[Contents]CHAPTER XIII.HUMANITY.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The wanton disposition of young children, like themischievousnessof our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests, has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome[161]child, like a playful monkey, is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are, in fact, almost invariably intended as aprotestagainst acts of injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number ofbabuinoshasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar long-drawn wail of a young[162]capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to succor a distressed fellow-creature.That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and execrations for having killed a youngRoussette—some sort of frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors, inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by wrestling and pummeling each other, and[163]then shaking hands again. A similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles. Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a fellow-creature.A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agriculturalIndiosof Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the[164]frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming another-worldlychance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved disguise of polite formalities.A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits. Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian,[165]mentally perhaps the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews andMoriscosin an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation.A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were,[166]with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the harmony of Nature.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul. “Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to theirafflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal practice ofaltruism(i.e., the subordination of personal to alien interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would have been only an additional motive in recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,” was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce! renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all[167]earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his enemies also bids himhatehis father, mother, sister, brother, and friends.“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once therationaleand the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance,[168]acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed to the devil.”[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,” says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the[169]catechism of such a religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic colleges.”Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful.… The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of escape from the horrors of existence.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosophical friends, directed the keenest shafts of their logic against the doctrine of eternal punishment, and never[170]wearied of repeating that the belief in a merciless God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless bigots. “How insignificant,” they argued, “the occasional sufferings of a transient life on earth must appear to the converts of John Calvin, who held that about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed to an eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures. How absurd they must deem the complaints of a life-weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look back to the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness of a lost Eden.” The Universalists are fond of enlarging on the moral of that theme, yet from a wider point of view their objections might be extended to the entire doctrine ofother-worldliness, since Holbach’s argument might find its exact analogue in the dogma ofpost mortemcompensation. “His soul will be the gainer,” thought the Crusader who had demonstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a Moorish skull, “and if he should die his spirit will enter the gates of the New Jerusalem.” “Oh, the ingratitude,” actually said a priest of the Spanish-American land robbers, “the ingratitude of the wretches who grudge us the territories of their base earthly kingdoms and forget that our gospel offers them a passport to the glorious kingdom of heaven!” “The ingratitude!” repeats the modern pharisee, “the base ingratitude of those factory children who grudge me the privileges of my position, and clamor for an increase of wages to gratify their worldly desires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should not the rich promises of the gospel compensate such temporal inconveniences, and have I not founded a[171]Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of their unregenerate souls?”Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher acquainted us with the verdict of his countrymen on the “gospel of love” that sends its missionaries on ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by armadas for the demolition of seaports that might refuse to admit the cargo of spirituous and spiritual poisons.Secularism, the religion of Nature, should teach our brethren that their highest physical and their highest moral welfare can be only conjointly attained, and that cramping misery stunts the soul, as well as the body of its victim. It should preach thesolidarityof human interests which prevents the oppressor from enjoying the fruits of his inhumanity, and makes the curses of his dependents, nay, even the mute misery of his starving cattle, react on the happiness of a cruel master. It should expose the business methods of the humanitarians who propose to silence the clamors of their famished brethren with consecrated wafers and drafts on the bank of the New Jerusalem.The Christian duty of transferring our love from our friends to our enemies may be one of those virtues that have to await their recompense in a mysterious hereafter, but natural humanity can hope to find its reward on this side of the grave.[172]
[Contents]CHAPTER XIII.HUMANITY.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The wanton disposition of young children, like themischievousnessof our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests, has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome[161]child, like a playful monkey, is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are, in fact, almost invariably intended as aprotestagainst acts of injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number ofbabuinoshasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar long-drawn wail of a young[162]capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to succor a distressed fellow-creature.That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and execrations for having killed a youngRoussette—some sort of frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors, inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by wrestling and pummeling each other, and[163]then shaking hands again. A similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles. Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a fellow-creature.A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agriculturalIndiosof Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the[164]frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming another-worldlychance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved disguise of polite formalities.A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits. Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian,[165]mentally perhaps the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews andMoriscosin an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation.A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were,[166]with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the harmony of Nature.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul. “Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to theirafflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal practice ofaltruism(i.e., the subordination of personal to alien interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would have been only an additional motive in recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,” was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce! renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all[167]earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his enemies also bids himhatehis father, mother, sister, brother, and friends.“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once therationaleand the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance,[168]acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed to the devil.”[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,” says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the[169]catechism of such a religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic colleges.”Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful.… The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of escape from the horrors of existence.