Of man, scorn'd by the world, his name unheard,
Save by the rabble of his native town,
Even as a parish demagogue. He led
The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace,
In semblance; but he lit within their souls
The quenchless flame of zeal, and blest the sword
He brought on earth to satiate with the blood
Of truth and freedom his malignant soul."
Elsewhere, in extension of the same, he puts the accompanying words in
the mouth of God the Father, to illustrate the doctrine of Christian
Atonement:
"I will beget a son, and he shall bear
The sins of all the world; he shall arise
In an unnoticed corner of the earth,
And he shall die upon a cross, and purge
The universal crime; so that the few
On whom my grace descends, those who are marked
As vessels to the honor of their God,
May credit this strange sacrifice, and save
Their souls alive. Millions shall live and die,
Who ne'er shall call upon their Saviour's name,
But unredeem'd go to the gaping grave;
Thousands shall deem it an old woman's tale,
Such as the nurses frighten babes withal;
These, in a gulf of anguish an I of flame,
Shall curse their reprobation endlessly,
Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow,
Even on their beds of torment, where they howl,
My honor and the justice of their doom.
What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts
Of purity, with radiant genius bright,
Or lit with human reason's earthly ray?
Many are call'd but few will I elect."
The popular faith of Europe and America, which experience demonstrates
to this age has, even as a means of reforming humanity, been a
complete failure, Shelley correctly believed, had the same human
foundation and origin as that of other revealed theologies--he sums up
the proofs on which Christianity rests, miracles, prophecies, and
martyrdoms, with great clearness; proves the absurdity of the doctrine
of miracles, as taught by Christian writers, shows the falseness of
the so-called prophecies, even granting the utmost warping of the real
meaning of the Old Testament texts for Christian purposes, which he
asserted were to be compared unfavorably with the oracles of Delphos,
and points out that the Mohammedan dying for his prophet, or the
Hindoo immolating himself under the wheels of Juggernaut could be
cited equally as a proof of the divine origin of their faiths, as the
reputed martyrdoms of Christians could of theirs.
The development of Christianity, which was really founded by Paul, was
a subject to which Shelley devoted much attention--he tells us that
"The same means that have supported every other belief, have
supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, assassination,
and falsehood; deeds of unexampled and incomparable
atrocity, have made it what it is. The blood shed by the
votaries of the God of mercy and peace, since the
establishment of his religion, would probably suffice to
drown all other sectaries now on the habitable globe. We
derive from our ancestors a faith thus fostered and
supported; we quarrel, persecute, and hate, for its
maintenance. Even under a government which, while it
infringes the very right of thought and speech, boasts of
permitting the liberty of the press, a man is pilloried and
imprisoned because he is a deist, and no one raises his
voice in the indignation of outraged humanity."
The numerical majority of Christians--the Greek and Roman Catholic--are
as much pagans as their ancestors, the ancient Greeks and Romans were
exoterically. And why? Simply because on the break-up of the Roman
empire--like Mohammedanism afterwards, which was the natural reformation
and revolution from Christian image-worship--Christianity, in a natural
succession, and by fortuitous circumstances, took possession of the
executive, and placed on the seat of power a Christian Byzantine emperor
in lieu of a pagan. Basilicas, dedicated to Jupiter, Mercury, Adonis,
Venus and the deities of High Olympus, were re-dedicated to God the
Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, and the other
saints (or gods) of the Christian Pantheon. Statues therein were
rechristened, and the sacrificial altars were simply transferred for the
use of the eucharistical sacrifice. The vestal virgins became nuns of
the church; the _Sacerdotes_, her priests; the mysteries of Isis, her
Agapae. Her incense, her pictures, her image-worship, her holy water,
her processions, and her prodigies, too, all came from the same source.
