MYTHS AND MYTH-MONGERS.[69]This bald, unjointed chat of his, my lord, I answered indirectly—Shakespeare, Henry IV.Authorsare proverbially not the best judges of their own works. It is as rare, therefore, as it is gratifying to meet with one whose verdict on his own production exactly coincides with that of the critic. Such a fortunate concurrence of opinion between the writer and the person to whose lot it has fallen to pass sentence on a work for a certain portion of the public, relieves the latter gentleman of a vast amount of responsibility, and renders his difficult task infinitely lighter and more pleasant than such a task generally proves to be.When, then, Mr. Fiske, the author ofMyths and Myth-Makers, is kind enough gratuitously to inform us in his preface that the “series of papers” of which his book is composed is “somewhat rambling and unsystematic,” it can be considered no injustice to him, and no presumption on our part, to say that we cordially agree with him. And when he further informs us that, “in order to avoid confusing the reader with intricate discussions, he has sometimes cut the matter short by expressing himself with dogmatic definiteness where a sceptical vagueness might perhaps have been more becoming,” we find nothing whatever to object to in this statement, with the solitary exception of the word “perhaps,” which, if suppressed, would bring it nearer the exact truth.However, Mr. Fiske has here furnished us with a very fair idea, of what the reader is to expect from hisMyths. He himself has passed sentence on himself. He tells us practically that we must not expect too much from his “rambling” papers; he forestalls, if he does not deprecate, criticism by assuring us at the outstart that his fault has not been on the side of modesty of opinion and judicial weighing of what he set forth. What, then, is left for the critic to do but to confirm the self-condemnation of the author?But we cannot allow Mr. Fiske to escape us in this fashion. Mr. Fiske is an M.A., and Mr. Fiske is an LL.B., and a professor, and a professor of philosophy—at Harvard, too. So that, although the dates so carefully affixed to the end of each of his “rambling and unsystematic” papers indicate that Mr. Fiske knocked this book off in three months, still three months of philosophic chaff from a Harvard professor ought surely to contain some grains of wheat.The book in itself is not an uninteresting one. It is chock-full of mythical stories, or folk-lore, or whatever people may please to call what in our younger days we should have comprised under the one delicious head of fairy-tales. To be sure, the stories were all told before and by somebody else; but then, Mr. Fiske gives everybody due credit, and confines his own portion of the work to a running commentary with an undercurrent of foot-notes, and all sorts of quotations, from the Rig-Veda down to Jack and Jill. We cannot in justice say that Mr. Fiske’s portion is as interestingas the myths themselves, though partaking considerably of their character.But to come to the point—what does Mr. Fiske mean by his book? What idea would he convey to us? What would he have us infer from it? “A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t.”If it is suggestive of anything at all, it is this: all or the chief portion of the great myths of antiquity refer to the struggle between darkness and light. It was the phenomenon of night and day which puzzled people in the dawn of the world, ages before men possessed the great blessing of this XIXth century, which blessing is, according to Mr. Fiske,viaM. Littré, “scientific faith,” seemingly the only sure thing in this enlightened age.Some people might require a definition of this wonderful faith of modern invention; but then, some people always will ask disagreeable questions. For their benefit, it may be said to mean taking nothing for fact or truth except what you can arrive at, or prove, or demonstrate by a scientific process: in plain English, no faith at all.Mr. Fiske then takes up this theory: that all men, being puzzled by this daily phenomenon of light and darkness, day and night, and having no “scientific faith” to guide them, and nothing better (Mr. Fiske will pardon us this little bit of heresy against the XIXth century) to supply its place, set to thinking and endeavoring to solve this tremendous problem. They were all a dreadful sort of people all the world over: they “knew nothing about laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect, nothing about the necessary regularity of things.” As a set-off against all these “nothings,” they possessed a something in the shape of “an unlimited capacity for believing and fancying, because fancy and belief had not yet been checked and headed off in various directions by established rules of experience.” To all of which, and a great deal more of the same nature, we feel very much inclined to append that awkwardQ. E. D.of the geometry which somebody would tag on to the end of those beautiful propositions at school, and which our professor terrified us by translating, “Which must be proved.”Mr. Fiske, then, having set this profound and eternal conundrum before the crazed intellects of the human race, which were gifted, according to him, with nothing but this “unlimited capacity for believing and fancying”—one would imagine that there might have been room for Revelation here; but Revelation, of course, clashes with “scientific faith,” and is therefore a myth in Mr. Fiske’s eyes—what were the poor beings to do but endow everything, particularly the sun, with the “volition” which they felt within themselves? How or why thismusthave been so Mr. Fiske fails to explain, or indeed that it was so at all. However, just for argument’s sake, let us take his word for it, though by so doing we are false to scientific faith. Mr. Fiske’s proposition, then, runs thus: Given the sun, and given the people with eyes to gaze at the sun, the people must necessarily have endowed the sun with “volition,” and worshipped the sun as a god. Once more,Q. E. D.Hence Mr. Fiske proceeds to argue: “The conception of infallible skill in archery, which underlies such a great variety of myths and popular fairy-tales, is originally derived from the inevitable victory of the sun over his enemies, the demons of night,winter, and tempest. Arrows and spears which never miss their mark, swords from whose blow no armor can protect, are invariably the weapons of solar divinities or heroes.” Consequently, Mr. Fiske is cruel enough to knock on the head a considerable number of fictitious characters who were much better known and loved by us years ago than many real characters to-day. He levels his shaft tipped with scientific faith, whiz!—and down drop William Tell, William of Cloudeslee, Beth-Gellert, Jack and the Beanstalk, Roland, Sir Bedivere, Ulysses, Achilles, Balder the Beautiful, Hercules, and a whole host of other famous heroes—or rather they mount, for one and all represented the sun, and were types and figures of his solar majesty.Well, though we grieve to say it, it may be so; but the consolation is still left us that, even if it be so, “it’s of no consequence,” as our old friend Mr. Toots was wont sagaciously to remark. There is so much of reality around us, and so much real sham, to speak a paradox, to wing with our arrows, to shoot at all our lifelong and make no visible impression on, that we have neither time, nor inclination, nor patience to bother our brains with wire-drawn theories as to whether Tell was Tell or the sun; whether a man ever performed the impossible feat of piercing an apple, which happened to be on his boy’s head, with a shaft or not, or whether a dog was killed by its master in mistake. Such things may serve to amuse children or people who can find nothing better to occupy their time. So far there is nothing to object to in it. But when a man takes every imaginable story, collects them all as he would old fossils, and tickets each off with a bad explanation, or throws them together into a bag, as it were, and, charlatan-like, shakes them all up in order to see if by any chance they might tumble out in a shape antagonistic to Christianity, a work which, in view of the many realities around us, is rubbish at the best, becomes in Mr. Fiske’s hands rubbish at the worst.For he does not hold to his tether; he will go out of his way to drag religion into a place where, if it must enter, it shows itself, as always, full of majesty, and beauty, and sublime truth, but not a thing of ridicule, as this writer, by hint, and innuendo, and insinuating little foot-note, and sly little chuckle, and weak little laugh, and wit of the very smallest, would make it.“The religious myths of antiquity, and the fireside legends of ancient and modern times, have their common roots in the mental habits of primeval humanity. They are the earliest recorded utterances of men concerning the visible phenomena of the world into which they were born.”Now, there is nothing particularly startling in this passage; it is just such an one as the reader might or might not assent to, being really utterly careless on the subject. He would scarcely stop to inquire how far Mr. Fiske’s “religious myths of antiquity” extended. There is a seemingly unconscious vagueness about the phrase that allows it to pass without question. And Mr. Fiske’s theories, if we may dignify them by such a title, run on smoothly enough in killing Beth-Gellert for the thousandth time, and bringing his powerful mind and the infallible test of his “scientific faith” to bear on old nursery jingles—such, for instance, as:“Jack and Jill went up the hillTo get a pail of water;Jack fell down and broke his crown,And Jill came tumbling after.”“This may read like mere nonsense,” says Mr. Fiske. Again we agree with him it may; but the rising smile fades on the lip when met by the solemn assurance immediately following: “But there is a point of view from which it may be safely said that there is very little absolute nonsense in the world.”We grieve to say that the thought which struck us immediately on reading this aphorism of Mr. Fiske’s was that, if one thing more than another could tend to make us dubious as to its truth, it would be the perusal of his own book. Butrevenons: “The story is a venerable one,” he proceedsin re“Jack and Jill.” “They—the children—fall away from one another as the moon wanes, and their water-pail symbolizes the supposed connection of the moon with rainstorms.”Leaving our readers to ponder over this profound mystery so solemnly set forth by the author, dazzled and bewildered, doubtless, by this latest exhibition of moonshine, we pass from it to other things. It is of a piece with all the author’s deductions, and as fair a sample as any other of the ingenuity of his argument and the profundity of his conclusions. We do not attempt to refute them; that task is above us; we leave such questions to be argued out in their more fitting sphere, where the characters in the story are best known and believed in—the nursery.To all this sort of thing we do not object; it is very harmless, and though scarcely the style of study and method of deduction one might expect from a professor of philosophy at what is esteemed the leading university in the United States, we can only arrive, however regretfully, at the conclusion that we had perhaps made a false estimate of the intellectual standing of that university, and of the calibre, mental and moral, of its professors. Still, Mr. Fiske may argue all his lifelong in this fashion, and we can only wish him better employment. But unfortunately he does not stop here.All the unravelling of these worthless myths has one aim and tendency: the connecting with them true religion, Judaism first, and afterwards Christianity, the belief in Christ, the Christian sacraments, Christian observances, Christian practices; not as the one truth of which all these myths formed so many broken and distorted fragments, but—hear it, Christian fathers who send your sons to Harvard to learn wisdom and truth from such men as the one under our notice—a myth with the rest of them!Ulysses, Achilles, Ormutz, Thor, Tell, William of Cloudeslee, the sun, Jesus Christ—“These be thy gods, O Israel!”A mad world, my masters! We are all wrong; living in a myth, worshipping a myth, teaching a myth, our social and political state to-day built upon a myth. “We may learn anew the lesson, taught with fresh emphasis by modern scholarship, that in the deepest sense there is nothing new under the sun.” So says Mr. Fiske. There is nothing sure but scientific faith as expounded by M. Littré and—Mr. Fiske. All the rest is myth.It would be no surprise to us if Mr. Fiske were indignantly to reject the construction which the Catholic, or the Christian reader of whatever denomination, who possesses any knowledge of Christianity, must put upon his words. Apparently he himself is not sufficiently acquainted with Christianity to understand the meaning of those words; and yet he is a “professor of philosophy” at a presumably Christian university. He is, to judge him by this book, of that school of would-be atheists so fashionable tod-ay,who talk mild infidelity over their tea, and take it down with their muffins—a toast-and-water infidelity, nice to take hob-and-nob with and to the admiration of some antiquated Blue-Stocking. Mr. Fiske, like his class, might be considered an atheist did he only possess the faintest conception of what Christianity meant. An atheist is not a man who does not, but whowillnot, know God—a rebellious spirit who, like the fallen archangel who has seduced him, rejects God, flings back his offering, and cries out: “I will not serve!”Such is atheism—negation, not unconsciousness; denial, not lack of knowledge. Mr. Fiske’s toast-and-water stuff partakes of the latter character. It is so very weak, so very thin, so supremely unconscious of its feebleness, so full of self-sufficiency, so sublimely ignorant of the fact that the poor little hobby-horse which it rides astride of, and on which it pranks out, with “all the pomp and circumstance” of mimic warfare, to have a tilt with the church, has been long ago ridden to death by far doughtier champions than Mr. Fiske, but with a like result—a tumble in the dust. Like the carpet-knight, who, “but for those vile guns, might himself have been a soldier,” but for the vile faith, these carpet-atheists might themselves have become Christian. Did we not recollect that they possess immortal souls destined for one of two eternities, we might almost congratulate ourselves on their defection.But not to lay so very serious a charge at Mr. Fiske’s door without just grounds, we proceed to give a few instances of that gentleman’s mythical contortions, which will sufficiently vindicate the severe strictures we feel compelled to pass upon his book—a book, indeed, which should have passed unnoticed, only that it is typical of the tone and tendency of the class of writers remarked upon above.Mr. Fiske would seem to have received some sort of a Christian education, if we may so call it, in his youth; for he tells us “of that burning Calvinistic hell with which his childish imagination had been unwisely terrified.” Calvinism probably drove him into revolt against Christianity, as it has driven so many others, and, instead of returning, and examining, and searching for truth, he has adopted the easier course of saying that it was all a sham—the devil was only a bogy conjured up by nurses to frighten children and make them good. Christianity was an excellent religion for children and timid old maids; but forMEN, men of the XIXth century, it was a little too much. On reading the fables of the pagans, he found that they had their bogies to frighten their children, as the heathen possesses them still. All the same, all the same, all the way down to the cradle, if there be such, of the race.