to heavenly inspiration; it is in vain that they pretend to describe a
supernatural state of things as first in order of events; the original
barbarous state of mankind, attested by their own monuments, belies all
their assertions. These assertions are still more victoriously refuted
by considering this great principle, _that man receives no ideas but
through the medium of his senses_: for from hence it appears that every
system which ascribes human wisdom to any other source than experience
and sensation, includes in it a ysteron vroteron, and represents the
last results of understanding as earliest in the order of time. If
we examine the different religious systems which have been formed
respecting the actions of the Gods, and the origin of the world, we
shall discover at every turn an anticipation in the order of narrating
things, which could only be suggested by subsequent reflection. Reason,
then, emboldened by these contradictions, hesitates not to reject
whatever does not accord with the nature of things, and accepts nothing
for historical truth that is not capable of being established by
argument and ratiocination. Its ideas and suggestions are as follows:--
"Before any nation received from a neighbor nation dogmas already
invented; before one generation inherited the ideas of another, none of
these complicated systems had existence. The first men, the children of
nature, whose consciousness was anterior to experience, and who brought
no preconceived knowledge into the world with them, were born without
any idea of those articles of faith which are the result of learned
contention; of those religious rites which had relation to arts and
practices not yet in existence; of those precepts which suppose the
passions already developed; of those laws which have reference to a
language and a social order hereafter to be produced; of that God, whose
attributes are abstractions of the knowledge of nature, and the idea of
whose conduct is suggested by the experience of a despotic government;
in fine, of that soul and those spiritual existences which are said not
to be the object of the senses, but which, however, we must forever have
remained unacquainted with, if our senses had not introduced them to
us. Previously to arriving at these notions, an immense catalogue of
existing facts must have been observed. Man, originally savage, must
have learned from repeated trials the use of his organs. Successive
generations must have invented and refined upon the means of
subsistence; and the understanding, at liberty to disengage itself from
the wants of nature, must have risen to the complicated art of comparing
ideas, digesting reasonings, and seizing upon abstract similitudes.
"It was not till after having surmounted those obstacles, and run a long
career in the night of history, that man, reflecting on his state, began
to perceive his subjection to forces superior to his own and independent
of his will. The sun gave him light and warmth; fire burned, thunder
terrified, the winds buffeted, water overwhelmed him; all the various
natural existences acted upon him in a manner not to be resisted. For a
long time an automaton, he remained passive, without inquiring into the
cause of this action; but the very moment he was desirous of accounting
to himself for it, astonishment seized his mind; and passing from the
surprise of a first thought to the reverie of curiosity, he formed a
chain of reasoning.
"At first, considering only the action of the elements upon him, he
inferred relatively to himself, an idea of weakness, of subjection, and
relatively to them, an idea of power, of domination; and this idea
was the primitive and fundamental type of all his conceptions of the
divinity.
"The action of the natural existences, in the second place, excited in
him sensations of pleasure or pain, of good or evil; by virtue of his
organization, he conceived love or aversion for them, he desired or
dreaded their presence: and fear or hope was the principle of every idea
of religion.
"Afterwards, judging everything by comparison, and remarking in those
beings a motion spontaneous like his own, he supposed there to be a
will, an intelligence inherent in that motion, of a nature similar to
what existed in himself; and hence, by way of inference, he started
a fresh argument. Having experienced that certain modes of behavior
towards his fellow-creatures wrought a change in their affections and
governed their conduct, he applied those practices to the powerful
beings of the universe. 'When my fellow-creature of superior strength,'
said he to himself, 'is disposed to injure me, I humble myself before
him, and my prayer has the art of appeasing him. I will pray to the
powerful beings that strike me. I will supplicate the faculties of the
planets, the waters, and they will hear me. I will conjure them to
avert the calamities, and to grant me the blessings which are at their
disposal. My tears will move, my offerings propitiate them, and I shall
enjoy complete felicity.'
"And, simple in the infancy of his reason, man spoke to the sun and
the moon; he animated with his understanding and his passions the great
agents of nature; he thought by vain sounds and useless practices to
change their inflexible laws. Fatal error! He desired that the water
should ascend, the mountains be removed, the stone mount in the air;
and substituting a fantastic to a real world, he constituted for himself
beings of opinion, to the terror of his mind and the torment of his
race.
"Thus the ideas of God and religion sprung, like all others, from
physical objects, and were in the understanding of man, the products
of his sensations, his wants, the circumstances of his life, and the
progressive state of his knowledge.
"As these ideas had natural beings for their first models, it resulted
from hence that the divinity was originally as various and manifold
as the forms under which he seemed to act: each being was a power, a
genius, and the first men found the universe crowded with innumerable
Gods.
