Chapter IV. The Eighteenth Century

THE eighteenth century deserves that the penman who touches its records

shall have some virility; for these records contain, not only the

narrative of the rapid growth of the new philosophy in France, England,

and Germany, where its roots had been firmly struck in the previous

century, but they also give the history of a glorious endeavor on the

part of a down-trodden and long-suffering people, weakened and degraded

by generations of starvation and oppression, to break the yoke of

tyranny and superstition. Eighteenth century historians can write how

the men of France, after having been cursed by a long race of kings, who

never dreamed of identifying their interests with those of the people;

after enduring centuries of tyranny from priests, whose only gods were

power, pleasure, and mammon, and at the hands of nobles, who denied

civil rights to their serfs; at last, could endure no longer, but

electrified into life by eighteenth-century heresy, "spurned under foot

the idols of tyranny and superstition," and sought "by the influence of

reason to erect on the ruins of arbitrary power the glorious edifice of

civil and religious liberty." Why Frenchmen then failed in giving

permanent success to their heroic endeavor, is not difficult to explain,

when we consider that every tyranny in Europe united against that young

republic to which the monarchy had bequeathed a legacy of a wretched

pauper people, a people whose minds had been hitherto wholly in the

hands of the priests, whose passions had revolted against wrong, but

whose brains were yet too weak for the permanent enjoyment of the

freedom temporarily resulting from physical effort. Eighteenth-century

heresy is especially noticeable for its immediate connexion with

political change. For the first time in European history, the great mass

commenced to yearn for the assertion in government of democratic

principles. The French Republican Revolution, which overthrew Louis XVI

and the Bastille, was only possible because the heretical teachers who

preceded it had weakened the divine right of kingcraft; and it was

ultimately unsuccessful, only because an overwhelming majority of the

people were as yet not sufficiently released from the thraldom of the

church, and therefore fell before the allied despotisms of Europe, who

were aided by the Catholic priests, who naturally plotted against the

spirit which seemed likely to make men too independent to be pious.

In Germany the liberation of the masses from the dominion of the Church

of Rome was effected with the, at first, active believing concurrence of

the nation; in England this was not so. Protestantism here was the

result rather of the influence and interests of the King and Court, and

of the indifference of the great body of the people. The Reformed Church

of England, sustained by the crown and aristocracy, has generally left

the people to find their own way to heaven or hell, and has only

required abstinence from avowed denial of, or active opposition to, its

tenets. Its ministers have usually preached with the same force to a few

worshippers scattered over their grand cathedrals and numerous churches

as to a thronging crowd, but in each case there has been a lack of

vitality in the sermon. It is only when the material interests of the

church have been apparently threatened that vigor has been shown on the

part of its teachers.

It is a curious fact, and one for comment hereafter, that while in the

modern struggle for the progress of heresy its sixteenth-century pages

present many most prominent Italian names, when we come to the

eighteenth century there are but few such names worthy special notice;

it is no longer from the extreme South, but from France, Germany, and

England, that you have the great array of Freethinking warriors. Those

whom Italy boasts, too, are now nearly all in the Idealistic ranks.

We commenced the list by a brief reference to Bernard Man-deville, a

Dutch physician, born at Dordrecht in 1670, and who died in 1733; a

writer with great power as a satirist, whose fable of the "Bees, or

Private Vices made Public Benefits," not only served as source for much

of Helvetius, but had the double honor of an indictment at the Middlesex

session, and an answer from the pen of Bishop Berkeley.

One of the early, and perhaps one of the most important promoters of

heresy in the United Kingdom, was George Berkeley, an Irishman by birth.

He was born on the 12th of March, 1684, at Kilcrin, and died at Oxford

in 1753. It was this writer to whom Pope assigned "every virtue under

heaven," and of whom Byron wrote:

"When Bishop Berkeley said 'there was no matter,'

And proved it--'twas no matter what he said:

They say his system 'tis in vain to batter,

Too subtle for the airiest human head;

And yet who can believe it?"

A writer in the "Encyclopaedia Metropolitana" describes him as "the one,

perhaps, whose heart was most free from scepticism, and whose

understanding was most prone to it." Berkeley is here dealt with as one

specially contributing to the growth of sceptical thought, and not as an

Idealist only. Arthur Collier published, about the same time as

Berkeley, several works in which absolute Idealism is advocated. Collier

and Berkeley were mouthpieces for the expression of an effort at

resistance against the growing Spinozistic school. They wrote against

substance assumed as the "noumenon lying underneath all phenomena--the

substratum supporting all qualities--the something in which all

accidents inhere." Collier and his writings are almost unknown;

Berkeley's name has become famous, and his arguments have served to

excite far wider scepticism than have those of any other Englishman of

his age. Most religious men who read him misunderstand him, and nearly

all misrepresent his theory. Hume, speaking of Berkeley, says: "Most of

the writings of that very ingenious philosopher form the best lessons of

scepticism which are to be found, either among the ancient or modern

philosophers, Bayle not excepted. He professes, however, in his title

page (and undoubtedly with great truth) to have composed his book

against the sceptics, as well as against the Atheists and Freethinkers.

But that all his arguments, though otherwise intended, are in reality

merely sceptical, appears from this, that they admit of no answer, and

produce no conviction."

Berkeley wrote for those who "want a demonstration of the existence and

immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the soul," and his

philosophy was intended to check materialism. The key-note of his works

may be found in his declaration: "The only thing whose existence I deny,

is that which philosophers call Matter or corporeal substance." The

definition given by Berkeley of matter is one which no materialist will

be ready to accept, i.e., "an inert, senseless substance in which

extension, figure, and motion do actually exist." The "Principles of

Human Knowledge" is the work in which Berkeley's Idealism is chiefly set

forth, and many have been the volumes and pamphlets written in reply.

Whatever might have been Berkeley's intention as to refuting scepticism,

the result of his labors was to increase it in no ordinary degree. Dr.

Pye Smith thus summarises Berkeley's views:--"He denied the existence of

matter as a cause of our perceptions, but firmly maintained the

existence of created and dependent spirits, of which every man is one;

that to suppose the existence of sensible qualities and of a material

world, is an erroneous deduction from the fact of our perceptions; that

those perceptions are nothing but ideas and thoughts in our minds; that

these are produced in perfect uniformity, order, and consistency in all

minds, so that their occurrence is according to fixed rules, which may

be called the laws of nature; that the Deity is either the immediate or

the mediate cause of these perceptions, by his universal operation on

created minds; and that the created mind has a power of managing these

perceptions, so that volitions arise, and all the phenomena of moral

action and responsibility. The great reply to this is, that it is a

hypothesis which cannot be proved, which is highly improbable, and which

seems to put upon the Deity the inflicting on man a perpetual delusion."

The weakness of Berkeley's system as a mere question of logic is, that

while he requires the most rigorous demonstration of the existence of

what he defines as matter, he assumes an eternal spirit with various

attributes, and also creates spirits of various sorts. He creates the

states of mind resulting from the sensation of surrounding phenomena

into ideas, existing independent of the ego, when in truth, man's ideas

are not in addition to man's mind; but the aggregate of sensative

ability, and the result of its exercise is the mind, just as the

aggregate of functional ability and activity is life. The foundation of

Berkeley's faith in the invisible "eternal spirit," in angels as

"created spirits," is difficult to discover, when you accept his

argument for the rejection of visible phenomena. He in truth should have

rejected everything save his own mind, for the mental processes are

clearly not always reliable. In dreams, in delirium, in insanity, in

temporary disease of particular nerves of sensation, in some phases of

magnetic influence, the ideas which Berkeley sustains so forcibly are

admittedly delusions.

As in George Berkeley, so we have in Bishop Butler, an illustration of

the endeavor to check the rapidly enlarging scepticism of this century.

Joseph Butler was born in 1692, died 1752, and will be long known by his

famous work on the "Analogy of Religion to the course of Nature." In

this place it is not our duty to do more than point out a few features

of the argument, observing that this elaborate piece of special pleading

for natural and revealed religion, is evidence that danger was

apprehended by the clergy, from the spread of Freethought views amongst

the masses. A popular reply was written to provide against the growing

popular objection. Bishop Butler argues that "we know that we are endued

with certain capacities of action, of happiness and misery; for we are

conscious of acting, of enjoying pleasure, and of suffering pain. Now

that we have these powers and capacities before death, is a presumption

that we shall retain them through and after death; indeed, a probability

of it abundantly sufficient to act upon, unless there be some positive

reason to think that death is the destruction of those living powers."

It may be fairly submitted, in reply, that here the argument from

analogy is as utterly faulty, as if in the spring season a traveller

should say of a wayside pool, it is here before the summer sun shines

upon it, and will be here during and after the summer drought, when

ordinary experience would teach him that as the pool is only gathered

during the rainy season in the hollow ground, so in the dry hot summer

days, it will be gradually evaporated under the blazing rays of the July

sun. As to the human capacities, experience teaches us that they have

changed with the condition of the body; emotional feelings and animal

passions, the gratification of which ensured temporary pleasure or pain,

have varied, have been newly felt, and have died out in different

periods and conditions of our lives, and the presumption is against the

complete endurance of all these "capacities for action," etc., even

during the whole life, and much more strongly, therefore, against their

endurance after death. Besides which--continuing the argument from

analogy--my "capacities" having only been manifested since my body has

existed, and in proportion to my physical ability, the presumption is

rather that the manifestation which commenced with the body will finish

as the body finishes. Further, it is fair to presume that "death is the

destruction of those living powers," for death is the cessation of

organic functional activity; a cessation consequent on some change or

destruction of organisation. Of course, the word "destruction" is not

here used in any sense of annihilation of substance, but as meaning such

a change of condition that vital phenomena are no longer manifested.

