You are aware that all prominent nations have set up a public cult.
Men have at all times assembled to deal with their interests and
communicate their needs, and it was quite natural that they should
open these meetings with some expression of the respect and love
which they owe to the author of their lives. This homage has been
compared to the respect which children pay to their father, and
subjects to their sovereign. These are but feeble images of the
worship of God. The relations of man to man have no proportion to the
relation of the creature to the Supreme Being; there is no affinity
between them. It would even be blasphemy to render homage to God in
the form of a monarch. A ruler of the whole earth--if there could
be such a person, and all men were so unhappy as to be subject to
one man--would be but a worm of the earth, commanding other worms
of the earth; he would still be infinitely lower than the Deity.
In republics, moreover, which are unquestionably earlier than any
monarchy, how could God be conceived in the shape of a king? If it
be necessary to represent God in any sensible form, the idea of a
father, defective as it is, would seem to be the best fitted to our
weakness.
But emblems of the Deity were one of the first sources of
superstition. As soon as we made God in our own image, the divine
cult was perverted. Having dared to represent God in the form of a
man, our wretched imagination, which never halts, ascribed to him all
the vices of a man. We regarded him only as a powerful master, and we
charged him with abuse of power; we described him as proud, jealous,
angry, vindictive, maleficent, capricious, pitilessly destructive,
a despoiler of some to enrich others, with no other reason but his
will. Our ideas are confined to the things about us; we conceive
hardly anything except by similitudes; and so, when the earth was
covered with tyrants, God was regarded as the first of tyrants. It
was much worse when the Deity was presented in emblems taken from
animals and plants. God became an ox, serpent, crocodile, ape, cat,
or lamb; bellowing, hissing, devouring, and being devoured.
The superstition of almost all nations has been so horrible that, did
not the monuments of it survive, it would be impossible to believe
the accounts of it. The history of the world is the history of
fanaticism.
Have there been innocent superstitions among the monstrous forms that
have covered the earth? Can we not distinguish between poisons which
have been used as remedies and poisons which have retained their
murderous nature? If I mistake not, here is an inquiry worth the
close attention of reasonable men.
A man does good to his fellows and brothers. One man destroys
carnivorous beasts; another invents arts by the force of his genius.
They are, on that account, regarded as higher in the favour of
God than other men, as children of God; they become demi-gods, or
secondary gods, when they die. They are proposed to other men, not
merely as models, but as objects of worship. He who worships Hercules
and Perseus is incited to imitate them. Altars are the reward of
genius and courage. I see in that only an error which leads to good.
In that case they are deceived to their own advantage. How could
we reproach the ancient Romans if they had raised to the rank of
secondary gods only such men as Scipio, Titus, Trajan, and Marcus
Aurelius?
There is an infinite distance between God and man. We agree; but
if, in the system of the ancients, the human soul was regarded as a
finite portion of the infinite intelligence, sinking back into the
great whole without adding to it; if it be supposed that God dwelt in
the soul of Marcus Aurelius, since his soul was superior to others in
virtue during life; why may we not suppose that it is still superior
when it is separated from its mortal body?
Our brothers of the Roman Catholic Church (for all men are brothers)
have filled heaven with demi-gods, which they call “saints.” Had
they always chosen them wisely, we may candidly allow that their
error would have been of service to human nature. We pour on them
our disdain only because they honour an Ignatius, the knight of the
Virgin, a Dominic, the persecutor, or a Francis, fanatical to the
pitch of madness, who goes naked, speaks to animals, catechises a
wolf, and makes himself a wife of snow. We cannot forgive Jerome,
the learned but faulty translator of the Jewish books, for having, in
his history of the fathers of the desert, demanded our respect for a
St. Pacomius, who paid his visits on the back of a crocodile. We are
especially angered when we see that Rome has canonised Gregory VII.,
the incendiary of Europe.
It is otherwise with the cult that is paid in France to King Louis
IX., who was just and courageous. If it is too much to invoke him,
it is not too much to revere him. It is but to say to other princes:
Imitate his virtues.
