We shall see at the article "Certainty" that we ought often to be very uncertain of what we are certain of; and that we may fail in good sense when deciding according to what is calledcommonsense. But what is it that we callbelieving?
A Turk comes and says to me, "I believe that the angel Gabriel often descended from the empyrean, to bring Mahomet leaves of the Koran, written on blue vellum."
Well, Mustapha, and on what does thy shaven head found its belief of this incredible thing?
"On this: That there are the greatest probabilities that I have not been deceived in the relation of these improbable prodigies; that Abubeker, the father-in-law, Ali, the son-in-law, Aisha, or Aisse, the daughter, Omar, and Osman, certified the truth of the fact in the presence of fifty thousand men—gathered together all the leaves, read them to the faithful, and attested that not a word had been altered.
"That we have never had but one Koran, which has never been contradicted by another Koran. That God has never permitted the least alteration to be made in this book.
"That its doctrine and precepts are the perfection of reason. Its doctrine consists in the unity of God, for Whom we must live and die; in the immortality of the soul; the eternal rewards of the just and punishments of the wicked; and the mission of our great prophet Mahomet, proved by victories.
"Its precepts are: To be just and valiant; to give alms to the poor; to abstain from that enormous number of women whom the Eastern princes, and in particular the petty Jewish kings, took to themselves without scruple; to renounce the good wines of Engaddi and Tadmor, which those drunken Hebrews have so praised in their books; to pray to God five times a day, etc.
"This sublime religion has been confirmed by the miracle of all others the finest, the most constant, and best verified in the history of the world; that Mahomet, persecuted by the gross and absurd scholastic magistrates who decreed his arrest, and obliged to quit his country, returned victorious; that he made his imbecile and sanguinary enemies his footstool; that he all his life fought the battles of the Lord; that with a small number he always triumphed over the greater number; that he and his successors have converted one-half of the earth; and that, with God's help, we shall one day convert the other half."
Nothing can be arrayed in more dazzling colors. Yet Mustapha, while believing so firmly, always feels some small shadows of doubt arising in his soul when he hears any difficulties started respecting the visits of the angel Gabriel; the sura or chapter brought from heaven to declare that the great prophet was not a cuckold; or the mare Borak, which carried him in one night from Mecca to Jerusalem. Mustapha stammers; he makes very bad answers, at which he blushes; yet he not only tells you that he believes, but would also persuade you to believe. You press Mustapha; he still gapes and stares, and at last goes away to wash himself in honor of Allah, beginning his ablution at the elbow and ending with the forefinger.
Is Mustapha really persuaded—convinced of all that he has told us? Is he perfectly sure that Mahomet was sent by God, as he is sure that the city of Stamboul exists? as he is sure that the Empress Catherine II. sent a fleet from the remotest seas of the North to land troops in Peloponnesus—a thing as astonishing as the journey from Mecca to Jerusalem in one night—and that this fleet destroyed that of the Ottomans in the Dardanelles?
The truth is that Mustapha believes what he does not believe. He has been accustomed to pronounce, with his mollah, certain words which he takes for ideas. Tobelieveis very often todoubt.
"Why do you believe that?" says Harpagon. "I believe it because I believe it," answers Master Jacques; and most men might return the same answer.
Believe me fully, my dear reader, when I say one must not believe too easily. But what shall we say of those who would persuade others of what they themselves do not believe? and what of the monsters who persecute their brethren in the humble and rational doctrine of doubt and self-distrust?
Men of the world will perhaps be astonished to find this word the subject of an article; but we here address only the learned and ask their instruction.
Bethshemesh was a village belonging to God's people, situated, according to commentators, two miles north of Jerusalem. The Phœnicians having, in Samuel's time, beaten the Jews, and taken from them their Ark of alliance in the battle, in which they killed thirty thousand of their men, were severely punished for it by the Lord:
"Percussit eos in secretiori parte natium, et ebullierunt villæ et agri.... et nati sunt mures, et facta est confusio mortis magna in civitate."Literally: "He struck them in the most secret part of the buttocks; and the fields and the farmhouses were troubled.... and there sprung up mice; and there was a great confusion of death in the city."
The prophets of the Phœnicians, or Philistines, having informed them that they could deliver themselves from the scourge only by giving to the Lord five golden mice and five golden emeroids, and sending him back the Jewish Ark, they fulfilled this order, and, according to the express command of their prophets sent back the Ark with the mice and emeroids on a wagon drawn by two cows, with each a sucking calf and without a driver.
These two cows of themselves took the Ark straight to Bethshemesh. The men of Bethshemesh approached the Ark in order to look at it, which liberty was punished yet more severely than the profanation by the Phœnicians had been. The Lord struck with sudden death seventy men of the people, and fifty thousand of the populace.
The reverend Doctor Kennicott, an Irishman, printed in 1768 a French commentary on this occurrence and dedicated it to the bishop of Oxford. At the head of this commentary he entitles himself Doctor of Divinity, member of the Royal Society of London, of the Palatine Academy, of the Academy of Göttingen, and of the Academy of Inscriptions at Paris. All that I know of the matter is that he is not of the Academy of Inscriptions at Paris. Perhaps he is one of its correspondents. His vast erudition may have deceived him, but titles are distinct from things.