"In like manner the ideas of the divinity having had for motors the
affections of the human heart, they underwent an order of division
calculated from the sensations of pain: and pleasure, of love and
hatred: the powers of nature, the Gods, the genii, were classed into
benign and maleficent, into good and evil ones: and this constitutes the
universality of these two ideas in every system of religion.
"These ideas, analogous to the condition of their inventors, were for
a long time confused and cross. Wandering in woods, beset with wants,
destitute of resources, men in their savage state had no leisure to make
comparisons and draw conclusions. Suffering more ills than they tasted
enjoyments, their most habitual sentiment was fear, their theology
terror, their worship was confined to certain modes of salutation,
of offerings which they presented to beings whom they supposed to be
ferocious and greedy like themselves. In their state of equality and
independence, no one took upon him the office of mediator with Gods
as insubordinate and poor as himself. No one having any superfluity
to dispose of, there existed no parasite under the name of priest, nor
tribute under the name of victim, nor empire under the name of
altar; their dogmas and morality, jumbled together, were only
self-preservation; and their religion, an arbitrary idea without
influence on the mutual relations existing between men, was but a vain
homage paid to the visible powers of nature.
"Such was the first and necessary origin of every idea of the
divinity...."
"In reality, when the vulgar heard others talk of a new heaven and
another world, they gave a body to these fictions; they erected on it
a solid stage and real scenes; and their notions of geography and
astronomy served to strengthen, if they did not give rise to the delusion.
"On the one hand, the Phoenician navigators, those who passed the
pillars of Hercules to fetch the pewter of Thule and the amber of the
Baltic, related that at the extremity of the world, the boundaries of
the ocean (the Mediterranean,) where the sun sets to the countries of
Asia, there were Fortunate Islands, the abode of an everlasting spring;
and at a farther distance, hyperborean regions, placed under the earth
(relatively to the tropics,) where reigned an eternal night. From
those stories, badly understood, and no doubt confusedly related, the
imagination of the people composed the Elysian Fields, delightful spots
in a world below, having their heaven, their sun, and their stars; and
Tartarus, a place of darkness, humidity, mire, and chilling frost.
Now, inasmuch as mankind, inquisitive about all that of which they are
ignorant, and desirous of a protracted existence, had already exerted
their faculties respecting what was to become of them after death;
inasmuch, as they had early reasoned upon that principle of life which
animates the body, and which quits it without changing the form of the
body, and had conceived to themselves airy substances, phantoms
and shades, they loved to believe that they should resume in the
subterranean world that life which it was so painful to lose; and this
abode appeared commodious for the reception of those beloved objects
which they could not prevail on themselves to renounce.
"On the other hand, the astrological and philosophical priests told such
stories of their heavens as perfectly quadrated with these fictions.
Having, in their metaphorical language, denominated the equinoxes and
solstices the gates of heaven, or the entrance of the seasons, they
explained the terrestrial phenomena by saying, that through the gate of
horn (first the bull, afterwards the ram,) vivifying fires descended,
which, in spring, gave life to vegetation, and aquatic spirits, which
caused, at the solstice, the overflowing of the Nile: that through the
gate of ivory (originally the bowman, or Sagittarius, then the balance,)
and through that of Capricorn, or the urn, the emanations or influences
of the heavens returned to their source and re-ascended to their origin;
and the Milky Way which passed through the doors of the solstices,
seemed to them to have been placed there on purpose to be their road
and vehicle. The celestial scene farther presented, according to their
Atlas, a river (the Nile, designated by the windings of the Hydra;)
together with a barge (the vessel Argo,) and the dog Sirius, both
bearing relation to that river, of which they foreboded the overflowing.
These circumstances, added to the preceding ones, increased the
probability of the fiction; and thus to arrive at Tartarus or Elysium,
souls were obliged to cross the rivers Styx and Acheron, in the boat of
Charon the ferryman, and to pass through the doors of horn and ivory,
which were guarded by the mastiff Cerberus. At length a civil usage was
joined to all these inventions, and gave them consistency.