“Black spirits and white,Red spirits and gray,Mingle, mingle, mingle,You that mingle may.”Such, if put into a coherent shape, would be, we think, Mr. Fiske’s mode of explaining his belief. To him all mystery is myth, and the one true guide is scientific faith.There is no mention of Revelation from beginning to end of the book: the author evidently does not believe in it. But though he is careful not to say so in express words, the meaning of all his deductions is very clear; and passages from the sacred Scriptures are contorted to suit his purpose.Thus, we are told[70]that “the veryidea of an archfiend, Satan, which Christianity received from Judaism, seems to have been suggested by the Persian Ahriman, or at least to have derived its principal characteristics from that source. There is no evidence that the Jews, previous to the Babylonish captivity, possessed the conception of a devil as the author of all evil. In the earlier books of the Old Testament, Jehovah is represented as dispensing with his own hand the good and the evil, like the Zeus of theIliad.”Of course, to a man of Mr. Fiske’s vast knowledge and profound erudition, it would be an impertinence to suggest that, as the name—the mere name, apart from all belief in it—Jehovah is the more ancient of the two, it might have been more in order to invert its position, so that it would run: “The Zeus of theIliad, like the Jehovah of the Old Testament, was the dispenser of good and evil.” But Mr. Fiske studiously sets Jehovah first in place, though second in time, giving one to understand thereby that Zeus was his precursor. This may have been done inadvertently, but, if so, there is a strange method in Mr. Fiske’s carelessness. He is clearly a believer in that“Divinity which doth shape our ends,Rough hew them as we may.”Then, again, Mr. Fiske is correct enough in the passages which he cites as showing that the Jehovah of the Old Testament dispenses “with his own hand the good and the evil.” There is nothing startling in this: it is the soundest Catholic as well as Jewish doctrine. We believe that God does dispense the good and the evil alike; but the “dispensing of the good and the evil” is a very different thing from the phrase which concludes the preceding sentence: “The author ofallevil.” Mr. Fiske plumes himself on his philological knowledge; he is great in word-science, if we may so call it; does he, then, recognize no distinction between “a dispenser” and “an author,” or again, between evil and evil, or still further, between “evil” and “allevil”?“Evil is natural and moral,” says the dictionary. In the first sense, it means what we generally comprehend by the word “misfortune”; as, evil tidings, evil news, evil accident. In this sense, God is said to be the dispenser of evil; that is, of trials which he sets his children, as a father sets his son a hard task, to prepare them, to test them, to educate them, to lift them up to the fulness of manhood, which is in God. “Whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth.” But “moral evil” or what Mr. Fiske calls “all evil,” is a very different thing. It is that which is evil naturally,in seandper se, which is in the will of the devil, and which it is blasphemy to attribute to God. Evil in the first sense may be, is generally, good in itself: the latter, never. It may not be blasphemy in Mr. Fiske, for, as we said, he does not, from insufficient acquaintance with the subject, know the meaning of his own words. But observe how carefully all these words are placed in connection and juxtaposition one with another, and how easily each slides into its wrong place. Again, there is a singular method in Mr. Fiske’s glaring—for a milder term in the face of what we have just pointed out would be impossible—inaccuracies.He goes on: “The story of the serpent in Eden—an Aryan story in every particular, which has crept into the Pentateuch—is not once alluded to in the Old Testament.” To this he adds a note: “Nor is there any ground for believing that the serpent in theEden-mythis intended for Satan?” Though Mr. Fiske is overrunning our space far more than weintended he should do at the beginning, the next sentence is too good to omit, as replete with a piece of criticism unique in its simplicity and loftiness of tone: “The identification (of the serpent in the Eden-myth with Satan) is entirely the work of modern dogmatic theology, and is due, naturally enough, to the habit, so common alike among theologians and laymen, of reasoning about the Bible as if it were a single book (!), and not a collection of writings of different ages and of very different degrees of historic authenticity.”To all his readers the question will naturally suggest itself: Has Mr. Fiske ever been outside the walls of Harvard? But there—we leave the matter: it suggests its own comment; and, moreover, Mr. Fiske promises us, “in a future work entitled (start not, ye publishers!)Aryana Vaedjo, to examine, at considerable length,this interesting mythof the Garden of Eden.” We hope to see it.Well, here we have in plain English the whole story of the fall of man, the origin of good and evil in this world, and the cause of all the consequences which followed therefrom; the whole story of the Creation in fact, as in another place that of the Deluge, set aside quietly and easily, without a word of doubt, or difficulty, or hesitation, as a myth. It would be interesting to know what Mr. Fiske does believe on these points—but his book is to come. We trust he will take the pains to set us right on the subject of the origin of man and of the Creation generally. Of man we should judge him to have as high an opinion as Mr. Darwin, when he explains his present condition as being brought about by “that stupendous process of breeding which we call civilization; which has strengthened the feelings by which we are chiefly distinguished from the brutes, leavingour primitive bestial impulsesto die for want of exercise, or checking in every possible way their further expansion by legislative enactments. (Draw this to its legitimate conclusion, and there is no such thing as morality, it being merely synonymous with law or education.) But this process which is transforming us from savages into civilized men is a very slow one; and now and then there occur cases of what physiologists call atavism, orreversion to an ancestral type of character.... Now and then persons are born possessed of the bestial appetite and cravings of primitive man, his fiendish cruelty, and his liking for human flesh.”This is a Harvard professor who thus explains what people generally accredit to the maxims of the Gospel and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Morality is simply education or force, and evil is inherent in the naturally brutal being, man, who, like Topsy, gradually “growed” up to what he is.It were easy to go on thus multiplying instances of the truth of our observation, that Mr. Fiske reduces Christianity to a myth; but we think there is enough proof already. We pass by many things, therefore, where the author’s display of shallow learning is only equalled by his flimsy remarks. In a note (p. 48), he would have us infer that the Jews believed in a plurality of gods just as did the pagans, because Elohim—God—is plural—a common use of the word even in the English Version, as when God says, “Let us go down and confound their tongue,” etc.; but the Jews certainly never interpreted it as meaning anything else than the one God, whom they adored. It was merely a foreshadowing of the doctrine of the Trinity. In another place, he informs us that S. Ursula isArtemis and Aphrodite, S. Gertrude the heathen Holda. He is evidently unaware that one of the most popular books of Catholic devotion is written by the “heathen Holda.” Stupid inaccuracies of this description are unaccountable. In any other person they would indicate a mind inflated with that dangerous “little learning” which Pope warns us against; in a Harvard “professor of philosophy,” they doubtless take the form of Shakespeare’s sins against grammar and good taste, and go down as “beauties.” “Angels—women with large wings” (sic)—are kinsfolk of the werewolf family, and Christianity has “degradedthe beneficent lightning-god, Thor,” into the “grotesque mediæval devil.” Odin and other glorious divinities undergo a similar hideous transformation under the “degrading” influence of Christianity. In fact, Christianity is but a system of plagiarizing, and plagiarizing which by no means improves on the old pagan superstitions. The devil is really a good-natured sort of being, or was till Christianity came and spoiled his temper and himself generally. Of course such a being never existed except in the brain of superstitious people unendowed with scientific faith, who were racking their brains to find out the meaning of that eternal puzzle, darkness and light, so that they at length came to embody darkness in the form of the devil, and light in the person of God, or Jupiter, or Apollo, or William Tell. That is the plain English of Mr. Fiske’s book.Mr. Fiske seems to think that he has struck a new vein, and opened up to the world a golden ore long hidden. His theory is as old as any other; and he has only given us a poor rehash of what much cleverer men than he have oversurfeited us with ages ago. Before attempting to handle the subjects he has touched upon, it would be advisable to go to school again, and he might thus be saved a lamentable display of childish ignorance on points known to all the world, save apparently to Mr. Fiske. In a very weak review of a most interesting and clever book,Juventus Mundi, written by a scholar and a thinker, neither of which titles we feel justified in applying to Mr. Fiske, this latter gentleman remarks, with astonishment, that Mr. Gladstone draws an analogy between the gods of heathendom and the God of Christianity; in other words, between distorted truth and its first original. This, again, is as old as the hills.Prometheus, for instance, has struck all readers as a wonderful type of the Saviour; and so with other gods and heroes of antiquity. Scholars are pleased to draw likenesses between the characters of the fables of pagan antiquity and those of the sacred Scriptures; such connection is by no means necessary to prove the truth of Christianity and of the doctrines of Revelation. Christianity is here, around us, living, real: we are in it. It is clear, well defined, unchanging, distinct, a solemn and awful fact: deal withit, study it, destroy it, if you can. It has no connection, claims no connection, needs no connection, with paganism. It stands alone, self-sufficient, for God is its centre. It embraces the world; it rules nations; and the better the governments, the nearer they approach to the observance of its codes. History hallows it; scientific discovery only tends to confirm our faith in it. It is superseding all things, as its Founder meant it should; and people have the impudence, for it is nothing else, to come and tell us to-day, in out-of-the-way notes in silly books, that this stupendous fact is a myth! We can only say to them,tolle, lege!It is easy for a man to sit down in his chair, and spin out a theory, connecting the most distant objects together in his own mind. Thus Mr. Fiske drives Tell back to the sun, or Ulysses, or Odysseus, as he prefers to call him, for he takes kindly to what we may be pardoned calling theGrotesqueetymology; and even in this, like all poor imitators, goes beyond his master. Homer tells us Ulysses was a man, a great traveller, who had seen many lands. Oh! no, says Mr. Fiske; Homer made a great mistake; he did not know what he was talking about; Ulysses was meant for the sun. And yet Mr. Fiske tells us that the “minds of primitive men worked like our own, and, when they spoke of the far-darting sun-god, they meant just what they said.” Why should not this reasoning hold good for Ulysses, as well as for Apollo?Why, we might take up the story of Mr. Stanley’s discovery of Livingstone, and concoct a far better myth out of it than Mr. Fiske has out of many of his materials. Livingstone, like Ulysses, is a man who had seen many lands; he is hurried away and lost to the world in a dark and fiery country—a land of demons and impenetrable burning deserts. The world laments his loss, and Stanley, the youthful, the Dawn, goes out to seek him, and, after the usual obstacles, finds him in the dark land, clothed in rags, with a blue cap on his head, adorned with a gold band, a long beard falling gray over his breast, surrounded by the dark children of the desert. When that fabulous New Zealander sits on the ruins of London Bridge, some future Professor Fiske will probably take up this story of to-day, and weave a myth out of it as the present one has done with Ulysses; but Mr. Fiske may remember that the prophet who foretold the New Zealander in his incongruous position only did so to serve as an example of the indestructibility of God’s church.If he must refer everything back to light, why not go a little beyond the sun to theLux Mundi—the light which shineth in the darkness, but which the darkness comprehended not? Light and fire run from the beginning to the end of the New and Old Testaments, as typical of God. The first thing God made was light; he spoke to Moses in a burning bush; his angel accompanied his people in a cloud and a pillar of light. Man cannot look upon his face and