He informs the public that his pamphlet is sold at Paris by Saillant and Molini, at Rome by Monaldini, at Venice by Pasquali, at Florence by Cambiagi, at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey, at The Hague by Gosse, at Leyden by Jaquau, and in London by Beckett, who receives subscriptions.
In this pamphlet he pretends to prove that the Scripture text has been corrupted. Here we must be permitted to differ with him. Nearly all Bibles agree in these expressions: seventy men of the people and fifty thousand of the populace—"De populo septuaginta viros, et quinquaginta millia plebis."The reverend Doctor Kennicott says to the right reverend the lord bishop of Oxford that formerly there were strong prejudices in favor of the Hebrew text, but that for seventeen years his lordship and himself have been freed from their prejudices, after the deliberate and attentive perusal of this chapter.
In this we differ from Dr. Kennicott, and the more we read this chapter the more we reverence the ways of the Lord, which are not our ways. It is impossible, says Kennicott, for the candid reader not to feel astonished and affected at the contemplation of fifty thousand men destroyed in one village—men, too, employed in gathering the harvest.
This does, it is true, suppose a hundred thousand persons, at least, in that village, but should the doctor forget that the Lord had promised Abraham that his posterity should be as numerous as the sands of the sea?
The Jews and the Christians, adds he, have not scrupled to express their repugnance to attach faith to this destruction of fifty thousand and seventy men.
We answer that we are Christians and have no repugnance to attach faith to whatever is in the Holy Scriptures. We answer, with the reverend Father Calmet, that "if we were to reject whatever is extraordinary and beyond the reach of our conception we must reject the whole Bible." We are persuaded that the Jews, being under the guidance of God himself, could experience no events but such as were stamped with the seal of the Divinity and quite different from what happened to other men. We will even venture to advance that the death of these fifty thousand and seventy men is one of the least surprising things in the Old Testament.
We are struck with astonishment still more reverential when Eve's serpent and Balaam's ass talk; when the waters of the cataracts are swelled by rain fifteen cubits above all the mountains; when we behold the plagues of Egypt, and the six hundred and thirty thousand fighting Jews flying on foot through the divided and suspended sea; when Joshua stops the sun and moon at noonday; when Samson slays a thousand Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass.... In those divine times all was miracle, without exception, and we have the profoundest reverence for all these miracles—for that ancient world which was not our world; for that nature which was not our nature; for a divine book, in which there can be nothing human.
But we are astonished at the liberty which Dr. Kennicott takes of calling those deists and atheists, who, while they revere the Bible more than he does, differ from him in opinion. Never will it be believed that a man with such ideas is of the Academy of Medals and Inscriptions. He is, perhaps, of the Academy of Bedlam, the most ancient of all, and whose colonies extend throughout the earth.
Bilhah, servant to Rachel, and Zilpah, servant to Leah, each bore the patriarch Jacob two children, and, be it observed, that they inherited like legitimate sons, as well as the eight other male children whom Jacob had by the two sisters Leah and Rachel. It is true that all their inheritance consisted in a blessing; whereas, William the Bastard inherited Normandy.
Thierri, a bastard of Clovis, inherited the best part of Gaul, invaded by his father. Several kings of Spain and Naples have been bastards. In Spain bastards have always inherited. King Henry of Transtamare was not considered as an illegitimate king, though he was an illegitimate child, and this race of bastards, founded in the house of Austria, reigned in Spain until Philip V.
The line of Aragon, who reigned in Naples in the time of Louis XII., were bastards. Count de Dunois signed himself "the bastard of Orleans," and letters were long preserved of the duke of Normandy, king of England, which were signed "William the Bastard."
In Germany it is otherwise; the descent must be pure; bastards never inherit fiefs, nor have any estate. In France, as has long been the case, a king's bastard cannot be a priest without a dispensation from Rome, but he becomes a prince without any difficulty as soon as the king acknowledges him to be the offspring of his sire, even though he be the bastard of an adulterous father and mother. It is the same in Spain. The bastard of a king of England may be a duke but not a prince. Jacob's bastards were neither princes nor dukes; they had no lands, the reason being that their father had none, but they were afterwards calledpatriarchs, which may be renderedarch-fathers.
It has been asked whether the bastards of the popes might be popes in turn. Pope John XI. was, it is true, a bastard of Pope Sergius III., and of the famous Marozia; but an instance is not a law.
Samuel Ornik, a native of Basle, was, as is well known, a very amiable young man, who, moreover, knew his German and Greek New Testament by heart. At the age of twenty his parents sent him to travel. He was commissioned to carry books to the coadjutor at Paris in the time of the Fronde. He arrived at the archbishop's gate and was told by the Swiss thatmonseigneursaw no one. "My dear fellow," said Ornik, "you are very rude to your countrymen; the apostles allowed every one to approach, and Jesus Christ desired that little children should come unto him. I have nothing to ask of your master; on the contrary, I bring him something." "Enter, then," said the Swiss.
