late. I ask no indulgence for calling attention to the case of
Prohibition. Fundamentalism, it may be, is sneaking upon the nation in
the same disarming way. The cities laugh at the yokels, but meanwhile
the politicians take careful notice; such mountebanks as Peay of
Tennessee and Blease of South Carolina have already issued their
preliminary whoops. As the tide rolls up the pastors will attain to
greater and greater consequence. Already, indeed, they swell visibly
in power and pretension. The Klan, in its earlier days, kept them
discreetly under cover; they labored valiantly in the hold, but only
lay go-getters were seen upon the bridge. But now they are everywhere
on public display, leading the anthropoid host. The curious thing is
that their activity gets little if any attention from the established
publicists. Let a lone Red arise to annoy a barroom full of Michigan
lumber-jacks, and at once the fire-alarm sounds and the full military
and naval power of the nation is summoned to put down the outrage.
But how many Americans would the Reds convert to their rubbish, even
supposing them free to spout it on every street-corner? Probably not
enough, all told, to make a day’s hunting for a regiment of militia.
The American moron’s mind simply does not run in that direction; he
wants to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the Bill of Rights.
But the stuff that the Baptist and Methodist dervishes have on tap
is very much to his taste; he gulps it eagerly and rubs his tummy. I
suggest that it might be well to make a scientific inquiry into the
nature of it. The existing agencies of sociological snooting seem
to be busy in other directions. There are elaborate surveys of some
of the large cities, showing how much it costs to teach a child the
principles of Americanism, how often the average citizen falls into
the hands of the cops, how many detective stories are taken out of the
city library daily, and how many children a normal Polish woman has
every year. Why not a survey of the rustic areas, where men are he and
God still reigns? Why not an attempt to find out just what the Baptist
dominies have drilled into the heads of the Tennesseeans, Arkansans
and Nebraskans? It would be amusing, and it would be instructive. And
useful. For it is well, in such matters, to see clearly what is ahead.
The United States grows increasingly urban, but its ideas are still
hatched in the little towns. What the swineherds credit to-day is
whooped to-morrow by their agents and attorneys in Congress, and then
comes upon the cities suddenly, with all the force of law. Where do the
swineherds get it? Mainly from the only publicists and metaphysicians
they know: the gentlemen of the sacred faculty. It was not the bawling
of the mountebank Bryan, but the sermon of a mountain Bossuet that laid
the train of the Scopes case and made a whole State forever ridiculous.
I suggest looking more carefully into the notions that such ignoramuses
spout.
Meanwhile, what is the effect of all this upon the Protestant who
retains some measure of sanity, the moderate and peaceable fellow--him
called by William Graham Sumner the Forgotten Man? He is silent while
the bombs burst and the stink bombs go off, but what is he thinking?
I believe that he is thinking strange and dreadful thoughts--thoughts
that would have frozen his own spine a dozen years ago. He is thinking,
_imprimis_, that there must be something in this evolution heresy after
all, else Methodist bishops and other such bristling foes to sense
would not be so frantically against it. And he is thinking, secondly,
that perhaps a civilized man, in the last analysis, would not be worse
off if Sherman’s march were repeated by the Papal Guard. Between these
two thoughts American Protestantism is being squeezed, so to speak, to
death.
VIII. FROM THE FILES OF A BOOK REVIEWER
1
_Counter-Offensive_
IS IT GOD’S WORD? by Joseph Wheless. New York: _Alfred A. Knopf_.
[The American Mercury, May, 1926.]
The author of this book, who is an associate editor of the _American
Bar Association Journal_, was trained as a lawyer, but that training,
somewhat surprisingly, seems to have left his logical powers
unimpaired, and with them his capacity for differentiating between
facts and mere appearances. There is no hint of the usual evasions and
obfuscations of the advocate in his pages. His business is to examine
calmly the authority and plausibility of Holy Writ, both as history
and as revelation of the Omnipotent Will, and to that business he
brings an immense and meticulous knowledge, an exact and unfailing
judicial sense, and a skill at orderly exposition which is quite
extraordinary. There is no vaporing of the orthodox exegetes that
he is not familiar with, and none that he fails to refute, simply
and devastatingly. Nine-tenths of his evidence he takes out of the
mouths of his opponents. Patiently, mercilessly, irresistibly, he
subjects it to logical analysis, and when he is done at last--his
book runs to 494 pages of fine print--there is little left of the two
Testaments save a farrago of palpable nonsense, swathed, to be sure,
in very lovely poetry. He exposes all their gross and preposterous
contradictions, their violations of common sense and common decency,
their grotesque collisions with the known and indubitable facts, their
petty tergiversations and fraudulences. He goes behind the mellifluous
rhetoric of the King James Version to the harsh balderdash of the
originals, and brings it out into the horrible light of day. He exposes
the prophecies that have failed to come off. He exhibits the conflicts
of romantic and unreliable witnesses, most of them with something to
sell. He tracks down ideas to their barbaric sources. He concocts an
almost endless series of logical dilemmas. And he does it all with good
manners, never pausing to rant and nowhere going beyond the strict
letter of the record.
Obviously, there is room and need for such a book, and it deserves
to be widely read. For in the America of to-day, after a time of
quiescence, the old conflict between religion and science has been
resumed with great ferocity, and the partisans of the former, not
content with denouncing all free inquiry as evil, have now undertaken
to make it downright unlawful. Worse, they show signs of succeeding.
And why? Chiefly, it seems to me, because the cause of their opponents
has been badly handled--above all, because it has lacked vigorous
_offensive_ leadership. Even the defense is largely an abject running
away. We are assured with pious snuffling that there is actually no
conflict, that the domains of science and religion do not overlap, that
it is quite possible for a man to be a scientist (even a biologist!)
and yet believe that Jonah swallowed the whale. No wonder the whoopers
for Genesis take courage, and lay on with glad, _sforzando_ shouts.