live, for the glory of it. Is it possible that Mr. Fiske, who is so keen at connections, could miss such palpable indications of the connection between the traditions he has mentioned and Revelation, without being struck by it, unless he did so intentionally?Had we space, we could show by comparison that the very words he has quoted from Indian and other traditions of the Michabo, the great white One, of the origin of the world and the history of the Deluge, are almost identical in phrase even with the Scriptures. From F. De Smet’s interesting Indian sketches, appearing in theCatholic Review, we find that the Indians adore the Great Medicine, who is, above all, the All-powerful, and sacrifice to him through the sun and the thunder, because the sun is his great servitor.And as for the devil, whom Mr. Fiske finds such an amusing character (happy man! may he never be undeceived!), it may make him laugh at us, but, for our part, we have a very decided belief in his existence and power to do harm; in fact, did we only discern a spice of something stronger and more powerful than Mr. Fiske presents us in his book, just the faintest flavor of the genuine article—realbrimstone and fire—we should have been led to refer its authorship to the very personage whom Mr. Fiske so despises. As it is, the work is unworthy of his Satanic majesty. He inspired the idea which animates it long ago, but the present execution is by too weak a hand for his. In this we find an indication that the idea is used up and gone beyond working order—driven to death, in fact.Superstition undoubtedly did exist in the middle ages; perhaps—for we are not too ready to believe this age so very far superior in many points to those days as is generally conceded; at all events, the world, as the world, is materially even very little better off than it then was, notwithstanding all our boasted science, and the rest, and the days allotted to man are not lengthened—perhaps, then, superstition did flourish at that time to a greater extent than it does to-day; but what does that prove? Simply that Christianity, “that stupendous process of breeding,” did not convert the world in a day.Did superstition prevail to a greater or less degree than it did prior to the introduction of Christianity, before the old Jewish order passed away, and gave place to the new—to the religion which was no longer to be restricted to a single nation, but which was to spread abroad, to become Catholic, and embrace the world, the family of God’s human creatures, within its bosom? Was it, so much of it as did exist, more or less hideous in the supernatural figures with which it peoples the universe? Were the Norse gods of blood and bestiality, Thor, and Odin, and Friga, “degraded”? Could they be degraded? Was Venus degraded, or Jupiter, or Bacchus, or the multitude of others, by being replaced by the truth, by the light which was so long coming and expected of the nations—by the Sun of Justice?It was this bursting of the light of the world upon nations which dispelled for ever the dark mists of superstition that had so long hidden the creation from its Creator; this was the Sun the nations dimly saw and adored; this was the victorious Conqueror who overcame all obstacles by his own sufferings, and death, and sacrifice; who, like Prometheus, “came to cast fire upon the earth,” and who died in agony to save his fellows, and destroy the false Jove with his heaven of immorality—Jesus Christ! at whose name “every knee shall bow.”And the darkness was this very devil, the author of all evil, who fell, freely and consciously, in eternal rebellion against God; who cannot be destroyed, for God created him immortal; who uses the power still left him, which was once heavenly, in order to lead into rebellion all creation against the God he hates with an eternal hatred; who is permitted by God to tempt man, for man is a free agent—God not having endowed a mere machine with the breath of life, the breathing of his spirit—and, if man falls, he falls freely and consciously as did Satan.Here lay the puzzle of darkness and light, good and evil, right and wrong. The world saw itself bounded everywhere by the impassable; by its wickedness it had lost the clear knowledge of its God; it would overleap those barriers, and reach him again. The craving of its heart was eternal; it saw the marks of its God around it: “The heavens declared the glory of God, and the firmament displayed the wonders of his works.” Men felt the supernatural, and worshipped; but their eyes were blinded, and, groping in the darkness for their God, they mistook his enemy, and worshipped him.Paganism was and is the worship of the devil. The evil one allows men to worship him under whatever form they please, provided only they rebel against God. Impurity, bestiality, drunkenness, intellectual pride, all things that lead astray, are for him good; but the law of God is one and unchangeable, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and, therefore, though it is hard to kick against the goad, the free-will of man whispers rebellion to him ever, for he finds God everywhere.What, then, dealt the death-blow to superstition? Was it scientific faith, or the coming of Christ?In order completely to fill a void, you must have something adequate. The world through all the ages had this yearning for a something wanting, this searching after a something lost. It felt the supernatural, the beyond—it felt, but did not see. So each one made him a religion of his own. To fill that eternal void, to make all one, to satisfy the craving of the world, that void must be filled. But what can fill it, save the supernatural? An infinite want can only be filled by infinity. Jesus Christ came in form and with surroundings the very reverse of what those who had waited most anxiously for him expected. Consequently, their pride revolted, and they refused to accept the Messiah. Nevertheless, no sooner was his doctrine made known, than the world outside, the gropers in the darkness, felt the Sun; the scales dropped from their eyes, the void was at length filled, the craving satisfied; they saw their God, and knew him. Then superstition ended, for they found a reason for every mystery in the all-powerful, all-pervading God.Had the world to wait for scientific faith to clear up its doubts and give a reason for its longings and beliefs, superstition would still reign paramount among men. What is scientific faith? What can it do? That science has advanced since the days when men built the pyramids, constructed cities whose ruins are the wonders of to-day, converted the Eastern deserts into gardens, constructed the alphabet, built the Parthenon, devised the geometrical figure, organized the sciences of numbers, philosophy, the heavens, and set up leaning towers, we concede; but the men who performed those wonders can scarcely be set down as “knowing nothing of the laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect.” This age has made an advance on them, it is true; but an advance utterly disproportionate to the centuries which have rolled between; nay, in some things it has retrograded.Did people wait, then, for scientific faith to lift the veil from their eyes, or was it the teachings of Christianity and the appearance of Jesus Christ which lifted it? How much more has scientific faith taught us than it taught the men who centuries ago, by their intimate and accurate knowledge of natural causes, wrought those wonders touched upon above? The supernatural still confronts us as it did them. Science ends with the scientist. Can it tell him who he is, or why he is? Can it touch the lightning, weigh the sun, reveal the mystery of life and death? It can tell us we live and we die; that, when such or such a circumstance occurs, what we call life is over. But can it tell us what is life, whence it came, whither it goes? what the world is, who made it, why it was made? what the seed is, why it grows up into a tree, why the leaves sprout from the hard wood, who set all this principle of life going, and why? Here lies the mystery that puzzled men; here science stops, and God reveals himself: it isawed into silence, and listens for his voice.On reading this article once more, the thought has occurred to the writer that objection may be taken to its tone as not exactly in accordance with that myth of myths which goes by the name of “amenities of literature.” Catholics very rarely come across this pleasing illusion in the columns of adverse writers. But even should this charge be well grounded, it is idle for Catholics to wrap what they have to say in wadding, lest it fall too roughly on the delicate sensibilities of people who undertake to insult a religion of which they know nothing. Mr. Fiske is only a type of a class to whom is entrusted the sacred mission of educating the youth of this country, those particularly whose means admit of the highest education, and from whom, therefore, much should be expected. Men wonder at the immorality of our youth—the young man of society of to-day. Why wonder, when his professors teach him that morality is a name, Christianity a fable, and all religion a sham? We cannot affect to toy when the stakes played for are so high. The morality of the coming race depends on the education it receives. When, therefore, we find men, set in high places in our foremost universities, abusing their position, and striving by every means in their power to sap and undermine Christian education, we think studious phrases idle and polished courtesy thrown away. Insult and evil must be met with other weapons. If Mr. Fiske wishes to know whether Christianity is a myth or not, let him sit down and study before pronouncing. When he has sought and inquired earnestly, he will find plenty to furnish him with the right answer.
MYTHS AND MYTH-MONGERS.[69]This bald, unjointed chat of his, my lord, I answered indirectly—Shakespeare, Henry IV.Authorsare proverbially not the best judges of their own works. It is as rare, therefore, as it is gratifying to meet with one whose verdict on his own production exactly coincides with that of the critic. Such a fortunate concurrence of opinion between the writer and the person to whose lot it has fallen to pass sentence on a work for a certain portion of the public, relieves the latter gentleman of a vast amount of responsibility, and renders his difficult task infinitely lighter and more pleasant than such a task generally proves to be.When, then, Mr. Fiske, the author ofMyths and Myth-Makers, is kind enough gratuitously to inform us in his preface that the “series of papers” of which his book is composed is “somewhat rambling and unsystematic,” it can be considered no injustice to him, and no presumption on our part, to say that we cordially agree with him. And when he further informs us that, “in order to avoid confusing the reader with intricate discussions, he has sometimes cut the matter short by expressing himself with dogmatic definiteness where a sceptical vagueness might perhaps have been more becoming,” we find nothing whatever to object to in this statement, with the solitary exception of the word “perhaps,” which, if suppressed, would bring it nearer the exact truth.However, Mr. Fiske has here furnished us with a very fair idea, of what the reader is to expect from hisMyths. He himself has passed sentence on himself. He tells us practically that we must not expect too much from his “rambling” papers; he forestalls, if he does not deprecate, criticism by assuring us at the outstart that his fault has not been on the side of modesty of opinion and judicial weighing of what he set forth. What, then, is left for the critic to do but to confirm the self-condemnation of the author?But we cannot allow Mr. Fiske to escape us in this fashion. Mr. Fiske is an M.A., and Mr. Fiske is an LL.B., and a professor, and a professor of philosophy—at Harvard, too. So that, although the dates so carefully affixed to the end of each of his “rambling and unsystematic” papers indicate that Mr. Fiske knocked this book off in three months, still three months of philosophic chaff from a Harvard professor ought surely to contain some grains of wheat.The book in itself is not an uninteresting one. It is chock-full of mythical stories, or folk-lore, or whatever people may please to call what in our younger days we should have comprised under the one delicious head of fairy-tales. To be sure, the stories were all told before and by somebody else; but then, Mr. Fiske gives everybody due credit, and confines his own portion of the work to a running commentary with an undercurrent of foot-notes, and all sorts of quotations, from the Rig-Veda down to Jack and Jill. We cannot in justice say that Mr. Fiske’s portion is as interestingas the myths themselves, though partaking considerably of their character.But to come to the point—what does Mr. Fiske mean by his book? What idea would he convey to us? What would he have us infer from it? “A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t.”If it is suggestive of anything at all, it is this: all or the chief portion of the great myths of antiquity refer to the struggle between darkness and light. It was the phenomenon of night and day which puzzled people in the dawn of the world, ages before men possessed the great blessing of this XIXth century, which blessing is, according to Mr. Fiske,viaM. Littré, “scientific faith,” seemingly the only sure thing in this enlightened age.Some people might require a definition of this wonderful faith of modern invention; but then, some people always will ask disagreeable questions. For their benefit, it may be said to mean taking nothing for fact or truth except what you can arrive at, or prove, or demonstrate by a scientific process: in plain English, no faith at all.Mr. Fiske then takes up this theory: that all men, being puzzled by this daily phenomenon of light and darkness, day and night, and having no “scientific faith” to guide them, and nothing better (Mr. Fiske will pardon us this little bit of heresy against the XIXth century) to supply its place, set to thinking and endeavoring to solve this tremendous problem. They were all a dreadful sort of people all the world over: they “knew nothing about laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect, nothing about the necessary regularity of things.” As a set-off against all these “nothings,” they possessed a something in the shape of “an unlimited capacity for believing and fancying, because fancy and belief had not yet been checked and headed off in various directions by established rules of experience.” To all of which, and a great deal more of the same nature, we feel very much inclined to append that awkwardQ. E. D.of the geometry which somebody would tag on to the end of those beautiful propositions at school, and which our professor terrified us by translating, “Which must be proved.”Mr. Fiske, then, having set this profound and eternal conundrum before the crazed intellects of the human race, which were gifted, according to him, with nothing but this “unlimited capacity for believing and fancying”—one would imagine that there might have been room for Revelation here; but Revelation, of course, clashes with “scientific faith,” and is therefore a myth in Mr. Fiske’s eyes—what were the poor beings to do but endow everything, particularly the sun, with the “volition” which they felt within themselves? How or why thismusthave been so Mr. Fiske fails to explain, or indeed that it was so at all. However, just for argument’s sake, let us take his word for it, though by so doing we are false to scientific faith. Mr. Fiske’s proposition, then, runs thus: Given the sun, and given the people with eyes to gaze at the sun, the people must necessarily have endowed the sun with “volition,” and worshipped the sun as a god. Once more,Q. E. D.Hence Mr. Fiske proceeds to argue: “The conception of infallible skill in archery, which underlies such a great variety of myths and popular fairy-tales, is originally derived from the inevitable victory of the sun over his enemies, the demons of night,winter, and tempest. Arrows and spears which never miss their mark, swords from whose blow no armor can protect, are invariably the weapons of solar divinities or heroes.” Consequently, Mr. Fiske is cruel enough to knock on the head a considerable number of fictitious characters who were much better known and loved by us years ago than many real characters to-day. He levels his shaft tipped with scientific faith, whiz!