(1867.)
This is one of our few and far-between outbursts of Rabelasian laughter,
irresistibly provoked by the aggressive absurdities of theology; and as
such I consider it thoroughly defensible. In all seriousness I affirm
that its mockery is far less “blasphemous” than the solemn outrage on
reason, the infernal damnation of all mankind who are sensible and sane
or who are even mad otherwise than the author, the cold-blooded
dissection of the infinite and eternal God as a superior surgeon may
dissect an inferior corpse, perpetrated by its prototype the so-called
Athanasian Creed. I do not see in what the statement that an old monkey
of the tribe once saw the tail of this great big monkey is more
irreverent than that other statement how Moses of the tribe of Levi once
saw the back parts of the Lord; whom the Church believes to be a Spirit
infinite, without parts, a sort of omnipresent æther or supersubtle gas.
Nor do I see that the monkey, who is at least a natural animal, is a
more outrageous symbol or emblem than the utterly unnatural Lamb as it
had been slain, with seven horns and seven eyes, encompassed by all “the
menagerie of the Apocalypse.” It would be easy to produce, I think,
mockeries far more insulting, buffooneries far more bitter and
malignant, lavished upon Paganism, Socinianism, Atheism, and many
another _ism_, in the works of the most saintly divines. The hierarchy
of Olympus is more venerable than the triune Lord of the New Jerusalem;
yet how is it treated in our most popular burlesques? I go to a theatre
and find a Christian audience, very tenderly sensitive as to their own
religious feelings rolling with laughter and thundering applause at the
representation of a ballet-girl Jupiter ascending in a car like a
monstrous coal-scuttle, with a deboshed mechanical eagle nodding its
head tipsily to the pit; a male Minerva, spectacles on nose, who takes
sly gulps from a gin bottle and dances a fish-fag carmagnole; a Bacchus
sprawling about drunken and brutish as Caliban; all uttering idiotic
puns and singing idiotic songs. And if other mythologies were equally
familiar, they would doubtless be maltreated with equal contempt. You
thus deliver over to your dismal comic writers, to your clowns and
merry-andrews and bayaderes, the gods of Homer and Æschylus, of
Herodotus, Pindar and Phidias, you the sanctimonious and reverent modern
Britons; and you cry out aghast against “atrocious blasphemy” touching a
Divinity, who was first the anthropomorphic clan-god of a petty Syrian
tribe, who grew afterwards into a vague Ormuzd with the devil for
Ahriman when this tribe had been captive in Babylonia, whom you have
filched from this tribe which you still detest and disdain, with whom
you have associated two colleagues declared by this tribe (which surely
ought to know best) utterly spurious, whom you worship with rites
borrowed from old pagans you decry, and discuss in divinity borrowed
from old philosophers and schoolmen you sneer at; who gave to his tribe
some millenniums back laws which you preserve in the filched book of
your idolatry, but which not one of you dare read to his wife and
children; whose son and colleague gave you laws which are certainly
readable enough, but which you are so far from obeying that you would
assuredly consign to Bedlam any one seeking to act upon them perfectly.