He waited an hour in the first ante-chamber. Being quite artless he attacked with questions a domestic who was very fond of telling all he knew about his master. "He must be pretty rich," said Ornik, "to have such a swarm of pages and footmen running in and out of the house." "I don't know," answered the other, "what his income is, but I hear Joli and the Abbé Charier say that he is two millions in debt." "But who is that lady who came out of a cabinet and is passing by?" "That is Madame de Pomereu, one of his mistresses." "She is really very pretty, but I have not read that the apostles had such company in their bedchambers in a morning." "Ah! that, I believe, is monsieur, about to give audience." "Saysa grandeur, monseigneur." "Well, with all my heart...." Ornik salutedsa grandeur, presented his books, and was received with a most gracious smile.Sa grandeursaid three words to him, and stepped into his carriage, escorted by fifty horsemen. In stepping in, monseigneur dropped a sheath and Ornik was astonished that monseigneur should carry so large an inkhorn. "Do you not see," said the talker, "that it is his dagger? every one that goes to parliament wears his dagger?" Ornik uttered an exclamation of astonishment, and departed.
He went through France and was edified by town after town. From thence he passed into Italy. In the papal territories he met a bishop with an income of only a thousand crowns, who went on foot. Ornik, being naturally kind, offered him a place in his cambiatura. "Signor, you are no doubt going to comfort the sick?" "Sir, I am going to my master." "Your master? He, no doubt, is Jesus Christ." "Sir, he is Cardinal Azolino; I am his almoner. He gives me a very poor salary, but he has promised to place me with Donna Olimpia, the favorite sister-in-law ofnostro signore." "What! are you in the pay of a cardinal? But do you not know that there were no cardinals in the time of Jesus Christ and St. John?" "Is it possible!" exclaimed the Italian prelate. "Nothing is more true; you have read it in the Gospel." "I have never read it," replied the bishop; "I know only the office of Our Lady." "I tell you there were neither cardinals nor bishops, and when there were bishops the priests were almost their equals, as St. Jerome, in several places, assures us." "Holy Virgin" said the Italian, "I knew nothing about it; and what of the popes?" "There were no popes either." The good bishop crossed himself, thinking he was with the evil one, and leaped from the side of his companion.
This is a Greek word signifyingan attack on reputation. We find blasphemia in Demosthenes. In the Greek Church it was used only to express an injury done to God. The Romans never made use of this expression, apparently not thinking that God's honor could be offended like that of men.
There scarcely exists one synonym. Blasphemy does not altogether convey the idea of sacrilege. We say of a man who has taken God's name in vain, who, in the violence of anger, has sworn—as it is expressed—by the name of God, that he hasblasphemed; but we do not say that he has committed sacrilege. The sacrilegious man is he who perjures himself on the gospel, who extends his rapacity to sacred things, who imbrues his hands in the blood of priests.
Great sacrileges have always been punished with death in all nations, especially those accompanied by bloodshed. The author of the"Institutes au Droit Criminel"reckons among divine high treasons in the second degree, the non-observance of Sundays and holidays. He should have said the non-observance attended with marked contempt, for simple negligence is a sin, but not, as he calls it, a sacrilege. It is absurd to class together, as this author does, simony, the carrying off of a nun, and the forgetting to go to vespers on a holiday. It is one great instance of the errors committed by writers on jurisprudence, who, not having been called upon to make laws, take upon themselves to interpret those of the state.
Blasphemies uttered in intoxication, in anger, in the excess of debauchery, or in the heat of unguarded conversation have been subjected by legislators to much lighter penalties. For instance, the advocate whom we have already cited says that the laws of France condemn simple blasphemers to a fine for the first offence, which is doubled for the second, tripled for the third, and quadrupled for the fourth offence; for the fifth relapse the culprit is set in the pillory, for the sixth relapse he is pilloried, and has his upper lip burned off with a hot iron, and for the seventh he loses his tongue. He should have added that this was an ordinance of the year 1666.
Punishments are almost always arbitrary, which is a great defect in jurisprudence. But this defect opens the way for clemency and compassion, and this compassion is no other than the strictest justice, for it would be horrible to punish a youthful indiscretion as poisoners and parricides are punished. A sentence of death for an offence which deserves nothing more than correction is no other than an assassination committed with the sword of justice.
Is it not to the purpose here to remark that what has been blasphemy in one country has often been piety in another?
Suppose a Tyrian merchant landed at the port of Canope: he might be scandalized on seeing an onion, a cat, or a goat carried in procession; he might speak indecorously of Isheth, Oshireth, and Horeth, or might turn aside his head and not fall on his knees at the sight of a procession with the parts of human generation larger than life; he might express his opinion at supper, or even sing some song in which the Tyrian sailors made a jest of the Egyptian absurdities. He might be overheard by the maid of the inn, whose conscience would not suffer her to conceal so enormous a crime; she would run and denounce the offender to the nearest shoen that bore the image of the truth on his breast, and it is known how this image of truth was made. The tribunal of the shoens, or shotim, would condemn the Tyrian blasphemer to a dreadful death, and confiscate his vessel. Yet this merchant might be considered at Tyre as one of the most pious persons in Phœnicia.