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosophical friends, directed the keenest shafts of their logic against the doctrine of eternal punishment, and never[170]wearied of repeating that the belief in a merciless God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless bigots. “How insignificant,” they argued, “the occasional sufferings of a transient life on earth must appear to the converts of John Calvin, who held that about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed to an eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures. How absurd they must deem the complaints of a life-weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look back to the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness of a lost Eden.” The Universalists are fond of enlarging on the moral of that theme, yet from a wider point of view their objections might be extended to the entire doctrine ofother-worldliness, since Holbach’s argument might find its exact analogue in the dogma ofpost mortemcompensation. “His soul will be the gainer,” thought the Crusader who had demonstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a Moorish skull, “and if he should die his spirit will enter the gates of the New Jerusalem.” “Oh, the ingratitude,” actually said a priest of the Spanish-American land robbers, “the ingratitude of the wretches who grudge us the territories of their base earthly kingdoms and forget that our gospel offers them a passport to the glorious kingdom of heaven!” “The ingratitude!” repeats the modern pharisee, “the base ingratitude of those factory children who grudge me the privileges of my position, and clamor for an increase of wages to gratify their worldly desires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should not the rich promises of the gospel compensate such temporal inconveniences, and have I not founded a[171]Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of their unregenerate souls?”Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher acquainted us with the verdict of his countrymen on the “gospel of love” that sends its missionaries on ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by armadas for the demolition of seaports that might refuse to admit the cargo of spirituous and spiritual poisons.Secularism, the religion of Nature, should teach our brethren that their highest physical and their highest moral welfare can be only conjointly attained, and that cramping misery stunts the soul, as well as the body of its victim. It should preach thesolidarityof human interests which prevents the oppressor from enjoying the fruits of his inhumanity, and makes the curses of his dependents, nay, even the mute misery of his starving cattle, react on the happiness of a cruel master. It should expose the business methods of the humanitarians who propose to silence the clamors of their famished brethren with consecrated wafers and drafts on the bank of the New Jerusalem.The Christian duty of transferring our love from our friends to our enemies may be one of those virtues that have to await their recompense in a mysterious hereafter, but natural humanity can hope to find its reward on this side of the grave.[172]
[Contents]CHAPTER XIII.HUMANITY.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The wanton disposition of young children, like themischievousnessof our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests, has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome[161]child, like a playful monkey, is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are, in fact, almost invariably intended as aprotestagainst acts of injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number ofbabuinoshasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar long-drawn wail of a young[162]capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to succor a distressed fellow-creature.That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and execrations for having killed a youngRoussette—some sort of frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors, inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by wrestling and pummeling each other, and[163]then shaking hands again. A similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles. Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a fellow-creature.A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agriculturalIndiosof Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the[164]frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming another-worldlychance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved disguise of polite formalities.A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits. Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian,[165]mentally perhaps the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews andMoriscosin an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation.A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were,[166]with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the harmony of Nature.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul. “Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to theirafflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal practice ofaltruism(i.e., the subordination of personal to alien interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would have been only an additional motive in recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,” was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce! renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all[167]earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his enemies also bids himhatehis father, mother, sister, brother, and friends.“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once therationaleand the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance,[168]acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed to the devil.”[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,” says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the[169]catechism of such a religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic colleges.”Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful.… The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of escape from the horrors of existence.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosophical friends, directed the keenest shafts of their logic against the doctrine of eternal punishment, and never[170]wearied of repeating that the belief in a merciless God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless bigots. “How insignificant,” they argued, “the occasional sufferings of a transient life on earth must appear to the converts of John Calvin, who held that about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed to an eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures. How absurd they must deem the complaints of a life-weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look back to the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness of a lost Eden.” The Universalists are fond of enlarging on the moral of that theme, yet from a wider point of view their objections might be extended to the entire doctrine ofother-worldliness, since Holbach’s argument might find its exact analogue in the dogma ofpost mortemcompensation. “His soul will be the gainer,” thought the Crusader who had demonstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a Moorish skull, “and if he should die his spirit will enter the gates of the New Jerusalem.” “Oh, the ingratitude,” actually said a priest of the Spanish-American land robbers, “the ingratitude of the wretches who grudge us the territories of their base earthly kingdoms and forget that our gospel offers them a passport to the glorious kingdom of heaven!” “The ingratitude!” repeats the modern pharisee, “the base ingratitude of those factory children who grudge me the privileges of my position, and clamor for an increase of wages to gratify their worldly desires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should not the rich promises of the gospel compensate such temporal inconveniences, and have I not founded a[171]Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of their unregenerate souls?”Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher acquainted us with the verdict of his countrymen on the “gospel of love” that sends its missionaries on ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by armadas for the demolition of seaports that might refuse to admit the cargo of spirituous and spiritual poisons.Secularism, the religion of Nature, should teach our brethren that their highest physical and their highest moral welfare can be only conjointly attained, and that cramping misery stunts the soul, as well as the body of its victim. It should preach thesolidarityof human interests which prevents the oppressor from enjoying the fruits of his inhumanity, and makes the curses of his dependents, nay, even the mute misery of his starving cattle, react on the happiness of a cruel master. It should expose the business methods of the humanitarians who propose to silence the clamors of their famished brethren with consecrated wafers and drafts on the bank of the New Jerusalem.The Christian duty of transferring our love from our friends to our enemies may be one of those virtues that have to await their recompense in a mysterious hereafter, but natural humanity can hope to find its reward on this side of the grave.[172]
CHAPTER XIII.HUMANITY.
