HISTORY OF EARLY SOCIAL REFORMERS.
Intention of foregoing Contrast--Difficulties of Christian
Revolution, and comparative Facility of Coming Ones--Essenes as
Early Reformers--Difficulties in the way of Christian Innovations
on Pagan Slavery.
Before proceeding to show how Christianity, on the one hand, and
worldly selfishness on the other, concurred in superimposing the evil
of proletarianism upon that of chattel-slavery, and in gradually
supplanting chattel-slavery itself, to make place for the wages-slavery
of modern civilization, let us guard ourselves by a word or two against
a misconception that might possibly arise in the minds of some from the
perusal of the two last chapters.
Let no one suppose that it was any part of our intention to extenuate
the abomination of serfdom or chattel-slavery under any condition, or
to mitigate that just abhorrence of it, in all its forms, which we feel
assured the reader, in common with ourselves, feels towards it. Far be
from us any such purpose. The object of this part of our inquiry was
simply to show that wages-slavery with proletarianism may be the worse
evil of the two, and is positively at this moment a greater curse to
the human race than any form of chattel-slavery or of serfdom known in
ancient, mediæval, or even in modern times. The inference, therefore,
that should be drawn from the last two chapters is, not that we regret
the social revolution which has taken place, but that it did not take
place in the right way, and that, in consequence, another and greater
revolution is still indispensable and inevitable for the major part of
the human race.
That such revolution or, as we prefer to call it, reformation is
ardently desired by the millions everywhere cannot be doubted.
The existing condition of every country in Europe--our own
included--affords unmistakable evidence of it. The revolutionary
struggles of 1848, and the counter-revolutionary barbarities of 1849,
resorted to for their temporary suppression, are but forerunners
of the great social reconstruction we refer to. Whether this
reconstruction shall be effected peaceably in the way of social
reformation, or emerge, like order out of chaos, from the throes of a
violent convulsion, is a secret of the future, which time alone can
disclose. It ought to be, it may be, and, we trust, will be a peaceful
reformation. The times are favourable for such a change. The amazing
revolution which has lately taken place in the arts and sciences, as
applicable to the purposes of human economy, ought naturally to give
birth to another revolution of a kindred quality in the political and
social mechanism of society. This latter change need have nothing in
common with the innovations or revolutions of times past. We live at
an era of the world’s history when science may be made to yield more
treasure for all than ever was won for the few, by war and commerce,
in the past. We have agencies and powers at command for the production
of wealth, and facilities for its rapid interchange, which the ancient
world never dreamt of, and which to even our own grandfathers in the
last century would have seemed as marvellous as a Barmecidal feast or
any other brain-creation in an Arabian tale. By the agency of a single
inanimate power, that consumes not and never tires, we can do more
to change the face of terrestrial creation than could be done by the
labour of all the men and horses in the known world. We have already
in full play, though misapplied, a sufficiency of this power to equal
the labour of 700 or 800 millions of hands, with a capability of
enlarging its application and uses _ad libitum_, and with mechanical
contrivances within reach whereby that gigantic power may be made
available for the performance of every operation now performed by human
hands, and for the production and distribution of every description of
wealth and luxury desirable for man’s use. We can raise more sustenance
for man and beast from an acre of land than could the ancients from
six. We can transport tons of merchandise in ten or twelve hours to
distances which our ancestors could hardly have reached within as
many days. We could, were it worth while, light up the whole of this
vast metropolis at a single stroke of the clock. We have learned to
ride by vapour, to sketch and paint with the sunbeam, and to transmit
our messages by the lightning. In the subjugation of the elements to
man’s use, we have opened new fields for ambition, new roads to glory,
whose trophies will, ere long, throw those of kings and conquerors
into the shade, and render statecraft, priestcraft, lawyer-craft, and
every other description of craft now in the service of landlordism and
money-mongering, as odious and as obsolete as the occult sciences.
