of skill, and new arts. It
would be a mistake to suppose that the liberality of such
establishments offered a premium on idleness. The immense increase of
the metropolitan population justified the constant extension of that
liberality, but even after the erection of permanent amphitheaters the
vigilance of public censors discouraged mendicancy; the complaints of
wives, creditors, and landlords against habitual idlers were made the
basis of penal proceedings, and from the total appropriations for the
support of free municipal institutions the overseers of the poor
deducted considerable sums for purposes of public charity.
Nor did the citizens of the metropolis monopolize the privilege of free
public amusements. At the time of the Antonines not less than fifty
cities of Italy alone had amphitheaters of their own, and the smallest
hamlet had at least a palaestra, where the local champions met every
evening for a trial of strength and skill.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The alternation of day and night should reveal the truth that nature is
averse to permanent gloom. Sunlight is a primary condition of all
nobler life, and only ignorance or basest selfishness can doom a child
of earth to the misery of toil uncheered by the sun-rays of recreation.
For even enlightened selfishness would recognize the advantages of the
pagan plan. The passions of personal ambition burnt then as fiercely as
now, but the Roman world-conquerors thought it wiser, as well as
nobler, to share their spoils with the soldiers who had fought their
battles, with the workmen who had reared their castles, with the
neighbors who had witnessed their triumphs. The very slaves of Greece
and Rome were indulged in periodic enjoyments of all the luxuries
fortune had bestowed upon their masters; at the end of the working-day
menials and artisans forgot their toil amidst the wonders of the
amphitheater, and neither their work nor their work-givers were the
worse for it. The promise of the evening cheered the labors of the day;
minds frequently unbent by the relaxation of diverting pastimes were
less apt to break under the strain of toil, less liable to yield to the
temptation of despondency, envy, and despair.
During the last four weeks of his Egyptian campaign Napoleon relieved
the tedium of camp-life by a series of athletic games and horse-races,
and thus succeeded in sustaining the spirit of his troops under
hardships which at first threatened to demoralize even his veterans.
For similar purposes and with similar success, Marshal Saxe indulged
his men in a variety of exciting sports, and Captain Kane found
dramatic entertainments the best prophylactic against the influence of
a monotonous diet combined with an average temperature of fifty degrees
below zero. Captain Burton ascribes the longevity of the nomadic Arabs
to their habit of passing their evenings as cheerfully as their stock
of provisions and anecdotes will permit, and it is a suggestive
circumstance that the joy-loving aristocracy of medieval France could
boast a surprising number of octogenarians, and that the gay capitals
of modern Europe, with all their vices, enjoy a better chance of
longevity than the dull provincial towns.
C.—PERVERSION.
The superstition which dooms its votaries to a worship of sorrow has
for centuries treated pleasure and sin as synonymous terms. In the era
of the Cæsars the licentious passions of a large metropolis gave that
asceticism a specious pretext; but its true purpose was soon after
revealed by the suppression of rustic pastimes, of athletic sports, and
at last, even of the classic festival which for centuries had assembled
the champions of the Mediterranean nations on the isthmus of Corinth.
With a similar rancor of bigoted intolerance the Puritans suppressed
the sports of “merry old England,” and their fanatical protests against
the most harmless amusements would be utterly incomprehensible if the
secret of Christian asceticism had not been unriddled by the study of
the Buddhistic parent-dogma. The doctrine which the apostle of Galilee
thought it wisest to veil in parables and metaphors, the Indian messiah
of anti-naturalism reveals in its ghastly nakedness as an attempt to
wean the hearts of mankind from their earth-born loves and reconcile
them to the alternative of annihilation—“Nirvana”—the only refuge from
the delusions of a life outweighing a single joy by a hundred sorrows.
Not life only, but the very instincts of life were to be suppressed, to
prevent their revival in new forms of re-birth; and in pursuit of that
plan the prophet of Nepaul does not hesitate to warn his disciples
against sleeping twice under the same tree, to lessen the chance of
undue fondness for any earthly object whatever. The indulgements of
life-endearing desires, that creed denounced as the height of folly and
recommended absolute abstinence from physical enjoyments as the
shortest path to the goal of redemption. In its practical consequences,
if not in its theoretical significances, the same principle asserts
itself in the doctrine of the New Testament, and justified the dread of
the life-loving pagans in realizing the stealthy growth of the Galilean
church, and anticipating the ultimate consequences of that gospel of
renunciation whose ideal of perfection was the other-worldliness of an
earth-despising fanatic. More or less consciously, the suppression of
earthly desires has always been pursued as the chief aim of Christian
dogmatism; the “world” has ever been the antithesis of the Christian
kingdom of God, the “flesh” the irreconcilable antagonist of the
regenerate soul. Hence that rancorous fury against the “worldliness” of
naturalism, against the pagan worship of joy, against the modern
revivals of that worship. Hence the grief of those “whining saints who
groaned in spirit at the sight of Jack in the Green;” hence the crusade
against Easter-fires, May-poles, foot-races, country excursions,
round-dances, and picnics; hence the anathemas against the athletic
sports of ancient Greece and the entertainments of the modern theater.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Wherever the fanatics of the Galilean church have trampled the flowers
of earth, the wasted gardens have been covered with a rank thicket of
weeds. Outlawed freedom has given way to the caprice of despots and the
license of crime; outraged common sense has yielded to the vagaries of
superstition; the suppression of healthful recreation has avenged
itself in the riots of secret vice. The history of alcoholism proves
that every revival of asceticism has been followed by an increase of
intemperance, as inevitably as the obstruction of a natural river-bed
would be followed by an inundation. When the convent-slaves of the
Middle Ages had been deprived of every chance of devoting a leisure
hour to more healthful recreations, neither the rigor of their vows nor
the bigotry of their creed could prevent them from drowning their
misery in wine. When the Puritans of the seventeenth century had turned
Scotland into an ecclesiastic penitentiary, the burghers of the
Sabbath-stricken towns sought refuge in the dreamland of intoxication.