Numa sees that his little horde of Romans is a Collection of Latin freebooters who steal right and left all they can find—oxen, sheep, fowls, and girls. He tells them that he has spoken with the nymph Egeria in a cavern, and that the nymph has been employed by Jupiter to give him laws. The senators treat him at first as a blasphemer and threaten to throw him headlong from the Tarpeian rock. Numa makes himself a powerful party; he gains over some seniors who go with him into Egeria's grotto. She talks to them and converts them; they convert the senate and the people. In a little time Numa is no longer a blasphemer, the name is given only to such as doubt the existence of the nymph.
In our own times it is unfortunate that what is blasphemy at Rome, at our Lady of Loretto, and within the walls of San Gennaro, is piety in London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin, Copenhagen, Berne, Basel, and Hamburg. It is yet more unfortunate that even in the same country, in the same town, in the same street, people treat one another as blasphemers.
Nay, of the ten thousand Jews living at Rome there is not one who does not regard the pope as the chief of the blasphemers, while the hundred thousand Christians who inhabit Rome, in place of two millions of Jovians who filled it in Trajan's time, firmly believe that the Jews meet in their synagogues on Saturday for the purpose of blaspheming.
A Cordelier has no hesitation in applying the epithet of blasphemer to a Dominican who says that the Holy Virgin was born in original sin, notwithstanding that the Dominicans have a bull from the pope which permits them to teach the maculate conception in their convents, and that, besides this bull, they have in their forum the express declaration of St. Thomas Aquinas.
The first origin of the schism of three-fourths of Switzerland and a part of Lower Germany was a quarrel in the cathedral church of Frankfort between a Cordelier, whose name I forget, and a Dominican named Vigand.
Both were drunk, according to the custom of that day. The drunken Cordelier, who was preaching, thanked God that he was not a Jacobin, swearing that it was necessary to exterminate the blaspheming Jacobins who believed that the Holy Virgin had been born in mortal sin, and delivered from sin only by the merits of her son. The drunken Jacobin cried out: "Thou hast lied; thou thyself art a blasphemer." The Cordelier descended from the pulpit with a great iron crucifix in his hand, laid it about his adversary, and left him almost dead on the spot.
To revenge this outrage the Dominicans worked many miracles in Germany and Switzerland; these miracles were designed to prove their faith. They at length found means to imprint the marks of our Lord Jesus Christ on one of their lay brethren named Jetzer. This operation was performed at Berne by the Holy Virgin herself, but she borrowed the hand of the sub-prior, who dressed himself in female attire and put a glory round his head. The poor little lay brother, exposed all bloody to the veneration of the people on the altar of the Dominicans at Berne, at last cried out murder! sacrilege! The monks, in order to quiet him as quickly as possible administered to him a host sprinkled with corrosive sublimate, but the excess of the dose made him discharge the host from his stomach.
The monks then accused him to the bishop of Lausanne of horrible sacrilege. The indignant people of Berne in their turn accused the monks, and four of them were burned at Berne on the 13th of May, 1509, at the Marsilly gate. Such was the termination of this abominable affair, which determined the people of Berne to choose a religion, bad indeed in Catholic eyes, but which delivered them from the Cordeliers and the Jacobins. The number of similar sacrileges is incredible. Such are the effects of party spirit.
The Jesuits maintained for a hundred years that the Jansenists were blasphemers, and proved it by a thousandlettres-de-cachet; the Jansenists by upwards of four thousand volumes demonstrated that it was the Jesuits who blasphemed. The writer of the"Gazettes Ecclésiastiques"pretends that all honest men blaspheme against him, while he himself blasphemes from his garret on high against every honest man in the kingdom. The gazette-writer's publisher blasphemes in return and complains that he is starving. He would find it better to be honest and polite.
One thing equally remarkable and consoling is that never in any country of the earth, among the wildest idolaters, has any man been considered as a blasphemer for acknowledging one supreme, eternal, and all-powerful God. It certainly was not for having acknowledged this truth that Socrates was condemned to the hemlock, for the doctrine of a Supreme God was announced in all the Grecian mysteries. It was a faction that destroyed Socrates; he was accused, at a venture, of not recognizing thesecondarygods, and on this point it was that he was accused as a blasphemer.
The first Christians were accused of blasphemy for the same reason, but the partisans of the ancient religion of the empire, the Jovians, who reproached the primitive Christians with blasphemy, were at length condemned as blasphemers themselves, under Theodosius II. Dryden says:
This side to-day, to-morrow t'other burns,And they're all Gods Almighty in their turns.
Body and matter are here the same thing although there is hardly any such thing as synonym in the most rigorous sense of the word. There have been persons who by this word "body" have understood "spirit" also. They have said spirit originally signifies breath; only a body can breathe, therefore body and spirit may, after all, be the same thing. In this sense La Fontaine said to the celebrated Duke de la Rochefoucauld:"J'entens les esprits corps et pétris de matière."In the same sense he says to Madame Sablière:
Je subtiliserais un morceau de matière,Quintessence d'atome, extrait de la lumière,je ne sais quoiplus vif et plus subtil encor....