But, says Butler, "we know not at all what death is in itself, but only

some of its effects, such as the dissolution of flesh, skin, and bones,

and these effects do in nowise appear to imply the destruction of a

living agent." Here, perhaps, there is an unjustifiable assumption in

the words "living agent," for if by living agent is only meant the

animal which dies, then the destruction of flesh, skin, and bones does

fairly imply the destruction of the living agent, but if by living agent

is intended more than this, then the argument is speciously and unfairly

worded. But beyond this, if Bishop Butler's argument has any value, it

proves too much. He says: "Nor can we find anything throughout the whole

analogy of nature, to afford us even the slightest presumption that

animals ever lose their living powers... by death." That is, Bishop

Butler, applies his argument for a future state of existence, not only

to man, but to the whole animal kingdom; and it may be fairly conceded

that there is as much ground to presume that man will live again, as

there is that the worm will live again, which, being impaled upon a

hook, is eaten by the gudgeon, or that the gudgeon will live again

which, threadled as a bait, is torn and mangled to death by a ravenous

pike, or that the pike will live again after it has been kept out of

water till rigid, then gutted, scaled, stuffed with savory condiments,

broiled, and ultimately eaten by Piscator and his family. Bishop

Butler's argument that because pleasure or pain is uniformly found to

follow the acting or not acting in some particular manner, there is

presumptive analogy in favor of future rewards and punishments by Deity,

appears weak in the extreme. According to Butler, God is the author of

nature. Nature's laws are such, that punishment, immediate or remote,

follows nonobservance, and reward, more or less immediate, is the result

of observance; and because God is, by Butler's argument, assumed as the

author of nature, and has therefore already punished or rewarded once,

we are following Butler, to presume that he will after death punish or

reward again for an action upon which he has already adjudicated. In his

chapter on the Moral Government of God, Butler says: "As the manifold

appearances of design and of final causes in the constitution of the

world prove it to be the work of an intelligent mind, so the particular

final causes of pleasure and pain distributed amongst his creatures

prove that they are under his government--what may be called his natural

government of creatures endowed with sense and reason." But taking

Bishop Butler's own position, what sort of government is demonstrated by

this argument from analogy? God, according to Bishop Butler's reasoning,

designed the whale to swallow the Clio Borealis, which latter he

designed to be so swallowed, but which he nevertheless invested with

some 360,000 suckers, to enable it in its turn to seize the minute

animalculae on which it lives. God designed Brutus to kill Cesar, Orsini

to be beheaded by Louis Napoleon. These, according to Butler, would be

all under the special control of God's government. Bishop Butler's

theory that our present life is a state of trial and probation is met by

the difficulty, that while he assumes the justice and benevolence of God

as moral governor, he has the fact that many exist with organisations

and capacities so originally different, that it is manifestly most

unfair to put one and the same reward, or one and the same punishment

for all. The Esquimaux or Negro is not on a level at the outset of life

with the Caucasian races. How from analogy can anyone argue in favor of

the doctrine that an impartial judge who had started them in the race of

life unfairly matched, would put the same prize before all, none of the

starters being handicapped? Bishop Butler's argument on the doctrine of

necessity, is that which one might expect to find from a hired _nisi

prius_ advocate, but which is read with regret coming from the pen of a

gentleman who ought to be striving to convince his erring brethren by

the words of truth alone. He says, suppose a child to be educated from

his earliest youth in the principles of "fatalism," what then? The reply

is, that a necessitarian knowing that a certain education of the human

mind was most conducive to human happiness, would strive to impart to

his children education of that character. That a worse "fatalism" is

inculcated in the doctrine of a foreordaining and ever-directing

providence, planning and controlling every one of the child's actions,

than ever was taught in necessitarian essays. That the child would be

taught the laws of existence, and would be shown how certain conduct

resulted in pleasure, and certain other conduct was during life attended

with pain, and that the result of such teaching would be far more

efficacious in its moral results, than the inculcation of a present

responsibility, and an ultimate heaven and hell, in which latter

doctrine, nearly all Christians profess to believe, but nearly all act

as if it were not of the slightest consequence whether any such paradise

or infernal region exists.

Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, born October 1, 1672, died November

15, 1751, may be taken as one of the school of polished deistical

writers, who, though comparatively few, fairly enough represents the

religious opinions of the large majority of the journalists of the

present day. In the course of Bolingbroke's "Letters on the Study of

History" a strong sceptical spirit is manifested, and he speaks in one

of "the share which the divines of all religions have taken in the

corruption of history." In another he thus deals with the question of

the Bible:--"It has been said by Abbadie, and others, 'that the

accidents which have happened to alter the texts of the Bible, and to

disfigure, if I may say so, the scriptures in many respects, could not

have been prevented without a perpetual standing miracle, and that a

perpetual standing miracle is not in the order of providence.' Now I can

by no means subscribe to this opinion. It seems evident to my reason

that the very contrary must be true; if we suppose that God acts towards

men according to the moral fitness of things; and if we suppose that he

acts arbitrarily, we can form no opinion at all. I think these accidents

would not have happened, or that the scriptures would have been

preserved entirely in their genuine purity notwithstanding these

accidents, if they had been entirely dictated by the Holy Ghost: and the

proof of this probable proposition, according to our clearest and most

distinct ideas of wisdom and moral fitness, is obvious and easy. But

these scriptures are not so come down to us: they are come down broken

and confused, full of additions, interpolations, and transpositions,

made we neither know when, nor by whom; and such, in short, as never

appeared on the face of any other book, on whose authority men have

agreed to rely. This being so, my lord, what hypothesis shall we follow?

Shall we adhere to some such distinction as I have mentioned? Shall we

say, for instance, that the scriptures were originally written by the

authors to whom they are vulgarly ascribed, but that these authors writ

nothing by inspiration, except the legal, the doctrinal, and the

prophetical parts, and that in every other respect their authority is

purely human, and therefore fallible? Or shall we say that these

histories are nothing more than compilations of old traditions, and

abridgements of old records, made in later times, as they appear to

every one who reads them without prepossession and with attention?"

It has been alleged that Pope's verse is but another rendering of

Bolingbroke's views without his "aristocratic nonchalance," and that

some passages of Pope regarded as hostile to revealed religion, were

specially due to the influence of Bolingbroke; and more than one critic

has professed to trace identities of thought and expression in order to

show that Pope was largely indebted to the published works of St. John.

David Hume was born at Edinburgh, 26th April, 1711, and died 1776. He

created a new school of Freethinkers, and is to-day one of the most

esteemed amongst sceptical authors. He was a profound thinker, and an

easy, elegant writer, who did much to give a force and solidity to

extreme heretical reasonings, which they had hitherto been regarded as

lacking. His heretical essays have had a far wider circulation since his

death than they enjoyed during his life. Many volumes have been issued

in the fruitless endeavor to refute him, and all these have contributed

to widen the circle of his readers. He adopted and advocated the

utilitarian and necessitarian theory of morals, and wrote of ordinary

theism and religion as arising from personification of unknown causes

for general or special phenomena. He held and advanced the idea, which

Buckle so fully states, and endeavors to prove in his "History of

Civilisation"--viz., that general laws operate amongst peoples, and

influence and determine their so-called moral conduct, much as other

laws do the orbits of planets, the occurrences of eclipses, etc. His

arguments against miracles, as evidences for revealed religion, remain

unrefuted, although they have been made the subject of many attacks. He

contends, in effect, that in each account of a miraculous occurrence

there is always more _prima facie_ probability of error, or bad faith on

the part of the narrator, than of interference with those invariable

sequences known as natural laws, and there was really no reply in the

conclusion of Dr. Campbell, to the effect that we have equally to trust

human testimony for an account of the laws of nature and for the

narratives of miracles, for in truth you never have the same character

of human testimony for the latter as for the former. And, further, while

in the case of human testimony as to natural events, it is evidence

which you may test and compare with your own experience. This is not so

as to miracles, declared at once to be out of the range of all ordinary

experience. "Men," he says, "are carried by a natural instinct or

prepossession to repose faith in their senses. When they follow this

blind and powerful instinct of nature, they always suppose the very

images presented to the senses to be the external objects, and never

entertain any suspicion that the one are nothing but representatives of

the other. But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon

destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us that nothing can

ever be present to the mind but an image or perception. So far, then, we

are necessitated by reasoning to contradict the primary instincts of

nature, and to embrace a new system with regard to the evidence of our

senses. But here philosophy finds herself extremely embarrassed, when

she would obviate the cavils and objections of the sceptics. She can no

longer plead the infallible and irresistible instinct of nature, for

that led us to quite a different system, which is acknowledged fallible,

and even erroneous, and to justify this pretended philosophical system

by a chain of clear and convincing argument, or even any appearance of

argument, exceeds the power of all human capacity. Do you follow the

instinct and propensities of nature in assenting to the veracity of the

senses? But these lead you to believe that the very perception or

sensible image is the external object--(Idealism.) Do you disclaim this

principle in order to embrace a more rational opinion, that the

perceptions are only representations of something external? You here

depart from your natural propensities, and more obvious sentiments; and

yet are not able to satisfy your reason, which can never find any

convincing argument from experience to prove that the perceptions are

connected with external objects--(Scepticism.)"

Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu, born in 1689 near Bordeaux,

died at Paris 1755, who earned considerable fame by his "Lettres

Persanes," is more famous for his oft-referred to work "L'Esprit des

Lois." Victor Cousin describes him as "the man of our country who has

best comprehended history, and who first gave an example of true

historic method." In the publication of certain of his ideas on history,

Montesquieu was the layer of the foundation-stone for an edifice which

Buckle would probably have gloriously crowned had his life been longer.

Voltaire, who sharply criticises Montesquieu, declares that he has

earned the eternal gratitude of Europe by his grand views and his bold

attacks on tyranny, superstition, and grinding taxation. Montesquieu

urged that virtue is the true essence of republicanism, but misled by

the mistaken notions of honor held by his predecessors and

contemporaries, he declared honor to be the principle of monarchical

institutions. Voltaire reminds him that "it is in courts that men,

devoid of honor, often attain to the highest dignities; and it is in

republics that a known dishonorable citizen is seldom trusted by the

people with public concerns." Montesquieu wrote in favor of a

constitutional monarchy such as then existed in England, and his work

shadowed forth a future for the middle class in France.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire, born 20th February, 1694, at Chatenay,

died 30th May, 1778, may be fairly written of as the man, to whose

fertile brain and active pen, to whose great genius, fierce irony, and

thorough humanity, we owe much more of the rapid change of popular

thought in Europe during the last century, than to any other man. His

wit, like the electric flash, spared nothing; his love for his kind

would have made him the protector of everything weak, his desire to

protect himself from the consequences of his truest utterances often

dims the hero-halo with which his name is surrounded. Born and trained

amongst a corrupt and selfish class, it is not wonderful that we find

some of their pernicious habits clinging to parts of his career. On the

contrary, it is more wonderful to find that he has shaken off so much of

the consequences of his education. Neither in politics nor in theology

was he so very extreme in his utterances as many deemed him, for while

he occasionally severely handled individual monarchs, we do not find him

the preacher of republicanism. On the contrary, he is often severe

against some of the advanced political views of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

He nevertheless suggests that it might have been "the art of working

metals which originally made kings, and the art of casting cannons which

now maintains them," and as a commentary on kingly conduct in the matter

of taxation, declares that "a shepherd ought to shear his sheep and not

to flay them." In theological controversy he wrote as a Theist, and

declares "Atheism and Fanaticism" to be "two monsters which may tear

Society in pieces, but the Atheist preserves his reason, which checks

his propensity to mischief, while the fanatic is under the influence of

a madness constantly urging him on." For the ancient Jews, and for the

Hebrew records, Voltaire entertained so thorough a feeling of

contemptuous detestation, that in his "Defense de mon Oncle," and his

articles and letters on the Jews, we find utter disbelief in them as a

chosen people, and the strongest abhorrence of their brutal habits,

heightened in expression by the scathing satire of his phrases. To the

more modern descendants of Abraham he said: "We have repeatedly driven

you away through avarice; we have recalled you through avarice and

stupidity; we still, in more towns than one, make you pay for liberty to

breathe the air; we have, in more kingdoms than one, sacrificed you to

God; we have burned you as holocausts--for I will not follow your

example, and dissemble that we have offered up sacrifices of human

blood; all the difference is, that our priests, content with applying

your money to their own use, have had you burned by laymen; while your

priests always immolated their human victims with their own sacred

hands. You were monsters of cruelty and fanaticism in Palestine; we have

been so in Europe."