The experience of many centuries has, indeed, forced the priesthood of
southern Europe to tolerate Sunday recreations as a minor evil. In
Spain the bull-rings of the larger cities open every Sunday at 2 P.M.
In Italy the patronage of Sunday excursions and Sunday theaters is
limited only by the financial resources of their patrons. In France
Sunday is by large odds the gayest day in the week. In the large cities
of Islam the muftis connive at Sunday dances and Sunday horse-races;
and as a consequence a much less pardonable abuse of holidays is far
rarer in southern Europe than in the cities of the Sabbatarian north,
the consumption of Sunday intoxicants being larger in Great Britain
than in France, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and Italy taken together.
Climatic causes may have their share in effecting that difference;
another cause was revealed when the followers of Ibn Hanbal attempted
to enforce the asceticism of their master upon the citizens of Bagdad.
Ibn Hanbal, the Mohammedan Hudibras, used to travel from village to
village, with a horde of bigots, breaking up dance-houses, upsetting
the tables of the confectionery pedlers, pelting flower-girls, and
thrashing musicians, and when the revolt of a provincial city resulted
in the death of the “reformer,” his fanatical followers assembled their
fellow-converts from all parts of the country, and raided town after
town, till they at last forced their way into the capital of the
caliphate. The recklessness of their zeal overcame all resistance, but
the completeness of their triumph led to a rather unexpected result.
Every play-house of the metropolis was not only closed, but utterly
demolished; musicians were jailed; dance-girls were left to choose
between instant flight and crucifixion; showmen were banished from all
public streets; but the dwellings of private citizens were less easy to
control, and those private citizens before long evinced a passionate
and ever-increasing fondness for intoxicating drinks. Elders of the
mosque were seen wallowing in their gutters, howling blasphemies that
would have appalled the heart of the toughest Giaour; dignitaries of
the green turban staggered along under the weight of a wine-skin, or
waltzed about in imitation of the exiled ballet performers. The
Hanbalites convoked tri-weekly, and at last daily, prayer-meetings, but
things went from bad to worse, till a counter-revolution finally
restored the authority of the old city government, and the flight of
the fanatics was attended with a prompt decrease both of spiritual and
spirituous excesses.
E.—REFORM.
The predictions of our latter-day augurs would seem to indicate that
the civilization of the Caucasian race is drifting toward Socialism;
but a modern philosopher reminds us that “a reform, however great, is
apt to come out in a different shape from that predicted by the
reformers.” The citizens of the coming republic will probably waive
their claim to free government lunch-houses and similar “establishments
for preventing the natural penalties of idleness,” but they will most
decidedly protest against government interference with the legitimate
rewards of industry. Even now, few sane persons can realize the degree
of ignorance that enabled the clergy of the Middle Ages to fatten on
the proceeds of witchcraft trials and heretic hunts, and the time may
be near when our children will find it difficult to conceive the degree
of infatuation that could induce their forefathers to sacrifice their
weekly leisure-day at the bidding of brainless and heartless bigots.
Drudgery will perhaps continue the hard task-master of the
working-week; but the Sundays of the future will be as free as the
light of their sun.
CHAPTER XVIII.
DOMESTIC REFORM.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
In the nest-building propensity of the social insects the biologist can
recognize the first germ of the instinctive desire for the
establishment of a permanent home. Certain birds, like the
weaver-thrush of the tropics, imitate the community life of the ant and
bee, but in all higher animals the homestead instinct is associated
with the desire for domestic privacy. The eagle will suffer no other
bird to approach the rock that shelters his eyrie; the hawk, the heron,
and the kingfisher rear their brood at the greatest possible distance
from the nesting-place of their next relatives. Each pair of squirrels
try to get a tree all to themselves; and even the social prairie-dog
shares its home with strangers (owls and serpents) rather than with
another family of its own tribe. The “homestead instinct” of our
primitive forefathers formed the first, and perhaps the most potent,
stimulus to the acquisition of personal property. There is a period in
life when the desire for the possession of a private domicile asserts
itself with the power almost of a vital passion; and success in the
realization of that desire solves in many respects the chief problems
of individual existence. The love of domestic peace, the delight in the
improvement of a private homestead, are the best guarantees of staid
habits. There was a time when the neglect of husbandry was considered a
conclusive proof of profligate habits; and the office of a Roman censor
comprised the duty of reproving careless housekeepers. The poorest
citizen of the Roman commonwealth had a little patrimonium of his own,
a dwelling-house, an orchard, and a small lot of land, which he did his
best to improve, and where his children learned their first lesson of
personal rights in defense of their private playgrounds.
The ruins of Pompeii show that the civilization of the Mediterranean
coast-lands had anticipated the conclusion of our sanitarian reformers,
who recommend the advantage of cottage-suburbs as a remedy for the
horrors of tenement life. Between the acropolis and the seaside villas
the town forms an aggregation of small dwelling-houses, mostly
one-story, but each with a private yard (probably a little garden) or a
wide portico, with bath-room and private gymnasiums. And though the
ancients were well acquainted with the manufacture of glass, their
dwelling-houses were lighted by mere lattice-windows, excluding rain
and the glare of the sun, but freely admitting every breeze, and thus
solving the problem of ventilation in the simplest and most effective
manner. The dwellings of our Saxon forefathers, too, resembled the
log-cabins of the Kentucky backwoods, and admitted fresh air so freely
that the large family-hearth could dispense with a chimney, and vented
its smoke through the open eaves of the roof. In the palaces of the
Roman patricians there were special winter-rooms, with a smoke-flue
resembling a narrow alcove; but even there, ventilation was insured by
numerous lattice doors, communicating with as many balconies or terrace
roofs.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The evolution of all hereditary instincts has been explained by the
“survival of the fittest,” and the instinct of homestead-love has
doubtlessly been developed in the same way. The results of its
predominance prevailed against the results of its absence. Defensive
love of a private “hearth and home” is the basis of patriotism, so
unmistakably, indeed, that the fathers of the Roman republic for
centuries refused to employ foreign mercenaries, who had no personal
interest in the defense of the soil. As a modern humorist has cleverly
expressed it: “Few men have been patriotic enough to shoulder a musket
in defense of a boarding-house.” And the golden age of civic virtues is
almost limited to the time when every free citizen of Greece and Rome
was a landowner.