No one thought of harassing good Monsieur La Fontaine, or bringing him to trial for his expressions. Were a poor philosopher, or even a poet, to say as much nowadays, how many would there be to fall on him! How many scribblers to sell their extracts for sixpence! How many knaves, for the sole purpose of making mischief, to cry philosopher! peripatetic! disciple of Gassendi! pupil of Locke, and the primitive fathers! damnable!
As we know not what a spirit is, so also we are ignorant of what a body is; we see various properties, but what is the subject in which those properties reside? "There is nothing but body," said Democritus and Epicurus; "there is no such thing as body," said the disciples of Zeno, of Elia.
Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne, is the last who, by a hundred captious sophisms, has pretended to prove that bodies do not exist. They have, says he, neither color, nor smell, nor heat; all these modalities are in your sensations, not in the objects. He might have spared himself the trouble of proving this truth for it was already sufficiently known. But thence he passed to extent and solidity, which are essential to body, and thinks he proves that there is no extent in a piece of green cloth because the cloth is not in reality green, the sensation of green being in ourselves only, therefore the sensation of extent is likewise in ourselves only. Having thus destroyed extent he concludes that solidity, which is attached to it, falls of itself, and therefore that there is nothing in the world but our ideas. So that, according to this doctor, ten thousand men killed by ten thousand cannon shots are in reality nothing more than ten thousand apprehensions of our understanding, and when a female becomes pregnant it is only one idea lodged in another idea from which a third idea will be produced.
Surely, the bishop of Cloyne might have saved himself from falling into this excessive absurdity. He thinks he shows that there is no extent because a body has appeared to him four times as large through a glass as to his naked eye, and four times as small through another glass. Hence he concludes, that, since a body cannot be at the same time four feet, sixteen feet, and but one foot in extent, there is no extent, therefore there is nothing. He had only to take any measure and say: of whatever extent this body may appear to me to be, it extends to so many of these measures.
We might very easily see that extent and solidity were quite different from sound, color, taste, smell. It is quite clear that these are sensations excited in us by the configuration of parts, but extent is not a sensation. When this lighted coal goes out, I am no longer warm; when the air is no longer struck, I cease to hear; when this rose withers, I no longer smell it: but the coal, the air, and the rose have extent without me. Berkeley's paradox is not worth refuting.
Thus argued Zeno and Parmenides of old, and very clever they were; they would prove to you that a tortoise went along as swiftly as Achilles, for there was no such thing as motion; they discussed a hundred other questions equally important. Most of the Greeks made philosophy a juggle, and they transmitted their art to our schoolmen. Bayle himself was occasionally one of the set and embroidered cobwebs like the rest. In his article, "Zeno," against the divisible extent of matter and the contiguity of bodies he ventures to say what would not be tolerated in any six-months geometrician.
It is worth knowing how Berkeley was drawn into this paradox. A long while ago I had some conversation with him, and he told me that his opinion originated in our being unable to conceive what the subject of this extension is, and certainly, in his book, he triumphs when he asks Hylas what this subject, this substratum, this substance is? It is the extended body, answers Hylas. Then the bishop, under the name of Philonous, laughs at him, and poor Hylas, finding that he has said that extension is the subject of extension, and has therefore talked nonsense, remains quite confused, acknowledges that he understands nothing at all of the matter; that there is no such thing as body; that the natural world does not exist, and that there is none but an intellectual world.
Hylas should only have said to Philonous: We know nothing of the subject of this extension, solidity, divisibility, mobility, figure, etc.; I know no more of it than I do of the subject of thought, feeling, and will, but the subject does not the less exist for it has essential properties of which it cannot be deprived.
We all resemble the greater part of the Parisian ladies who live well without knowing what is put in their ragouts; just so do we enjoy bodies without knowing of what they are composed. Of what does a body consist? Of parts, and these parts resolve themselves into other parts. What are these last parts? They, too, are bodies; you divide incessantly without making any progress.
In short, a subtle philosopher, observing that a picture was made of ingredients of which no single ingredient was a picture, and a house of materials of which no one material was a house, imagined that bodies are composed of an infinity of small things which are not bodies, and these are called monads. This system is not without its merits, and, were it revealed, I should think it very possible. These little beings would be so many mathematical points, a sort of souls, waiting only for a tenement: here would be a continual metempsychosis. This system is as good as another; I like it quite as well as the declination of atoms, the substantial forms, the versatile grace, or the vampires.
You despise books; you, whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence, but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books. All Africa, to the limits of Ethiopia and Nigritia obeys the book of the Koran after bowing to the book of the Gospel. China is ruled by the moral book of Confucius, and a great part of India by the Veda. Persia was governed for ages by the books of one of the Zoroasters.
In a lawsuit or criminal process, your property, your honor, perhaps your life, depends on the interpretation of a book which you never read. It is, however, with books as with men, a very small number play a great part, the rest are confounded with the multitude.