—and down drop William Tell, William of Cloudeslee, Beth-Gellert, Jack and the Beanstalk, Roland, Sir Bedivere, Ulysses, Achilles, Balder the Beautiful, Hercules, and a whole host of other famous heroes—or rather they mount, for one and all represented the sun, and were types and figures of his solar majesty.Well, though we grieve to say it, it may be so; but the consolation is still left us that, even if it be so, “it’s of no consequence,” as our old friend Mr. Toots was wont sagaciously to remark. There is so much of reality around us, and so much real sham, to speak a paradox, to wing with our arrows, to shoot at all our lifelong and make no visible impression on, that we have neither time, nor inclination, nor patience to bother our brains with wire-drawn theories as to whether Tell was Tell or the sun; whether a man ever performed the impossible feat of piercing an apple, which happened to be on his boy’s head, with a shaft or not, or whether a dog was killed by its master in mistake. Such things may serve to amuse children or people who can find nothing better to occupy their time. So far there is nothing to object to in it. But when a man takes every imaginable story, collects them all as he would old fossils, and tickets each off with a bad explanation, or throws them together into a bag, as it were, and, charlatan-like, shakes them all up in order to see if by any chance they might tumble out in a shape antagonistic to Christianity, a work which, in view of the many realities around us, is rubbish at the best, becomes in Mr. Fiske’s hands rubbish at the worst.For he does not hold to his tether; he will go out of his way to drag religion into a place where, if it must enter, it shows itself, as always, full of majesty, and beauty, and sublime truth, but not a thing of ridicule, as this writer, by hint, and innuendo, and insinuating little foot-note, and sly little chuckle, and weak little laugh, and wit of the very smallest, would make it.“The religious myths of antiquity, and the fireside legends of ancient and modern times, have their common roots in the mental habits of primeval humanity. They are the earliest recorded utterances of men concerning the visible phenomena of the world into which they were born.”Now, there is nothing particularly startling in this passage; it is just such an one as the reader might or might not assent to, being really utterly careless on the subject. He would scarcely stop to inquire how far Mr. Fiske’s “religious myths of antiquity” extended. There is a seemingly unconscious vagueness about the phrase that allows it to pass without question. And Mr. Fiske’s theories, if we may dignify them by such a title, run on smoothly enough in killing Beth-Gellert for the thousandth time, and bringing his powerful mind and the infallible test of his “scientific faith” to bear on old nursery jingles—such, for instance, as:“Jack and Jill went up the hillTo get a pail of water;Jack fell down and broke his crown,And Jill came tumbling after.”“This may read like mere nonsense,” says Mr. Fiske. Again we agree with him it may; but the rising smile fades on the lip when met by the solemn assurance immediately following: “But there is a point of view from which it may be safely said that there is very little absolute nonsense in the world.”We grieve to say that the thought which struck us immediately on reading this aphorism of Mr. Fiske’s was that, if one thing more than another could tend to make us dubious as to its truth, it would be the perusal of his own book. Butrevenons: “The story is a venerable one,” he proceedsin re“Jack and Jill.” “They—the children—fall away from one another as the moon wanes, and their water-pail symbolizes the supposed connection of the moon with rainstorms.”Leaving our readers to ponder over this profound mystery so solemnly set forth by the author, dazzled and bewildered, doubtless, by this latest exhibition of moonshine, we pass from it to other things. It is of a piece with all the author’s deductions, and as fair a sample as any other of the ingenuity of his argument and the profundity of his conclusions. We do not attempt to refute them; that task is above us; we leave such questions to be argued out in their more fitting sphere, where the characters in the story are best known and believed in—the nursery.To all this sort of thing we do not object; it is very harmless, and though scarcely the style of study and method of deduction one might expect from a professor of philosophy at what is esteemed the leading university in the United States, we can only arrive, however regretfully, at the conclusion that we had perhaps made a false estimate of the intellectual standing of that university, and of the calibre, mental and moral, of its professors. Still, Mr. Fiske may argue all his lifelong in this fashion, and we can only wish him better employment. But unfortunately he does not stop here.All the unravelling of these worthless myths has one aim and tendency: the connecting with them true religion, Judaism first, and afterwards Christianity, the belief in Christ, the Christian sacraments, Christian observances, Christian practices; not as the one truth of which all these myths formed so many broken and distorted fragments, but—hear it, Christian fathers who send your sons to Harvard to learn wisdom and truth from such men as the one under our notice—a myth with the rest of them!Ulysses, Achilles, Ormutz, Thor, Tell, William of Cloudeslee, the sun, Jesus Christ—“These be thy gods, O Israel!”A mad world, my masters! We are all wrong; living in a myth, worshipping a myth, teaching a myth, our social and political state to-day built upon a myth. “We may learn anew the lesson, taught with fresh emphasis by modern scholarship, that in the deepest sense there is nothing new under the sun.” So says Mr. Fiske. There is nothing sure but scientific faith as expounded by M. Littré and—Mr. Fiske. All the rest is myth.It would be no surprise to us if Mr. Fiske were indignantly to reject the construction which the Catholic, or the Christian reader of whatever denomination, who possesses any knowledge of Christianity, must put upon his words. Apparently he himself is not sufficiently acquainted with Christianity to understand the meaning of those words; and yet he is a “professor of philosophy” at a presumably Christian university. He is, to judge him by this book, of that school of would-be atheists so fashionable tod-ay,who talk mild infidelity over their tea, and take it down with their muffins—a toast-and-water infidelity, nice to take hob-and-nob with and to the admiration of some antiquated Blue-Stocking. Mr. Fiske, like his class, might be considered an atheist did he only possess the faintest conception of what Christianity meant. An atheist is not a man who does not, but whowillnot, know God—a rebellious spirit who, like the fallen archangel who has seduced him, rejects God, flings back his offering, and cries out: “I will not serve!”Such is atheism—negation, not unconsciousness; denial, not lack of knowledge. Mr. Fiske’s toast-and-water stuff partakes of the latter character. It is so very weak, so very thin, so supremely unconscious of its feebleness, so full of self-sufficiency, so sublimely ignorant of the fact that the poor little hobby-horse which it rides astride of, and on which it pranks out, with “all the pomp and circumstance” of mimic warfare, to have a tilt with the church, has been long ago ridden to death by far doughtier champions than Mr. Fiske, but with a like result—a tumble in the dust. Like the carpet-knight, who, “but for those vile guns, might himself have been a soldier,” but for the vile faith, these carpet-atheists might themselves have become Christian. Did we not recollect that they possess immortal souls destined for one of two eternities, we might almost congratulate ourselves on their defection.But not to lay so very serious a charge at Mr. Fiske’s door without just grounds, we proceed to give a few instances of that gentleman’s mythical contortions, which will sufficiently vindicate the severe strictures we feel compelled to pass upon his book—a book, indeed, which should have passed unnoticed, only that it is typical of the tone and tendency of the class of writers remarked upon above.Mr. Fiske would seem to have received some sort of a Christian education, if we may so call it, in his youth; for he tells us “of that burning Calvinistic hell with which his childish imagination had been unwisely terrified.” Calvinism probably drove him into revolt against Christianity, as it has driven so many others, and, instead of returning, and examining, and searching for truth, he has adopted the easier course of saying that it was all a sham—the devil was only a bogy conjured up by nurses to frighten children and make them good. Christianity was an excellent religion for children and timid old maids; but forMEN, men of the XIXth century, it was a little too much. On reading the fables of the pagans, he found that they had their bogies to frighten their children, as the heathen possesses them still. All the same, all the same, all the way down to the cradle, if there be such, of the race.“Black spirits and white,Red spirits and gray,Mingle, mingle, mingle,You that mingle may.”Such, if put into a coherent shape, would be, we think, Mr. Fiske’s mode of explaining his belief. To him all mystery is myth, and the one true guide is scientific faith.There is no mention of Revelation from beginning to end of the book: the author evidently does not believe in it. But though he is careful not to say so in express words, the meaning of all his deductions is very clear; and passages from the sacred Scriptures are contorted to suit his purpose.Thus, we are told[70]that “the veryidea of an archfiend, Satan, which Christianity received from Judaism, seems to have been suggested by the Persian Ahriman, or at least to have derived its principal characteristics from that source. There is no evidence that the Jews, previous to the Babylonish captivity, possessed the conception of a devil as the author of all evil. In the earlier books of the Old Testament, Jehovah is represented as dispensing with his own hand the good and the evil, like the Zeus of theIliad.”Of course, to a man of Mr. Fiske’s vast knowledge and profound erudition, it would be an impertinence to suggest that, as the name—the mere name, apart from all belief in it—Jehovah is the more ancient of the two, it might have been more in order to invert its position, so that it would run: “The Zeus of theIliad, like the Jehovah of the Old Testament, was the dispenser of good and evil.” But Mr. Fiske studiously sets Jehovah first in place, though second in time, giving one to understand thereby that Zeus was his precursor. This may have been done inadvertently, but, if so, there is a strange method in Mr. Fiske’s carelessness. He is clearly a believer in that“Divinity which doth shape our ends,Rough hew them as we may.”Then, again, Mr. Fiske is correct enough in the passages which he cites as showing that the Jehovah of the Old Testament dispenses “with his own hand the good and the evil.” There is nothing startling in this: it is the soundest Catholic as well as Jewish doctrine. We believe that God does dispense the good and the evil alike; but the “dispensing of the good and the evil” is a very different thing from the phrase which concludes the preceding sentence: “The author ofallevil.” Mr. Fiske plumes himself on his philological knowledge; he is great in word-science, if we may so call it; does he, then, recognize no distinction between “a dispenser” and “an author,” or again, between evil and evil, or still further, between “evil” and “allevil”?