I go farther. Suppose there had been placed in some church the statue
of Henry IV., who won his kingdom with the valour of Alexander and
the clemency of Titus, who was good and compassionate, chose the best
ministers and was his own first minister; suppose that, in spite of
his weaknesses, he received a homage beyond the respect which we owe
to great men. What harm would be done? It would assuredly be better
to bend the knee before him than before this crowd of unknown saints,
whose very names have become a subject of opprobrium and ridicule. I
agree that it would be a superstition, but a superstition that could
do no harm; a patriotic enthusiasm, not a pernicious fanaticism. If
man is born to error, let us wish him virtuous errors.
The superstition that we must drive from the earth is that which,
making a tyrant of God, invites men to become tyrants. He who was the
first to say that we must detest the wicked put a sword in the hands
of all who dared to think themselves faithful. He who was the first
to forbid communication with those who were not of his opinion rang
the tocsin of civil war throughout the earth.
I believe what seems to reason impossible--in other words, I believe
what I do not believe--and therefore I must hate those who boast that
they believe an absurdity opposed to mine. Such is the logic--such,
rather, is the madness--of the superstitious. To worship, love, and
serve the Supreme Being, and to be of use to men, is nothing; it is
indeed, according to some, a false virtue, a “splendid sin,” as they
call it. Ever since men made it a sacred duty to dispute about what
they cannot understand, and made virtue consist in the pronunciation
of certain unintelligible words, which every one attempted to
explain, Christian countries have been a theatre of discord and
carnage.
You will tell me that this universal pestilence should be imputed
to the fury of ambition rather than to that of fanaticism. I answer
that it is due to both. The thirst for domination has been assuaged
with the blood of fools. I do not aspire to heal men of power of this
furious passion to subject the minds of others; it is an incurable
disease. Every man would like to see others hastening to serve him;
and, that he may be the better served, he will, if he can, make them
believe that their duty and their happiness are to be slaves. Find me
a man with an income of a hundred thousand pounds a year, and with
four or five hundred thousand subjects throughout Europe, who cost
him nothing, besides his soldiers, and tell him that Christ, of whom
he is the vicar and imitator, lived in poverty and humility. He will
reply that the times are changed, and to prove it he will condemn
you to perish in the flames. You will neither correct this man [the
Pope] nor a Cardinal de Lorraine, the simultaneous possessor of
seven bishoprics. What can one do, then? Appeal to the people, and,
brutalised as they are, they listen and half open their eyes. They
partly throw off the most humiliating yoke that has ever been borne.
They rid themselves of some of their errors, and win back a part of
their freedom, that appanage or essence of man of which they had been
robbed. We cannot cure the powerful of ambition, but we can cure the
people of superstition. We can, by speech and pen, make men more
enlightened and better.
It is easy to make them see what they have suffered during fifteen
hundred years. Few people read, but all may listen. Listen, then,
my brethren, and hear the calamities which have fallen on earlier
generations.
Hardly had the Christians, breathing freely under Constantine, dipped
their hands in the blood of the virtuous Valeria,[32] daughter,
wife, and mother of the Cæsars, and in the blood of her young son
Candidian, the hope of the Empire; hardly had they put to death the
son of the Emperor Maximin, in his eighth year, and his daughter
in her seventh year; hardly had these men, who are described as so
patient for two centuries, betrayed their fury at the beginning of
the fourth century, than controversy gave birth to those civil
discords which, succeeding each other without a moment of relaxation,
still agitate Europe. What are the subjects of these bloody quarrels?
Subtilties, my brethren, of which not a trace is to be found in the
Gospel. They would know whether the Son was engendered or made;
whether he was engendered in time or before time; whether he is
consubstantial with, or like, the Father; whether the divine “monad,”
as Athanasius puts it, is threefold in three hypostases; whether the
Holy Ghost was engendered, or proceeded; whether he proceeds from the
Father only, or the Father and the Son; whether Jesus had one will or
two, or two natures, or one or two persons.
In a word, from “consubstantiality” to “transubstantiation”--terms
equally difficult to pronounce and to understand--everything has been
a matter of dispute, and every dispute has caused torrents of blood
to flow.
You know how much was shed by our superstitious Mary, daughter of
the tyrant Henry VIII., and worthy spouse of the Spanish tyrant
Philip II. The throne of Charles I. became a scaffold; he perished
ignominiously, after more than two hundred thousand men had been
slaughtered for a liturgy.