Writing on miracles, Voltaire asks: "For what purpose would God perform

a miracle? To accomplish some particular design upon living beings? He

would then, in reality, be supposed to say--I have not been able to

effect by my construction of the universe, by my divine decrees, by my

eternal laws, a particular object; I am now going to change my eternal

ideas and immutable laws, to endeavor to accomplish what I have not been

able to do by means of them. This would be an avowal of his weakness,

not of his power; it would appear in such a being an inconceivable

contradiction. Accordingly, therefore, to dare to ascribe miracles to

God is, if man can in reality insult God, actually offering him that

insult. It is saying to him--You are a weak and inconsistent being. It

is therefore absurd to believe in miracles; it is, in fact, dishonoring

the divinity."

Those who are inclined to attack the character of Voltaire should read

the account of his endeavors for the Calas family. How, when old Calas

had been broken alive on the wheel at Toulouse, and his family were

ruined, Voltaire took up their case, aided them with means, spared no

effort of his pen or brain, and ultimately achieved the great victory of

reversing the unjust sentence, and obtaining compensation for the

family. If, then, these Voltaire-haters have not learned to love this

great heretic, let them study the narrative of his even more successful

endeavors on behalf of the Sirvens; more successful, because in this

case he took up the fight before an unjust judgment could be delivered,

and thus prevented the repetition of such an iniquitous execution as had

taken place in the Calas case. The cowardly slanders as to his conduct

when dying are not worth notice; those spit on the grave of the dead who

would not have dared to look in the face of the living.

Claude Adrian Helvetius was born at Paris 1715, and died December, 1771.

His best known works are "De l'Esprit," published 1758: "Essai sur

l'Origine des Connaissances Humaines," 1746; "Traite des Systemes,"

1749; "Traite des Sensations," 1758. Rousseau wrote in reply to

Helvetius, but when the Parliament of Paris condemned the work "De

l'Esprit," and it was in consequence burned by the common hangman,

Rousseau withdrew his refutatory volume. Helvetius argues that any

religion, of which the chiefs are intolerant, and the conduct of which

is expensive to the state, "cannot long be the religion of an

enlightened and well governed nation. The people that submit to it will

labor only to maintain the ease and luxury of the priesthood; each of

its inhabitants will be nothing more than a slave to the sacerdotal

power. A religion to be good should be tolerant and little expensive.

Its clergy should have no authority over the people. A dread of the

priest debases the mind and the soul, makes the one brutish and the

other slavish. Must the ministers of the altar always be armed with the

sword of the State? Can the barbarities committed by their intolerance

ever be forgotten? The earth is yet drenched with the blood they have

spilled. Civil tolerance alone is not sufficient to secure the peace of

nations. Every dogma is a seed of discord and injustice sown amongst

mankind."

"Why do you make the Supreme Being resemble an eastern tyrant? Why make

him punish slight faults with eternal torment? Why thus put the name of

the Divinity at the bottom of the portrait of the devil? Why oppress the

soul with a load of fear, break its springs, and of a worshipper of

Jesus make a vile, pusillanimous slave? It is the malignant who paint a

malignant God. What is their devotion? A veil for their crimes."

"Let not the rewards of heaven be made the price of trifling religious

operations, which convey a diminutive idea of the Eternal and a false

conception of virtue; its rewards should never be assigned to fasting,

haircloth, a blind submission, and self-castigation. The men who place

these operations among the virtues, might as well place those of

leaping, dancing, and tumbling on the rope." "Humility may be held in

veneration by the dwellers in a monastery or a convent, it favors the

meanness and idleness of a monastic life. But ought humility to be

regarded as the virtue of the people? No." Speaking of the Pagan

systems, Helvetius says: "All the fables of mythology were mere emblems

of certain principles of nature."

Baron d'Holbach, a native of the Palatinate, born January 1723, died

21st January, 1789, deserves special notice, as being the man whose

house was the gathering place of the knot of writers and thinkers who

struck light and life into the dark and deadened brain of France. He is

generally reputed to have been the author of that well-known work, the

"System of Nature," which was issued as if by Mirabaud. This work,

although it was fiercely assailed at the time by the pen of Voltaire,

and by the _plaidorie_ of the prosecuting Avocat-General, and has since

been attacked by hundreds who had never read it, yet remains a

wonderfully popular exposition of the power-gathering heresy of the

century, and, as far as we are aware, has never received efficient

reply. Probably next to Paine's works, it had in England during the

second quarter of this century the widest circulation of any

anti-theological book, this circulation extending through the

manufacturing ranks. In the eighteenth century Mirabaud could, in

England, only be found in the hands of the few, but fifty years had

wondrously multiplied the number of readers.

Joseph Priestley was born near Leeds, 13th March, 1733, and being

towards the latter part of his life driven out of England, by the

persecuting spirit evinced towards him, and which had been specially

excited by his republican tendencies, he died at Northumberland,

Pennsylvania, on the 6th February, 1804. Originally a Church of England

clergyman, his first notable inclination towards heterodoxy manifested

itself in hesitation as to the doctrine of the atonement. He ultimately

rejected the immortality and immateriality of the soul, argued for

necessitarianism, and earned considerable unpopularity by the boldness

of some of his sentiments on political as well as theological matters.

Priestley was one of the rapidly multiplying instances of heresy alike

in religion and politics, but he provoked the most bitter antagonism.

His works were burned by the common hangman, his house, library, and

scientific instruments were destroyed by an infuriate and pious mob.

Despite all this, his heresy, according to his own view of it, was not

of a very outrageous character, for he believed in Deity, in revealed

religion, and in Christianity, rather putting the blame on misconduct of

alleged Christians. He said: "The wretched forms under which

Christianity has long been generally exhibited, and its degrading

alliance with, or rather its subjection to, a power wholly heterogeneous

to it, and which has employed it for the most unworthy purposes, has

made it contemptible and odious in the eyes of all sensible men, who are

now everywhere casting off the very profession and every badge of it.

Enlightened Christians must themselves, in some measure, join with

unbelievers in exposing whatever will not bear examination in or about

religion." His writings on scientific topics were most voluminous; his

most heretical volumes are those on "Matter and Spirit."

Edward Gibbon was born at Putney, the 27th April, 1737, and died 16th

January, 1794. He was a polished and painstaking writer, aristocratic in

his tendencies and associations, who had educated himself into a

disbelief in the principal dogmas of Christianity, but who loved the

peace and quietude of an easy life too much to enter the lists as an

active antagonist of the Church. His works, especially the fifteenth and

sixteenth chapters of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," have

been regarded as infidel in their tendency, rather from what has been

left unsaid than from the direct statements against Christianity. The

sneer at the evidence of prophecy, or the doubt of the reality of

miraculous evidences, is guardedly expressed. It is only when Gibbon can

couch his lance against some reckless and impudent forger of Christian

evidences, such as Eusebius, that you have anything like a bold

condemnation. A prophecy or a miracle is treated tenderly, and if

killed, it is rather with over-affectionate courtesy than by rough

handling. In some parts of his vindications of the attacked passages,

Gibbon's scepticism finds vent in the collection and quotation of

unpleasantly heretical views of others, but he carefully avoids

committing himself to very distinct personal declarations of disbelief;

he claims to be the unbiased historian recording fact, and leaving

others to form their own conclusions. It would perhaps be most

appropriate to express his convictions as to the religions of the world,

in nearly the same words as those which he used to characterise the

various modes of worship at Rome: "All considered by the people as

equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate

as equally useful."

Pierre John George Cabanis, born at Conac, near Breves 5th June, 1757,

died 6th May, 1808, following Condillac in many respects, was one of

those whose physiological investigations have opened out wide fields of

knowledge in psychology, and who did much to promote the establishment

in France, America, and England, of a new school of Freethinkers.

"Subject to the action of external bodies," he says, "man finds in the

impressions these bodies make on his organs, at once his knowledge and

the causes of his continued existence, for to live is to feel; and in

that admirable chain of phenomena which constitute his existence, every

want depends on the development of some faculty; every faculty by its

very development satisfies some want, and the faculties grow by

exercise, as the wants extend with the facility of satisfying them. By

the continual action of external bodies on the senses of man, results

the most remarkable part of his existence. But is it true that the

nervous centres only receive and combine the impressions which reach

them from the bodies? Is it true that no image or idea is formed in the

brain, and that no determination of the sensative organ takes place,

other than by virtue of these same impressions on the senses strictly

so-called? The faculty of feeling and of spontaneous movement forms the

character of animal nature. The faculty of feeling consists in the

property possessed by the nervous system of being warned by the

impressions produced on its different parts, and notably on its

extremities. These impressions are internal or external. External

impressions, when perception is distinct, are called sensations.

Internal impressions are very often vague and confused, and the animal

is then only warned by their effects, and does not clearly distinguish

their connexion with the causes. The former result from the application

of external objects to the organs of sense, and on them ideas depend.

The latter result from the development of the regular functions, or from

the maladies to which each organ is subject; and from these issue those

determinations which bear the name of instincts. Feeling and movement

are linked together. Every movement is determined by an impression, and

the nerves, as the organs of feeling, animate and direct the motor

organs. In feeling, the nervous organ reacts on itself. In movement it

reacts on other parts, to which it communicates the contractile faculty,

the simple and fecund principle of all animal movement. Finally, the

vital functions can exercise themselves by the influence of some nervous

ramifications, isolated from the system--the instinctive faculties can

develop themselves, even when the brain is almost wholly destroyed, and

when it seems wholly inactive. But for the formation of thoughts, it is

necessary that the brain should exist, and be in a healthy condition; it

is the special organ of thought."

