I am in receipt of a long letter from a Missouri minister, in
which, to my surprise, he says: "I regret to note that you
are a Pessimist. Permit me to express the hope that so
powerful a journal as the ICONOCLAST will yet espouse
the sunny philosophy of Optimism, which teaches that all
that is accords with the Plan of the Creator, and works
together for the ultimate good."
"God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform."
I had not hitherto suspected that I was inoculated with the
awful microbes of Pessimism, but if my reverend friend is a
professor in the sunny school of Optimism, I certainly do
not belong to that sect. If "all that is accords with the Plan
of the Creator," did not Christ deserve to be crucified for
bringing about new conditions, and Galileo to go to jail for
interfering with the stupid ignorance of certain Catholic
cardinals? Can even the Missouri minister be held guiltless
when he attempts to turn my thinking apparatus around and
make it operate from the other end? Surely he should not
interfere in even so slight a particular with the "Plan of the
Creator," who may have been moving "in a mysterious way
his wonders to perform" when he gave the supposedly
pessimistic bend to my mind. Nay, if my Christian friend do
but have the rheumatism, should he not refrain from
poulticing himself, lest he throw the celestial
machinery out of gear? If changes wrought in religion,
science, government, etc., constitute a portion of the
"Plan," we must concede it to have originally been a very
faulty affair--quite upsetting the optimistic theory that
"Whatever is is right."
The terms Pessimism and Optimism are handled very
loosely in these latter days. In the modern acceptance of
the terms, the first may be defined as a chronic intellectual
bellyache, the latter as an incurable case of mossbackism.
The thorough Pessimist believes the world is going in hot
haste to the demnition bowwows, and that nothing short of
a miracle can head it off; the full-fledged Optimist carries
concealed about his person an abiding faith that "God
ordereth all things well"--that he not only designed the
mighty universe, but is giving his personal attention to the
details of its management. Really, I do not believe I am
Pessimist to hurt, or that my reverend critic is so
dangerously ill of the Optimistic disease as he imagines.
Perhaps he has been living too high for great intellectual
effort. Were he in the condition of some millions of his
fellow creatures, the cuticle of whose abdomens is flapping
against their vertebrae like a wet dish-rag wrapping itself
around a wire clothesline, perhaps there would not be quite
so much sunshine in his philosophy. The man with whom
the world goes well is apt to prattle of the "ultimate good"
when considering the woes of other people.
The basis of Optimism is foreordination, the foolish faith
that before God created the majestic universe and sent the
planets whirling about the blazing sun; that before the first
star gleamed in the black, overhanging firmament or a
single mountain peak rose from the watery waste, he
calmly sat him down and mapped out every act of moral
man--decreed every war and pestilence, the rise and fall of
every nation, and fixed the date of every birth and
death. That may be excellent "orthodoxy," but it is
not good sense. I reject the theory that all the happenings
here below "accord with the Plan of the Creator--work
together for the ultimate good." Hence, I am not an
Optimist. I dare not accuse my Creator of being
responsible for all the sin and sorrow, suffering and shame
that since the dawn of history has bedewed the world with
blood and tears.
I do not believe the "Plan of the Creator" contemplated that
millions of people should perish miserably by war, and
famine and pestilence. I do not believe the black buck who
ravishes and murders a white babe is one of the great
moral agents of the Almighty, nor that the infamous act has
any possible tendency to promote "the ultimate good."
And did I so believe, I would keep my shotgun loaded just
the same. I do not believe that the blessed God intended
there should ever be a liar or a thief, a prostitute or a
murderer in this beautiful world. I do not believe that the
Creator entered into a compact with the devil or a covenant
with the cholera. And if not, then all that is does not
"accord with the Plan of the Creator." If that be
Pessimism, make the most of it.
That there is a Divine Plan I do not doubt; but I believe it to
be broader, deeper, more worthy of the great Demiurgus
than that which pictures him telling a priest how to carve his
pantaloons or sacrifice a pair of pigeons, than standing idly
by with his hands under his coat-tails, while some drunken
duffer beats the head of his better half with a bootjack, or a
bronze brute rips the scalp from a smiling babe. If that's
the kind of a hairpin who occupies the throne of Heaven, I
don't blame Lucifer for raising a revolution. I would have
taken a fall out of him myself, even had I known that my
viscera would be strewn across the face of the shrinking
universe.
God gave us life, and this grand old globe for habitat. He
stored it with everything necessary to the health and
happiness of the human race--poured his treasures forth
with a hand so bounteous that though its population were
doubled, trebled, it might go on forever and no mortal son
of Adam need suffer for life's necessaries. The gaunt
specters of Want and Pestilence are not of his creation;
they were born of Greed and Ignorance. God sent no devil
with hoofs and horns to torment or tempt us; he gave to us
passions necessary to the perpetuation and progress of the
race and divine Reason wherewith to rule them--then left us
to work out our own salvation, aided by those silent forces
that are pressing all animate and inanimate life onward to
perfection. Reason needs no celestial guide, no heavenly
monitor, for it is the grandest attribute of God himself.
Where Reason sits enthroned God reigns!
For more than half a million years man has been toiling
upwards, impelled by that mysterious law that causes the
pine to spring towards the sun. Sometimes the advance is
by leaps and bounds, as when some giant intellect--some
Son of God, especially gifted with the attributes of his Sire--
brushes aside the obstructions at which lesser men toil in
vain; sometimes the Car of Progress stands still for a
thousand years, else rolls slowly back toward brutishness,
there being none of sufficient strength to advance the
standards further up the rugged mountainside--nearer the
Celestial City. Thus, ever in ebb and flow, gaining and
losing, only to regain; nations rising and falling but to serve
as stepping-stones whereon mount a nobler race, a grander
people, the irrepressible conflict of the Godlike with the
Beastlike in man goes bravely on.
In half a million years we have come far--won many a fair
field from the dominion of Darkness. We no longer dwell in
caves and hollow trees, fighting naked with the wild
beasts of the forest for our prey. We have erected temples
to that God who dwells, not only in the heavens, but here
on earth--in the brain and heart of the human race. We
have made matter so far subject unto mind that nature's
mighty forces have become our obedient bondslaves. We
have built societies, nations, weighed the world and
measured the stars. We have acquired not only knowledge
and power, but love and modesty. The procreative passion
no longer crawls, a hideous thing, but soars aloft, a winged
Psyche. Thus, one by one, through the long ages, have we
built up within ourselves the attributes of the Most High,
toward whom our feet are tending. Life is no longer mere
animalism, content to gorge itself with roots and raw meat
and sit in the sun. The ear craves melody, the eye beauty,
the brain dominion, while the soul mounts to the very stars!
Thus far have we come out of the Valley of Darkness, led
on, not by those who believe that "all that is accords with
the Plan of the Creator," but by those whose battle-cry has
ever been,
"Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin forever
Down the ringing grooves of change."
Every reformation yet wrought in religion, science or
polities, was the work of men who declined to accept the
doctrines enunciated by the Missouri divine. If I am a
Pessimist I am in such excellent company as Confucius and
Christ, General Washington and Mr. Gladstone, Prof. Morse
and Dr. Pasteur, while my critic is training with the gang
that poisoned Socrates, bribed Iscariot and crucified the
Savior. And the world persists in judging a man by the
company he keeps!