“Evil is natural and moral,” says the dictionary. In the first sense, it means what we generally comprehend by the word “misfortune”; as, evil tidings, evil news, evil accident. In this sense, God is said to be the dispenser of evil; that is, of trials which he sets his children, as a father sets his son a hard task, to prepare them, to test them, to educate them, to lift them up to the fulness of manhood, which is in God. “Whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth.” But “moral evil” or what Mr. Fiske calls “all evil,” is a very different thing. It is that which is evil naturally,in seandper se, which is in the will of the devil, and which it is blasphemy to attribute to God. Evil in the first sense may be, is generally, good in itself: the latter, never. It may not be blasphemy in Mr. Fiske, for, as we said, he does not, from insufficient acquaintance with the subject, know the meaning of his own words. But observe how carefully all these words are placed in connection and juxtaposition one with another, and how easily each slides into its wrong place. Again, there is a singular method in Mr. Fiske’s glaring—for a milder term in the face of what we have just pointed out would be impossible—inaccuracies.He goes on: “The story of the serpent in Eden—an Aryan story in every particular, which has crept into the Pentateuch—is not once alluded to in the Old Testament.” To this he adds a note: “Nor is there any ground for believing that the serpent in theEden-mythis intended for Satan?” Though Mr. Fiske is overrunning our space far more than weintended he should do at the beginning, the next sentence is too good to omit, as replete with a piece of criticism unique in its simplicity and loftiness of tone: “The identification (of the serpent in the Eden-myth with Satan) is entirely the work of modern dogmatic theology, and is due, naturally enough, to the habit, so common alike among theologians and laymen, of reasoning about the Bible as if it were a single book (!), and not a collection of writings of different ages and of very different degrees of historic authenticity.”To all his readers the question will naturally suggest itself: Has Mr. Fiske ever been outside the walls of Harvard? But there—we leave the matter: it suggests its own comment; and, moreover, Mr. Fiske promises us, “in a future work entitled (start not, ye publishers!)Aryana Vaedjo, to examine, at considerable length,this interesting mythof the Garden of Eden.” We hope to see it.Well, here we have in plain English the whole story of the fall of man, the origin of good and evil in this world, and the cause of all the consequences which followed therefrom; the whole story of the Creation in fact, as in another place that of the Deluge, set aside quietly and easily, without a word of doubt, or difficulty, or hesitation, as a myth. It would be interesting to know what Mr. Fiske does believe on these points—but his book is to come. We trust he will take the pains to set us right on the subject of the origin of man and of the Creation generally. Of man we should judge him to have as high an opinion as Mr. Darwin, when he explains his present condition as being brought about by “that stupendous process of breeding which we call civilization; which has strengthened the feelings by which we are chiefly distinguished from the brutes, leavingour primitive bestial impulsesto die for want of exercise, or checking in every possible way their further expansion by legislative enactments. (Draw this to its legitimate conclusion, and there is no such thing as morality, it being merely synonymous with law or education.) But this process which is transforming us from savages into civilized men is a very slow one; and now and then there occur cases of what physiologists call atavism, orreversion to an ancestral type of character.... Now and then persons are born possessed of the bestial appetite and cravings of primitive man, his fiendish cruelty, and his liking for human flesh.”This is a Harvard professor who thus explains what people generally accredit to the maxims of the Gospel and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Morality is simply education or force, and evil is inherent in the naturally brutal being, man, who, like Topsy, gradually “growed” up to what he is.It were easy to go on thus multiplying instances of the truth of our observation, that Mr. Fiske reduces Christianity to a myth; but we think there is enough proof already. We pass by many things, therefore, where the author’s display of shallow learning is only equalled by his flimsy remarks. In a note (p. 48), he would have us infer that the Jews believed in a plurality of gods just as did the pagans, because Elohim—God—is plural—a common use of the word even in the English Version, as when God says, “Let us go down and confound their tongue,” etc.; but the Jews certainly never interpreted it as meaning anything else than the one God, whom they adored. It was merely a foreshadowing of the doctrine of the Trinity. In another place, he informs us that S. Ursula isArtemis and Aphrodite, S. Gertrude the heathen Holda. He is evidently unaware that one of the most popular books of Catholic devotion is written by the “heathen Holda.” Stupid inaccuracies of this description are unaccountable. In any other person they would indicate a mind inflated with that dangerous “little learning” which Pope warns us against; in a Harvard “professor of philosophy,” they doubtless take the form of Shakespeare’s sins against grammar and good taste, and go down as “beauties.” “Angels—women with large wings” (sic)—are kinsfolk of the werewolf family, and Christianity has “degradedthe beneficent lightning-god, Thor,” into the “grotesque mediæval devil.” Odin and other glorious divinities undergo a similar hideous transformation under the “degrading” influence of Christianity. In fact, Christianity is but a system of plagiarizing, and plagiarizing which by no means improves on the old pagan superstitions. The devil is really a good-natured sort of being, or was till Christianity came and spoiled his temper and himself generally. Of course such a being never existed except in the brain of superstitious people unendowed with scientific faith, who were racking their brains to find out the meaning of that eternal puzzle, darkness and light, so that they at length came to embody darkness in the form of the devil, and light in the person of God, or Jupiter, or Apollo, or William Tell. That is the plain English of Mr. Fiske’s book.Mr. Fiske seems to think that he has struck a new vein, and opened up to the world a golden ore long hidden. His theory is as old as any other; and he has only given us a poor rehash of what much cleverer men than he have oversurfeited us with ages ago. Before attempting to handle the subjects he has touched upon, it would be advisable to go to school again, and he might thus be saved a lamentable display of childish ignorance on points known to all the world, save apparently to Mr. Fiske. In a very weak review of a most interesting and clever book,Juventus Mundi, written by a scholar and a thinker, neither of which titles we feel justified in applying to Mr. Fiske, this latter gentleman remarks, with astonishment, that Mr. Gladstone draws an analogy between the gods of heathendom and the God of Christianity; in other words, between distorted truth and its first original. This, again, is as old as the hills.Prometheus, for instance, has struck all readers as a wonderful type of the Saviour; and so with other gods and heroes of antiquity. Scholars are pleased to draw likenesses between the characters of the fables of pagan antiquity and those of the sacred Scriptures; such connection is by no means necessary to prove the truth of Christianity and of the doctrines of Revelation. Christianity is here, around us, living, real: we are in it. It is clear, well defined, unchanging, distinct, a solemn and awful fact: deal withit, study it, destroy it, if you can. It has no connection, claims no connection, needs no connection, with paganism. It stands alone, self-sufficient, for God is its centre. It embraces the world; it rules nations; and the better the governments, the nearer they approach to the observance of its codes. History hallows it; scientific discovery only tends to confirm our faith in it. It is superseding all things, as its Founder meant it should; and people have the impudence, for it is nothing else, to come and tell us to-day, in out-of-the-way notes in silly books, that this stupendous fact is a myth! We can only say to them,tolle, lege!It is easy for a man to sit down in his chair, and spin out a theory, connecting the most distant objects together in his own mind. Thus Mr. Fiske drives Tell back to the sun, or Ulysses, or Odysseus, as he prefers to call him, for he takes kindly to what we may be pardoned calling theGrotesqueetymology; and even in this, like all poor imitators, goes beyond his master. Homer tells us Ulysses was a man, a great traveller, who had seen many lands. Oh! no, says Mr. Fiske; Homer made a great mistake; he did not know what he was talking about; Ulysses was meant for the sun. And yet Mr. Fiske tells us that the “minds of primitive men worked like our own, and, when they spoke of the far-darting sun-god, they meant just what they said.” Why should not this reasoning hold good for Ulysses, as well as for Apollo?Why, we might take up the story of Mr. Stanley’s discovery of Livingstone, and concoct a far better myth out of it than Mr. Fiske has out of many of his materials. Livingstone, like Ulysses, is a man who had seen many lands; he is hurried away and lost to the world in a dark and fiery country—a land of demons and impenetrable burning deserts. The world laments his loss, and Stanley, the youthful, the Dawn, goes out to seek him, and, after the usual obstacles, finds him in the dark land, clothed in rags, with a blue cap on his head, adorned with a gold band, a long beard falling gray over his breast, surrounded by the dark children of the desert. When that fabulous New Zealander sits on the ruins of London Bridge, some future Professor Fiske will probably take up this story of to-day, and weave a myth out of it as the present one has done with Ulysses; but Mr. Fiske may remember that the prophet who foretold the New Zealander in his incongruous position only did so to serve as an example of the indestructibility of God’s church.If he must refer everything back to light, why not go a little beyond the sun to theLux Mundi—the light which shineth in the darkness, but which the darkness comprehended not? Light and fire run from the beginning to the end of the New and Old Testaments, as typical of God. The first thing God made was light; he spoke to Moses in a burning bush; his angel accompanied his people in a cloud and a pillar of light. Man cannot look upon his face and live, for the glory of it. Is it possible that Mr. Fiske, who is so keen at connections, could miss such palpable indications of the connection between the traditions he has mentioned and Revelation, without being struck by it, unless he did so intentionally?Had we space, we could show by comparison that the very words he has quoted from Indian and other traditions of the Michabo, the great white One, of the origin of the world and the history of the Deluge, are almost identical in phrase even with the Scriptures. From F. De Smet’s interesting Indian sketches, appearing in theCatholic Review, we find that the Indians adore the Great Medicine, who is, above all, the All-powerful, and sacrifice to him through the sun and the thunder, because the sun is his great servitor.And as for the devil, whom Mr. Fiske finds such an amusing character (happy man! may he never be undeceived!), it may make him laugh at us, but, for our part, we have a very decided belief in his existence and power to do harm; in fact, did we only discern a spice of something stronger and more powerful than Mr. Fiske presents us in his book, just the faintest flavor of the genuine article—realbrimstone and fire—we should have been led to refer its authorship to the very personage whom Mr. Fiske so despises. As it is, the work is unworthy of his Satanic majesty. He inspired the idea which animates it long ago, but the present execution is by too weak a hand for his. In this we find an indication that the idea is used up and gone beyond working order—driven to death, in fact.Superstition undoubtedly did exist in the middle ages; perhaps—for we are not too ready to believe this age so very far superior in many points to those days as is generally conceded; at all events, the world, as the world, is materially even very little better off than it then was, notwithstanding all our boasted science, and the rest, and the days allotted to man are not lengthened—perhaps, then, superstition did flourish at that time to a greater extent than it does to-day; but what does that prove? Simply that Christianity, “that stupendous process of breeding,” did not convert the world in a day.Did superstition prevail to a greater or less degree than it did prior to the introduction of Christianity, before the old Jewish order passed away, and gave place to the new—to the religion which was no longer to be restricted to a single nation, but which was to spread abroad, to become Catholic, and embrace the world, the family of God’s human creatures, within its bosom? Was it, so much of it as did exist, more or less hideous in the supernatural figures with which it peoples the universe? Were the Norse gods of blood and bestiality, Thor, and Odin, and Friga, “degraded”? Could they be degraded? Was Venus degraded, or Jupiter, or Bacchus, or the multitude of others, by being replaced by the truth, by the light which was so long coming and expected of the nations—by the Sun of Justice?It was this bursting of the light of the world upon nations which dispelled for ever the dark mists of superstition that had so long hidden the creation from its Creator; this was the Sun the nations dimly saw and adored; this was the victorious Conqueror who overcame all obstacles by his own sufferings, and death, and sacrifice; who, like Prometheus, “came to cast fire upon the earth,” and who died in agony to save his fellows, and destroy the false Jove with his heaven of immorality—Jesus Christ! at whose name “every knee shall bow.”And the darkness was this very devil, the author of all evil, who fell, freely and consciously, in eternal rebellion against God; who cannot be destroyed, for God created him immortal; who uses the power still left him, which was once heavenly, in order to lead into rebellion all creation against the God he hates with an eternal hatred; who is permitted by God to tempt man, for man is a free agent—God not having endowed a mere machine with the breath of life, the breathing of his spirit—and, if man falls, he falls freely and consciously as did Satan.Here lay the puzzle of darkness and light, good and evil, right and wrong. The world saw itself bounded everywhere by the impassable; by its wickedness it had lost the clear knowledge of its God; it would overleap those barriers, and reach him again. The craving of its heart was eternal; it saw the marks of its God around it: “The heavens declared the glory of God, and the firmament displayed the wonders of his works.” Men felt the supernatural, and worshipped; but their eyes were blinded, and, groping in the darkness for their God, they mistook his enemy, and worshipped him.Paganism was and is the worship of the devil. The evil one allows men to worship him under whatever form they please, provided only they rebel against God. Impurity, bestiality, drunkenness, intellectual pride, all things that lead astray, are