Thomas Paine, the most famous Deist of modern times, was born at

Thetford, on the 29th January, 1737, and died 8th June, 1809. It will

hardly be untrue to say that the famous "rebellious needleman" has been

the most popular writer in Great Britain and America against revealed

religion, and that his works, from their plain clear language, have in

those countries had, and still have, a far wider circulation than those

of any other modern sceptical author. His anti-theology was allied to

his republicanism; he warred alike against church and throne, and his

impeachment of each was couched in the plainest Anglo-Saxon. His name

became at the same time a word of terror to the aristocracy and to the

clergy. In England numerous prosecutions were commenced against the

vendors of his political and theological works, and against persons

suspected of giving currency to his views. The peace-officers searched

poor men's houses to discover his dreaded works. Lancashire and

Yorkshire artisans read him by stealth, and assembled in corners of

fields that they might discuss the "Age of Reason," and yet be safe from

surprise by the authorities. Heavy sentences were passed upon men

convicted of promulgating his opinions; but all without effect, the

forbidden fruit found eager gatherers. Paine appears to have been tinged

with scepticism from his early boyhood, but it was as a democratic

writer that he first achieved literary fame. His "Age of Reason" was the

culminating blow which the dying eighteenth century aimed at the Hebrew

and Christian records. Theretofore scholarly philosophers,

metaphysicians, and critics had written for their fellows, and whether

or not any of the mass read and understood, the authors cared but

little. Now the people were addressed by one of themselves in language

startling in its plainness. Paine was not a deep examiner of

metaphysical problems, but he was terribly in earnest in his rejection

of an impossible creed.

Charles Francois Dupuis was born near Chaumont, in France, the 16th Oct,

1742, died 29th Sept, 1809. He played a prominent part in the great

revolutionary movement, and was Secretary to the National Convention.

His famous work, "L'Origine de tous les Cultes," is one of the grand

heresy marks of the eighteenth century. Himself a Pantheist, he searched

through the mythic traditions of the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Hindus,

and the Hebrews, and as a result, sought to demonstrate a common origin

for all religions. Dr. John Pye Smith classes Dupuis as an Atheist, but

this is most certainly an incorrect classification. He did not believe

in creation, nor could he go outside the universe to search for its

cause, but he regarded God as _"la force universelle et eternellement

active,_ " which permeated and animated everything. Dupuis was an

example of a new and rapidly increasing class of Freethinking

writers--i.e., those who, not content with doubting the divine origin of

the religions they attacked, sought to explain the source and progress

of the various systems. He urges that all religions find their base in

the attempts at personification of some one or other, or of the whole of

the forces of the universe, and shows what an important part the sun and

moon have been made to play in the Egyptian, Greek, and Hindu

mythologies. He argues that the fabulous biographies of Hercules,

Bacchus, Osiris, Mithra, and Jesus, find their common origin in the

sun-worship, thus cloaked and hidden from the vulgar in each country. He

does not attack the Hebrew Records as simply inaccurate, but endeavors

to show clear Sabaistic foundation for many of the most important

narratives. The works of Dupuis and Dulaure should be read together;

they contain the most complete amongst the many attempts to trace out

the common origins of the various mythologies of the world. In the ninth

chapter of Dupuis' great work, he deals with the "fable made upon the

sun adored under the name of Christ," "_un dieu qui ait mange autrefois

sur la terre, et qu'on y mange aujourd'hui_" and unquestionably urges

strange points of coincidence. It is only astrologically that the 25th

of December can be fixed, he argues, as the birthday of Mithra and of

Jesus, then born of the celestial Virgin. Our Easter festivities for the

resurrection of Jesus are but another form of the more ancient rejoicing

at that season for Adonis, the sun-God, restored to the world after his

descent into the lower regions. He recalls that the ancient Druidic

worship recognised the Virgin suckling the child, and gathers together

many illustrations favorable to his theory. Here we do no more than

point out that while reason was rapidly releasing itself from priestly

thraldom, heretics were not content to deny the divine origin of

Christianity, but sought to trace its mundane or celestial source, and

strip it of its fabulous plumage.

Constantine Francis Chasseboeuf Count Volney, born at Craon in Anjou,

February 3rd, 1757, died 1820. He was a Deist. In his two great works,

"The Ruins of Empires," and "New Researches on Ancient History," he

advances many of the views brought forward by Dupuis, from whom he

quotes, but his volumes are much more readable than those of the author

of the "Origin of all Religions." Volney appears to have been one of the

first to popularise many of Spinoza's Biblical criticisms. He denied the

Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. He wrote most vigorously against

kingcraft as well as priestcraft, regarding all systems of monarchy and

religion as founded on the ignorance and servility, the superstition and

weakness of the people. He puts the following into the mouth of

Mahommedan priests replying to Christian preachers: "We maintain that

your gospel morality is by no means characterised by the perfection you

ascribe to it. It is not true that it has introduced into the world new

and unknown virtues; for example, the equality of mankind in the eyes of

God, and the fraternity and benevolence which are the consequence of

this equality, were tenets formerly professed by the sect of Hermetics

and Samaneans, from whom you have your descent. As to forgiveness of

injuries, it had been taught by the Pagans themselves; but in the

latitude you give to it, it ceases to be a virtue, and becomes an

immorality and a crime. Your boasted precept, to him that strikes thee

on thy right cheek turn the other also, is not only contrary to the

feelings of man, but a flagrant violation of every principle of justice;

it emboldens the wicked by impunity, degrades the virtuous by the

servility to which it subjects them; delivers up the world to disorder

and tyranny, and dissolves the bands of society--such is the true spirit

of your doctrine. The precepts and parables of your Gospel also never

represent God other than as a despot, acting by no rule of equity; than

as a partial father treating a debauched and prodigal son with greater

favor than his obedient and virtuous children; than as a capricious

master giving the same wages to him who has wrought but one hour, as to

those who have borne the burden and heat of the day, and preferring the

last comers to the first. In short, your morality throughout is

unfriendly to human intercourse; a code of misanthropy calculated to

give men a disgust for life and society, and attach them to solitude and

celibacy. With respect to the manner in which you have practised your

boasted doctrine, we in our turn appeal to the testimony of fact, and

ask, was it your evangelical meekness and forbearance which excited

those endless wars among your sectaries, those atrocious persecutions of

what you call heretics, those crusades against the Arians, the

Manichaeans, and the Protestants, not to mention those which you have

committed against us, nor the sacrilegious associations still subsisting

among you, formed of men who have sworn to perpetuate them?[1] Was it

the charity of your Gospel that led you to exterminate whole nations in

America, and to destroy the empires of Mexico and Peru; that makes you

still desolate Africa, the inhabitants of which you sell like cattle,

notwithstanding the abolition of slavery that you pretend your religion

has effected; that makes you ravage India whose domain you usurp; in

short, is it charity that has prompted you for three centuries past to

disturb the peaceful inhabitants of three continents, the most prudent

of whom, those of Japan and China, have been constrained to banish you

from their country, that they might escape your chains and recover their

domestic tranquillity?"

[1] The oath taken by the Knights of the Order of Malta is to kill, or

make the Mahometans prisoners, for the glory of God.

During the early part of the eighteenth century, magazines and other

periodicals began to grow apace, and pamphlets multiplied exceedingly in

this country. Addison, Steele, Defoe, and Dean Swift all helped in the

work of popular education, and often in a manner probably unanticipated

by themselves. Dean Swift's satire against scepticism was fiercely

powerful; but his onslaughts against Roman Catholics and Presbyterians

made far more sceptics than his other writings had made churchmen.

During the latter portion of the eighteenth century, a new phase of

popular progress was exhibited in the comparatively lively interest

taken in political questions by the great body of the people inhabiting

large towns. In America, France, and England, this was strongly marked;

it is, however, in this country that we find special evidences of the

connexion between heresy and progress, as contradistinguished from

orthodoxy and obstructiveness, manifested in the struggle for the

liberty of the press and platform; a struggle in which some of the

boldest efforts were made by poor and heretical self-taught men. The

dying eighteenth century witnessed, in England, repeated instances of

State prosecutions, in which the charge of entertaining or advocating

the views of the Republican heretic, Paine, formed a prominent feature,

and there is little doubt that the efforts of the London Corresponding

Society (which the Government of the day made strenuous endeavors to

repress) to give circulation to some of Paine's political opinions in

Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the North, had for result the familiarising

many men with views they would have otherwise feared to investigate. The

step from the "Rights of Man" to the "Age of Reason" was but a short

stride for an advancing inquirer. In France the end of the eighteenth

century was marked by a frightful convulsion, but in the case of France,

the revolution was too sudden to be immediately beneficial or enduring,

the people were as a mass too poor, and therefore too ignorant, to wield

the power so rapidly wrested from the class who had so long monopolised

it. It is far better to grow out of a creed by the sure and gradual

consciousness of the truths of existence, than to dash off a religious

garb simply from abhorrence of the shameful practices of its professors,

or sudden conviction of the falsity of many of the testimonies in its

favor. So it is a more permanent and more complete revolution which is

effectuated by educating men to a sense of the majesty and worth of true

manhood, than is any mere sudden overturning a rotten or cruel

usurpation. Monarchies are most thoroughly and entirely destroyed--not

by pulling down the throne, or by decapitating the king, but by

educating and building up with a knowledge of political duty, each

individual citizen amongst the people.

It is here that heresy has its great advantage. Christianity says: "The

powers that be are ordained of God, he that resisteth the power

resisteth the ordinance of God." Heresy challenges the divine right of

the governor, and declares that government should be the best

contrivance of national wisdom to promote the national weal, to provide

against national want, and alleviate national suffering--that government

which is only a costly machinery for conserving class privileges, and

preventing popular freedom, is a tyrannical usurpation of power, which

it is the duty of true men to destroy.

I have briefly and imperfectly alluded to a few of the men who stand out

as the sign-posts of heretical progress during the sixteenth,

seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries; in some future publication of

wider scope fairer tribute may be paid to the memories of some of these

mighty warriors in the Freethought army. My object is to show that the

civilisation of the masses is in proportion to the spread of heresy

amongst them, that its effect is seen in an exhibition of manly dignity

and self-reliant effort which is utterly unattainable amongst a

superstitious people. Look at the lazzaroni of the Neapolitan States, or

the peasant of the Campagna, and you have at once the fearful

illustration of demoralisation by faith in the beggar, brigand, and

believer.