Nor would it be easy to overrate the subjective advantages of
home-life. Health, happiness, and longevity have no more insidious foe
than the canker-worm of vexation; and for the unavoidable
disappointments of social life there is no more effective specific than
the peace of a prosperous private homestead, soothing the mind with
evidences of success in the growth of a promising orchard, in the
increase and improvement of domestic animals, in the happiness of merry
children and contented dependents. Xenophon, after proving the
excitements of an adventurous life by land and sea, found a truer
happiness in the solitude of his Arcadian hunting-lodge. Felix Sylla,
Fortune’s most constant favorite, abandoned the throne of a mighty
empire to enjoy the frugal fare of a small hill-farm. Voltaire, worn
out by the trials of a fifty years’ life-and-death struggle against the
rancor of bigots, recovered his health and his peace of mind amidst the
pear-tree plantations of Villa Ferney.
In the resources of medicine and scientific surgery the ancients were
far behind even the half-civilized nations of modern times, but their
children could enjoy their holidays on their own playground, their
sleepers could breathe pure air, their worn-out laborers could retire
to the peace of a private home; and they enjoyed a degree of health and
vigor which our most progressive nations can hope to re-attain only
after centuries of sanitary reform.
C.—PERVERSION.
The germ of the ignoble patience which submits to the miseries of
modern tenement-life, and learns to prefer the fetor of a crowded
slum-alley to the free air of the woods and fields, can be traced to
the voluntary prison-life of the first Christian monasteries. With all
the gregariousness of the African race, the very slaves of our American
plantations preferred to avoid quarrels and constraint by building a
separate cabin for the use of each family; but the ethics of the
Galilean church recognized no privilege of personal rights; the
sympathies of family-life were crushed out by the enforcement of
celibacy; every symptom of self-assertion was denounced as a revolt
against the duty of passive subordination; the very instincts of
individuality were systematically suppressed to make each convert a
whining, emasculated, self-despising, and world-renouncing “member of
the church of Christ.” The mortification of the body being the chief
object of monastic seclusion, the hygienic architecture of convent
buildings was considered a matter of such absolute unimportance that
many of the cells (dormitories) had no windows at all, but merely a
door communicating with an ill-ventilated gallery, after the plan of
our old-style prisons. Eight feet by ten, and eight high, were the
usual dimensions of those man-pens; and that utter indifference to the
physical health of the inmates was but rarely seconded by a view to the
advantages of private meditation is proved by the circumstance that the
convent-slaves of the eastern church (in the Byzantine empire, for
instance) were not often permitted to enjoy the privacy of their
wretched dens; their dormitories were packed like the bunks of a
Portuguese slave-ship, and the word Syncellus (cell-mate) is used as a
cognomen of numerous ecclesiastics. The abbot, and in less ascetic
centuries perhaps the learned clerks (legend-writers, etc.), were the
only members of a monastic community who could ever rely on the privacy
of a single hour. For the admitted purpose of mortifying their love of
physical comforts, the weary sleepers, worn-out with penance and
hunger, were summoned to prayer in the middle of the night, or sent out
on begging expeditions in the roughest weather. Every vestige of
furniture or clothing apt to mitigate the dreariness of discomfort was
banished from their cells; they suffered all the hardships without
enjoying the peace and security of a hermit’s home; novices (on
probation), and even the pupils of the convent-schools, were submitted
to a similar discipline, and thus monasticism became the
training-school of modern tenement-life.
During the latter half of the Middle Ages, feudalism found an
additional motive for suppressing the love of domestic independence.
The church usurers and aristocrats monopolized real estate, and made it
more and more difficult, even for the most industrious of their
dependants, to acquire a share of landed property. Every feudal lord
secured his control over his serfs by crowding them together in a small
village (literally an abode of villains, i.e., of vile pariahs), where
his slave-drivers could at any time rally them for an extra job of
socage duty. The incessant raids of mail-clad highway-robbers—robber
knights and marauding partisans—obliged all peace-loving freemen to
congregate for mutual protection and rear their children in the stone
prisons of an over-crowded burgh. The suppression of all natural
sciences, including the science of health, aggravated the evil by a
persistent neglect of such partial remedies as disinfectants and
artificial ventilation. The home of a medieval artisan combined all the
disadvantages of a jail and a pest-house.