Thus were the socialistic and communistic teachings, based on the
Philoic-Essenism of the Reformer of Nazareth, paganized, prostituted,
and entirely misrepresented. His life and labors were transformed from
the natural into what was considered by the vulgar the supernatural, and
all those who dared--like Hypatia, with thousands of other pious and
noble ancients--to deny his divinity, were sacrificed to this new
Moloch, set up by parricide Constantines, or adulterers of the
Theodosius caste. Thus through the ages, has the race suffered under
such murder, rapine, and lust, as never disgraced tolerant ancient
heathendom in the interests of paganism, even as recently happened in
Central America,[C] and would happen everywhere else, if priestcraft had
the power to act without restraint, so that, as Shelley says,
"Earth groans beneath religion's iron age,
And priests dare babble of a God of Peace--
Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood,
Murdering the while, uprooting every germ
Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all,
Making the earth a slaughter-house."
[Footnote C: I refer to the abominable outrages perpetrated a few
months ago at San Miguel, Panama, where popular preachers were forced
by the ecclesiastical powers to foment rebellion by violently
denouncing the State authorities, who had refused to allow a pastoral
of the Christian Bishop of San Salvador, hostile to the laws, to be
read in the churches. Having been put into a state of frenzy by one
Palacios, a canon of the cathedral, a fanatic mob revolted, liberated
prisoners, murdered generals in command, massacred numbers of the best
citizens, set fire to the city with kerosene, and destroyed over one
million dollars' worth of property. After this theological revolt had
been put down, passports, couched in the following terms, and sealed
with the seal of the bishopric, were found on the bodies of some of
these holy murderers;
"PETER.--Open to the bearer the gates of heaven, who has died for religion.
(Signed), GEORGE, Bishop of San Salvador."
Similar attempts were made by the Christian hierarchy in Brazil
against the Masonic body; but, fortunately, the emperor, a liberal and
an enlightened savant, crushed the attempt under foot, and
unmistakably proved, to the satisfaction of humanity, that he was not
to be transformed into a nineteenth century Charles the Ninth or
Philip the Second, and act the cat's paw for Pio Nono, ex-carbonari
and recusant mason, to wreak his vengeance on the brethren whom he had
betrayed.]
To those who will look down the ages, I would ask, is this picture
overdrawn? and further, to remember that in Shelley's own words:
"Eleven millions of men, women and children have been killed
in battle, butchered in their sleep, burned to death at
public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured,
assassinated and pillaged in the spirit of the religion of
peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God."
Is it amazing that he should have written such a "highly wrought and
admirably sustained" tragedy as the "Cenci," founded on facts, and
which has been deemed by competent critics the first since
Shakspeare--that he should have brought forward, with vivid
delineation, the crimes of the priesthood--and that he should have
made us remember the terrors of the bloody wars on heretics and
heathen, in words such as these:
"Yes! I have seen God's worshippers unsheathe
The sword of His revenge, when grace descended,
Confirming all unnatural impulses,
To sanctify their desolating deeds;
And frantic priests wave the ill-omen'd cross
O'er the unhappy earth; then shone the sun
On showers of gore from the upflashing steel
Of safe assassination, and all crime
Made stingless by the spirits of the Lord.
And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.
Spirit! no year of my eventful being
Has pass'd unstain'd by crime and misery,
Which flows from God's own faith. I've marked his slaves
With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile
The insensate mob, and whilst one hand was red
With murder, feign to stretch the other out
For brotherhood and peace; and that they now
Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds
Are marked with all the narrowness and crime
That freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise?"