It is sometimes pretended that such advantages of education and position

as the people may boast in England, their civil rights and social

advancement, are owing to their Christianity, but in point of fact the

reverse is the case. For centuries Christianity had done little but

fetter tightly the masses to Church and Crown, to Priest and Baron; the

enfranchisement is comparatively modern. Even in this very day, in the

districts where the people are entirely in the hands of the clergy of

the Established Church, there they are as a mass the most depraved. Take

the agricultural counties and the agricultural laborers: there are no

heretical books or papers to be seen in their cottages, no heretical

speakers come amongst them to disturb their contentment; the

deputy-lieutenant, the squire, and the rector wield supreme

authority--the parish church has no rival. But what are the people as a

mass? They are not men, they are not women; they lack men's and women's

thoughts and aspirations; they are diggers and weeders, hedgers and

ditchers, ploughmen and carters; they are taught to be content with the

state of life in which it has pleased God to place them.

My plea is, that modern heresy, from Spinoza to Mill, has given

brain-strength and dignity to every one it has permeated--that the

popular propagandists of this heresy, from Bruno to Carlile, have been

the true redeemers and saviors, the true educators of the people. The

redemption is yet only at its commencement, the education only lately

begun, but the change is traceable already; as witness the power to

speak and write, and the ability to listen and read, which have grown

amongst the masses during the last hundred years. And if to-day we write

with higher hope, it is because the right to speak and the right to

print has been partly freed from the fetters forged through long

generations of intellectual prostration, and almost entirely freed from

the statutory limitations which, under pretence of checking blasphemy

and sedition, have really gagged honest speech against Pope and Emperor,

against Church and Throne.

HUMANITY'S GAIN FROM UNBELIEF

AS an unbeliever, I ask leave to plead that humanity has been real

gainer from scepticism, and that the gradual and growing rejection of

Christianity--like the rejection of the faiths which preceded it--has in

fact added, and will add, to man's happiness and well being. I maintain

that in physics science is the outcome of scepticism, and that general

progress is impossible without scepticism on matters of religion. I mean

by religion every form of belief which accepts or asserts the

supernatural. I write as a Monist, and use the word "nature" as meaning

all phenomena, every phenomenon, all that is necessary for the happening

of any and every phenomenon. Every religion is constantly changing, and

at any given time is the measure of the civilisation attained by what

Guizot described as the _juste milieu_ of those who profess it. Each

religion is slowly but certainly modified in its dogma and practice by

the gradual development of the peoples amongst whom it is professed.

Each discovery destroys in whole or part some theretofore cherished

belief. No religion is suddenly rejected by any people; it is rather

gradually out-grown. None see a religion die; dead religions are like

dead languages and obsolete customs; the decay is long and--like the

glacier march--is only perceptible to the careful watcher by comparisons

extending over long periods. A superseded religion may often be traced

in the festivals, ceremonies, and dogmas of the religion which has

replaced it. Traces of obsolete religions may often be found in popular

customs, in old wives' stories, and in children's tales.

It is necessary, in order that my plea should be understood, that I

should explain what I mean by Christianity; and in the very attempt at

this explanation there will, I think, be found strong illustration of

the value of unbelief. Christianity in practice may be gathered from its

more ancient forms, represented by the Roman Catholic and the Greek

Churches, or from the various churches which have grown up in the last

few centuries. Each of these churches calls itself Christian. Some of

them deny the right of the others to use the word Christian. Some

Christian churches treat, or have treated, other Christian churches as

heretics or unbelievers. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants in

Great Britain and Ireland have in turn been terribly cruel one to the

other; and the ferocious laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, enacted by the English Protestants against English and Irish

Papists, are a disgrace to civilisation. These penal laws, enduring

longest in Ireland, still bear fruit in much of the political mischief

and agrarian crime of to-day. It is only the tolerant indifference of

scepticism that, one after the other, has repealed most of the laws

directed by the Established Christian Church against Papists and

Dissenters, and also against Jews and heretics. Church of England

clergymen have in the past gone to great lengths in denouncing

nonconformity; and even in the present day an effective sample of such

denunciatory bigotry may be found in a sort of orthodox catechism

written by the Rev. F.A. Gace, of Great Barling, Essex, the popularity

of which is vouched by the fact that it has gone through ten editions.

This catechism for little children teaches that "Dissent is a great

sin," and that Dissenters "worship God according to their own evil and

corrupt imaginations, and not according to his revealed will, and

therefore their worship is idolatrous." Church of England Christians and

Dissenting Christians, when fraternising amongst themselves, often

publicly draw the line at Unitarians, and positively deny that these

have any sort of right to call themselves Christians.

In the first half of the seventeenth century Quakers were flogged and

imprisoned in England as blasphemers; and the early Christian settlers

in New England, escaping from the persecution of Old World Christians,

showed scant mercy to the followers of Fox and Penn. It is customary, in

controversy, for those advocating the claims of Christianity, to include

all good done by men in nominally Christian countries as if such good

were the result of Christianity, while they contend that the evil which

exists prevails in spite of Christianity. I shall try to make out that

the ameliorating march of the last few centuries has been initiated by

the heretics of each age, though I quite concede that the men and women

denounced and persecuted as infidels by the pious of one century, are

frequently claimed as saints by the pious of a later generation.

What then is Christianity? As a system or scheme of doctrine,

Christianity may, I submit, not unfairly be gathered from the Old and

New Testaments. It is true that some Christians to-day desire to escape

from submission to portions, at any rate, of the Old Testament; but this

very tendency seems to me to be part of the result of the beneficial

heresy for which I am pleading. Man's humanity has revolted against Old

Testament barbarism; and therefore he has attempted to disassociate the

Old Testament from Christianity. Unless Old and New Testaments are

accepted as God's revelation to man, Christianity has no higher claim

than any other of the world's many religions, if no such claim can be

made out for it apart from the Bible. And though it is quite true that

some who deem themselves Christians put the Old Testament completely in

the background, this is, I allege, because they are out-growing their

Christianity. Without the doctrine of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus,

Christianity, as a religion, is naught; but unless the story of Adam's

fall is accepted, the redemption from the consequences of that fall

cannot be believed. Both in Great Britain and in the United States the

Old and New Testaments are forced on the people as part of Christianity;

for it is blasphemy at common law to deny the scriptures of the Old and

New Testaments to be of divine authority; and such denial is punishable

with fine and imprisonment, or even worse. The rejection of Christianity

intended throughout this paper, is therefore the rejection of the Old

and New Testaments as being of divine revelation. It is the rejection

alike of the authorised teachings of the Church of Rome and of the

Church of England, as these may be found in the Bible, the creeds, the

encyclicals, the prayer book, the canons and homilies of either or both

of these churches. It is the rejection of the Christianity of Luther, of

Calvin, and of Wesley.

A ground frequently taken by Christian theologians is that the progress

and civilisation of the world are due to Christianity; and the

discussion is complicated by the fact that many eminent servants of

humanity have been nominal Christians, of one or other of the sects. My

allegation will be that the special services rendered to human progress

by these exceptional men, have not been in consequence of their adhesion

to Christianity, but in spite of it; and that the specific points of

advantage to human kind have been in ratio of their direct opposition to

precise Biblical enactments.

A.S. Farrar says[2] that Christianity "asserts authority over religious

belief in virtue of being a supernatural communication from God, and

claims the right to control human thought in virtue of possessing sacred

books, which are at once the record and the instrument of the

communication, written by men endowed with supernatural inspiration."

Unbelievers refuse to submit to the asserted authority, and deny this

claim of control over human thought: they allege that every effort at

freethinking must provoke sturdier thought.

[2] Farrar's "Critical History of Freethought".

Take one clear gain to humanity consequent on unbelief, i.e., in the

abolition of slavery in some countries, in the abolition of the slave

trade in most civilised countries, and in the tendency to its total

abolition. I am unaware of any religion in the world which in the past

forbade slavery. The professors of Christianity for ages supported it;

the Old Testament repeatedly sanctioned it by special laws; the New

Testament has no repealing declaration. Though we are at the close of

the nineteenth century of the Christian era, it is only during the past

three-quarters of a century that the battle for freedom has been

gradually won. It is scarcely a quarter of a century since the famous

emancipation amendment was carried to the United States Constitution.

And it is impossible for any well-informed Christian to deny that the

abolition movement in North America was most steadily and bitterly

opposed by the religious bodies in the various States. Henry Wilson, in

his "Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America;" Samuel J. May, in his

"Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Conflict;" and J. Greenleaf Whittier,

in his poems, alike are witnesses that the Bible and pulpit, the Church

and its great influence, were used against abolition and in favor of the

slave-owner. I know that Christians in the present day often declare

that Christianity had a large share in bringing about the abolition of

slavery, and this because men professing Christianity were

abolitionists. I plead that these so-called Christian abolitionists were

men and women whose humanity, recognising freedom for all, was in this

in direct conflict with Christianity. It is not yet fifty years since

the European Christian powers jointly agreed to abolish the slave trade.

What of the effect of Christianity on these powers in the centuries

which had preceded? The heretic Condorcet pleaded powerfully for freedom

whilst Christian France was still slave-holding. For many centuries

Christian Spain and Christian Portugal held slaves. Porto Rico freedom

is not of long date; and Cuban emancipation is even yet newer. It was a

Christian King, Charles 5th, and a Christian friar, who founded in

Spanish America the slave trade between the Old World and the New. For

some 1800 years, almost, Christians kept slaves, bought slaves, sold

slaves, bred slaves, stole slaves. Pious Bristol and godly Liverpool

less than 100 years ago openly grew rich on the traffic. During the

ninth century Greek Christians sold slaves to the Saracens. In the

eleventh century prostitutes were publicly sold as slaves in Rome, and

the profit went to the Church.

It is said that William Wilberforce, the abolitionist, was a Christian.

But at any rate his Christianity was strongly diluted with unbelief. As

an abolitionist he did not believe Leviticus xxv, 44-6; he must have

rejected Exodus xxi, 2-6; he could not have accepted the many

permissions and injunctions by the Bible deity to his chosen people to

capture and hold slaves. In the House of Commons on 18th February, 1796,

Wilberforce reminded that Christian assembly that infidel and anarchic

France had given liberty to the Africans, whilst Christian and monarchic

England was "obstinately continuing a system of cruelty and injustice."