for him good; but the law of God is one and unchangeable, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and, therefore, though it is hard to kick against the goad, the free-will of man whispers rebellion to him ever, for he finds God everywhere.What, then, dealt the death-blow to superstition? Was it scientific faith, or the coming of Christ?In order completely to fill a void, you must have something adequate. The world through all the ages had this yearning for a something wanting, this searching after a something lost. It felt the supernatural, the beyond—it felt, but did not see. So each one made him a religion of his own. To fill that eternal void, to make all one, to satisfy the craving of the world, that void must be filled. But what can fill it, save the supernatural? An infinite want can only be filled by infinity. Jesus Christ came in form and with surroundings the very reverse of what those who had waited most anxiously for him expected. Consequently, their pride revolted, and they refused to accept the Messiah. Nevertheless, no sooner was his doctrine made known, than the world outside, the gropers in the darkness, felt the Sun; the scales dropped from their eyes, the void was at length filled, the craving satisfied; they saw their God, and knew him. Then superstition ended, for they found a reason for every mystery in the all-powerful, all-pervading God.Had the world to wait for scientific faith to clear up its doubts and give a reason for its longings and beliefs, superstition would still reign paramount among men. What is scientific faith? What can it do? That science has advanced since the days when men built the pyramids, constructed cities whose ruins are the wonders of to-day, converted the Eastern deserts into gardens, constructed the alphabet, built the Parthenon, devised the geometrical figure, organized the sciences of numbers, philosophy, the heavens, and set up leaning towers, we concede; but the men who performed those wonders can scarcely be set down as “knowing nothing of the laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect.” This age has made an advance on them, it is true; but an advance utterly disproportionate to the centuries which have rolled between; nay, in some things it has retrograded.Did people wait, then, for scientific faith to lift the veil from their eyes, or was it the teachings of Christianity and the appearance of Jesus Christ which lifted it? How much more has scientific faith taught us than it taught the men who centuries ago, by their intimate and accurate knowledge of natural causes, wrought those wonders touched upon above? The supernatural still confronts us as it did them. Science ends with the scientist. Can it tell him who he is, or why he is? Can it touch the lightning, weigh the sun, reveal the mystery of life and death? It can tell us we live and we die; that, when such or such a circumstance occurs, what we call life is over. But can it tell us what is life, whence it came, whither it goes? what the world is, who made it, why it was made? what the seed is, why it grows up into a tree, why the leaves sprout from the hard wood, who set all this principle of life going, and why? Here lies the mystery that puzzled men; here science stops, and God reveals himself: it isawed into silence, and listens for his voice.On reading this article once more, the thought has occurred to the writer that objection may be taken to its tone as not exactly in accordance with that myth of myths which goes by the name of “amenities of literature.” Catholics very rarely come across this pleasing illusion in the columns of adverse writers. But even should this charge be well grounded, it is idle for Catholics to wrap what they have to say in wadding, lest it fall too roughly on the delicate sensibilities of people who undertake to insult a religion of which they know nothing. Mr. Fiske is only a type of a class to whom is entrusted the sacred mission of educating the youth of this country, those particularly whose means admit of the highest education, and from whom, therefore, much should be expected. Men wonder at the immorality of our youth—the young man of society of to-day. Why wonder, when his professors teach him that morality is a name, Christianity a fable, and all religion a sham? We cannot affect to toy when the stakes played for are so high. The morality of the coming race depends on the education it receives. When, therefore, we find men, set in high places in our foremost universities, abusing their position, and striving by every means in their power to sap and undermine Christian education, we think studious phrases idle and polished courtesy thrown away. Insult and evil must be met with other weapons. If Mr. Fiske wishes to know whether Christianity is a myth or not, let him sit down and study before pronouncing. When he has sought and inquired earnestly, he will find plenty to furnish him with the right answer.
This bald, unjointed chat of his, my lord, I answered indirectly—Shakespeare, Henry IV.
Authorsare proverbially not the best judges of their own works. It is as rare, therefore, as it is gratifying to meet with one whose verdict on his own production exactly coincides with that of the critic. Such a fortunate concurrence of opinion between the writer and the person to whose lot it has fallen to pass sentence on a work for a certain portion of the public, relieves the latter gentleman of a vast amount of responsibility, and renders his difficult task infinitely lighter and more pleasant than such a task generally proves to be.
When, then, Mr. Fiske, the author ofMyths and Myth-Makers, is kind enough gratuitously to inform us in his preface that the “series of papers” of which his book is composed is “somewhat rambling and unsystematic,” it can be considered no injustice to him, and no presumption on our part, to say that we cordially agree with him. And when he further informs us that, “in order to avoid confusing the reader with intricate discussions, he has sometimes cut the matter short by expressing himself with dogmatic definiteness where a sceptical vagueness might perhaps have been more becoming,” we find nothing whatever to object to in this statement, with the solitary exception of the word “perhaps,” which, if suppressed, would bring it nearer the exact truth.
However, Mr. Fiske has here furnished us with a very fair idea, of what the reader is to expect from hisMyths. He himself has passed sentence on himself. He tells us practically that we must not expect too much from his “rambling” papers; he forestalls, if he does not deprecate, criticism by assuring us at the outstart that his fault has not been on the side of modesty of opinion and judicial weighing of what he set forth. What, then, is left for the critic to do but to confirm the self-condemnation of the author?
But we cannot allow Mr. Fiske to escape us in this fashion. Mr. Fiske is an M.A., and Mr. Fiske is an LL.B., and a professor, and a professor of philosophy—at Harvard, too. So that, although the dates so carefully affixed to the end of each of his “rambling and unsystematic” papers indicate that Mr. Fiske knocked this book off in three months, still three months of philosophic chaff from a Harvard professor ought surely to contain some grains of wheat.
The book in itself is not an uninteresting one. It is chock-full of mythical stories, or folk-lore, or whatever people may please to call what in our younger days we should have comprised under the one delicious head of fairy-tales. To be sure, the stories were all told before and by somebody else; but then, Mr. Fiske gives everybody due credit, and confines his own portion of the work to a running commentary with an undercurrent of foot-notes, and all sorts of quotations, from the Rig-Veda down to Jack and Jill. We cannot in justice say that Mr. Fiske’s portion is as interestingas the myths themselves, though partaking considerably of their character.
But to come to the point—what does Mr. Fiske mean by his book? What idea would he convey to us? What would he have us infer from it? “A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t.”
If it is suggestive of anything at all, it is this: all or the chief portion of the great myths of antiquity refer to the struggle between darkness and light. It was the phenomenon of night and day which puzzled people in the dawn of the world, ages before men possessed the great blessing of this XIXth century, which blessing is, according to Mr. Fiske,viaM. Littré, “scientific faith,” seemingly the only sure thing in this enlightened age.
Some people might require a definition of this wonderful faith of modern invention; but then, some people always will ask disagreeable questions. For their benefit, it may be said to mean taking nothing for fact or truth except what you can arrive at, or prove, or demonstrate by a scientific process: in plain English, no faith at all.
Mr. Fiske then takes up this theory: that all men, being puzzled by this daily phenomenon of light and darkness, day and night, and having no “scientific faith” to guide them, and nothing better (Mr. Fiske will pardon us this little bit of heresy against the XIXth century) to supply its place, set to thinking and endeavoring to solve this tremendous problem. They were all a dreadful sort of people all the world over: they “knew nothing about laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect, nothing about the necessary regularity of things.” As a set-off against all these “nothings,” they possessed a something in the shape of “an unlimited capacity for believing and fancying, because fancy and belief had not yet been checked and headed off in various directions by established rules of experience.” To all of which, and a great deal more of the same nature, we feel very much inclined to append that awkwardQ. E. D.of the geometry which somebody would tag on to the end of those beautiful propositions at school, and which our professor terrified us by translating, “Which must be proved.”
Mr. Fiske, then, having set this profound and eternal conundrum before the crazed intellects of the human race, which were gifted, according to him, with nothing but this “unlimited capacity for believing and fancying”—one would imagine that there might have been room for Revelation here; but Revelation, of course, clashes with “scientific faith,” and is therefore a myth in Mr. Fiske’s eyes—what were the poor beings to do but endow everything, particularly the sun, with the “volition” which they felt within themselves? How or why thismusthave been so Mr. Fiske fails to explain, or indeed that it was so at all. However, just for argument’s sake, let us take his word for it, though by so doing we are false to scientific faith. Mr. Fiske’s proposition, then, runs thus: Given the sun, and given the people with eyes to gaze at the sun, the people must necessarily have endowed the sun with “volition,” and worshipped the sun as a god. Once more,Q. E. D.
Hence Mr. Fiske proceeds to argue: “The conception of infallible skill in archery, which underlies such a great variety of myths and popular fairy-tales, is originally derived from the inevitable victory of the sun over his enemies, the demons of night,winter, and tempest. Arrows and spears which never miss their mark, swords from whose blow no armor can protect, are invariably the weapons of solar divinities or heroes.” Consequently, Mr. Fiske is cruel enough to knock on the head a considerable number of fictitious characters who were much better known and loved by us years ago than many real characters to-day. He levels his shaft tipped with scientific faith, whiz!—and down drop William Tell, William of Cloudeslee, Beth-Gellert, Jack and the Beanstalk, Roland, Sir Bedivere, Ulysses, Achilles, Balder the Beautiful, Hercules, and a whole host of other famous heroes—or rather they mount, for one and all represented the sun, and were types and figures of his solar majesty.
Well, though we grieve to say it, it may be so; but the consolation is still left us that, even if it be so, “it’s of no consequence,” as our old friend Mr. Toots was wont sagaciously to remark. There is so much of reality around us, and so much real sham, to speak a paradox, to wing with our arrows, to shoot at all our lifelong and make no visible impression on, that we have neither time, nor inclination, nor patience to bother our brains with wire-drawn theories as to whether Tell was Tell or the sun; whether a man ever performed the impossible feat of piercing an apple, which happened to be on his boy’s head, with a shaft or not, or whether a dog was killed by its master in mistake. Such things may serve to amuse children or people who can find nothing better to occupy their time. So far there is nothing to object to in it. But when a man takes every imaginable story, collects them all as he would old fossils, and tickets each off with a bad explanation, or throws them together into a bag, as it were, and, charlatan-like, shakes them all up in order to see if by any chance they might tumble out in a shape antagonistic to Christianity, a work which, in view of the many realities around us, is rubbish at the best, becomes in Mr. Fiske’s hands rubbish at the worst.
For he does not hold to his tether; he will go out of his way to drag religion into a place where, if it must enter, it shows itself, as always, full of majesty, and beauty, and sublime truth, but not a thing of ridicule, as this writer, by hint, and innuendo, and insinuating little foot-note, and sly little chuckle, and weak little laugh, and wit of the very smallest, would make it.
“The religious myths of antiquity, and the fireside legends of ancient and modern times, have their common roots in the mental habits of primeval humanity. They are the earliest recorded utterances of men concerning the visible phenomena of the world into which they were born.”
Now, there is nothing particularly startling in this passage; it is just such an one as the reader might or might not assent to, being really utterly careless on the subject. He would scarcely stop to inquire how far Mr. Fiske’s “religious myths of antiquity” extended. There is a seemingly unconscious vagueness about the phrase that allows it to pass without question. And Mr. Fiske’s theories, if we may dignify them by such a title, run on smoothly enough in killing Beth-Gellert for the thousandth time, and bringing his powerful mind and the infallible test of his “scientific faith” to bear on old nursery jingles—such, for instance, as:
“Jack and Jill went up the hillTo get a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,And Jill came tumbling after.”
