"Look forward--not backward; Look up--not down; Look around;
Lend a hand."*
--Edward Everett Hale, D. D.
Where a monarchy is master, inquiry is apt to be a disturbing element;
and though exercised in the interest of the commonwealth it is none the
less resented. Where the priest is master inquiry is sharply prohibited.
The priest represents a spiritual monarchy in which the tenets of belief
are fixed, assumed to be infallible, and to be prescribed by deity. Thus
the priest regards inquiry as proceeding from an impertinent distrust,
to which he is not reconciled on being assured that it is undertaken in
the interest of truth. Thus the king denounces inquiry as sedition, and
the priest as sin. In the end the inquirer finds himself an alien in
State and Church, and laws are made against his life, his liberty,
property, and veracity.**
* Dr. Hale did not popularise these energetic maxims of
earnestness in the connexion in which they are here used;
but their wisdom is of general application.
**When martyrdoms and imprisonments ceased, disabling laws
remained which imposed the Christian oath on all who
appealed to the courts, and any who had the pride of
veracity and declined to to swear, were denied protection
for property, or credence of their word.
Thus from the time when monarch and priest first set up their
pretensions in the world, the inquiring mind has had small
encouragement. When Protestantism came it merely conceded inquiry _under
direction_, and only so far as it tended to confirm its own anti-papal
tenets. But when inquiry claimed to be independent, unfettered,
uncontrolled,--in fact to be _free_ inquiry,--then Papist, Lutheran, and
Dissenter, alike regarded it as dangerous, and stigmatised it by every
term calculated to deter or dissuade people from it.
But though this combined defamation of inquiry set many against it, it
did not intimidate men entirely. There arose independent thinkers who
held that unfettered investigation was the discoverer of truth and
dangerous to error only, and that the freer it was the more effective it
must be.
Still timorous-minded persons remained suspicious of _free_ thought.
At its best they found it involved conflict with false opinion, and
conflict, to those without aspiration or conscience, is disquieting; and
where impartial investigation interfered with personal interests it was
opposed. No one could enter on the search for truth without finding his
path obstructed by theological errors and interdictions. Having taken
the side of truth, all who were loyal to it, were bound like Bunyan's
Pilgrim to withstand the Apollyons who opposed it, and a combat began
which lasted for centuries, and is not yet ended. But though theology
was always in power, men of courage at length established the right of
free inquiry, and established also a free press for the publication of
the results arrived at. These rights were so indispensable for progress
and were so long resisted, that generations fought for them as ends in
themselves. Thus there grew up, as in military affairs, a class whose
profession was destruction, and free thinkers came to be regarded as
negationists. When I came into the field the combat was raging. Richard
Carlile had not long been liberated from successive imprisonments of
more than nine years duration in all. Charles Southwell was in Bristol
gaol. Before his sentence had half expired I was in Gloucester gaol.
George Adams was there; Mrs. Harriet Adams was committed for trial from
Cheltenham. Matilda Roalfe, Thomas Finlay, Thomas Paterson, and others
were incarcerated in Scotland. Robert Buchanan and Lloyd Jones, two
social missionaries--colleagues of my own--only escaped imprisonment by
swearing they believed what they did not believe,--an act I refused to
imitate, and no mean inconvenience has resulted to me from it. I took
part in the vindication of the free publicity of opinion until it was
practically conceded. At the time when I was arrested in 1842, the
Cheltenham magistrates who were angered at defiant remarks I made, had
the power (and used it) of committing me to the Quarter Sessions as a
"felon," where the same justices could resent, by penalties, what I had
said to them. On representations I made to Parliament--through my friend
John Arthur Roebuck and others--Sir James Graham caused a Bill to be
passed which removed trials for opinion to the Assizes. I was the first
person tried under this act. Thus for the first time heresy was ensured
a dispassionate trial and was no longer subject to the jurisdiction of
local prejudice and personal magisterial resentment.
When overt acts of outrage were no longer possible against the adherents
of free thought, Christians, some from fairness, and others from
necessity, began to reason with them and asked: "Now you have
established your claim to be heard. What have you to say?" The reply
I proposed was: "Secularism--a form of opinion relating to the duty of
this life which substituted the piety of useful men for the usefulness
of piety."