By whom are mankind led in all civilized countries? By those who can read and write. You are acquainted with neither Hippocrates, nor Boerhaave, nor Sydenham, but you place your body in the hands of those who can read them. You leave your soul entirely to the care of those who are paid for reading the Bible, although there are not fifty of them who have read it through with attention.
The world is now so entirely governed by books that they who command in the city of the Scipios and the Catos have resolved that the books of their law shall be for themselves alone; they are their sceptre, which they have made it high treason in their subjects to touch without an express permission. In other countries it has been forbidden to think in print without letters-patent.
There are nations in which thought is considered merely as an article of commerce, the operations of the human understanding being valued only at so much per sheet. If the bookseller happens to desire a privilege for his merchandise whether he is selling "Rabelais," or the "Fathers of the Church," the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book.
In another country the liberty of explaining yourself by books is one of the most inviolable prerogatives. There you may print whatever you please, on pain of being tiresome, and of being punished if you have too much abused your natural right.
Before the admirable invention of printing, books were scarcer and dearer than jewels. There were scarcely any books in our barbarous nations, either before Charlemagne or after him, until the time of Charles V., king of France, called the Wise, and from this time to Francis I. the scarcity was extreme. The Arabs alone had them from the eighth to the thirteenth century of our era. China was full of them when we could neither read nor write.
Copyists were much employed in the Roman Empire from the time of the Scipios until the irruption of the barbarians. This was a very ungrateful employment. The dealers always paid authors and copyists very ill. It required two years of assiduous labor for a copyist to transcribe the whole Bible well on vellum, and what time and trouble to copy correctly in Greek and Latin the works of Origen, Clement of Alexandria and all the others writers called Fathers!
St. Hieronymos, or Hieronymus, whom we call Jerome, says, in one of his satirical letters against Rufinus that he has ruined himself with buying the works of Origen, against whom he wrote with so much bitterness and violence. "Yes," says he, "I have read Origen, if it be a crime I confess that I am guilty and that I exhausted my purse in buying his works at Alexandria."
The Christian societies of the three first centuries had fifty-four gospels, of which, until Diocletian's time scarcely two or three copies found their way among the Romans of the old religion.
Among the Christians it was an unpardonable crime to show the gospels to the Gentiles; they did not even lend them to the catechumens.
When Lucian (insulting our religion of which he knew very little) relates that "a troop of beggars took him up into a fourth story where they were invoking the Father through the Son, and foretelling misfortunes to the emperor and the empire," he does not say that they showed him a single book. No Roman historian, no Roman author whomsoever makes mention of the gospels.
When a Christian, who was unfortunately rash and unworthy of his holy religion had publicly torn in pieces and trampled under foot an edict of the Emperor Diocletian, and had thus drawn down upon Christianity that persecution which succeeded the greatest toleration, the Christians were then obliged to give up their gospels and written authors to the magistrates, which before then had never been done. Those who gave up their books through fear of imprisonment, or even of death, were held by the rest of the Christians to be sacrilegious apostates, they received the surname oftraditores, whence we have the word "traitor," and several bishops asserted that they should be rebaptized, which occasioned a dreadful schism.
The poems of Homer were long so little known that Pisistratus was the first who put them in order and had them transcribed at Athens about five hundred years before the Christian era.
Perhaps there was not at this time in all the East a dozen copies of the Veda and the Zend-Avesta.
In 1700 you would not have found a single book in all Rome, excepting the missals and a few Bibles in the hands of papas drunk with brandy.
The complaint now is of their too great abundance. But it is not for readers to complain, the remedy is in their own hands; nothing forces them to read. Nor for authors, they who make the multitude of books have not to complain of being pressed. Notwithstanding this enormous quantity how few people read! But if they read, and read with advantage, should we have to witness the deplorable infatuations to which the vulgar are still every day a prey?
The reason that books are multiplied in spite of the general law that beings shall not be multiplied without necessity, is that books are made from books. A new history of France or Spain is manufactured from several volumes already printed, without adding anything new. All dictionaries are made from dictionaries; almost all new geographical books are made from other books of geography; St. Thomas's Dream has brought forth two thousand large volumes of divinity, and the same race of little worms that have devoured the parent are now gnawing the children.
Écrive qui voudra, chacun a son métierPeut perdre impunément de l'encre et du papier.Write, write away; each writer at his pleasureMay squander ink and paper without measure.
It is sometimes very dangerous to make a book. Silhouète, before he could suspect that he should one day be comptroller-general of the finances, published a translation of Warburton's "Alliance of Church and State," and his father-in-law, Astuce the physician, gave to the public the "Memoirs," in which the author of the Pentateuch might have found all the astonishing things which happened so long before his time.
The very day that Silhouète came into office, some good friend of his sought out a copy of each of these books by the father-in-law and son-in-law, in order to denounce them to the parliament and have them condemned to the flames, according to custom. They immediately bought up all the copies in the kingdom, whence it is that they are now extremely rare.