[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The wanton disposition of young children, like themischievousnessof our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests, has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome[161]child, like a playful monkey, is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are, in fact, almost invariably intended as aprotestagainst acts of injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number ofbabuinoshasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar long-drawn wail of a young[162]capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to succor a distressed fellow-creature.That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and execrations for having killed a youngRoussette—some sort of frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors, inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by wrestling and pummeling each other, and[163]then shaking hands again. A similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles. Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a fellow-creature.A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agriculturalIndiosof Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the[164]frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming another-worldlychance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved disguise of polite formalities.A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits. Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian,[165]mentally perhaps the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews andMoriscosin an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation.A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were,[166]with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the harmony of Nature.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul. “Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to theirafflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal practice ofaltruism(i.e., the subordination of personal to alien interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would have been only an additional motive in recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,” was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce! renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all[167]earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his enemies also bids himhatehis father, mother, sister, brother, and friends.“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once therationaleand the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance,[168]acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed to the devil.”[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,” says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the[169]catechism of such a religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic colleges.”Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful.… The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of escape from the horrors of existence.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosophical friends, directed the keenest shafts of their logic against the doctrine of eternal punishment, and never[170]wearied of repeating that the belief in a merciless God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless bigots. “How insignificant,” they argued, “the occasional sufferings of a transient life on earth must appear to the converts of John Calvin, who held that about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed to an eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures. How absurd they must deem the complaints of a life-weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look back to the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness of a lost Eden.” The Universalists are fond of enlarging on the moral of that theme, yet from a wider point of view their objections might be extended to the entire doctrine ofother-worldliness, since Holbach’s argument might find its exact analogue in the dogma ofpost mortemcompensation. “His soul will be the gainer,” thought the Crusader who had demonstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a Moorish skull, “and if he should die his spirit will enter the gates of the New Jerusalem.” “Oh, the ingratitude,” actually said a priest of the Spanish-American land robbers, “the ingratitude of the wretches who grudge us the territories of their base earthly kingdoms and forget that our gospel offers them a passport to the glorious kingdom of heaven!” “The ingratitude!” repeats the modern pharisee, “the base ingratitude of those factory children who grudge me the privileges of my position, and clamor for an increase of wages to gratify their worldly desires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should not the rich promises of the gospel compensate such temporal inconveniences, and have I not founded a[171]Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of their unregenerate souls?”Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher acquainted us with the verdict of his countrymen on the “gospel of love” that sends its missionaries on ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by armadas for the demolition of seaports that might refuse to admit the cargo of spirituous and spiritual poisons.Secularism, the religion of Nature, should teach our brethren that their highest physical and their highest moral welfare can be only conjointly attained, and that cramping misery stunts the soul, as well as the body of its victim. It should preach thesolidarityof human interests which prevents the oppressor from enjoying the fruits of his inhumanity, and makes the curses of his dependents, nay, even the mute misery of his starving cattle, react on the happiness of a cruel master. It should expose the business methods of the humanitarians who propose to silence the clamors of their famished brethren with consecrated wafers and drafts on the bank of the New Jerusalem.The Christian duty of transferring our love from our friends to our enemies may be one of those virtues that have to await their recompense in a mysterious hereafter, but natural humanity can hope to find its reward on this side of the grave.[172]
[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The wanton disposition of young children, like themischievousnessof our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests, has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome[161]child, like a playful monkey, is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are, in fact, almost invariably intended as aprotestagainst acts of injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number ofbabuinoshasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar long-drawn wail of a young[162]capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to succor a distressed fellow-creature.That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and execrations for having killed a youngRoussette—some sort of frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors, inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by wrestling and pummeling each other, and[163]then shaking hands again. A similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles. Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a fellow-creature.A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agriculturalIndiosof Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the[164]frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The wanton disposition of young children, like themischievousnessof our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests, has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome[161]child, like a playful monkey, is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are, in fact, almost invariably intended as aprotestagainst acts of injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number ofbabuinoshasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar long-drawn wail of a young[162]capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to succor a distressed fellow-creature.That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and execrations for having killed a youngRoussette—some sort of frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors, inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by wrestling and pummeling each other, and[163]then shaking hands again. A similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles. Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a fellow-creature.A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agriculturalIndiosof Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the[164]frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.