The revolt against feudalism has at last broken the stone-fetters of
our larger cities; city walls have been turned into promenades, and
convents into store-houses or lunatic asylums; but the spirit of
monasticism still survives; indifference to the blessings of health and
domestic independence seems to have acquired the strength of a second
nature, and thousands of our modern factory slaves actually prefer
their slum-prisons to the freedom of a cheaper suburban home.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Nature rarely fails to avenge the violation of her laws, but it might
be doubted if the perversion of any other natural instinct has entailed
more numerous or direr penalties than our habitual outrages against the
instinct of home-life. The monstrosities of our tenement system, by a
moderate estimate, cost on the average every year the lives of
1,500,000 children under ten years of age (in Europe and North
America), and of 1,200,000 consumptives, besides thousands of victims
to epidemic disorders, aggravated, if not engendered, by the influence
of vitiated air. Habitual intemperance, too, has undoubtedly been
increased by the dearth of home-comforts. Our factory-laborers, our
mechanics, and thousands of students and young clerks, spend their
evenings in riot, because the man-trap of the lowest grog-shop is,
after all, less unattractive than the dungeon of a stifling tenement
home. In many of our larger cities similar causes have led to a
constant increase of a manner of existence which a modern reformer
calls the “celibacy of vice.” But the decreasing demand for independent
homes is not the only cause of the decreased supply, and the heartless
selfishness of our wealthy land-gluttons has provoked a form of
nihilism which threatens to shake, if not to subvert, the very
foundations of social life.
E.—REFORM.
That latter danger seems, at last, to have awakened our political
economists to the necessity of redressing a many-sided abuse, and the
failure of earlier reform projects has at least helped to emphasize the
demand for more adequate remedies. The traffic in human life in the
floating hells of the African slave-traders hardly called for more
stringent repressive measures than the inhumanity of our tenement
speculators who fatten on the profits of a system propagating the
infallible seeds of pulmonary consumption, and sacrificing the lives of
more children than the superstition of the dark ages ever doomed to the
altars of Moloch. Even in a country where the jealousy of personal
rights would hardly countenance legislative interference with the
construction of private dwelling-houses, the license of tenement-owners
ought to be circumscribed by the conditions of Dr. Paul Boettger’s
rule, providing for appropriation of a certain number of cubic feet of
breathing space, and square feet of window, front, and garden (or
play-ground) room for each tenant or family of tenants. The abuse of
sub-renting could be limited by similar provisions, and the adoption of
the separate cottage plan should be promoted by the reduction of
municipal passenger tariffs and suburban taxes.
The plan of equalizing the burden of taxation and the opportunities of
land tenure by a general confiscation and redistribution of real estate
might recommend itself as a last resort, though hardly in preference to
the project of Fedor Bakunin, the “Russian Mirabeau,” who proposed to
found new communities under a charter, reserving the tenth part of all
building lots for communal purposes, and lease the tenant-right to the
highest bidder. The value of those reserve lots would increase with the
growth of the town, and by renewing their lease from ten to ten years,
the rent could be made to cover the budget of all direct municipal
expenses, and leave a fair surplus for charitable and educational
purposes. In comparison with the confiscation plan, that project could
claim all the advantages which make prevention preferable to a drastic
cure.
As a check to the evils of land monopoly the least objectionable plan
would seem to be Professor De Graaf’s proposition of a graded system of
real estate taxation, increasing the rate of tallage with each multiple
of a fair homestead lot, and thus taxing a land-shark for the privilege
of acquisition, as well as for the actual possession, of an immoderate
estate.
The art of making home-life pleasant will yet prove the most effective
specific in the list of temperance remedies, and will aid the apostles
of Secularism in that work of redemption which the gospel of
renunciation has failed to achieve.
CHAPTER XIX.
LEGISLATIVE REFORM.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Progress is a general law of Nature, and the comparative study of
Evolution proves that the tendency to improvement increases with the
advance to higher planes of development. Among the lowest organisms the
rate of progress is hardly appreciable. The sea shells of the Devonian
period can scarcely be distinguished from the shells of our present
seas. The balls of amber found on the shores of the Baltic often
contain the mummies of insects closely resembling certain species of
latter-day flies and beetles, while the horse, the zebra, and other
modern varieties of the equine genus, have developed from a creature
not much larger than a fox. The Neanderthal skull proves that the heads
of our early ancestors were almost ape-like in their protruding jaws
and flatness of cranium. The lower animals adhere to inherited habits
with a persistency that has often proved their ruin by diminishing
their ability of adapting themselves to change of circumstances, as in
the case of that sea-lizard of the South sea islands, where its
ancestors had for ages managed to escape their only enemies by leaving
the water and crawling up the beach, and where their modern descendants
persist in crawling landward in the hope of escaping from dogs and
hunters.
The higher animals, on the other hand, rarely fail to profit by lessons
of experience. Trappers know that the contrivances for capturing wild
animals have to be changed from time to time, the older methods being
apt to lose their efficacy after the fate of a certain number of
victims has warned their relatives. Old rats have been seen driving
their young from a dish of arsenic-poisoned gruel. Deer, foxes, and
wild turkeys learn to avoid the favorite trails of the hunter; monkeys,
on their first arrival in a cold climate, impatiently tear off the
jackets or shawls furnished by the kindness of their keeper, but soon
learn to appreciate the advantage of artificial teguments, and even try
to increase their stock of wardrobe by appropriating every stray piece
of cloth they can lay their hands on.
The instinct of adaptation to the conditions of progress has asserted
itself both among modern and very ancient nations, though during the
mental bondage of the Middle Ages its manifestations were
systematically suppressed by the conservatism of religious bigots.
Savages show an almost apish eagerness in adopting the habits,
fashions, and foibles of civilization. The political institutions of
primitive nations are very elastic. The Grecian republics were not only
willing but anxious to improve their laws by abolishing abuses and
testing amendments. In ancient Rome every general assembly of freemen
exercised the functions of a legislative council; legislative reforms
were proposed by private citizens and were often carried by
acclamation, like the edict for the expulsion of the Tarquins, and the
resolution revoking the exile of Cicero.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Legislative reform, the manful renunciation of entangling alliances
with the ghosts of the past, is a sword that has more than once cut a
Gordian knot of fatal complications. The suppression of monasteries
saved four of our Spanish American sister republics from a brood of
vampires that had drained the life-blood of Spain for a series of
centuries. In England the timely repeal of the corn-laws averted an
explosion that might have rent the coherence of the entire British
empire. The abolition of slavery with one blow destroyed a hydra that
had menaced the safety of the American Union by an endless series of
political disputes. By the abolition of serfdom Czar Alexander elevated
the Russian empire to the rank of a progressive nation. The very
possibility of national progress depends, indeed, on the hope of
legislative reform, for the rigor of unalterable laws prevents social
development as the clasp of an iron ring prevents the growth of a tree.