"The inhabitants of Egypt having remarked that the putrefaction of dead
bodies became in their burning climate the source of pestilence and
diseases, the custom was introduced in a great number of States, of
burying the dead at a distance from the inhabited districts, in the
desert which lies at the West. To arrive there it was necessary to cross
the canals of the river in a boat, and to pay a toll to the ferryman,
otherwise the body remaining unburied, would have been left a prey
to wild beasts. This custom suggested to her civil and religious
legislators, a powerful means of affecting the manners of her
inhabitants, and addressing savage and uncultivated men with the motives
of filial piety and reverence for the dead; they introduced, as a
necessary condition, the undergoing that previous trial which should
decide whether the deceased deserved to be admitted upon the footing of
his family honors into the _black city_. Such an idea too well accorded
with the rest of the business not to be incorporated with it; it
accordingly entered for an article into religious creeds, and hell had
its Minos and its Radamanthus, with the wand, the chair, the guards, and
the urn, after the exact model of this civil transaction. The divinity
then, for the first time, became a subject of moral and political
consideration, a legislator, by so much the more formidable as,
while his judgment was final and his decrees without appeal, he was
unapproachable to his subjects. This mythological and fabulous creation,
composed as it was of scattered and discordant parts, then became a
source of future punishments and rewards, in which divine justice was
supposed to correct the vices and errors of this transitory state. A
spiritual and mystical system, such as I have mentioned, acquired so
much the more credit as it applied itself to the mind by every argument
suited to it. The oppressed looked thither for an indemnification, and
entertained the consoling hope of vengeance; the oppressor expected by
the costliness of his offerings to secure to himself impunity, and
at the same time employed this principle to inspire the vulgar with
timidity; kings and priests, the heads of the people, saw in it a
new source of power, as they reserved to themselves the privilege of
awarding the favors or the censure of the great Judge of all, accord-ing
to the opinion they, should inculcate of the odiousness of crimes and
the meritoriousness of virtue.
"Thus, then, an invisible and imaginary world entered into competition
with that which was real. Such, O Persians! was the origin of your
renovated earth, your city of resurrection, placed under the equator,
and distinguished from all other cities by this singular attribute,
that the bodies of its inhabitants cast no shade. Such, O Jews and
Christians! disciples of the Persians, was the source of your New
Jerusalem, your paradise and your heaven, modelled upon the astrological
heaven of Hermes. Meanwhile your hell, O ye Musselmans! a subterraneous
pit surmounted by a bridge, your balance of souls and good works,
your judgment pronounced by the angels Monkir and Nekir, derives its
attributes from the mysterious ceremonies of the cave of Mithra; and
your heaven is exactly coincident with that of Osiris, Ormuzd, and
Brama."....
"It is evident, that it is not truth for which you contend; that it is
not her cause you are jealous of maintaining, but the cause of your own
passions and prejudices; that it is not the object as it really exists
that you wish to verify, but the object as it appears to you; that it is
not the evidence of the thing that you are anxious should prevail, but
your personal opinion, your mode of seeing and judging. There is a power
that you want to exercise, an interest that you want to maintain, a
prerogative that you want to assume: in short, the whole is a struggle
of vanity. And as every individual, when he compares himself with every
other, finds himself to be his equal and fellow, he resists by a similar
feeling of right; and from this right, which you all deny to each
other, and from the inherent consciousness of your equality, spring your
disputes, your combats, and your intolerance.
"Now the only way of restoring unanimity is by returning to nature, and
taking the order of things which she has established for your director
and guide, and this farther truth will then appear from your uniformity
of sentiment.
"If we would arrive at uniformity of opinion, we must previously
establish certainty, and verify the resemblance which our ideas have
to their models. Now, this cannot be obtained, except so far as the
objects of our inquiry can be referred to the testimony, and subjected
to the examination of our senses. Whatever cannot be brought to this
trial is beyond the limits of our understanding: we have neither rule to
try it by, nor measure by which to institute a comparison, nor source of
demonstration and knowledge concerning it.
"Whence it is obvious that, in order to live in peace and harmony,
we must consent not to pronounce upon such objects, nor annex to them
importance; we must draw a line of demarcation between such as can be
verified and such as cannot, and separate, by an inviolable barrier, the
world of fantastic beings from the world of realities: that is to say,
all civil effect must be taken away from theological and religious
opinions.
"This, O nations! is the end that a great people, freed from their
fetters and prejudices, have proposed to themselves; this is the work
in which, by their command, and under their immediate auspices, we were
engaged, when your kings and your priests came to interrupt our
labors.... Kings and priests! you may yet for awhile suspend the solemn
publication of the laws of nature; but it is no longer in your power to
annihilate or to subvert them."
We conclude with the following:--"Investigate the laws which nature,
for our direction, has implanted in our breasts, and form from thence
an authentic and immutable code. Nor let this code be calculated for one
family, or one nation only, but for the whole with-out exception. Be
the legislators of the human race, as ye are the interpreters of their
common nature. Show us the line that separates the world of chimeras
from that of realities: and teach us, after so many religions of error
and delusion, the religion of evidence and truth."
