[Contents]CHAPTER XII.TRUTH.[Contents]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[149]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[150]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.[Contents]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.[151]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[152]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 professionalhypocrites, 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[153]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[154]prevails against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth.[Contents]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.[155]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[156]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.[Contents]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[157]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, andbona fidehistorians 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[158]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 favoredthe survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common sense a capital crime.[Contents]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[159]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[160]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 theunknowablemysteries 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 theknowableproblems 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.”
[Contents]CHAPTER XII.TRUTH.[Contents]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[149]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[150]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.[Contents]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.[151]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[152]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 professionalhypocrites, 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[153]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[154]prevails against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth.[Contents]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.[155]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[156]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.[Contents]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[157]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, andbona fidehistorians 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[158]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 favoredthe survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common sense a capital crime.[Contents]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[159]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[160]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 theunknowablemysteries 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 theknowableproblems 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.”
[Contents]CHAPTER XII.TRUTH.[Contents]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[149]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[150]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.[Contents]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.[151]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[152]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 professionalhypocrites, 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[153]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[154]prevails against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth.[Contents]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.[155]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[156]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.[Contents]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[157]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, andbona fidehistorians 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[158]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 favoredthe survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common sense a capital crime.[Contents]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[159]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[160]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 theunknowablemysteries 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 theknowableproblems 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 XII.TRUTH.
[Contents]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[149]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[150]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.[Contents]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.[151]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[152]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 professionalhypocrites, 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[153]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[154]prevails against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth.[Contents]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.[155]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[156]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.[Contents]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[157]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, andbona fidehistorians 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[158]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 favoredthe survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common sense a capital crime.[Contents]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[159]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[160]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 theunknowablemysteries 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 theknowableproblems 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.”
[Contents]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[149]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[150]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.
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[149]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[150]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.
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[149]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[150]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.
[Contents]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.[151]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[152]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 professionalhypocrites, 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[153]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[154]prevails against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth.
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.[151]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[152]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 professionalhypocrites, 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[153]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[154]prevails against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth.
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.[151]
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[152]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 professionalhypocrites, 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[153]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[154]prevails against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth.
[Contents]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.[155]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[156]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.
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.[155]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[156]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.
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—
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.[155]
God is paid when man receiveth;To enjoy is to obey;
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[156]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.
[Contents]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[157]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, andbona fidehistorians 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[158]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 favoredthe survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common sense a capital crime.
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[157]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, andbona fidehistorians 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[158]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 favoredthe survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common sense a capital crime.
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[157]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, andbona fidehistorians 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[158]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 favoredthe survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common sense a capital crime.
[Contents]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[159]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[160]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 theunknowablemysteries 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 theknowableproblems 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.”
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[159]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[160]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 theunknowablemysteries 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 theknowableproblems 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.”
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[159]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[160]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 theunknowablemysteries 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 theknowableproblems 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.”