Wilberforce, whilst advocating the abolition of slavery, found the whole

influence of the English Court, and the great weight of the Episcopal

Bench, against him. George III, a most Christian king, regarded

abolition theories with abhorrence, and the Christian House of Lords was

utterly opposed to granting freedom to the slave. When Christian

missionaries some sixty-two years ago preached to Demerara negroes under

the rule of Christian England, they were treated by Christian judges,

holding commission from Christian England, as criminals for so

preaching. A Christian commissioned officer, member of the Established

Church of England, signed the auction notices for the sale of slaves as

late as the year 1824. In the evidence before a Christian court-martial,

a missionary is charged with having tended to make the negroes

dissatisfied with their condition as slaves, and with having promoted

discontent and dissatisfaction amongst the slaves against their lawful

masters. For this the Christian judges sentenced the Demerara

abolitionist missionary to be hanged by the neck till he was dead. The

judges belonged to the Established Church; the missionary was a

Methodist. In this the Church of England Christians in Demerara were no

worse than Christians of other sects: their Roman Catholic Christian

brethren in St. Domingo fiercely attacked the Jesuits as criminals

because they treated negroes as though they were men and women, in

encouraging "two slaves to separate their interest and safety from that

of the gang," whilst orthodox Christians let them couple promiscuously

and breed for the benefit of their owners like any other of their

plantation cattle. In 1823 the _Royal Gazette_ (Christian) of Demerara

said:

"We shall not suffer you to enlighten our slaves, who are by law our

property, till you can demonstrate that when they are made religious and

knowing they will continue to be our slaves."

When William Lloyd Garrison, the pure-minded and most earnest

abolitionist, delivered his first anti-slavery address in Boston,

Massachusetts, the only building he could obtain, in which to speak, was

the infidel hall owned by Abner Kneeland, the "infidel" editor of the

_Boston Investigator_, who had been sent to gaol for blasphemy. Every

Christian sect had in turn refused Mr. Lloyd Garrison the use of the

buildings they severally controlled. Lloyd Garrison told me himself how

honored deacons of a Christian Church joined in an actual attempt to

hang him.

When abolition was advocated in the United States in 1790, the

representative from South Carolina was able to plead that the Southern

clergy "did not condemn either slavery or the slave trade;" and Mr.

Jackson, the representative from Georgia, pleaded that "from Genesis to

Revelation" the current was favorable to slavery. Elias Hicks, the brave

Abolitionist Quaker, was denounced as an Atheist, and less than twenty

years ago a Hicksite Quaker was expelled from one of the Southern

American Legislatures, because of the reputed irreligion of these

abolitionist "Friends."

When the Fugitive Slave Law was under discussion in North America, large

numbers of clergymen of nearly every denomination were found ready to

defend this infamous law. Samuel James May, the famous abolitionist, was

driven from the pulpit as irreligious, solely because of his attacks on

slaveholding.[3] Northern clergymen tried to induce "silver tongued"

Wendell Philips to abandon his advocacy of abolition. Southern pulpits

rang with praises for the murderous attack on Charles Sumner. The

slayers of Elijah Lovejoy were highly reputed Christian men.

[3] "Capital and Wages," p. 19.

Guizot, notwithstanding that he tries to claim that the Church exerted

its influence to restrain slavery, says ("European Civilisation," vol.

i, p. 110):

"It has often been repeated that the abolition of slavery among modern

people is entirely due to Christians. That, I think, is saying too much.

Slavery existed for a long period in the heart of Christian society,

without its being particularly astonished or irritated. A multitude of

causes, and a great development in other ideas and principles of

civilisation, were necessary for the abolition of this iniquity of all

iniquities."

And my contention is that this "development in other ideas and

principles of civilisation" was long retarded by Governments in which

the Christian Church was dominant. The men who advocated liberty were

imprisoned, racked, and burned, so long as the Church was strong enough

to be merciless.

The Rev. Francis Minton, Rector of Middlewich, in his recent earnest

volume on the struggles of labor, admits that "a few centuries ago

slavery was acknowledged throughout Christendom to have the divine

sanction.... Neither the exact cause, nor the precise time of the

decline of the belief in the righteousness of slavery can be defined. It

was doubtless due to a combination of causes, one probably being as

indirect as the recognition of the greater economy of free labor. With

the decline of the belief the abolition of slavery took place."

The institution of slavery was actually existent in Christian Scotland

in the 17th century, where the white coal workers and salt workers of

East Lothian were chattels, as were their negro brethren in the Southern

States thirty years since; they "went to those who succeeded to the

property of the works, and they could be sold, bartered, or pawned."[4]

"There is," says J.M. Robertson, "no trace that the Protestant clergy of

Scotland ever raised a voice against the slavery which grew up before

their eyes. And it was not until 1799, after republican and irreligious

France had set the example, that it was legally abolished."

[4] "Perversion of Scotland," p. 197.

Take further the gain to humanity consequent on the unbelief, or rather

disbelief, in witchcraft and wizardry. Apart from the brutality by

Christians towards those suspected of witchcraft, the hindrance to

scientific initiative or experiment was incalculably great so long as

belief in magic obtained. The inventions of the past two centuries, and

especially those of the 18th century, might have benefitted mankind much

earlier and much more largely, but for the foolish belief in witchcraft

and the shocking ferocity exhibited against those suspected of

necromancy. After quoting a large number of cases of trial and

punishment for witchcraft from official records in Scotland, J.M.

Robertson says: "The people seem to have passed from cruelty to cruelty

precisely as they became more and more fanatical, more and more devoted

to their Church, till after many generations the slow spread of human

science began to counteract the ravages of superstition, the clergy

resisting reason and humanity to the last."

The Rev. Mr. Minton[5] concedes that it is "the advance of knowledge

which has rendered the idea of Satanic agency through the medium of

witchcraft grotesquely ridiculous." He admits that "for more than 1500

years the belief in witchcraft was universal in Christendom," and that

"the public mind was saturated with the idea of Satanic agency in the

economy of nature." He adds: "If we ask why the world now rejects what

was once so unquestioningly believed, we can only reply that advancing

knowledge has gradually undermined the belief."

[5] "Capital and Wages," pp. 15, 16.

In a letter recently sent to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ against modern

Spiritualism, Professor Huxley declares, "that the older form of the

same fundamental delusion--the belief in possession and in

witchcraft--gave rise in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth

centuries to persecutions by Christians of innocent men, women, and

children, more extensive, more cruel, and more murderous than any to

which the Christians of the first three centuries were subjected by the

authorities of pagan Rome."

And Professor Huxley adds: "No one deserves much blame for being

deceived in these matters. We are all intellectually handicapped in

youth by the incessant repetition of the stories about possession and

witchcraft in both the Old and the New Testaments. The majority of us

are taught nothing which will help us to observe accurately and to

interpret observations with due caution."

The English Statute Book under Elizabeth and under James was disfigured

by enactments against witchcraft passed under pressure from the

Christian churches, which Acts have only been repealed in consequence of

the disbelief in the Christian precept, "thou shalt not suffer a witch

to live." The statute 1 James I, c. 12, condemned to death "all persons

invoking any evil spirits, or consulting, covenanting with,

entertaining, employing, feeding, or rewarding any evil spirit" or

generally practising any "infernal arts." This was not repealed until

the eighteenth century was far advanced. Edison's phonograph would 280

years ago have insured martyrdom for its inventor; the utilisation of

electric force to transmit messages around the world would have been

clearly the practice of an infernal art. At least we may plead that

unbelief has healed the bleeding feet of science, and made the road free

for her upward march.

Is it not also fair to urge the gain to humanity which has been apparent

in the wiser treatment of the insane, consequent on the unbelief in the

Christian doctrine that these unfortunates were examples either of

demoniacal possession or of special visitation of deity? For centuries

under Christianity mental disease was most ignorantly treated. Exorcism,

shackles, and the whip were the penalties rather than the curatives for

mental maladies. From the heretical departure of Pinel at the close of

the last century to the position of Maudsley to-day, every step

illustrates the march of unbelief. Take the gain to humanity in the

unbelief not yet complete, but now largely preponderant, in the dogma

that sickness, pestilence, and famine were manifestations of divine

anger, the results of which could neither be avoided nor prevented. The

Christian Churches have done little or nothing to dispel this

superstition. The official and authorised prayers of the principal

denominations, even to-day, reaffirm it. Modern study of the laws of

health, experiments in sanitary improvements, more careful applications

of medical knowledge, have proved more efficacious in preventing or

diminishing plagues and pestilence than have the intervention of the

priest or the practice of prayer. Those in England who hold the old

faith that prayer will suffice to cure disease are to-day termed

"peculiar people" and are occasionally indicted for manslaughter when

their sick children die, because the parents have trusted to God instead

of appealing to the resources of science.

It is certainly a clear gain to astronomical science that the Church

which tried to compel Galileo to unsay the truth has been overborne by

the growing unbelief of the age, even though our little children are yet

taught that Joshua made the sun and moon stand still, and that for

Hezekiah the sun-dial reversed its record. As Buckle, arguing for the

morality of scepticism, says:[6]

[6] "History of Civilisation," vol. i, p. 345.

"As long as men refer the movements of the comets to the immediate

finger of God, and as long as they believe that an eclipse is one of the

modes by which the deity expresses his anger, they will never be guilty

of the blasphemous presumption of attempting to predict such

supernatural appearances. Before they could dare to investigate the

causes of these mysterious phenomena, it is necessary that they should

believe, or at all events that they should suspect, that the phenomena

themselves were capable of being explained by the human mind."

As in astronomy so in geology, the gain of knowledge to humanity has

been almost solely in measure of the rejection of the Christian theory.

A century since it was almost universally held that the world was

created 6,000 years ago, or at any rate, that by the sin of the first

man, Adam, death commenced about that period. Ethnology and Anthropology

have only been possible in so far as, adopting the regretful words of

Sir W. Jones, "intelligent and virtuous persons are inclined to doubt

the authenticity of the accounts delivered by Moses concerning the

primitive world."

Surely it is clear gain to humanity that unbelief has sprung up against

the divine right of kings, that men no longer believe that the monarch

is "God's anointed" or that "the powers that be are ordained of God." In

the struggles for political freedom the weight of the Church was mostly

thrown on the side of the tyrant. The homilies of the Church of England

declare that "even the wicked rulers have their power and authority from

God," and that "such subjects as are disobedient or rebellious against

their princes disobey God and procure their own damnation." It can

scarcely be necessary to argue to the citizens of the United States of

America that the origin of their liberties was in the rejection of faith

in the divine right of George III.

Will any one, save the most bigoted, contend that it is not certain gain

to humanity to spread unbelief in the terrible doctrine that eternal

torment is the probable fate of the great majority of the human family?

Is it not gain to have diminished the faith that it was the duty of the

wretched and the miserable to be content with the lot in life which

providence had awarded them?