There is hardly a single philosophical or theological book in which heresies and impieties may not be found by misinterpreting, or adding to, or subtracting from, the sense.
Theodore of Mopsuestes ventured to call the "Canticle of Canticles," "a collection of impurities." Grotius pulls it in pieces and represents it as horrid, and Chatillon speaks of it as "a scandalous production."
Perhaps it will hardly be believed that Dr. Tamponet one day said to several others: "I would engage to find a multitude of heresies in the Lord's Prayer if this prayer, which we know to have come from the Divine mouth, were now for the first time published by a Jesuit."
I would proceed thus: "Our Father, who art in heaven—" a proposition inclining to heresy, since God is everywhere. Nay, we find in this expression the leaven of Socinianism, for here is nothing at all said of the Trinity.
"Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven—" another proposition tainted with heresy, for it said again and again in the Scriptures that God reigns eternally. Moreover it is very rash to ask that His will may be done, since nothing is or can be done but by the will of God.
"Give us this day our daily bread"—a proposition directly contrary to what Jesus Christ uttered on another occasion: "Take no thought, saying what shall we eat? or what shall we drink?... for after all these things do the Gentiles seek.... But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."
"And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors—" a rash proposition, which compares man to God, destroys gratuitous predestination, and teaches that God is bound to do to us as we do to others. Besides, how can the author say that we forgive our debtors? We have never forgiven them a single crown. No convent in Europe ever remitted to its farmers the payment of a sou. To dare to say the contrary is a formal heresy.
"Lead us not into temptation—" a proposition scandalous and manifestly heretical, for there is no tempter but the devil, and it is expressly said in St. James' Epistle: "God is no tempter of the wicked; He tempts no man."—"Deus enim intentator malorum est; ipse autem neminem tentat."
You see, then, said Doctor Tamponet, that there is nothing, though ever so venerable, to which a bad sense may not be given. What book, then, shall not be liable to human censure when even the Lord's Prayer may be attacked, by giving a diabolical interpretation to all the divine words that compose it?
As for me, I tremble at the thought of making a book. Thank God, I have never published anything; I have not even—like brothers La Rue, Du Ceveau, and Folard—had any of my theatrical pieces played, it would be too dangerous.
If you publish, a parish curate accuses you of heresy; a stupid collegian denounces you; a fellow that cannot read condemns you; the public laugh at you; your bookseller abandons you, and your wine merchant gives you no more credit. I always add to my paternoster, "Deliver me, O God, from the itch of bookmaking."
O ye who, like myself, lay black on white and make clean paper dirty! call to mind the following verses which I remember to have read, and by which we should have been corrected:
Tout ce fatras fat du chauvre en son temps,Linge il devint par l'art des tisserands;Puis en lambeaux des pilons le pressèrentIl fut papier. Cent cerveaux à l'enversDe visions à l'envi le chargèrent;Puis on le brûle; il vole dans les airs,Il est fumée aussi bien que la gloire.De nos travaux voilà quelle est l'histoire,Tout est fumée, et tout nous fait sentirCe grand néant qui doit nous engloutir.This miscellaneous rubbish once was flax,Till made soft linen by the honest weaver;But when at length it dropped from people's backs,'Twas turned to paper, and became receiverOf all that fifty motley brains could fashion;So now 'tis burned without the least compassion;It now, like glory, terminates in smoke;Thus all our toils are nothing but a joke—All ends in smoke; each nothing that we followTells of the nothing that must all things swallow.
Books are now multiplied to such a degree that it is impossible not only to read them all but even to know their number and their titles. Happily, one is not obliged to read all that is published, and Caramuel's plan for writing a hundred folio volumes and employing the spiritual and temporal power of princes to compel their subjects to read them, has not been put in execution. Ringelburg, too, had formed the design of composing about a thousand different volumes, but, even had he lived long enough to publish them he would have fallen far short of Hermes Trismegistus, who, according to Jamblicus, composed thirty-six thousand five hundred and twenty-five books. Supposing the truth of this fact, the ancients had no less reason than the moderns to complain of the multitude of books.
It is, indeed, generally agreed that a small number of choice books is sufficient. Some propose that we should confine ourselves to the Bible or Holy Scriptures, as the Turks limit themselves to the Koran. But there is a great difference between the feelings of reverence entertained by the Mahometans for their Koran and those of the Christians for the Scriptures. The veneration testified by the former when speaking of the Koran cannot be exceeded. It is, say they, the greatest of all miracles; nor are all the men in existence put together capable of anything at all approaching it; it is still more wonderful that the author had never studied, nor read any book. The Koran alone is worth sixty thousand miracles (the number of its verses, or thereabouts); one rising from the dead would not be a stronger proof of the truth of a religion than the composition of the Koran. It is so perfect that it ought not to be regarded as a work of creation.