With these powers and appliances at command, no portion of the
human race needs the subjugation of any other portion for the
gratification of its utmost legitimate wants and desires. With
such prodigious advantages in its favour, the age we live in ought
to witness the extinction of every vestige of every description
of slavery known to man. The transition from chattel-slavery to
proletarianism and wages-slavery cost, as we shall see, rivers of
human blood; and, nevertheless, man’s ignorance and barbarity have,
as we have seen, made the change rather a curse than a blessing
to the majority of his fellows. The second social revolution--the
transition from proletarianism and wages-slavery to real and universal
emancipation--may be effected without the loss of a single life, or
the sacrifice of a shilling’s worth of his possessions to any man of
any class. Such, at least, is the creed of us, National Reformers. To
make that creed known and appreciated by submitting it to a full and
impartial examination by the public, and thereby to enlist as many
as we can of the good and wise of all classes in the cause of human
redemption, is, we hardly need say, the main object of this inquiry.
In entering upon it, we found it necessary to begin at the beginning.
The light of the past, though a lurid one, has appeared to us necessary
to illumine the present; and, to see our way clearly into the future,
both lights will, we think, be found serviceable. In other words, to
render clearly intelligible _what ought to be_, we have deemed it an
essential part of our inquiry to ascertain _what has been_ and _what
now is_. In the prosecution of this task, we now proceed to show how
Christianity and selfishness concurred in changing the slavery _that
was_ into the slavery _that is_.
As already explained, the institution of slavery was never called in
question by any class of the ancients before the advent of Christ, if
we except that small obscure sect amongst the Jews known by the name
of Essenes. Even these are supposed by some to have been a society
of Christian monks originally formed by St. Mark, who is said to
have founded the first Christian church at Alexandria. The accounts
given us by Josephus and Philo, however, make it much more probable
that the Essenes were Jews, and not Christians, and that they existed
before the birth of the Messiah. Those who ascribe their origin to
St. Mark evidently confound them with another sect of later growth,
established at Alexandria by Christian monks, and known by the name,
Therapeutæ. The bulk of this latter sect are supposed to have been
Greek Jews, converted to Christianity, and settled in Egypt. The
Essenes lived chiefly in Palestine, and spoke the Aramean and not the
Greek language. As far as certainty can be had in such matters, there
is reason to believe that the Essenes existed before and in the time
of Christ; and though no mention is made of them in the New Testament,
they are supposed to be alluded to by St. Paul in his Epistles to the
Ephesians and Colossians and in his First Epistle to Timothy. From
Josephus’s and Philo’s account of them, we should suppose them to
have been enthusiasts and ascetics, who occupied pretty much the same
position amongst their contemporaries and co-religionists, the Jews, as
the Shakers in America do amongst the modern Christian sects of that
country. That they were not _necessarily_ Christians might, we think,
be fairly inferred from the very doctrines and practices ascribed to
them; and that the existence of such a sect might well have preceded
Christ’s appearance will appear strange to no one who considers how
very popular St. John the Baptist was, and what crowds of enthusiastic
followers he attracted by his preachings and asceticism before the
Saviour made known His mission. Assuredly the Essenes were not more
ascetic than St. John the Baptist, whose raiment was camel’s hair, and
food locusts and wild honey; and assuredly their mysticism and social
equalitarianism bear less analogy to veritable Christianity than the
doctrines and practices of John.