If it stood alone it would be almost sufficient to plead as

justification for heresy the approach towards equality and liberty for

the utterance of all opinions achieved because of growing unbelief. At

one period in Christendom each Government acted as though only one

religious faith could be true, and as though the holding, or at any rate

the making known, any other opinion was a criminal act deserving

punishment. Under the one word "infidel," even as late as Lord Coke,

were classed together all who were not Christians, even though they were

Mahommedans, Brahmins, or Jews. All who did not accept the Christian

faith were sweepingly denounced as infidels and therefore _hors de la

loi_. One hundred and forty-five years since, the Attorney-General,

pleading in our highest court, said:[7] "What is the definition of an

infidel? Why, one who does not believe in the Christian religion. Then a

Jew is an infidel." And English history for several centuries prior to

the Commonwealth shows how habitually and most atrociously Christian

kings, Christian courts, and Christian churches, persecuted and harassed

these infidel Jews. There was a time in England when Jews were such

infidels that they were not even allowed to be sworn as witnesses. In

1740 a legacy left for establishing an assembly for the reading of the

Jewish scriptures was held to be void[8] because it was "for the

propagation of the Jewish law in contradiction to the Christian

religion." It is only in very modern times that municipal rights have

been accorded in England to Jews. It is barely thirty years since they

have been allowed to sit in Parliament. In 1851, the late Mr. Newdegate

in debate[9] objected "that they should have sitting in that House an

individual who regarded our Redeemer as an impostor." Lord Chief Justice

Raymond has shown[10] how it was that Christian intolerance was

gradually broken down. "A Jew may sue at this day, but heretofore he

could not; for then they were looked upon as enemies, but now commerce

has taught the world more humanity."

[7] Omychund v. Barker, 1 Atkyns 29.

[8] D'Costa v. D'Pays, Amb. 228.

[9] 3 Hansard cxvi, 381.

[10] Lord Raymond's reports 282, Wells v. Williams.

Lord Coke treated the infidel as one who in law had no right of any

kind, with whom no contract need be kept, to whom no debt was payable.

The plea of alien infidel as answer to a claim was actually pleaded in

court as late as 1737.[11] In a solemn judgment, Lord Coke says:[12]

[11] Ramkissenseat v Barker, 1 Atkyns 51.

[12] Coke's reports, Calvin's case.

"All infidels are in law _perpetui inimici_; for between them, as with

the devils whose subjects they be, and the Christian, there is perpetual

hostility." Twenty years ago the law of England required the writer of

any periodical publication or pamphlet under sixpence in price to give

sureties for L800 against the publication of blasphemy. I was the last

person prosecuted in 1868 for non-compliance with that law, which was

repealed by Mr. Gladstone in 1869. Up till the 23rd December, 1888, an

infidel in Scotland was only allowed to enforce any legal claim in court

on condition that, if challenged, he denied his infidelity. If he lied

and said he was a Christian, he was accepted, despite his lying. If he

told the truth and said he was an unbeliever, then he was practically an

outlaw, incompetent to give evidence for himself or for any other.

Fortunately all this was changed by the Royal assent to the Oaths Act on

24th December. Has not humanity clearly gained a little in this struggle

through unbelief?

For more than a century and a half the Roman Catholic had in practice

harsher measure dealt out to him by the English Protestant Christian,

than was even during that period the fate of the Jew or the unbeliever.

If the Roman Catholic would not take the oath of abnegation, which to a

sincere Romanist was impossible, he was in effect an outlaw, and the

"jury packing" so much complained of to-day in Ireland is one of the

habit survivals of the old bad time when Roman Catholics were thus by

law excluded from the jury box.

_The Scotsman_ of January 5th, 1889, notes that in 1860 the Rev. Dr.

Robert Lee, of Greyfriars, gave a course of Sunday evening lectures on

Biblical Criticism, in which he showed the absurdity and untenableness

of regarding every word in the Bible as inspired; and it adds:

"We well remember the awful indignation such opinions inspired, and it

is refreshing to contrast them with the calmness with which they are now

received. Not only from the pulpits of the city, but from the press

(misnamed religious) were his doctrines denounced. And one eminent U.P.

minister went the length of publicly praying for him, and for the

students under his care. It speaks volumes for the progress made since

then, when we think in all probability Dr. Charteris, Dr. Lee's

successor in the chair, differs in his teaching from the Confession of

Faith much more widely than Dr. Lee ever did, and yet he is considered

supremely orthodox, whereas the stigma of heresy was attached to the

other all his life."

And this change and gain to humanity is due to the gradual progress of

unbelief, alike inside and outside the Churches. Take from differing

Churches two recent illustrations: The late Principal Dr. Lindsay

Alexander, a strict Calvinist, in his important work on "Biblical

Theology" claims that "all the statements of Scripture are alike to be

deferred to as presenting to us the mind of God."

Yet the Rev. Dr. of Divinity also says:

"We find in their writings [i.e., in the writings of the sacred authors]

statements which no ingenuity can reconcile with what modern research

has shown to be the scientific truth--i.e., we find in them statements

which modern science proves to be erroneous."

At the last Southwell Diocesan Church of England Conference at Derby,

the Bishop of the Diocese presiding, the Rev. J.G. Richardson said of

the Old Testament that "it was no longer honest or even safe to deny

that this noble literature, rich in all the elements of moral or

spiritual grandeur, given--so the Church had always taught, and would

always teach--under the inspiration of Almighty God, was sometimes

mistaken in its science, was sometimes inaccurate in its history, and

sometimes only relative and accommodatory in its morality. It assumed

theories of the physical world which science had abandoned and could

never resume; it contained passages of narrative which devout and

temperate men pronounced discredited, both by external and internal

evidence; it praised, or justified, or approved, or condoned, or

tolerated, conduct which the teaching of Christ and the conscience of

the Christian alike condemned."

Or, as I should urge, the gain to humanity by unbelief is that "the

teaching of Christ" has been modified, enlarged, widened, and humanised,

and that "the conscience of the Christian" is in quantity and quality

made fitter for human progress by the ever increasing additions of

knowledge of these later and more heretical days.

SUPERNATURAL AND RATIONAL MORALITY

THE essential of all religion is supernaturalism, and every religious

system therefore involves at least dualism; as creator and created,

ruler and ruled. This definition would, of course, exclude Pantheism

from consideration as a religion. Supernaturalism is for a rationalist a

word of self-contradiction. Nature to him means all phenomena, and all

that is necessary to the happening of every phenomenon; that is, nature

is the equivalent of everything. To the rationalist there can be nothing

supernatural. He is a Monist. There is, he affirms, one existence; he

knows only its phenomena. These phenomena he distinguishes in thought by

their varying characteristics. To the rationalist the word "create" in

the sense of absolute origin of substance is a word without meaning. He

cannot think totality of existence increased or non-existent.

"Substance," "existence," "matter," is to him the totality: known, and,

as far as he can yet think, knowable only in its phenomena.

It has been assumed so generally by religious advocates that some

theologic dogma is necessary to every system of morality that the

assumption needs direct traverse. It is put to-day by many of those who

are attacking secular education for the young that without religious

teaching there is no morality possible. This inaccuracy of speech is the

result of centuries of supernaturalistic bias. Buckle considers

Charron's "Treatise on Wisdom" as the first "attempt made in a modern

language to construct a system of morals without the aid of theology."

Charron says (Book II, chap. 5, sec. 4) that moral duties "are purely

the result of a reasonable and thinking mind."

It will be contended here that every system of "supernatural" morality

is necessarily uncertain, arbitrary, and confusing. That moral progress

is only made in the ratio in which supernaturalism is diminished.

THE RATIONALIST VIEW

To the rationalist that act is moral which tends to the greatest

happiness of the greatest number of the human family with the least

injury to any. That is, the test of the morality of any act is its

utility. The experience of all ages, collated and classified by the most

careful and accurate amongst investigators and profound thinkers, and

checked and verified by each day's new discoveries and newer

speculations, furnishes each individual with a sufficient but not

infallible moral guide. Morality is social; that is, all acts are moral

which tend to promote, build up, and ensure the permanent well being of

society. Tendencies to moral conduct are transmitted partly by the

training of the young by those already with recognised habit of life,

and partly by the influence of heredity. In England Jeremy Bentham and

John Stuart Mill have been chiefly identified with the modern

affirmation of this utilitarian theory, and R. Hildreth, the translator

of Dumont's "Bentham," says: "Whatever may be thought of the principle

of utility, when considered as the foundation of morals, no one

now-a-days will undertake to deny that it is the only safe rule of

legislation." Theologians object to the rationalist presentment of

morality: (a) That, according to the rationalist, morality varies, or,

(b) that at any rate the conceptions of morality vary. That with

different persons, therefore, there may be different views of what is

moral, and there being no reliable, unchangeable, and definite standard,

the rationalist position is chaotic. (c) The theologian asks, who is to

judge on each act, whether or not it is moral? and (d) the theologian

alleges that the measure of rational morality is the equivalent of mere

individual selfishness, i.e. that the rationalist only seeks his own

happiness, that is, only seeks to gratify his own desires.

The rationalist answers (a) that the test of rational morality never

varies; that the ability to apply the test does vary with the higher

education of the masses. (b) That the standard, though not infallible,

is sufficiently reliable for everyday life, and that rationalists seek

each day to improve the efficiency of the standard by enforcing

generally more accurate knowledge of life-conditions, thus developing a

sound healthy public opinion. (c) Each individual must judge for herself

or himself, and therefore should be well taught, or at least should have

fair opportunity of being well taught, and should be encouraged to be

well taught. It follows from this that morality develops with education.

Immorality and ignorance are inseparable. (d) That if it be selfish to

desire personal happiness, knowing that to permanently secure such

happiness it is necessary to always promote the happiness of the

majority, avoiding injury to any, then the rational moralist must be

content to be called selfish. He suggests that if there is anything in

the objection, it equally, if not with greater force, applies to the

Christian supernaturalist who desires to be eternally happy though he

knows that "few are chosen," and that "many shall strive to enter in and

shall not be able."

THE SUPERNATURAL VIEW

That act is moral which is in obedience to or in accord with the

commands of deity. That these commands are known (a) by direct

revelation from God; or (b) through the human conscience, which it is

alleged is implanted by God in each individual, and which infallibly

decides for each person what acts are right and what are wrong.

"For those who believe in the God of Christian morality," says the Rev.

J. Llewellyn Davies, in the preface to his discourses on social

questions, "the ultimate sources and rule of morality can be no other

than His will;" and Mr. Davies contends that rationalists "can find no

scientific basis for duty, no adequate explanation of conscience."

The rationalist objects (a) that the commands of deity must be expressed

either (1) to individuals or (2) to the whole race. In the first case

the rationalist asks, How is it to be determined when any individual is

reliable who professes to be the recipient and interpreter of God's

commands? In the second case he asks, Is it conceivable that any such

command should have been given to the whole human race without its most

complete recognition on the part of the recipients? When an individual

claims to be the medium of transmission of divine communication, how is

his claim to be tested? How is it clear that the communication was made?

that the individual understood it? and that he has correctly interpreted

it? If by the quality of the communication he makes, then by what

standard is the quality to be judged? The Mahdi claimed to be God-sent;

Joseph Smith declared himself charged with a special revelation; so did

Mahomet; so did Jesus. How, in either case, is it to be determined

whether the prophet is sane and truthful? Is it to be decided by the

numbers who accepted or rejected the prophet? and if yes, at what date

or within what limits does the numerical strength become material? There

are more Mormons now than there were Christians within a like period.