“This may read like mere nonsense,” says Mr. Fiske. Again we agree with him it may; but the rising smile fades on the lip when met by the solemn assurance immediately following: “But there is a point of view from which it may be safely said that there is very little absolute nonsense in the world.”
We grieve to say that the thought which struck us immediately on reading this aphorism of Mr. Fiske’s was that, if one thing more than another could tend to make us dubious as to its truth, it would be the perusal of his own book. Butrevenons: “The story is a venerable one,” he proceedsin re“Jack and Jill.” “They—the children—fall away from one another as the moon wanes, and their water-pail symbolizes the supposed connection of the moon with rainstorms.”
Leaving our readers to ponder over this profound mystery so solemnly set forth by the author, dazzled and bewildered, doubtless, by this latest exhibition of moonshine, we pass from it to other things. It is of a piece with all the author’s deductions, and as fair a sample as any other of the ingenuity of his argument and the profundity of his conclusions. We do not attempt to refute them; that task is above us; we leave such questions to be argued out in their more fitting sphere, where the characters in the story are best known and believed in—the nursery.
To all this sort of thing we do not object; it is very harmless, and though scarcely the style of study and method of deduction one might expect from a professor of philosophy at what is esteemed the leading university in the United States, we can only arrive, however regretfully, at the conclusion that we had perhaps made a false estimate of the intellectual standing of that university, and of the calibre, mental and moral, of its professors. Still, Mr. Fiske may argue all his lifelong in this fashion, and we can only wish him better employment. But unfortunately he does not stop here.
All the unravelling of these worthless myths has one aim and tendency: the connecting with them true religion, Judaism first, and afterwards Christianity, the belief in Christ, the Christian sacraments, Christian observances, Christian practices; not as the one truth of which all these myths formed so many broken and distorted fragments, but—hear it, Christian fathers who send your sons to Harvard to learn wisdom and truth from such men as the one under our notice—a myth with the rest of them!
Ulysses, Achilles, Ormutz, Thor, Tell, William of Cloudeslee, the sun, Jesus Christ—“These be thy gods, O Israel!”
A mad world, my masters! We are all wrong; living in a myth, worshipping a myth, teaching a myth, our social and political state to-day built upon a myth. “We may learn anew the lesson, taught with fresh emphasis by modern scholarship, that in the deepest sense there is nothing new under the sun.” So says Mr. Fiske. There is nothing sure but scientific faith as expounded by M. Littré and—Mr. Fiske. All the rest is myth.
It would be no surprise to us if Mr. Fiske were indignantly to reject the construction which the Catholic, or the Christian reader of whatever denomination, who possesses any knowledge of Christianity, must put upon his words. Apparently he himself is not sufficiently acquainted with Christianity to understand the meaning of those words; and yet he is a “professor of philosophy” at a presumably Christian university. He is, to judge him by this book, of that school of would-be atheists so fashionable tod-ay,who talk mild infidelity over their tea, and take it down with their muffins—a toast-and-water infidelity, nice to take hob-and-nob with and to the admiration of some antiquated Blue-Stocking. Mr. Fiske, like his class, might be considered an atheist did he only possess the faintest conception of what Christianity meant. An atheist is not a man who does not, but whowillnot, know God—a rebellious spirit who, like the fallen archangel who has seduced him, rejects God, flings back his offering, and cries out: “I will not serve!”
Such is atheism—negation, not unconsciousness; denial, not lack of knowledge. Mr. Fiske’s toast-and-water stuff partakes of the latter character. It is so very weak, so very thin, so supremely unconscious of its feebleness, so full of self-sufficiency, so sublimely ignorant of the fact that the poor little hobby-horse which it rides astride of, and on which it pranks out, with “all the pomp and circumstance” of mimic warfare, to have a tilt with the church, has been long ago ridden to death by far doughtier champions than Mr. Fiske, but with a like result—a tumble in the dust. Like the carpet-knight, who, “but for those vile guns, might himself have been a soldier,” but for the vile faith, these carpet-atheists might themselves have become Christian. Did we not recollect that they possess immortal souls destined for one of two eternities, we might almost congratulate ourselves on their defection.
But not to lay so very serious a charge at Mr. Fiske’s door without just grounds, we proceed to give a few instances of that gentleman’s mythical contortions, which will sufficiently vindicate the severe strictures we feel compelled to pass upon his book—a book, indeed, which should have passed unnoticed, only that it is typical of the tone and tendency of the class of writers remarked upon above.
Mr. Fiske would seem to have received some sort of a Christian education, if we may so call it, in his youth; for he tells us “of that burning Calvinistic hell with which his childish imagination had been unwisely terrified.” Calvinism probably drove him into revolt against Christianity, as it has driven so many others, and, instead of returning, and examining, and searching for truth, he has adopted the easier course of saying that it was all a sham—the devil was only a bogy conjured up by nurses to frighten children and make them good. Christianity was an excellent religion for children and timid old maids; but forMEN, men of the XIXth century, it was a little too much. On reading the fables of the pagans, he found that they had their bogies to frighten their children, as the heathen possesses them still. All the same, all the same, all the way down to the cradle, if there be such, of the race.
“Black spirits and white,Red spirits and gray,
Mingle, mingle, mingle,You that mingle may.”
Such, if put into a coherent shape, would be, we think, Mr. Fiske’s mode of explaining his belief. To him all mystery is myth, and the one true guide is scientific faith.
There is no mention of Revelation from beginning to end of the book: the author evidently does not believe in it. But though he is careful not to say so in express words, the meaning of all his deductions is very clear; and passages from the sacred Scriptures are contorted to suit his purpose.
Thus, we are told[70]that “the veryidea of an archfiend, Satan, which Christianity received from Judaism, seems to have been suggested by the Persian Ahriman, or at least to have derived its principal characteristics from that source. There is no evidence that the Jews, previous to the Babylonish captivity, possessed the conception of a devil as the author of all evil. In the earlier books of the Old Testament, Jehovah is represented as dispensing with his own hand the good and the evil, like the Zeus of theIliad.”
Of course, to a man of Mr. Fiske’s vast knowledge and profound erudition, it would be an impertinence to suggest that, as the name—the mere name, apart from all belief in it—Jehovah is the more ancient of the two, it might have been more in order to invert its position, so that it would run: “The Zeus of theIliad, like the Jehovah of the Old Testament, was the dispenser of good and evil.” But Mr. Fiske studiously sets Jehovah first in place, though second in time, giving one to understand thereby that Zeus was his precursor. This may have been done inadvertently, but, if so, there is a strange method in Mr. Fiske’s carelessness. He is clearly a believer in that
“Divinity which doth shape our ends,Rough hew them as we may.”
Then, again, Mr. Fiske is correct enough in the passages which he cites as showing that the Jehovah of the Old Testament dispenses “with his own hand the good and the evil.” There is nothing startling in this: it is the soundest Catholic as well as Jewish doctrine. We believe that God does dispense the good and the evil alike; but the “dispensing of the good and the evil” is a very different thing from the phrase which concludes the preceding sentence: “The author ofallevil.” Mr. Fiske plumes himself on his philological knowledge; he is great in word-science, if we may so call it; does he, then, recognize no distinction between “a dispenser” and “an author,” or again, between evil and evil, or still further, between “evil” and “allevil”?
“Evil is natural and moral,” says the dictionary. In the first sense, it means what we generally comprehend by the word “misfortune”; as, evil tidings, evil news, evil accident. In this sense, God is said to be the dispenser of evil; that is, of trials which he sets his children, as a father sets his son a hard task, to prepare them, to test them, to educate them, to lift them up to the fulness of manhood, which is in God. “Whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth.” But “moral evil” or what Mr. Fiske calls “all evil,” is a very different thing. It is that which is evil naturally,in seandper se, which is in the will of the devil, and which it is blasphemy to attribute to God. Evil in the first sense may be, is generally, good in itself: the latter, never. It may not be blasphemy in Mr. Fiske, for, as we said, he does not, from insufficient acquaintance with the subject, know the meaning of his own words. But observe how carefully all these words are placed in connection and juxtaposition one with another, and how easily each slides into its wrong place. Again, there is a singular method in Mr. Fiske’s glaring—for a milder term in the face of what we have just pointed out would be impossible—inaccuracies.
He goes on: “The story of the serpent in Eden—an Aryan story in every particular, which has crept into the Pentateuch—is not once alluded to in the Old Testament.” To this he adds a note: “Nor is there any ground for believing that the serpent in theEden-mythis intended for Satan?” Though Mr. Fiske is overrunning our space far more than weintended he should do at the beginning, the next sentence is too good to omit, as replete with a piece of criticism unique in its simplicity and loftiness of tone: “The identification (of the serpent in the Eden-myth with Satan) is entirely the work of modern dogmatic theology, and is due, naturally enough, to the habit, so common alike among theologians and laymen, of reasoning about the Bible as if it were a single book (!), and not a collection of writings of different ages and of very different degrees of historic authenticity.”
To all his readers the question will naturally suggest itself: Has Mr. Fiske ever been outside the walls of Harvard? But there—we leave the matter: it suggests its own comment; and, moreover, Mr. Fiske promises us, “in a future work entitled (start not, ye publishers!)Aryana Vaedjo, to examine, at considerable length,this interesting mythof the Garden of Eden.” We hope to see it.
Well, here we have in plain English the whole story of the fall of man, the origin of good and evil in this world, and the cause of all the consequences which followed therefrom; the whole story of the Creation in fact, as in another place that of the Deluge, set aside quietly and easily, without a word of doubt, or difficulty, or hesitation, as a myth. It would be interesting to know what Mr. Fiske does believe on these points—but his book is to come. We trust he will take the pains to set us right on the subject of the origin of man and of the Creation generally. Of man we should judge him to have as high an opinion as Mr. Darwin, when he explains his present condition as being brought about by “that stupendous process of breeding which we call civilization; which has strengthened the feelings by which we are chiefly distinguished from the brutes, leavingour primitive bestial impulsesto die for want of exercise, or checking in every possible way their further expansion by legislative enactments. (Draw this to its legitimate conclusion, and there is no such thing as morality, it being merely synonymous with law or education.) But this process which is transforming us from savages into civilized men is a very slow one; and now and then there occur cases of what physiologists call atavism, orreversion to an ancestral type of character.... Now and then persons are born possessed of the bestial appetite and cravings of primitive man, his fiendish cruelty, and his liking for human flesh.”
This is a Harvard professor who thus explains what people generally accredit to the maxims of the Gospel and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Morality is simply education or force, and evil is inherent in the naturally brutal being, man, who, like Topsy, gradually “growed” up to what he is.
It were easy to go on thus multiplying instances of the truth of our observation, that Mr. Fiske reduces Christianity to a myth; but we think there is enough proof already. We pass by many things, therefore, where the author’s display of shallow learning is only equalled by his flimsy remarks. In a note (p. 48), he would have us infer that the Jews believed in a plurality of gods just as did the pagans, because Elohim—God—is plural—a common use of the word even in the English Version, as when God says, “Let us go down and confound their tongue,” etc.; but the Jews certainly never interpreted it as meaning anything else than the one God, whom they adored. It was merely a foreshadowing of the doctrine of the Trinity. In another place, he informs us that S. Ursula isArtemis and Aphrodite, S. Gertrude the heathen Holda. He is evidently unaware that one of the most popular books of Catholic devotion is written by the “heathen Holda.” Stupid inaccuracies of this description are unaccountable. In any other person they would indicate a mind inflated with that dangerous “little learning” which Pope warns us against; in a Harvard “professor of philosophy,” they doubtless take the form of Shakespeare’s sins against grammar and good taste, and go down as “beauties.” “Angels—women with large wings” (sic)—are kinsfolk of the werewolf family, and Christianity has “degradedthe beneficent lightning-god, Thor,” into the “grotesque mediæval devil.” Odin and other glorious divinities undergo a similar hideous transformation under the “degrading” influence of Christianity. In fact, Christianity is but a system of plagiarizing, and plagiarizing which by no means improves on the old pagan superstitions. The devil is really a good-natured sort of being, or was till Christianity came and spoiled his temper and himself generally. Of course such a being never existed except in the brain of superstitious people unendowed with scientific faith, who were racking their brains to find out the meaning of that eternal puzzle, darkness and light, so that they at length came to embody darkness in the form of the devil, and light in the person of God, or Jupiter, or Apollo, or William Tell. That is the plain English of Mr. Fiske’s book.