The Christians do indeed say that their Scriptures were inspired by the Holy Ghost, yet not only is it acknowledged by Cardinal Cajetan and Bellarmine that errors have found their way into them through the negligence and ignorance of the book-sellers and the rabbis, who added the points, but they are considered as a book too dangerous for the hands of the majority of the faithful. This is expressed by the fifth rule of the Index, a congregation at Rome, whose office it is to examine what books are to be forbidden. It is as follows:
"Since it is evident that if the reading of the Bible, translated into the vulgar tongue, were permitted to every one indiscriminately the temerity of mankind would cause more evil than good to arise therefrom—we will that it be referred to the judgment of the bishop or inquisitor, who, with the advice of the curate or confessor, shall have power to grant permission to read the Bible rendered in the vulgar tongue by Catholic writers, to those to whom they shall judge that such reading will do no harm; they must have this permission in writing and shall not be absolved until they have returned their Bible into the hands of the ordinary. As for such book-sellers as shall sell Bibles in the vulgar tongue to those who have not this written permission, or in any other way put them into their hands, they shall lose the price of the books (which the bishop shall employ for pious purposes), and shall moreover be punished by arbitrary penalties. Nor shall regulars read or buy these books without the permission of their superiors."
Cardinal Duperron also asserted that the Scriptures, in the hands of the unlearned, were a two-edged knife which might wound them, to avoid which it was better that they should hear them from the mouth of the Church, with the solutions and interpretations of such passages as appear to the senses to be full of absurdity and contradiction, than that they should read them by themselves without any solution or interpretation. He afterwards made a long enumeration of these absurdities in terms so unqualified that Jurieu was not afraid to declare that he did not remember to have read anything so frightful or so scandalous in any Christian author.
Jurieu, who was so violent t in his invectives against Cardinal Duperron, had himself to sustain similar reproaches from the Catholics. "I heard that minister," says Pap, in speaking of him, "teaching the public that all the characteristics of the Holy Scriptures on which those pretended reformers had founded their persuasion of their divinity, did not appear to him to be sufficient. 'Let it not be inferred,' said Jurieu, 'that I wish to take from the light and strength of the characteristics of Scripture, but I will venture to affirm that there is not one of them which may not be eluded by the profane. There is not one of them that amounts to a proof; not one to which something may not be said in answer, and, considered altogether, although they have greater power than separately to work a moral conviction—that is, a proof on which to found a certainty excluding every doubt—I own that nothing seems to me to be more opposed to reason than to say that these characteristics are of themselves capable of producing such a certainty."
It is not then astonishing that the Jews and the first Christians, who, we find in the Acts of the Apostles, confined themselves in their meetings to the reading of the Bible, were, as will be seen in the article "Heresy," divided into different sects. For this reading was afterwards substituted that of various apocryphal works, or at least of extracts from them. The author of the "Synopsis of Scripture," which we find among the works of St. Athanasius, expressly avows that there are in the apocryphal books things most true and inspired by God which have been selected and extracted for the perusal of the faithful.
Our questions have but little to do with geography, but we shall, perhaps, be permitted to express in a few words our astonishment respecting the town of Bourges. The Trévoux Dictionary asserts that "it is one of the most ancient in Europe; that it was the seat of empire of the Gauls, and gave laws to the Celts."
I will not combat the antiquity of any town or of any family. But was there ever an empire of Gaul? had the Celts kings? This rage for antiquity is a malady which is not easily cured. In Gaul, in Germany, and in the North there is nothing ancient but the soil, the trees, and the animals. If you will have antiquities go to Asia, and even there they are hardly to be found. Man is ancient, but monuments are new; this has already been said in more articles than one.
If to be born within a certain stone or wooden limit more ancient than another were a real good it would be no more than reasonable to date the foundation of the town from the giants' war, but since this vanity is in no wise advantageous let it be renounced. This is all I have to say about Bourges.
Courteous reader, observe, in the first place, that Father Thomassin, one of the most learned men of modern Europe, derives the Brachmans from the Jewish wordbarac, by ac—supposing, of course, that the Jews had ac. Thisbarac, says he, signifiedto fly; and the Brachmans fled from the towns—supposing that there were any towns.
Or, if you like it better, Brachmans comes frombarakby ak, meaning toblessor topray. But why might not the Biscayans name the Brahmins from the wordbran? which expresses—I will not say what. They had as good a right as the Hebrews. Really, this is a strange sort of erudition. By rejecting it entirely, we should know less, but we should know it better.
Is it not likely that the Brahmins were the first legislators, the first philosophers, the first divines, of the earth? Do not the few remaining monuments of ancient history form a great presumption in their favor? since the first Greek philosophers went to them to learn mathematics; and the most ancient curiosities, those collected by the emperors of China, are all Indian, as is attested by the relations in Du Halde's collection.
Of the Shastah, we shall speak elsewhere. It is the first theological book of the Brahmins, written about fifteen hundred years before the Vedah, and anterior to all other books.
Their annals make no mention of any war undertaken by them at any time. The words "arms," "killing," "maiming," are to be found neither in the fragments of the Shastah that have reached us, nor in the Yajurvedah, nor in the Kormovedah. At least, I can affirm that I have not seen them in either of these two latter collections; and it is most singular that the Shastah, which speaks of a conspiracy in heaven, makes no mention of any war in the great peninsula between the Indus and Ganges.