You know the civil wars of France. A troop of fanatical theologians,
called the Sorbonne, declare Henry III. to have forfeited the throne,
and at once a theological apprentice assassinates him. The Sorbonne
declares the great Henry IV., our ally, incapable of ruling, and
twenty murderers rise in succession; until at last, on the mere
announcement that the hero is about to protect his former allies
against the Pope’s followers, a monk--a schoolmaster--plunges a knife
in the heart of the most valiant of kings and best of men in the
midst of his capital, under the eyes of his people, and in the arms
of his friends. And, by an inconceivable contradiction, his memory
is revered for ever, and the troop of the Sorbonne which proscribed
and excommunicated him and his faithful subjects, and has no right to
excommunicate anybody, still survives, to the shame of France.
It is not the ordinary people, my brethren, not the agricultural
workers and the ignorant and peaceful artisans, who have raised these
ridiculous and fatal quarrels, the sources of so many horrors and
parricides. There is, unhappily, not one of them that is not due to
the theologians. Men fed by your labours in a comfortable idleness,
enriched by your sweat and your misery, struggled for partisans and
slaves; they inspired you with a destructive fanaticism, that they
might be your masters; they made you superstitious, not that you
might fear God the more, but that you might fear them.
The gospel did not say to James, Peter, or Bartholomew: “Live in
opulence; deck yourselves with honours; walk amid a retinue of
guards.” It did not say to them: “Disturb the world with your
incomprehensible questions.” Jesus, my brethren, touched none of
these questions. Would you be better theologians than he whom you
recognise as your one master? What! He said to you: “All consists in
loving God and your neighbour”; yet you would seek something else.
Is there any one among you, is there any one on the whole earth, who
can think that God will examine him on points of theology, not judge
him by his deeds?
What is a theological opinion? It is an idea that may be true or
false; but morality has no interest in it. It is clear that you
should be virtuous, whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father
by spiration, or from the Father and the Son. It is not less clear
that you will never understand any proposition of this nature. You
will never have the least idea how Jesus could have two natures and
two wills in one person. If he had wished you to know it, he would
have told you of it. I choose these examples among a hundred others,
and I pass in silence over other controversies in order that I may
not reopen wounds that still bleed.
God has given you understanding; he cannot wish that you should
pervert it. How could a proposition of which you can never have an
idea be necessary to you? It is a fact of daily experience that God,
who gives everything, has given one man more light and more talent
than another. It does not offend our good sense that he has chosen to
link one man more closely to himself than others; that he has made
him a model of reason or virtue. No one can deny that it is possible
for God to shower his finest gifts on one of his works. We may,
therefore, believe in Jesus as one who taught and practised virtue;
but let us take care that in wishing to go too far beyond that, we do
not overturn the whole structure.
The superstitious man puts poison in the most wholesome food; he is
an enemy to himself and others. He believes himself the object of
eternal vengeance if he eats meat on a certain day; he believes that
a long, grey robe, with a pointed hood and a long beard, is much more
agreeable to God than a shaven face and a head that retains its hair;
he imagines that his salvation is bound up with certain Latin formulæ
which he does not understand. He has educated his daughter in these
principles. She buries herself in a dungeon as soon as she reaches a
marriageable age; she betrays posterity to please God--more guilty,
in regard to the human race, than the Hindoo widow, who casts herself
on her husband’s pyre after bearing him children.
Monks of the southern parts of Europe, self-condemned to a life
that is as abject as it is frightful, do not compare yourselves to
the penitents of the banks of the Ganges; your austerities do not
approach their voluntary sufferings. And think not that God approves
in you what you say he condemns in them.
The superstitious man is his own executioner; and he is the
executioner of all who do not agree with him. The most infamous
informing he calls “fraternal correction.” He accuses the simple
innocence that is not on its guard, and, in the candour of its heart,
has not set a seal upon its lips. He denounces it to those tyrants of
souls who laugh alike at the accused and the accuser.
Lastly, the superstitious man becomes a fanatic, and then his zeal
becomes capable of all crimes in the name of the Lord.