This argument alone, independently of historic authority, ought, we
think, to suffice to set aside the ill-grounded belief of many that
the Essenes were _necessarily_ an early Christian sect. Their holding
certain doctrines in common with Christians, such as the immortality
of the soul and man’s spiritual responsibility to and equality before
God, is no more a proof that they were followers of Christ, than the
holding of similar doctrines by Socrates and Plato would prove these
philosophers to have been believers in a religion which was unknown
till near four centuries after their death. Dr. Neander’s account of
the Essenes is, that they were a society of pious Jews, who, disgusted
with the cant and hypocrisy of the Pharisees, and wearied with the
trials of the outward and of the inward life, had withdrawn themselves
out of the strife of theological and political parties, at first,
apparently (according to Pliny the Elder), to the western side of the
Dead Sea, where they lived together in intimate connection, partly
after the fashion of the monks of later days, and partly like mystical
orders in all periods have done. From this society other smaller ones
afterwards proceeded, and spread themselves all over Palestine. They
employed themselves in the arts of peace, such as agriculture, pasture,
handicraft works, and especially in the art of healing according to
the simple but unerring ways of Nature. Dr. Neander thinks it also
probable that they imagined themselves supernaturally illuminated in
their search into Nature’s secrets and use of her powers; and that
their natural knowledge and art of healing assumed, moreover, a sort
of religious or theosophic character, since they professed to have
peculiar prophetic gifts. Comparing this account with what we know
of similar sects in our own time--with the Mormons, for instance,
or with the Shakers, or with the White Quakers of Dublin--it seems
probable enough. It is the way of all such enthusiasts to run from one
extreme to another. Despising the Pharisees for their hollowness and
canting adherence to mere traditional and ceremonial law, in which the
_letter_ was everything and the _spirit_ nothing, the Essenes went
right into the opposite extreme, and almost sacrificed the outer to
the inner man. They believed firmly in the immortality of the soul and
in future rewards and punishments; they were absolute predestinarians;
they observed the seventh day with peculiar strictness; they held the
traditions of the Old Testament in great reverence, but only as mystic
writings which they expounded allegorically; they sent gifts to the
Temple, like other Jews, but offered no sacrifices; they admitted
no one into their society till after a three years’ probation; they
lived in a state of perfect equality, except that they paid great
respect to the aged and to their priests; they considered all secular
employments ungodly and immoral, except agriculture and the trades
and occupations connected with it. They were practical communists in
the largest sense of the word, for they had no separate or individual
interests, and held all things in common; they were industrious,
quiet, orderly, and free from every kind of vice practised in ordinary
society; they held solitude and celibacy in high esteem. Some say they
allowed no marriages or sexual intercourse in their society; but this
is doubted. They allowed no change of raiment till necessity required;
they abstained from wine and other fermented liquors; they were not
permitted to eat but with their own sect, and then a certain portion
of food was served out to each person, of which they partook together
after solemn ablutions.
It is, no doubt, the similarity of many of these practices to those
of some of the early Christians, and of the Therapeutæ in particular,
that has led some Roman Catholic divines, and also some philosophic
writers, to speak of the Essenes as of a Christian sect. Were the
supposition of these writers correct, history would in that case be
without one single testimony to show that the theory or practice of
the equality of human rights was known to any ancient people on earth,
Jew or Gentile, before the propagation of the Gospel. We believe,
however, that the supposition is without foundation. We believe the
Essenes were a Jewish, not a Christian sect. We believe their sect
was anterior to Christ, and even to John the Baptist. We believe it
consisted of ardent Jews, who, inflamed by the pious, fervid, and
truly democratic outpourings of Nehemiah and others of their prophets,
and disgusted by the manner in which they saw all Moses’s laws in
favour of the poor set aside by the scribes and Pharisees of their
day, to the profit of usurers and land-monopolisers, resolved, in the
language of their own Scripture, to “come out from amongst them and be
separate;” and that, accordingly, in the words of Dr. Neander, they
were “distinguished from the mass of ordinary Jews in this--that they
knew and loved something higher than the outward ceremonial and a dead
faith--that they really did strive after holiness of heart and inward
communion with God.” We believe moreover, that, instead of owing their
origin to Christianity, Christianity in a great measure owed its early
progress and successes to the Essenes; and that the Therapeutæ, with
whom they have been confounded, were but an offshoot of their society,
which subsequently engrafted itself upon a Christian stock. With these
considerations we hold it to be an established fact that the Essenes do
constitute a veritable exception, but the only solitary one recorded
in all history, of any people, before Christ’s advent, repudiating the
doctrine and practice of human slavery. This singular exception, if it
be one, proves two things worthy of every serious man’s notice. One is,
that if we are not indebted to Christianity for the first or earliest
repudiation of human slavery, we are indebted for it to the purest
fraction of that people, and to the purest form of that religion, to
whom and to which we owe Christianity itself; in other words, it is to
believers in the God of the Jews and of the Christians, and not to the
believers in any pagan gods or in no God, we are indebted for the first
authoritative interference with the pretended right of man to hold
his fellow-man in bondage. The other is, that the Essenes must have
purposely avoided propagandism and proselytism, kept themselves few
and select, and courted retirement and obscurity, in order to escape
persecution and perhaps death at the hands of their Jewish brethren.