But mockery of the Olympians hurts no one’s feelings, while mockery of
the Tri-unity hurts the feelings of nearly all who hear or see it? I
know that there are here and there a few pious and tender hearts, with
whom habitude has become nature; people who, having less intellectual
than cordial energy, more affection and reverence than curiosity and
self-reliance, pour their whole melted nature into whatever religious
moulds chance to be nearest, and harden to the exact shape and size of
the mould, so that any blow struck upon it jars and wounds them; and the
feelings of these I should be very loth to hurt. I care not for
propagandism in general, and in such cases above all propagandism is
certainly useless. Why seek to convert women to a struggling faith? Let
the women be always on the victorious side, let the men do the fighting
and endure the hardships. When their struggling faith has conquered such
triumph as it merits, they will find the women all at once in agreement
with them, converted not by ideas (for which women care not an
apple-dumpling) but by feminine love and loyalty to manhood. One must
always be very loth, I say, to wound the feelings of the pious and
tender hearts, of the beautiful feminine souls; and fortunately these
love to seclude themselves in tranquillity, avoiding debates and
controversies. Whose religious feelings, then, are likely to be wounded
by “atrocious blasphemies,” by “blasphemous indecencies”? The feelings
of “the gentle spirit of our meek Review,” the benign and holy
_Saturday!_ The feelings of tract distributors, scripture-readers,
polemical parsons, all those in general who violate every courtesy of
life to thrust their narrowminded dogmas upon others, and who preach
everlasting damnation against people too sensible to care for their
ranting! They outrage our reason, they vilify our human nature, they
blaspheme our world, they pollute our flesh, and they wind up by dooming
us to eternal torture because we differ from them: these trifles are, of
course, not supposed to hurt _our_ feelings. We endeavor to enthrone
human reason, to ennoble human nature, to restore the human body to its
pure dignity, to develop the beauty and glory of the world; and we wind
up, not by retorting upon them their fiendish curses, not even by
laughing at the idea of an almighty and all-good God, but by laughing at
their notions of an almighty and all-good God, who has a Hell ready for
the vast majority of us: this horrible laugh lacerates their pious
sensibilities, and we hear the venomous whine of “atrocious blasphemy.”
After condemning us to death they commit us for contempt of court, which
surely is an anomalous procedure!
You can mock the Grecian mythology, you can burlesque Shakespeare,
without wounding any pious heart? No: Olympus is as sacred to many as
Mount Sion is to you; our own Shakespeare is as venerable and dear to us
as to you that bundle of dissimilar anonymous treatises which you have
made coherent by help of the bookbinder and called the Book of Books.
And mark this; the Grecian mythology is dead, is no longer aggressive in
its absurdities; the priestcraft and the foul rites have long since
perished, the beauty and the grace and the splendor remain. But your
composite theology is still alive, is insolently aggressive, its lust
for tyrannical dominion is unbounded; therefore we must attack it if we
would not be enslaved by it. The cross is a sublime symbol; I would no
more think of treating it with disrespect while it held itself aloft in
the serene heaven of poetry than of insulting the bow of Phoebus Apollo
or the thunderbolts of Zeus; but if coarse hands will insist on pulling
it down upon my back as a ponderous wooden reality, what can I do but
fling it off as a confounded burden not to be borne?
And now let us consider for a moment the meaning of this word
“blasphemy,” which is the burden of the _S. R.’s_ slanderous song; not
the legal meaning, but the philosophic, the sense in which it would be
used by enlightened and fair controversialists. The most Christian _S.
R._ says to the Atheistic Iconoclast, You blaspheme. Whom? The Christian
God! And the _S, R._ does not appear to see that it is assuming the very
existence of God which is in dispute between itself and Iconoclast! For
the Atheist, God is a figment, nothing; in blaspheming God he therefore
blasphemes nothing. A man really blasphemes when he mocks, insults,
pollutes, vilifies that which he really believes to be holy and awful.
Thus a Christian who really believes in the Christian God (and there
_may_ be a hundred such Christians in England) can be guilty of
blasphemy against that God, whether that God really subsists or not; for
such a Christian in mocking or vilifying God would really be violating
the most sacred convictions of his own nature. Speaking philosophically,
an honest Atheist can no more blaspheme God than an honest Republican
can be disloyal to a King, than an unmarried man can be guilty of
conjugal infidelity.
[This “Word on Blasphemy,” as I have ventured to call it, is
from a long article on the _Saturday Review_ and the _National
Reformer_, the rest of which was of merely temporary interest,
and that only to the readers of those two journals. The
“outburst of Rabelasian laughter” which so provoked the
_Saturday Review_, was a short satire on Christian theology and
priestcraft, entitled “The Fanatical Monkeys,” ascribed to
Charles Southwell, and just then published in the _National
Reformer_.—Editor.]