Mahomedanism in some countries would poll an overwhelming majority.

Buddhism counts to-day far more heads than can be claimed for

Christianity. And what is called Christianity is subdivisible into many

sects as hostile to each other, though Christian, as the Christian is to

the Mahomedan.

There is most certainly no one revelation to the whole race universally

admitted to be the revealed command of God. It is asserted by some that

the Bible is such a revelation, but the large majority of the world's

inhabitants do not now accept it: the largest proportion of the human

family have never accepted it. And even of the minority who nominally

accept the Bible as God's revelation, there are many, calling themselves

Christians, who declare that the Old Testament is now very imperfect as

a moral guide, and that it was only given to the Jews on account of the

hardness of their hearts; whilst the Jews on the other hand entirely

reject the New Testament. Christians are divided into Roman Catholics

and Protestants. The latter say, or at any rate in majority say, that

the Bible is an infallible moral guide. Roman Catholics deny that the

Bible is a rule of faith except under the interpretation of the Church.

Protestants are divided as to the value of various versions and

translations, and as to the extent to which the Old Testament is to be

regarded as superseded by the New. Even in the Church of England there

is an authorised version and a revised improvement as yet unauthorised.

(b) The rationalist further objects that what is described by the

supernaturalist as the human conscience is not a special faculty,

unvarying and identical in all, but that it is in each individual a

variable result of heredity, organisation, education, and general

life-surroundings, enabling judgment by the individual on the

consequence of events; that it affords no reliable clue to what is

moral, for the general judgments of public conscience as embodied in

public opinion, or in statute law, have varied in the same country in

different ages to the extent sometimes of absolute and irreconcileable

contradiction. That the individual conscience, so-called, varies in the

same individual at different periods of his life and under different

conditions of health. That at the present moment the judgments of

conscience are on most material points in direct conflict in different

parts of the world. Two hundred and fifty years ago it was moral in

England to believe in witches, and it was a moral act to kill a witch.

To-day it is held immoral to believe in witchcraft; to kill a witch

would now be at law a criminal act. Witchcraft is so admittedly false

that palmistry, conjuring, and fortune-telling are treated as punishable

frauds. Yet from the supernatural point of view the reality of

witchcraft is unquestionable, and the praiseworthiness of witchkilling

is indisputable (_vide_ Exodus xxii, 18; Leviticus xix, 26-31, xx, 27;

Deut. xviii, 10, 11; 1 Sam. xxviii). And in some of the districts of

England where school boards are yet without influence and where godless

education has been prevented, the pious ignorant folk still believe in

charms, wise women, and white and black magic.

One hundred years ago it was moral to trade in slaves, to own slaves,

and to breed slaves. Even twenty-five years ago it was moral to own and

breed slaves in the United States of America. Pious Bristol

slave-traders in the 18th century endowed churches from the profits of

their commerce. To-day slave-holding is not only punishable by law, but

the theory of slavery is indignantly repudiated by all decent English

folk. And yet supernaturalism maintained and legalised slavery

(Leviticus xxv, 44-46). Wilberforce, the English abolitionist, himself a

professing Christian, noting that infidel France had set its negroes

free, asked in the House of Commons, on February 11th, 1796: "What would

some future historian say in describing two great nations, the one

accused of promoting anarchy and confusion and every human misery, yet

giving liberty to the African; the other country contending for

religion, morality, and justice, yet obstinately continuing a system of

cruelty and injustice?" In the American Congress, in 1790, the

representative of South Carolina affirmed that the clergy did not

condemn either slavery or the slave-trade, and Mr. Jackson, of Georgia,

maintained that religion was not against slavery. On the 4th September,

1835, the Courier, Charleston, South Carolina, reports that at the

celebrated pro-slavery meeting held there, "the clergy of all

denominations attended in a body, lending their sanction to the

proceedings, and adding by their presence to the impressive character of

the scene." The rationalist asks, What was it that the consciences of

these Christian men said on the subject of slavery only fifty years ago?

Even in Boston, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist,

though an earnest Christian, was shut out of Christian society; and the

only building in that city of many churches in which he was at first

allowed to publicly plead for the abolition of slavery was a hall owned

by Abner Kneeland, an infidel who had been convicted and sent to gaol as

a blasphemer. Why for centuries did Christians trade in slaves, if

supernatural morality is dependent on the immutable judgments of a

God-ordained conscience? Why, if slavery was defensible by supernatural

moralists only twenty-five years ago, has it now become utterly

indefensible?

In England it is immoral to marry the sister of your deceased wife, and

the immorality is so clear and flagrant that any children born of such a

marriage are bastardized, and in the event of an intestacy are excluded

from sharing the property of either of the parents. In Canada it is

moral to marry your deceased wife's sister, and the children are

respected as legitimate. A few years ago a great supernaturalist, a

leader in the religious body to which he belonged, an eloquent preacher,

an otherwise good man, desired to marry his deceased wife's sister. It

being immoral in this country he went abroad to another country where

the act was moral, and there he married. The rationalist asks, How is

this explicable from the supernatural standpoint?

In any part of Great Britain or Ireland it is immoral to have more than

one wife, and the law will punish the parties to the union and put

disabilities on the issue. In India, under British law, it is moral to

have more than one wife, and the Christian law-courts sitting in London

will recognise the children of that union. Christian supernaturalists

will admit: That good men like Abraham had more than one wife; that

specially-rewarded men like David practised polygamy; but they say that

this is an old practice, which, though once good, is no longer to be

followed.

In England it is clearly immoral for one man to prepare and use dynamite

or other explosives so as to destroy the life and property of

Englishmen. But in England it is as clearly moral for men in the

Woolwich government laboratory to prepare and use similar explosives to

blow to pieces people in Egypt, the Soudan, or elsewhere. The morality

is vouched by the fact that an archbishop issues a special prayer to be

offered in all the churches for the success of the expedition carrying

the explosives.

Belief is moral from the supernatural standpoint; unbelief immoral and

punishable. The rationalist says that the varying beliefs of the world

are the natural result of organisation of transmitted traditions and

present life-surroundings; that beliefs are not criminal even when they

are erroneous, and that wrong beliefs should be met by refutation, not

by punishment.

The rationalist affirms that there are only two logical standpoints;

one, that of submission of opinion to arbitrary authority. This, in

Christianity, is the position of the church of Rome. The other, that of

the assertion of the right and duty of private judgment.

The Christian supernaturalist has, in England, considerably modified, in

recent times, his action on the immorality of unbelief. In the time of

Lord Coke a Turk was an infidel with whom no agreement was binding. From

the reign of William III, until late in the reign of George III,

Unitarianism was a crime by act of Parliament.

Until late in the reign of George IV Roman Catholicism was a crime

punishable by law. Until 1859 a Jew was considered sufficiently wicked

to be deprived of many civil rights. Two hundred and thirty years ago

Quakers were immoral men, and as such were publicly whipped.

The supernaturalist recommends right conduct that you may be rewarded

when you are dead. The rationalist recommends right conduct because in

increasing the present total of human happiness you increase your own

happiness now, and render future happiness more easily attainable by

others.

These are only a few of many like-charactered illustrations which

entitle the rationalist to return on the supernaturalist the weight of

the Rev. J. Llewellyn Davies' above-quoted contention.

HAS MAN A SOUL?

THE first step in this inquiry is to define what is meant; by the word

"soul," and the initial difficulty is that it is much easier to agree

with theologians upon what is not meant than upon what is meant.

Sometimes orthodox talkers seem to confuse "soul" with "life" and

"mind," and they use "soul" or "spirit" as if expressing contrast with

"matter." To at least prevent, as much as possible, misapprehension of

our own meaning, we shall try to define each word.

Limiting here the use of the word "life" to the animal kingdom, it is

defined to mean the total organic functional activity of each animal.

Accepting this definition, "life" will express a variable result not

only in each individual, but in the same individual in childhood, prime,

or old age. Life is not an entity, it is the state of an organised body

in which the organs perform their individual and collective functions.

When all the organs do this efficiently, we call this state health; when

some of the organs fail, or do too much, we call this disease; when all

the organs permanently cease to perform their functions, we call this

death. Life, then, is a state of the body; health and disease are phases

of life; death is the termination of life. Life is the word by which we

describe the result of a certain collocation; but this does not imply

that life can be predicated of any or all the components taken

separately. By the life of an animal is meant the existence of that

animal; when dead, the animal no longer exists; the substance of what

was the animal thenceforth exists in other modes, but the organism has

ceased. The life of each animal is as distinct from that of each other

animal as is the weight or size of each animal distinct from the weight

and size of any other animal; and the life of the animal no more exists

after the animal has ceased than does the weight or the size of the

animal exist, after its body is destroyed. The word "life" used of an

oyster, a lobster, a sheep, a horse, or of a human being, expresses in

each case a state distinguishable in significance. Life is the special

activity of each organised being; the sum of the phenomena proper to

organised bodies. George Henry Lewes says: "Life is the functional

activity of an organism in relation to its medium. Every part of a

living organism is vital as pertaining to life: but no part has this

life when isolated; for life is the synthesis of all the parts."

Theologians sometimes seek to make contrasts between living animals and

what they are pleased to term dead matter. Life is not a contrast to

non-living substance, but a different condition of it.

By the word "matter," or "substance," or "nature," is intended the sum

of all phenomena, actual, past, possible, and of all that is necessary

for the happening of any and every phenomenon.

The word "force" includes every phase of activity. Force does not

express an entity, but is the word by which we account for, or rather

the word by the use of which we avoid explaining, the activity of

matter, or, as G.H. Lewes would write it, the activity of the felt. He

says: "All we know is feeling and changes of feeling. We class the felt

apart from the changes, the one as matter, the other as force. The

qualities of matter are our feelings; the properties of matter are its

qualities, viewed in reference to the effects of one body on another,

rather than their effects on us. Both qualities and properties are

forces, when considered as affecting changes." By the "mind" of any

animal is meant the sum of the remembered perceptions of that animal,

and its, his, or her, thinkings on such perceptions. Says Max Mueller:

"All consciousness begins with sensuous perception, with what we feel,

and hear, and see." "Out of this we construct what may be called

conceptual knowledge." "Thinking consists simply in addition and

subtraction of precepts and concepts."