Mr. Fiske seems to think that he has struck a new vein, and opened up to the world a golden ore long hidden. His theory is as old as any other; and he has only given us a poor rehash of what much cleverer men than he have oversurfeited us with ages ago. Before attempting to handle the subjects he has touched upon, it would be advisable to go to school again, and he might thus be saved a lamentable display of childish ignorance on points known to all the world, save apparently to Mr. Fiske. In a very weak review of a most interesting and clever book,Juventus Mundi, written by a scholar and a thinker, neither of which titles we feel justified in applying to Mr. Fiske, this latter gentleman remarks, with astonishment, that Mr. Gladstone draws an analogy between the gods of heathendom and the God of Christianity; in other words, between distorted truth and its first original. This, again, is as old as the hills.Prometheus, for instance, has struck all readers as a wonderful type of the Saviour; and so with other gods and heroes of antiquity. Scholars are pleased to draw likenesses between the characters of the fables of pagan antiquity and those of the sacred Scriptures; such connection is by no means necessary to prove the truth of Christianity and of the doctrines of Revelation. Christianity is here, around us, living, real: we are in it. It is clear, well defined, unchanging, distinct, a solemn and awful fact: deal withit, study it, destroy it, if you can. It has no connection, claims no connection, needs no connection, with paganism. It stands alone, self-sufficient, for God is its centre. It embraces the world; it rules nations; and the better the governments, the nearer they approach to the observance of its codes. History hallows it; scientific discovery only tends to confirm our faith in it. It is superseding all things, as its Founder meant it should; and people have the impudence, for it is nothing else, to come and tell us to-day, in out-of-the-way notes in silly books, that this stupendous fact is a myth! We can only say to them,tolle, lege!
It is easy for a man to sit down in his chair, and spin out a theory, connecting the most distant objects together in his own mind. Thus Mr. Fiske drives Tell back to the sun, or Ulysses, or Odysseus, as he prefers to call him, for he takes kindly to what we may be pardoned calling theGrotesqueetymology; and even in this, like all poor imitators, goes beyond his master. Homer tells us Ulysses was a man, a great traveller, who had seen many lands. Oh! no, says Mr. Fiske; Homer made a great mistake; he did not know what he was talking about; Ulysses was meant for the sun. And yet Mr. Fiske tells us that the “minds of primitive men worked like our own, and, when they spoke of the far-darting sun-god, they meant just what they said.” Why should not this reasoning hold good for Ulysses, as well as for Apollo?
Why, we might take up the story of Mr. Stanley’s discovery of Livingstone, and concoct a far better myth out of it than Mr. Fiske has out of many of his materials. Livingstone, like Ulysses, is a man who had seen many lands; he is hurried away and lost to the world in a dark and fiery country—a land of demons and impenetrable burning deserts. The world laments his loss, and Stanley, the youthful, the Dawn, goes out to seek him, and, after the usual obstacles, finds him in the dark land, clothed in rags, with a blue cap on his head, adorned with a gold band, a long beard falling gray over his breast, surrounded by the dark children of the desert. When that fabulous New Zealander sits on the ruins of London Bridge, some future Professor Fiske will probably take up this story of to-day, and weave a myth out of it as the present one has done with Ulysses; but Mr. Fiske may remember that the prophet who foretold the New Zealander in his incongruous position only did so to serve as an example of the indestructibility of God’s church.
If he must refer everything back to light, why not go a little beyond the sun to theLux Mundi—the light which shineth in the darkness, but which the darkness comprehended not? Light and fire run from the beginning to the end of the New and Old Testaments, as typical of God. The first thing God made was light; he spoke to Moses in a burning bush; his angel accompanied his people in a cloud and a pillar of light. Man cannot look upon his face and live, for the glory of it. Is it possible that Mr. Fiske, who is so keen at connections, could miss such palpable indications of the connection between the traditions he has mentioned and Revelation, without being struck by it, unless he did so intentionally?
Had we space, we could show by comparison that the very words he has quoted from Indian and other traditions of the Michabo, the great white One, of the origin of the world and the history of the Deluge, are almost identical in phrase even with the Scriptures. From F. De Smet’s interesting Indian sketches, appearing in theCatholic Review, we find that the Indians adore the Great Medicine, who is, above all, the All-powerful, and sacrifice to him through the sun and the thunder, because the sun is his great servitor.
And as for the devil, whom Mr. Fiske finds such an amusing character (happy man! may he never be undeceived!), it may make him laugh at us, but, for our part, we have a very decided belief in his existence and power to do harm; in fact, did we only discern a spice of something stronger and more powerful than Mr. Fiske presents us in his book, just the faintest flavor of the genuine article—realbrimstone and fire—we should have been led to refer its authorship to the very personage whom Mr. Fiske so despises. As it is, the work is unworthy of his Satanic majesty. He inspired the idea which animates it long ago, but the present execution is by too weak a hand for his. In this we find an indication that the idea is used up and gone beyond working order—driven to death, in fact.
Superstition undoubtedly did exist in the middle ages; perhaps—for we are not too ready to believe this age so very far superior in many points to those days as is generally conceded; at all events, the world, as the world, is materially even very little better off than it then was, notwithstanding all our boasted science, and the rest, and the days allotted to man are not lengthened—perhaps, then, superstition did flourish at that time to a greater extent than it does to-day; but what does that prove? Simply that Christianity, “that stupendous process of breeding,” did not convert the world in a day.
Did superstition prevail to a greater or less degree than it did prior to the introduction of Christianity, before the old Jewish order passed away, and gave place to the new—to the religion which was no longer to be restricted to a single nation, but which was to spread abroad, to become Catholic, and embrace the world, the family of God’s human creatures, within its bosom? Was it, so much of it as did exist, more or less hideous in the supernatural figures with which it peoples the universe? Were the Norse gods of blood and bestiality, Thor, and Odin, and Friga, “degraded”? Could they be degraded? Was Venus degraded, or Jupiter, or Bacchus, or the multitude of others, by being replaced by the truth, by the light which was so long coming and expected of the nations—by the Sun of Justice?
It was this bursting of the light of the world upon nations which dispelled for ever the dark mists of superstition that had so long hidden the creation from its Creator; this was the Sun the nations dimly saw and adored; this was the victorious Conqueror who overcame all obstacles by his own sufferings, and death, and sacrifice; who, like Prometheus, “came to cast fire upon the earth,” and who died in agony to save his fellows, and destroy the false Jove with his heaven of immorality—Jesus Christ! at whose name “every knee shall bow.”
And the darkness was this very devil, the author of all evil, who fell, freely and consciously, in eternal rebellion against God; who cannot be destroyed, for God created him immortal; who uses the power still left him, which was once heavenly, in order to lead into rebellion all creation against the God he hates with an eternal hatred; who is permitted by God to tempt man, for man is a free agent—God not having endowed a mere machine with the breath of life, the breathing of his spirit—and, if man falls, he falls freely and consciously as did Satan.
Here lay the puzzle of darkness and light, good and evil, right and wrong. The world saw itself bounded everywhere by the impassable; by its wickedness it had lost the clear knowledge of its God; it would overleap those barriers, and reach him again. The craving of its heart was eternal; it saw the marks of its God around it: “The heavens declared the glory of God, and the firmament displayed the wonders of his works.” Men felt the supernatural, and worshipped; but their eyes were blinded, and, groping in the darkness for their God, they mistook his enemy, and worshipped him.
Paganism was and is the worship of the devil. The evil one allows men to worship him under whatever form they please, provided only they rebel against God. Impurity, bestiality, drunkenness, intellectual pride, all things that lead astray, are for him good; but the law of God is one and unchangeable, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and, therefore, though it is hard to kick against the goad, the free-will of man whispers rebellion to him ever, for he finds God everywhere.
What, then, dealt the death-blow to superstition? Was it scientific faith, or the coming of Christ?
In order completely to fill a void, you must have something adequate. The world through all the ages had this yearning for a something wanting, this searching after a something lost. It felt the supernatural, the beyond—it felt, but did not see. So each one made him a religion of his own. To fill that eternal void, to make all one, to satisfy the craving of the world, that void must be filled. But what can fill it, save the supernatural? An infinite want can only be filled by infinity. Jesus Christ came in form and with surroundings the very reverse of what those who had waited most anxiously for him expected. Consequently, their pride revolted, and they refused to accept the Messiah. Nevertheless, no sooner was his doctrine made known, than the world outside, the gropers in the darkness, felt the Sun; the scales dropped from their eyes, the void was at length filled, the craving satisfied; they saw their God, and knew him. Then superstition ended, for they found a reason for every mystery in the all-powerful, all-pervading God.
Had the world to wait for scientific faith to clear up its doubts and give a reason for its longings and beliefs, superstition would still reign paramount among men. What is scientific faith? What can it do? That science has advanced since the days when men built the pyramids, constructed cities whose ruins are the wonders of to-day, converted the Eastern deserts into gardens, constructed the alphabet, built the Parthenon, devised the geometrical figure, organized the sciences of numbers, philosophy, the heavens, and set up leaning towers, we concede; but the men who performed those wonders can scarcely be set down as “knowing nothing of the laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect.” This age has made an advance on them, it is true; but an advance utterly disproportionate to the centuries which have rolled between; nay, in some things it has retrograded.
Did people wait, then, for scientific faith to lift the veil from their eyes, or was it the teachings of Christianity and the appearance of Jesus Christ which lifted it? How much more has scientific faith taught us than it taught the men who centuries ago, by their intimate and accurate knowledge of natural causes, wrought those wonders touched upon above? The supernatural still confronts us as it did them. Science ends with the scientist. Can it tell him who he is, or why he is? Can it touch the lightning, weigh the sun, reveal the mystery of life and death? It can tell us we live and we die; that, when such or such a circumstance occurs, what we call life is over. But can it tell us what is life, whence it came, whither it goes? what the world is, who made it, why it was made? what the seed is, why it grows up into a tree, why the leaves sprout from the hard wood, who set all this principle of life going, and why? Here lies the mystery that puzzled men; here science stops, and God reveals himself: it isawed into silence, and listens for his voice.
On reading this article once more, the thought has occurred to the writer that objection may be taken to its tone as not exactly in accordance with that myth of myths which goes by the name of “amenities of literature.” Catholics very rarely come across this pleasing illusion in the columns of adverse writers. But even should this charge be well grounded, it is idle for Catholics to wrap what they have to say in wadding, lest it fall too roughly on the delicate sensibilities of people who undertake to insult a religion of which they know nothing. Mr. Fiske is only a type of a class to whom is entrusted the sacred mission of educating the youth of this country, those particularly whose means admit of the highest education, and from whom, therefore, much should be expected. Men wonder at the immorality of our youth—the young man of society of to-day. Why wonder, when his professors teach him that morality is a name, Christianity a fable, and all religion a sham? We cannot affect to toy when the stakes played for are so high. The morality of the coming race depends on the education it receives. When, therefore, we find men, set in high places in our foremost universities, abusing their position, and striving by every means in their power to sap and undermine Christian education, we think studious phrases idle and polished courtesy thrown away. Insult and evil must be met with other weapons. If Mr. Fiske wishes to know whether Christianity is a myth or not, let him sit down and study before pronouncing. When he has sought and inquired earnestly, he will find plenty to furnish him with the right answer.