Upon no other supposition would it be easy to account for their fewness
and impunity. For everything recorded of them goes to show that they
were as singular a people amongst the Jews, as the Jews themselves
were singular to the rest of the world; and those who did not spare
Christ and his Apostles were not likely to have spared them, had they
been equally bold and zealous in the propagation of their principles.
It was, probably, from similar motives that they mixed up celibacy
and other asceticisms and eccentricities with their system. What was
singular and unpopular was not likely to alarm rulers, or to excite
a dread of innovation, because not likely to excite imitation and to
attract followers; and what the authorities or the ruling classes saw
no cause to dread, they would not be forward to prosecute or persecute.
The apparent absurdities and vagaries of many other levelling sects
might probably be accounted for in a similar way. Had the Mormons mixed
up celibacy and other repulsive asceticisms and absurdities with their
politico-religious system, like the Shakers and White Quakers, it is
not improbable that they would be still under the patriarchal care of
Joe Smith at Nauvoo. This fact alone speaks volumes for the dangers and
difficulties Christianity had to encounter a few years later, when,
for the first time in the history of the human race, a few fishermen
and other obscure persons, headed by the supposed son of a carpenter,
proclaimed open warfare against all that, up to that time, had been
held sacred and indestructible in the constitution of human society.
And what pen, what tongue, can describe the zeal, the labour, the
sacrifices, the dangers, the trials, the persecutions, of the early
Christians in their first onslaught upon the powers of might and
darkness? Never, never, can a tithe of a tithe of what they achieved
and suffered in the cause of human redemption be known to their
Christian successors of our day. It is only the profound politician,
conversant with men and with the world, as well as versed in the
history of his own and other times, who can even imagine what they must
have suffered, or approximate to appreciating the miraculous virtues
they must have displayed, and the herculean labours they must have
performed.
Had the slaves of the ancient world been as conscious of their
own degradation, or as discontented with their lot, as are their
proletarian successors, the wages-slaves of our day, the case would
have been vastly different. But it was not so; on the contrary, the
slave-class of old was the very class that least of all was susceptible
of the sentiment of equality, and least disposed by inclination or
habit to countenance equalitarian innovators. What Mr. Edward Smith
says of the negroes of America is still more applicable to the ancient
slave-populations:--“They never tasted freedom, and do not feel the
want of it; and to be as happy as a nigger is a common phrase in free
and slave States alike.” If the modern negro has never tasted freedom,
he has at least heard of it, and heard that slavery is accounted a
crime and a felony in most Christian countries. But the ancient slave
never heard of, or imagined, any such a thing. Besides, except when he
had a downright brute for his master, he was really comfortable and
happy--“as happy as a nigger,” and for the self-same reasons.
Here was the first great difficulty Christianity had to cope with--a
difficulty almost impossible of conception in our times. To appreciate
it properly, we must only try to conceive what a Chartist or Socialist
lecturer’s difficulty would be as a propagandist in London or in the
provinces, provided all our labourers, artisans, and other workpeople
were so fully employed at light work and ample wages, that “as happy
as a hand-loom weaver,” “as happy as a London needlewoman,” or “as
happy as a Dorchester labourer” would be as current proverbial phrases
in England as the phrase, “as happy as a nigger,” is in America. Add
to this the difference between the toleration allowed to opinions
now-a-days and formerly, and the fact that as slaves were the property
of their masters, to tamper with them was, in the eye of the law and of
public opinion, to tamper with the master’s rights of property and with
his personal security. Just imagine these things, and we shall then
have some faint idea of what the early Christians had to contend with
from this source alone, in the first propagation of _liberty, equality,
and fraternity_. But of this and their other difficulties, dangers, and
sufferings more in the next chapter.
[Illustration: Decoration]