C.—PERVERSION.
All the intelligent nations of antiquity were distinguished by a
tendency to legislative progress, till the freedom of that progress was
checked by the claims of religious infallibility. The founder of the
Zendavesta advanced that claim for a pandect of pretended revelations
which became the religious code of Central Asia, and as a consequence
the intellectual and industrial development of two valiant nations was
stunted by legislative conservatism—the proverbially “unalterable laws
of the Medes and Persians.” The claims of an infallible revelation
preclude the necessity of reform. “Should mortals presume to improve
the ordinances of a God?”
But the blind hatred of progress which has for so many centuries
degraded the Christian hierarchy below the priesthood of all other
intolerant creeds, is the earth-renouncing antinaturalism of their
founder. The priests of Zoroaster, Moses, and Mohammed claimed the
sufficiency of their dogmas for the purposes of national prosperity.
The priests of the nature-hating Galilean attempted to suppress the
very desire of that prosperity. “The doctrine of renunciation made
patriotism an idle dream: the saints, whose ‘kingdom was not of this
world,’ had no business with vanities of that sort; no chieftain could
trust his neighbor; cities were pitted against cities and castles
against castles; patriotic reformers would vainly have appealed to the
sympathies of men who had been taught to reserve their interest for the
politics of the New Jerusalem” (Secret of the East, p. 76).
The Rev. Spurgeon, of London, England, recently provoked the protests
of his Liberal colleagues by the confession that he “positively hated
advanced thought;” but only five centuries ago such protests were
silenced with the gag and the fagot. For nearly a thousand years every
clergyman who had the courage to lift his voice in favor of secular
reforms was fiercely attacked as a traitor to the sacred cause of
other-worldliness. To question the authority of the church was a crime
which could not in the least be palliated by such pleas as the temporal
interests of mankind, and a mere hint at the fallibility of “revealed
scriptures” could only be expiated in the blood of the offender. Nay,
thousands of scientists, historians, and philosophers who had never
expressed a direct doubt of that sort, were doomed to a death of
torture merely because the logical inference of their discoveries was
at variance with the dogmas of the Galilean miracle-mongers. From the
reign of Charlemagne to the outbreak of the Protestant revolt the
intolerance of Christian bigots interposed an insuperable dam between
the projects and the realization of social reforms.
“I cannot conceive,” says Hallam, “of any state of society more adverse
to the intellectual improvement of mankind than one which admitted no
middle line between dissoluteness and fanatical mortifications.”
If it had not been for the exotic civilization of Moorish Spain, it
would be strictly true that at the end of the thirteenth century, when
the enemies of nature had reached the zenith of their power, “the
countries of Europe, without a single exception, were worse governed,
more ignorant, more superstitious, poorer, and unhappier than the worst
governed provinces of pagan Rome.”
In China and India, too, the resistance of religious prejudice has for
ages frustrated the hopes of political development, and the
civilization of Europe dates only from the time when a more or less
complete separation of church and state was effected by the
insurrection of the Germanic nations, and where the work of that
separation has been left unfinished the march of reform halts at every
step. Every claim of dogmatic infallibility has proved a spoke in the
wheels of progress.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The pig-headed conservatism of orthodox nations has never failed to
avenge itself in its ultimate results, but its fatuity has, perhaps,
been most strikingly illustrated by the practical consequences of
legislative non-progressiveness. There was a time when the small value
of real estate made it a trifle for an Italian prince to present a
favorite prelate with a few square leagues of neglected woodlands; but
now, when those woods have been turned into vineyards and
building-lots, and over-population makes the monopoly of land a
grievous burden, hundreds of industrious peasants are obliged to starve
to swell the revenues of a bloated priest, who nevertheless succeeds in
silencing all protests by an appeal to the “necessity of respecting
time-honored institutions.” At a time when agriculture and pastoral
pursuits were the chief industries of Scotland, it was no great
grievance to sequester the seventh day for the exclusive service of
ecclesiastic purposes; but now, when thousands of poor factory children
need outdoor recreations as they need sunlight and bread, it has become
an infamous outrage on personal rights to enforce a medieval by-law for
the suppression of outdoor sports on the day when those who need it
most can find their only chance for recreation. Nevertheless, the dread
of innovations defeats the urged repeal of a law which for the last
hundred years has obliged millions of city dwellers to sacrifice the
sunshine of their lives for the benefit of a few clerical vampires. The
repeal of the witchcraft laws was preceded by a transition period of at
least two hundred years, when the mere dread of an open rupture with
the specters of the past cowed intelligent jurists into accepting the
charge of an impossible crime, and consigning the victims of
superstition to the doom of a hideous death. Their private rationalism
might revolt against the absurdity of the proceedings, but there were
the witnesses, there were the legal precedents, there were the explicit
provisions of the penal code, and with or without the consent of their
intellectual conscience they had to pronounce the sentence of death.