Our space prohibits further quotation in this number; but when we return
to the subject, we shall notice chapter xxi., "Problem of Religious
Contradictions," and also "The Law of Nature; or Principles of
Morality." Few men wrote more on various topics than Volney; and few
have been more respected while living, and esteemed when dead, by those
whose respect and esteem it is always an honor to possess. At the age
of fifty-three, after much travel and great study, Volney consoled his
latter days by marrying his cousin--the hope of his youth--Mdlle. de
Chassebouf. A disorder of the bladder, contracted when traversing the
Arabian deserts, caused his death at the age of sixty-three. He was
buried in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, when Laya, Director of the
French Academy, pronounced a noble panegyric over his grave; and months
after his death he was spoken highly of by some of the most illustrious
men of France. Thus ended the days of one of the Freethinkers of the
past whose works, despite all suppression, will never die.
J. W.
CHARLES BLOUNT.
Look with me through the dark vista of 150 years of clouded history.
Throw your mind across the bridge of time, for we are about to visit
a tragic scene--a scene which might be depicted by a poet--so much of
beauty, of truth, and of goodness, all blasted by the perjuries of the
priest. Yonder, in the dim library of an ancestral mansion, embowered
amid the woods of the south, close by the gurgling waters which beat an
echo to the stormy breezes--those breezes which will never more fan
his cheek--that water where he has often bathed his limbs will be his
rippling monument. The shady moonlight of an August evening is gilding
the rich pastures of Hertfordshire; the gorse bushes have not yet lost
their beauty, the pheasants are playing in the woods--woods that so
lately resounded with laughter--laughter ringing like a bell--the music
of a merry heart. Withdraw those curtains which hide the heart-struck
and the dead. Above you is the exquisite picture of Eleanora, gazing
into the very bed at that form which lay shrouded in nothingness. You
see the broad manly brow--even now the brown hair rises in graceful
curls over that damp forehead. The lips are locked in an eternal smile,
as if to mock the closed eyes and the recumbent form. Is it true that
pictures of those we love are endowed with a clairvoyant power of gazing
at those who have caressed them in life? If it is, then on that August
night the wife of Charles Blount was watching over his bier.
But who is that pale form, with dishevelled hair and weeping eyes,
with an alabaster skin stained with the blue spots of grief? The rapid
upheaving swells of that fair bosom tell of affection withered, not by
remorse, but by superstition? See her how she nervously grasps that
dead man's hand, how she imprints kisses on his lips! Her hair, which
yesterday was glossy as the raven's, is now as bleached as the driven
snow; to-day she utters her plaintive cries, to-morrow she hastens to
join her lover in the tomb. This is a sad history. It should be written
with the juice of hemlock, as a warning to Genius of impatient love.
While the fair girl watches by the couch of the suicide, while from the
painted canvass Eleanora gleams on the living and the dead, while the
clouds of night gather silently over that ancestral hall, around the
drooping corn on the bold sloping park, and the clear blue river--all so
quiet and gentle--let us gather up the events of the past, and learn the
cause of a death so tragic, a grief so piercing.
In the year 1672, at the age of nineteen years, a young man (the son of
a baronet) led to the altar the lovely daughter of Sir Timothy Tyrrel.
Flowers strewed the path of the wedded pair, and for years their life
was one scene of bliss. At last, struck down by disease, Charles Blount
stood by the side of his dying wife--in his arms _his_ Eleanora yielded
her last sigh. He buried her by the willow-tree in the old churchyard.
The lily blended with the white rose, and the myrtle overshadowed the
grave. It was here where the widower rested in the evening--here where
he taught his children the virtues of their dead mother. Sometimes he
gazed at the azure skies, and strange fancies beguiled the mind of the
mourner. When he saw the sun sink to the west, gilding the world with
its glorious rays, he mused on the creeds of many lands. He fancied he
saw a heaven and a God, and traced in the lines of light the
patriarchal worshippers of the world. He looked at the sun and its
worshippers--those who sought the origin of purity by worshipping that
which is the origin of all good. He looked at the fables of Greece, and
found delight in the thought of Sappho uttering her diapason of joy in
lyrics which told of love and beauty; at Egypt, where the priests, in
their esoteric cunning, searched in vain for that which gives life, and
motion, and joy; and then he glanced at the Christian heaven, but here
all was dark--dark as the Plutonian caverns of Homer's hell. He
wished to meet his Eleanora--not in Pagan dreams--not in Christian
parables--but in the world of realities. He looked with eager eyes upon
the world around him, in society, at Court, and, in the homes of his
country. But wherever he went, there was but one thought--one feeling.
He wished a mother for his children--a mother like the sainted dead.
There was but one who answered the ideal--like in features, in passion,
and in beauty--to the lost Eleanora. Born of the same parents, loved by
the same brother, educated by the same teachers, imbued with the same
thoughts, she was the model of her dead sister; with a sisterly love
for her brother, she was already both mother and aunt to her sister's
children.