The wanton disposition of young children, like themischievousnessof our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests, has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome[161]child, like a playful monkey, is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are, in fact, almost invariably intended as aprotestagainst acts of injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number ofbabuinoshasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar long-drawn wail of a young[162]capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to succor a distressed fellow-creature.
That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and execrations for having killed a youngRoussette—some sort of frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”
“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors, inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by wrestling and pummeling each other, and[163]then shaking hands again. A similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles. Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a fellow-creature.
A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agriculturalIndiosof Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the[164]frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.
[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming another-worldlychance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved disguise of polite formalities.A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits. Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian,[165]mentally perhaps the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews andMoriscosin an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation.A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were,[166]with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the harmony of Nature.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming another-worldlychance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved disguise of polite formalities.A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits. Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian,[165]mentally perhaps the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews andMoriscosin an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation.A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were,[166]with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the harmony of Nature.
The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming another-worldlychance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.
But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved disguise of polite formalities.
A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits. Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian,[165]mentally perhaps the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews andMoriscosin an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.
Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation.
A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were,[166]with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the harmony of Nature.
[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul. “Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to theirafflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal practice ofaltruism(i.e., the subordination of personal to alien interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would have been only an additional motive in recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,” was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce! renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all[167]earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his enemies also bids himhatehis father, mother, sister, brother, and friends.“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once therationaleand the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance,[168]acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed to the devil.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul. “Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to theirafflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal practice ofaltruism(i.e., the subordination of personal to alien interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would have been only an additional motive in recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,” was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce! renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all[167]earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his enemies also bids himhatehis father, mother, sister, brother, and friends.“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once therationaleand the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance,[168]acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed to the devil.”
The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul. “Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to theirafflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal practice ofaltruism(i.e., the subordination of personal to alien interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would have been only an additional motive in recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,” was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce! renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all[167]earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his enemies also bids himhatehis father, mother, sister, brother, and friends.
“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once therationaleand the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance,[168]acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed to the devil.”
[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,” says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the[169]catechism of such a religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic colleges.”Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful.… The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of escape from the horrors of existence.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,” says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the[169]catechism of such a religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic colleges.”Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful.… The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of escape from the horrors of existence.
The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,” says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the[169]catechism of such a religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic colleges.”
Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.
“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful.… The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”
The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of escape from the horrors of existence.
[Contents]E.—REFORM.The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosophical friends, directed the keenest shafts of their logic against the doctrine of eternal punishment, and never[170]wearied of repeating that the belief in a merciless God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless bigots. “How insignificant,” they argued, “the occasional sufferings of a transient life on earth must appear to the converts of John Calvin, who held that about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed to an eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures. How absurd they must deem the complaints of a life-weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look back to the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness of a lost Eden.” The Universalists are fond of enlarging on the moral of that theme, yet from a wider point of view their objections might be extended to the entire doctrine ofother-worldliness, since Holbach’s argument might find its exact analogue in the dogma ofpost mortemcompensation. “His soul will be the gainer,” thought the Crusader who had demonstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a Moorish skull, “and if he should die his spirit will enter the gates of the New Jerusalem.” “Oh, the ingratitude,” actually said a priest of the Spanish-American land robbers, “the ingratitude of the wretches who grudge us the territories of their base earthly kingdoms and forget that our gospel offers them a passport to the glorious kingdom of heaven!” “The ingratitude!” repeats the modern pharisee, “the base ingratitude of those factory children who grudge me the privileges of my position, and clamor for an increase of wages to gratify their worldly desires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should not the rich promises of the gospel compensate such temporal inconveniences, and have I not founded a[171]Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of their unregenerate souls?”Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher acquainted us with the verdict of his countrymen on the “gospel of love” that sends its missionaries on ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by armadas for the demolition of seaports that might refuse to admit the cargo of spirituous and spiritual poisons.Secularism, the religion of Nature, should teach our brethren that their highest physical and their highest moral welfare can be only conjointly attained, and that cramping misery stunts the soul, as well as the body of its victim. It should preach thesolidarityof human interests which prevents the oppressor from enjoying the fruits of his inhumanity, and makes the curses of his dependents, nay, even the mute misery of his starving cattle, react on the happiness of a cruel master. It should expose the business methods of the humanitarians who propose to silence the clamors of their famished brethren with consecrated wafers and drafts on the bank of the New Jerusalem.The Christian duty of transferring our love from our friends to our enemies may be one of those virtues that have to await their recompense in a mysterious hereafter, but natural humanity can hope to find its reward on this side of the grave.[172]
E.—REFORM.