Protestant Christians may urge that all this is not Christianity; if
it be not--for it is the record of the Church--I would ask, what is?
and where shall we find the history of Christianity for the fifteen
centuries before Luther's time? and where, to-day? Their predecessors
plucked the plumage from the dying bird of mythology, as they,
themselves, have robbed the liberal orchard of all its choicest fruits
and palmed them off as of their own growth. Protestants would not, I
dare say, now countenance the persecutions of the past, but yet, I
would tell them that their Protestantism has been a great mistake; and
that, at this moment, there is no unity among the opposers of
Catholicism, who are split into a thousand sects, wrangling for
superiority, like wolves over offal; and that their churches are
gradually converging toward Rationalism on the one hand, and Catholic
Sacerdotalism on the other; in regard to which last, the Historical
Roman Church--the only Christian body which presents a solid
phalanx--one must not be too iconoclastic, remembering that, in the
monastic houses and great ecclesiastical libraries we have had
conserved for us, although, perchance by accident, the records of all
the philosophy, all the jurisprudence, all the polity, all the
literature, and all the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome, that
remained from the Alexandrian library and pre-Christian times--the
mediaeval clerics were the great conservators of knowledge, which we
inherit directly from Europe; and we should be, therefore, grateful to
them equally with Mohammedanism, from which we received, through the
Crusaders and the Moors, the basis of nearly all science and luxury,
from Asia. There were, undoubtedly, many bad popes, men as bad as the
incestuous, and, according to the recent dogma, the infallible
Alexander Borgia; priests who are not all vile, but many nobler than
their system, acknowledge this with regret, and among whom there are
some whom I can reverence, such as John Henry Newman, for instance,
whose life would favorably compare with that of Shelley, or any
liberal. There have been popes, also, whose lives have been as pure,
as disinterested, and as virtuous as that of any stoic or epicurean.
We owe much to Sixtus the Fifth, founder of the Vatican Library, and
would-be regenerator of order in his temporal dominions; to Leo the
Great, whose patronage of the arts has sent us down the wondrous
statuary, painting, and works of genius, which are the admiration of
the world; and to Hildebrand, who brought together, in one harmonious
whole, the struggling elements of European society. It is well to
note, too, in order that I may not be misunderstood, that Catholicism
is better than savage Fetishism, and Rationalism in degree superior to
either; and, further, that Liberalism should only war with evil
principles, and not with men whom they are generally the exponents of
ignorantly, and to the best of their knowledge. Comtism[D]
acknowledges the fact that Christianity was not simply a mere advance
on, but where we shall only find the civilization of Europe as it was
during mediaeval times, and recognizes this most strongly, by placing
over fifty of these great geniuses and luminaries, popes, bishops, and
saints of the Catholic Church, in the Comtist Calendar, under the
sixth and seventh months dedicated to St. Paul or Catholicism, and
Charlemagne or Feudal Civilization respectively. We should thank the
followers of Comte for thus bringing to our notice what we might be
liable to occasionally forget in our bigotry and frequent
over-anxiety.
[Footnote D: Comtism, or Positivism is that casuistical system of
modern Atheism, founded by Auguste Comte, the Ignatius Loyola of
Materialism, and which that learned pantarchical madman strung
together in Esquirol's lunatic asylum. It is an insidious philosophy,
full of Jesuistry, and teaches a _soi-disant_ Religion which is
Ir-religion, a pseudo-God, which has no conceivable existence, and an
impossible immortality of the soul, ignoring a future state. The
present crusade of Comtism in our midst, with false colors flying can
be justly compared to that of St. Francois Xavier in Hindostan.]
In popularizing terms wrongly, lies much mischief. If the misapplied
term Christianity, signify the current notion, zeal for truth, the
good of mankind, and active virtue or Christism, the reputed precepts
of Christ, then Shelley taught that ethical system, and the so-called
Christian world which persecuted him, the opposite.
No one believed, better than Shelley, in the necessity of continuity,
and that all theological systems are a portion of the development of
Humanity.
It should likewise be remembered, that even in the grossest
superstition, as in the highest belief, the underlying aspiration,
veiled perhaps, under some beautiful myth, is a straining after the
pure and the good, and, as Shelley puts it:
"All original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of
allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and
true."