The penal statutes of medieval England made sheep stealing a capital
offense, and the mulish conservatism of British legislators refused to
abolish that relic of the Dark Ages till the common sense of the lower
classes found means to redress the abuse in a way of their own. Juries
agreed to acquit sheep-stealers altogether, rather than vote away their
lives for that of a quadruped. It was in vain that the prosecuting
attorney established the fact of the offense beyond a shadow of
reasonable doubt. It was in vain that the charge of the judge
emphatically indorsed the indictment. It was in vain that the
defendants themselves completed the evidence of their guilt by a frank
confession; they were acquitted amidst the wrathful protests of the
court and the plaudits of the audience, till sheep-owners themselves
were obliged to petition for the repeal of the time-dishonored law. The
idea that the mere antiquity of a legal custom is an argument in its
favor is a twin sister of the superstitious veneration of antiquated
dogmas.
E.—REFORM.
The superstitious dread of innovation, rather than the want of natural
intelligence, has for ages thwarted the hopes of rationalism, and the
renunciation of that prejudice promises to rival the blessing of
Secular education in promoting the advance of social reforms. Orthodox
restiveness, rather than any conceivable degree of ignorance, has, for
instance, prevented the repeal of the Religious Disability laws which
still disgrace the statutes of so many civilized nations. A chemical
inventor would be suspected of insanity for trying to demonstrate his
theories by quoting the Bible in preference to a scientific text-book,
yet on questions as open to investigation and proof as any problem of
chemistry, the courts of numerous intelligent nations still refuse to
accept the testimony of a witness who happens to prefer the philosophy
of Humboldt and Spencer to the rant of an oriental spook-monger. The
proposition to oblige a water-drinker to defray the expense of his
neighbor’s passion for intoxicating beverages would justly land the
proposer in the next lunatic asylum, yet millions upon millions of our
Caucasian fellow-men are still taxed to enable their neighbors to enjoy
the luxuries of a creed which the conscience of the unwilling
tithe-payer rejects as a degrading superstition. In Europe countless
Nonconformists have to contribute to the support of a parish-priest or
village-rector on pain of having a sheriff sell their household goods
at public auction. In America farmers and mechanics have to pay double
taxes in order to enable an association of mythology-mongers to hold
their property tax-free. Because the pantheon of the Ammonites included
a god with cannibal propensities, helpless infants were for centuries
roasted on the consecrated gridiron of that god; and because eighteen
hundred years ago the diseased imagination of a world-renouncing bigot
conceived the idea of a deity delighting in the self-affliction of his
creatures, the gloom of death still broods over the day devoted to the
special worship of that God, and the coercive penalties of the law are
weekly visited upon all who refuse to sacrifice their health and
happiness on the altar of superstition.
But legislative abuses are not confined to religious anachronisms. The
inconsistencies of our penal code still betray the influence of
medieval prejudices in the unwise leniency, as well as in the
disproportionate severity, of their dealings with purely secular
offenses. The vice of intemperance was for centuries encouraged by the
example of the clergy, while the control, or even the suppression, of
the sexual instinct was enforced by barbarous penalties. And while the
panders of the alcohol vice are still countenanced by the sanction of
legal license and admitted to official positions of honor and
influence, the mediators of sexual vice are treated as social outcasts,
and punished with a severity out of all proportion to the actual social
standards of virtue. The deserted wife, who in a moment of despair has
caused the death of an unborn child, is treated as the vilest of
criminals, while the crime of a railway shark or tenement-speculator
whose selfishness and greed have caused a fatal disaster, is condoned
in consideration of “social respectability,” i.e., a mask of orthodox
sentiments and unctuous cant. A Christian jury will thank a banker for
shooting a poor wretch whom extreme distress may have driven to enter a
house for predatory purposes, but if that same banker should be
convicted of embezzling the hard-earned savings of trusting widows and
orphans, his fellow-hypocrites will circulate an eloquent petition for
his release from a few years of light imprisonment.
There is need of other reforms, which recommend themselves by such
cogent arguments that their adoption seems only a question of time,
such as the protection of forests, the recognition of women’s rights,
the “habitual criminal” law, physical education, and the abolition of
the poison-traffic.
It is undoubtedly true that the progress from barbarism to culture is
characterized by the growth of a voluntary respect for the authority of
legal institutions, but it is equally true that the highest goals of
civilization cannot be reached till the degree of that respect shall be
measured by the utility, rather than by the antiquity, of special laws.
CHAPTER XX.
THE PRIESTHOOD OF SECULARISM.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
An instinct inherited from the habits of many generations teaches our
social fellow-creatures to entrust the welfare of their communities to
the protection of an experienced leader. Birds that become gregarious
only at a certain time of the year select a guide for that special
occasion. Others have a permanent leader, and among the more
intelligent quadrupeds that leadership becomes dual. Besides the stout
champion who comes to the front in moments of danger, wild cattle,
horses, antelopes, deer, and the social quadrumana have a veteran
pioneer who guides their migrations and sentinels their encampments.
Among the primitive tribes of our fellow-men, too, the authority of
leadership is divided between a warrior and a teacher, a chieftain and
a priest. The obstinacy of savages, who refuse to yield to reason,
suggested the plan of controlling their passions by the fear of the
unseen, but ghost-mongery was not the only, nor even the most
essential, function of primitive priesthood. The elders of the Brahmans
were the guardians of homeless children and overseers of public
charities. The Celtic Druids were the custodians of national treasures.
The rune-wardens of the ancient Scandinavians preserved the historical
traditions and law records of their nation. The priests of the
Phœnicians (like our Indian medicine men) were trained physicians. The
Egyptian hierophants were priests of knowledge, as well as of
mythology. They were the historians and biographers of their nation.
They codified the national laws. They taught geometry; they taught
grammar; they taught and practiced surgery; they devoted a large
portion of their time to astronomical observations. Their temple-cities
were, in fact, free universities, and the waste of time devoted to the
rites of superstition was more than compensated by secular studies, and
to some degree also by the political services of learned priests, who
seem to have been occasionally employed in diplomatic emergencies.