The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosophical friends, directed the keenest shafts of their logic against the doctrine of eternal punishment, and never[170]wearied of repeating that the belief in a merciless God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless bigots. “How insignificant,” they argued, “the occasional sufferings of a transient life on earth must appear to the converts of John Calvin, who held that about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed to an eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures. How absurd they must deem the complaints of a life-weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look back to the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness of a lost Eden.” The Universalists are fond of enlarging on the moral of that theme, yet from a wider point of view their objections might be extended to the entire doctrine ofother-worldliness, since Holbach’s argument might find its exact analogue in the dogma ofpost mortemcompensation. “His soul will be the gainer,” thought the Crusader who had demonstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a Moorish skull, “and if he should die his spirit will enter the gates of the New Jerusalem.” “Oh, the ingratitude,” actually said a priest of the Spanish-American land robbers, “the ingratitude of the wretches who grudge us the territories of their base earthly kingdoms and forget that our gospel offers them a passport to the glorious kingdom of heaven!” “The ingratitude!” repeats the modern pharisee, “the base ingratitude of those factory children who grudge me the privileges of my position, and clamor for an increase of wages to gratify their worldly desires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should not the rich promises of the gospel compensate such temporal inconveniences, and have I not founded a[171]Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of their unregenerate souls?”Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher acquainted us with the verdict of his countrymen on the “gospel of love” that sends its missionaries on ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by armadas for the demolition of seaports that might refuse to admit the cargo of spirituous and spiritual poisons.Secularism, the religion of Nature, should teach our brethren that their highest physical and their highest moral welfare can be only conjointly attained, and that cramping misery stunts the soul, as well as the body of its victim. It should preach thesolidarityof human interests which prevents the oppressor from enjoying the fruits of his inhumanity, and makes the curses of his dependents, nay, even the mute misery of his starving cattle, react on the happiness of a cruel master. It should expose the business methods of the humanitarians who propose to silence the clamors of their famished brethren with consecrated wafers and drafts on the bank of the New Jerusalem.The Christian duty of transferring our love from our friends to our enemies may be one of those virtues that have to await their recompense in a mysterious hereafter, but natural humanity can hope to find its reward on this side of the grave.[172]
The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosophical friends, directed the keenest shafts of their logic against the doctrine of eternal punishment, and never[170]wearied of repeating that the belief in a merciless God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless bigots. “How insignificant,” they argued, “the occasional sufferings of a transient life on earth must appear to the converts of John Calvin, who held that about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed to an eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures. How absurd they must deem the complaints of a life-weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look back to the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness of a lost Eden.” The Universalists are fond of enlarging on the moral of that theme, yet from a wider point of view their objections might be extended to the entire doctrine ofother-worldliness, since Holbach’s argument might find its exact analogue in the dogma ofpost mortemcompensation. “His soul will be the gainer,” thought the Crusader who had demonstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a Moorish skull, “and if he should die his spirit will enter the gates of the New Jerusalem.” “Oh, the ingratitude,” actually said a priest of the Spanish-American land robbers, “the ingratitude of the wretches who grudge us the territories of their base earthly kingdoms and forget that our gospel offers them a passport to the glorious kingdom of heaven!” “The ingratitude!” repeats the modern pharisee, “the base ingratitude of those factory children who grudge me the privileges of my position, and clamor for an increase of wages to gratify their worldly desires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should not the rich promises of the gospel compensate such temporal inconveniences, and have I not founded a[171]Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of their unregenerate souls?”
Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher acquainted us with the verdict of his countrymen on the “gospel of love” that sends its missionaries on ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by armadas for the demolition of seaports that might refuse to admit the cargo of spirituous and spiritual poisons.
Secularism, the religion of Nature, should teach our brethren that their highest physical and their highest moral welfare can be only conjointly attained, and that cramping misery stunts the soul, as well as the body of its victim. It should preach thesolidarityof human interests which prevents the oppressor from enjoying the fruits of his inhumanity, and makes the curses of his dependents, nay, even the mute misery of his starving cattle, react on the happiness of a cruel master. It should expose the business methods of the humanitarians who propose to silence the clamors of their famished brethren with consecrated wafers and drafts on the bank of the New Jerusalem.
The Christian duty of transferring our love from our friends to our enemies may be one of those virtues that have to await their recompense in a mysterious hereafter, but natural humanity can hope to find its reward on this side of the grave.[172]