We live no longer, it is true, in those abominable days when
relatives and friends slaughtered each other, when a hundred battles
covered the earth with corpses for the sake of some argument of the
school; but a few sparks spring every day from the ashes of these
vast conflagrations. Princes no longer march to the field at the
voice of priests and monks; but citizens persecute each other still
in the heart of the towns, and private life is often poisoned with
superstition. What would you say of a family whose members were ever
ready to fight each other in order to settle in what way their father
must be saluted? My friends, the great thing is to love him; you may
salute him as you will. Are you brothers only to be divided? Must
that which should unite you be always a thing to separate you?
I know not of a single civil war among the Turks on the ground
of religion. I say “civil war”; but history tells of no sedition
or trouble among them that was due to controversy. Is it because
they have fewer pretexts for disputes? Is it because they are by
birth less restless and wiser than we? They ask not to what sect
you belong, provided that you pay regularly the slight tax. Latin
Christians and Greek Christians, Jacobites, Monothelites, Copts, or
Protestants--all are welcome to them; whereas there are not three
Christian nations that practise this humanity.
Jesus, my brethren, was not superstitious or intolerant; he said not
a single word against the cult of the Romans, who surrounded his
country. Let us imitate his indulgence, and deserve to experience it
from others.
Let us not be disturbed by the barbaric argument that is often used.
I will give it in its full strength:
“You believe that a good man may find favour in the eyes of the
being of beings, the God of justice and mercy, at any time, in any
place, in whatever religion he has spent his short life. We, on the
contrary, say that a man cannot please God unless he be born among
us, or taught by us. It is proved to us that we are the only persons
in the world who are right. We know that, although God came upon the
earth and died for all men, he will nevertheless show pity only to
our little gathering, and that even among us there are very few who
will escape eternal torment. Adopt the safer side, then. Enter our
little body, and strive to be one of the elect among us.”
Let us thank our brethren who use this language. Let us congratulate
them on being so sure that all in the world are damned except a few
of themselves; and let us conclude that our sect is better than
theirs by the very fact that it is more reasonable and humane. The
man who says to me, “Believe as I do, or God will damn thee,” will
presently say, “Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate thee.” Let
us pray God to soften these atrocious hearts and inspire all his
children with a feeling of brotherhood. We live in an island in
which the episcopal sect dominates from Dover to the Tweed.[33] From
there to the last of the Orkneys presbyterianism holds the field,
and beside these dominant religions are ten or a dozen others. Go to
Italy, and you will find papal despotism on the throne. In France it
is otherwise; France is already regarded by Rome as half-heretical.
Pass to Switzerland and Germany. You sleep to-night in a Calvinistic
town, to-morrow night in a Papist town, and the following night in a
Lutheran. You go on to Russia, and find nothing of all this. It is
a different sect. The court is illumined by an empress-philosopher.
The august Catherine has put reason on the throne, with magnificence
and generosity: but the people of her provinces detest alike the
Lutherans, Calvinists, and Papists. They would not eat, nor drink
in the same glass, with any of them. I ask you, my brethren, what
would happen if, in an assembly of all these sectaries, each thought
himself authorised by the divine spirit to secure the triumph of his
opinions? See you not the swords drawn, the gibbets raised, the fires
lit, from one end of Europe to the other? Who is right in this chaos
of disputes? Surely the tolerant and beneficent. Do not say that in
preaching tolerance we preach indifference. No, my brethren, he who
worships God and serves men is not indifferent. The name is more
fitting for the superstitious who thinks that God will be pleased
with him for uttering unintelligible formulæ, while he is really
very indifferent to the lot of his brother, whom he leaves to perish
without aid, or abandons in disgrace, or flatters in prosperity, or
persecutes if he is of another sect, unsupported and unprotected.
The more the superstitious man concentrates upon absurd beliefs
and practices, the more indifferent he becomes to the real needs
of humanity. Let us remember one of our charitable compatriots.
He founded a hospital for old men in his province. He was asked if
it was for Papists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Quakers, Socinians,
Anabaptists, Methodists, or Memnonists? He answered: For men.
O God, keep from us the error of atheism which denies thy existence,
and deliver us from the superstition that outrages thy existence and
fills ours with horror.