Motives of political prudence induced the law-givers of the
Mediterranean nations to circumscribe the authority of their pontiffs,
which at last was, indeed, almost limited to the supervision of
religious ceremonies. But in Rome, as well as in Greece and the Grecian
colonies of western Asia, the true functions of priesthood were assumed
by the popular exponents of philosophy, especially by the Stoics and
Pythagoreans. The weekly lectures of Zeno were attended by a
miscellaneous throng of truth-seekers; the disciples of Pythagoras
almost worshiped their master; Diagoras and Carneades traveled from
town to town, preaching to vast audiences of spell-bound admirers;
Apollonius of Tyana rose in fame till cities competed for the honor of
his visits; the clientèle of no Grecian prince was thought complete
without a court philosopher; the tyrant Dionysius, in all the pride of
his power, invited the moral rigorist Plato and submitted to his daily
repeated reproofs. Philosophers were the confessors, the comforters,
and the counselors of their patrons, and philosophic tutors were in
such request that wealthy Romans did not hesitate to procure them from
the traffickers in Grecian captives and indulge them in all privileges
but that of liberty. Centuries before a bishop of Rome contrived to
avert the wrath of King Alaric, doomed cities had been spared at the
intercession of pagan philosophers, and philosophers more than once
succeeded in allaying the fury of mutineers who would have ridiculed an
appeal to mythological traditions.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The power of filial love hardly exceeds that of the passionate
veneration which kindles about the person of a sincere teacher of
truth. The homage paid to an apostle of light is the noblest form of
hero-worship. The hosannas of idol-service overflowing upon the
idol-priest are marred by the discords of hypocrisy and the reproving
silence of reason; but the approval of wisdom is the highest reward of
its ministry. The brightness of that prestige shames the gilded halo of
the mythology-monger; the minister of Truth may lack the pomp of
consecrated temples, but his disciples will make a hermit’s cave a
Delphic grotto and will not willingly let the record of his oracles
perish. The chants of the Eleusynian festivals, the shout of the
Lupercalia, the mumblings of augurs and sibyls, have been forever
silenced; but the words of Plato still live; Socrates still speaks to
thousands of truth-seekers; the wisdom of Seneca still brightens the
gloom of adversity.
Religions founded on any basis of truth can survive the fall of their
temples. Jerusalem was wrecked in the storm of Roman conquest, but the
health-laws of the Mosaic code defied the power of the destroyer, and
of all the creeds born on the teeming soil of the East, Judaism alone
can still be preached without an alloy of cant and compromise.
The enthusiasm of progress has nothing to fear from the growth of
skepticism. Mankind will always appreciate their enlightened
well-wishers. In cities where the creed of the Galilean supernaturalist
has become almost as obsolete as the witchcraft delusion, progressive
clergymen still draw audiences of intelligent and sincere admirers, and
the apostles of social reform are haunted by anxious inquirers,
disciples whom the penalties of heresy fail to deter, and who if barred
out all day will come by night: “Master, what shall we do to be saved?”
In spite of sham saviors, the search after salvation has never ceased,
and after eighteen centuries of clerical caricatures the ideal of true
priesthood still survives in the hearts of men.
C.—PERVERSION.
The puerile supernaturalism of the pagan myth-mongers could not fail to
injure their prestige, even in an age of superstition; but the
antinaturalism of the Galilean fanatics not only neglected but
completely inverted the proper functions of priesthood. The pretended
ministers of Truth became her remorseless persecutors; the promised
healers depreciated the importance of bodily health, the hoped-for
apostles of social reform preached the doctrine of renunciation. We
should not judge the Christian clergy by the aberrations engendered by
the maddening influence of protracted persecutions. It would be equally
unfair to give them the credit of latter-day reforms, reluctantly
conceded to the demands of rationalism. But we can with perfect
fairness judge them by the standard of the moral and intellectual types
evolved during the period of their plenary power, the three hundred
years from the tenth to the end of the thirteenth century, when the
control of morals and education had been unconditionally surrendered
into the hands of their chosen representatives. The comparative scale
of human turpitude must not include the creations of fiction. We might
find a ne plus ultra of infamy in the satires of Rabelais, in the myths
of Hindostan, or the burlesques of the modern French dramatists. But if
we confine our comparison to the records of authentic history, it would
be no exaggeration to say that during the period named the type of a
Christian priest represented the absolute extreme of all the groveling
ignorance, the meanest selfishness, the rankest sloth, the basest
servility, the foulest perfidy, the grossest superstition, the most
bestial sensuality, to which the majesty of human nature has ever been
degraded. Thousands of monasteries fattened on the toil of starving
peasants. Villages were beggared by the rapacity of the tithe-gatherer;
cities were terrorized by witch-hunts and autos-da-fé. The crimps of
the inquisitorial tribunals hired spies and suborned perjurers by
promising them a share of confiscated estates. The evidence of
intellectual pursuits was equivalent to a sentence of death. Education
was almost limited to the memorizing of chants and prayers. “A cloud of
ignorance,” says Hallam, “overspread the whole face of the church,
hardly broken by a few glimmering lights who owe almost the whole of
their distinction to the surrounding darkness.... In 992, it was
asserted that scarcely a single person was to be found, even in Rome
itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a
thousand in Spain could address a common letter of salutation to
another.” Every deathbed became a harvest-field of clerical vampires
who did not hesitate to bully the dying into robbing their children for
the benefit of a bloated convent. Herds of howling fanatics roamed the
country, frenzying the superstitious rustics with their predictions of
impending horrors. Parishioners had to submit to the base avarice and
the baser lusts of insolent parish priests, who in his turn kissed the
dust at the feet of an arrogant prelate. The doctrine of Antinaturalism
had solved the problem of inflicting the greatest possible amount of
misery on the greatest possible number of victims.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The intellectual interregnum of the Middle Ages, the era of specters
and vampires, received the first promise of dawn about the middle of
the fourteenth century, when the lessons of the Crusades and the
influence of Moorish civilization began to react on the nations of
Christian Europe. Yet, by methods of their own, the vampires succeeded
in prolonging the dreadful night. They set their owls a-shrieking from
a thousand pulpits; they darkened the air with the smoke-clouds of
autos-da-fé. They treated every torch-bearer as an incendiary.