It should also be considered, that it is better not to interfere with
the faith of the ignorant, but let them remain in an exoteric
condition, until they are properly developed by sufficient education
and consequent intelligence. It is just as much the duty of advanced
thinkers not to tamper with the beliefs of men who are in an early
stage of progress, as it is not to put a flaming torch in the
possession of a lunatic, or a razor in the hands of a child.
Shelley, in his philosophy, accepted all this, with the full
consciousness that in the end truth would prevail--he yearned for the
time when priest-led slaves would
"Cease to proclaim that man
Inherits vice and misery, when force
And falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babe,
Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good,"
and for that epoch when "the Mohammedan, the Jew, the Christian, the
Deist, and the Atheist will live together in one community, equally
sharing the benefits which arise from its associations, and united in
the bonds of charity and brotherly love."
With Shelley we can turn with delight to the gospels of the future, as
of the ancient past; and the ramifications of the Trinity of a truly
Rational Religion, Mature, Science, and Art, where we have, instead of
idle prayers, addressed to gross material idols, or the impossible
entities hitherto depicted in theological systems, a feeling of real
satisfaction in learning how to live rather than to die, and in
practicing virtue and benevolence for their own sakes, than for
improbable rewards in the unsatisfactory hereafter, enunciated from
the theological platform.
Like a true religionist, Shelley tells us that aspirations to "Madre
Natura," like the following, should be poured out in silent, grateful
communion with Omnipresence, and not in temples made by hands:
Spirit of Nature! here!
In this interminable wilderness
Of worlds, at whose immensity
Even soaring fancy staggers,
Here is thy fitting temple.
Yet not the slightest leaf
That quivers to the passing breeze
Is less instinct with thee;
Yet not the meanest worm
That lurks in graves, and fattens on the dead
Less shares thy eternal breath.
Spirit of Nature! thou!
Imperishable as this scene,
Here is thy fitting temple.
From such a soul-inspiring altar should praises like these be raised,
and with what sacred feeling would the pure worshipper revel "where
spirits live and dream--where all that is sweet in sound, or pure in
vision floats on the air, or passes dimly before the sight," for as
the late Professor J.G. Hoyt, in his essay on Shelley beautifully
points out--"To him everything was God, and God was everything. Every
place was peopled with forms of beauty and animated with living
intelligences. Hills and valleys, forests and fountains, were each
thronged with presiding deities--bright effluences from the Diving
that stirred within, and shone above the whole."
In leaving the first portion of my paper, I will make the following
quotation from a remarkable article on Shelley in the pages of the
_National Magazine_, which all minds unshackled, and free from
prejudice, must acknowledge to be correct in the main, and which
admirably sums up his efforts in metaphysical philosophy. Our
attention is called to the fact that we discover in all Shelley's
writings "a freer and purer development of what is best and noblest in
ourselves. We are taught in it to love all living and lifeless things,
with which in the material and moral universe we are surrounded--we
are taught to love the wisdom and goodness and majesty of the
Almighty, for we are taught to love the universe, his symbol and
visible exponent. God has given two books for the study and
instruction of mankind; the book of revelation and the book of nature.
In one at least of these was Shelley deeply versed, and in this one he
has given admirable lessons to his fellow-men. Throughout his
writings, every thought and every feeling is subdued and chastened by
a spirit of unutterable and boundless love. The poet meets us on the
common ground of a disinterested humanity, and he teaches us to hold
an earnest faith in the worth and the intrinsic Godliness of the soul.
He tells us--he makes us feel that there is nothing higher than human
hope, nothing deeper than the human heart; he exhorts us to labor
devotedly in the great and good work of the advancement of human
virtue and happiness, and stimulates us
"To love and hear--to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates."
It is observed by Shelley that
"The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,
and their disciples in favor of oppressed and deluded
humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it
is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual
improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they
never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked
for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women and
children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have
been congratulating each other on the abolition of the
Inquisition in Spain."
The vast impetus, which these extraordinary geniuses gave to freedom
in metaphysical strongholds, led to a corresponding degree of liberty
in the political and social relations.
Shelley was not one who
"beheld the woe
In which mankind was bound, and deem'd that fate
Which made them abject, would preserve them so."
but on the contrary was aware of the progressive character of the
race, and threw himself with all his heart and soul into the cause of
Republicanism, and never slackened in his efforts till death took him
from his work. His noblest endeavors were directed toward the cause of
suffering humanity, crushed under the weight of despotism; and his
tuneful lyre was ever struck in behalf of the Goddess of Freedom, to
whom, in that soul inspiring "Ode to Liberty," he offers chaplets of
the most glorious verse to rouse the nations from their apathy. He has
given us his reflections on the English Revolution, when Cromwell
crushed royalty under his feet in the person of the tyrant Charles
Stuart, and which, notwithstanding, rose again to befoul, in the
profligacy and debauchery of the second Carolian epoch; on the French
Revolution, when an intelligent people drove out a brood of vampires,
who had drained the blood of France too long, to be replaced by
atrocious demagogues, hateful priest-ridden Bourbons and a Napoleon
Bonaparte, the wholesale Jaffa poisoner, on whose death Shelley wrote
lines pregnant with republican feelings:
"I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most ambitious slave,
Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne
Where it had stood even now; thou didst prefer
A frail and bloody pomp, which time has swept
In fragments towards oblivion. Massacre,
For this I pray'd would on thy sleep have crept,
Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear and Lust,
And stifled thee, their minister. I know
Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than force or fraud; old custom, legal crime,
And bloody Faith, the foulest birth of time."
With full knowledge of all this, he hopefully looked with loving eyes
toward this side of the Atlantic, to your magnificent constitution and
model Republic, built on the consolidated masonic bases of Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity, as did also the mass of my compatriots, who,
suffering under a more intolerant despotism, and unable to help
themselves, had no hand or voice in the attempted tyranny, from which
your forefathers properly rebelled one hundred years ago.
In "Hellas" we find Shelley advocating the cause of Greece, and it is
believed, that that poem assisted his friend Byron in the
determination to wield his sword in the cause of Grecian Liberty. "The
Revolt of Islam," his most mystical work, next to his early effort,
"St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian," is full of the most majestic and
sympathetic thoughts, and underlying its weirdness we have all those
elements "which essentially compose a poem in the cause of a liberal
and comprehensive morality, and with the view of kindling in the bosom
of his readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty
and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither
violence, nor misrepresentation, nor prejudice, nor the continual
presence and pressure of evil, can ever totally extinguish among
mankind."
Can we wonder that Shelley could be else than Republican when he
regarded what Thackeray afterward summed up with biting irony, the
record of the reigning house of Great Britain, the mad Guelph
_Defenders of the Christian Faith_(_?_), the results of whose labors
have been corroborated by Greville and recent writers?
To what a line of monarchs, was Shelley called upon to give allegiance
and prostrate himself before, and can we be astonished that he thus
describes the state these abominable Hanoverians had "England in
1819:"
"An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king,--
Princes the dregs of their dull race who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,--
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop blind in blood without a blow,--
A people starved and stabbed in unfilled field,--
An army which liberticide and prey
Make as a two-edged sword to all who wield,--
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay--
Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed,--
A Senate--time's worst statute unrepealed,--
Are graves from which a glorious phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day?"
To aid Republicanism, he threw himself with fervor into the cause of
the unhappy Caroline of Brunswick; and on her account he wrote "God
Save the Queen," in imitation of the British national anthem, and the
satirical piece entitled "Swellfoot, the Tyrant." In the following
words he attacked the prime minister, Lord Castleragh, whose
reactionary counsels were transforming England into a state analogous
to that of Russia to-day:
"Then trample and dance, thou oppressor,
For thy victim is no redressor!
Thou art sole lord and possessor
Of her corpses, and clods and abortions--they pave
Thy path to a grave."