But though the delay of redemption completed the ruin of some of their
victims, the ghouls did not escape the deserved retribution. Their fire
alarms failed to avert the brightening dawn. Daylight found its way
even through the painted glass of dome-windows, and in the open air the
blood-suckers had to take wing on pain of being shaken off and trampled
under foot. The slaves of Hayti never rose more fiercely against their
French tyrants than the German peasants against their clerical
oppressor. From Antwerp to Leipzig thousands of convents were leveled
with the ground; the villages of Holland, Minden, and Brunswick joined
in a general priest-hunt, carried on with all the cruelties which the
man-hunters of the Frankish crusade had inflicted on the pagan Saxons.
In the Mediterranean Peninsulas the Jesuits were expelled as enemies of
public peace, and their colleagues could maintain themselves only by an
alliance with despotism against the liberal and intellectual elements
of their country. To patriots of the Garibaldi type the name of a
priest has become a byword implying the very quintessence of infamy.
The explosion of the French Revolution struck a still deadlier blow at
clerical prestige. The fagot-arguments of the Holy Inquisition were
answered by a “burning, as in hell-fire, of priestly shams and lies,”
and not one out of twenty French monasteries escaped the fury of the
avengers. Our Protestant clergymen see their temple walls cracked by a
breach of ever-multiplying schisms, and can prop their prestige only by
more and more humiliating concessions, and in every intelligent
community have to purchase popularity by rank heresies against the
dogmas of their predecessors. Here and there the orthodox tenets of the
New Testament have survived the progress of rationalism, but haunt the
shade, like specters scenting the morning air, and momentarily
expecting the summons that shall banish them to the realms of their
native night.
E.—REFORM.
When the harbinger of day dispels the specters of darkness,
half-awakened sleepers often mourn the fading visions of dreamland, as
they would mourn the memories of a vanished world, till they find that
the solid earth still remains, with its mountains and forests, and that
the enjoyment of real life has but just begun. With a similar regret
the dupes of Jesuitism mourn the collapse of their creed and lament the
decline of morality, till they find that religion still remains, with
its consolations and hopes, and that the true work of redemption has
but just begun.
The reign of superstition begins to yield to a religion of reason and
humanity. The first forerunners of that religion appeared at the end of
the sixteenth century, when the philosophers of northern Europe first
dared to appeal from dogma to nature, and since that revival of
common-sense the prison walls of clerical obscurantism have been shaken
by shock after shock, till daylight now enters through a thousand
fissures.
But Secularism has a positive as well as a negative mission, and after
removing the ruins of exploded idols, the champions of reform will
begin the work of reconstruction. Temples dedicated to the religion of
progress will rise from the ruins of superstition. Communities of
reformants will intrust the work of education to chosen teachers, who
will combine the functions of an instructor with those of an exhorter.
In the languages of several European nations the word “rector” still
bears that twofold significance. The ministers of Secularism will not
sacrifice physical health to mental culture. They will be gymnasiarchs,
like the Grecian pedagogues who superintended the athletic exercises of
their pupils and accompanied them on foot journeys and hunting
excursions. They will be teachers of hygiene, laboring to secure the
foundations of mental energy by the preservation of physical vigor, and
to banish diseases by the removal of their causes. They will seek to
circumscribe the power of prejudice by the extension of knowledge. They
will obviate the perils of poverty by lessons of industry and prudence.
Their doctrines will dispense with miracles; they will make experience
the test of truth, and justice the test of integrity; they will not
suppress, but encourage, free inquiry; their war against error will
employ no weapons but those of logic.
The religion of reason will limit its proper sphere to the secular
welfare of mankind, but will ask, as well as grant, the fullest freedom
of metaphysical speculation. Why should the friends of light darken the
sunshine of earth with fanatical wars for the suppression of private
theories about the mystery of the unrevealed first cause? Why should
they rage about the riddle of the veiled hereafter to please the
ordainer of the eternal law that visits such inexorable penalties upon
the neglect of the present world? Should the friends of common sense
quarrel about guesses at the solution of unknowable secrets? We need
not grudge our wonder-loving brother the luxury of meditating on the
mysteries of the unseen or the possibilities of resurrection. Shall the
soul of the dying patriarch live only in his children? Shall it wing
its way to distant stars? Shall it linger on earth:
“Sigh in the breeze, keep silence in the cave,
And glide with airy foot o’er yonder sea?”
Why should we wrangle about riddles which we cannot possibly solve? But
we might certainly have honesty enough to admit that impossibility.
Musing on the enigmas of the “land beyond the veil” may entertain us
with the visions of a dreamy hour, but should not engross the time
needed for the problems of the only world thus far revealed.
Thus, founded on a basis of health-culture, reason, and justice, the
office of priesthood will regain its ancient prestige, and the best and
wisest of men will become ministers of Secularism by devoting their
lives to the science of happiness on earth.
NOTE
[1] Weibisches Klagen, bängliches Zagen
Wendet kein Unglück, macht dich nicht frei:
Allen Gewalten zum Trotz sich erhalten,
Nimmer sich beugen, kräftig sich zeigen
Rufet die Arme der Götter herbei.
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