At one stroke they are lifted to parity with their opponents, nay, to
superiority. The bilge they believe in becomes something sacrosanct;
its manifest absurdities are not mentioned, and hence tend to pass
unnoticed. But meanwhile they are quite free to belabor science with
their whole armamentarium of imbecilities. Every cross-roads Baptist
preacher becomes an authority upon its errors, and is heard gravely. In
brief, science exposes itself to be shot at, but agrees not to shoot
back. It would be difficult to imagine any strategy more idiotic.
Or to imagine a Huxley adopting it. Huxley, in his day, followed a far
different plan. When the Gladstones, Bishop Wilberforces and other such
obscurantists denounced the new biology, he did not waste any time upon
conciliatory politeness. Instead, he made a bold and headlong attack
upon Christian theology--an attack so vigorous and so skillful that the
enemy was soon in ignominious flight. Huxley knew the first principle
of war: he knew that a hearty offensive is worth a hundred defensives.
How well he succeeded is shown by the fact that even to-day, with
theology once more on the prowl and the very elements of science under
heavy attack, some of the gaudiest of the ancient theological notions
are not heard of. Huxley disposed of them completely; even in Darkest
Tennessee the yokels no longer give them credit. But if the Robert
Andrews Millikans and other such amiable bunglers continue to boss
the scientific camp you may be sure that all these exploded myths and
superstitions will be revived, and that the mob will once more embrace
them. For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what
is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient
to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce
the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that
it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it
and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it--to admit
this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion
inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and
without excuse.
It is, of course, quite true that there is a region in which science
and religion do not conflict. That is the region of the unknowable.
No one knows Who created the visible universe, and it is infinitely
improbable that anything properly describable as evidence on the point
will ever be discovered. No one knows what motives or intentions, if
any, lie behind what we call natural laws. No one knows why man has
his present form. No one knows why sin and suffering were sent into
this world--that is, why the fashioning of man was so badly botched.
Naturally enough, all these problems have engaged the interest of
humanity since the remotest days, and in every age, with every sort
of evidence completely lacking, men of speculative mind have sought
to frame plausible solutions. Some of them, more bold than the rest,
have pretended that their solutions were revealed to them by God,
and multitudes have believed them. But no man of science believes
them. He doesn’t say positively that they are wrong; he simply says
that there is no proof that they are right. If he admitted, without
proof, that they are right, he would not be a man of science. In his
view all such theories and speculations stand upon a common level.
In the most ambitious soarings of a Christian theologian he can find
nothing that differs in any essential way from the obvious hocus-pocus
of a medicine man in the jungle. Superficially, of course, the two
stand far apart. The Christian theologian, confined like all the
rest to the unknowable, has to be more careful than the medicine man,
for in Christendom the unknowable covers a far less extensive field
than in the jungle. Christian theology is thus, in a sense, more
reasonable than voodooism. But it is not more reasonable because its
professors know more than the voodoo-man about the unknowable; it is
more reasonable simply because they are under a far more rigorous and
enlightened scrutiny, and run a risk of being hauled up sharply every
time they venture too near the borders of the known.
This business of hauling them up is one of the principal functions of
science. Its prompt execution is the gauge of a high and progressive
civilization. So long as theologians keep within their proper bounds,
science has no quarrel with them, for it is no more able to prove that
they are wrong than they themselves are able to prove that they are
right. But human experience shows that they never keep within their
proper bounds voluntarily; they are always bulging over the line, and
making a great uproar over things that they know nothing about. Such
an uproar is going on in the United States at the present moment.
Hordes of theologians come marching down from the Southern mountains,
declaring raucously that God created the universe during a certain
single week of the year 4004 B. C., and demanding that all persons
who presume to doubt it be handed over to the secular arm. Here,
obviously, science cannot suffer them gladly, nor even patiently. Their
proposition is a statement of scientific fact; it may be examined and
tested like any other statement of scientific fact. So examined and
tested, it turns out to be wholly without evidential support. All the
known evidence, indeed, is against it, and overwhelmingly. No man
who knows the facts--that is, no man with any claim to scientific
equipment--is in any doubt about that. He disbelieves it as thoroughly
as he believes that the earth moves ’round the sun. Disbelieving it, it
is his professional duty, his first obligation of professional honor,
to attack and refute those who uphold it. Above all, it is his duty to
attack the false evidence upon which they base their case.
Thus an actual conflict is joined, and it is the height of absurdity
for the Millikans and other such compromisers to seek to evade it
with soft words. That conflict was not begun by science. It did not
start with an invasion of the proper field of theological speculation
by scientific raiders. It started with an invasion of the field of
science by theological raiders. Now that it is on, it must be pressed
vigorously from the scientific side, and without any flabby tenderness
for theological susceptibilities. A defensive war is not enough;
there must be a forthright onslaught upon the theological citadel,
and every effort must be made to knock it down. For so long as it
remains a stronghold, there will be no security for sound sense
among us, and little for common decency. So long as it may be used
as a recruiting-station and rallying-point for the rabble, science
will have to submit to incessant forays, and the same forays will be
directed against every sort of rational religion. The latter danger
is not unobserved by the more enlightened theologians. They are well
aware that, facing the Fundamentalists, they must either destroy or be
destroyed. It is to be hoped that the men of science will perceive the
same plain fact, and so give over their vain effort to stay the enemy
with weasel words.
2
_Heretics_
ALTGELD OF ILLINOIS, by Waldo R. Browne, New York: _B. W. Huebsch_.
THE LAST OF THE HERETICS, by Algernon Sidney Crapsey. New York:
_Alfred A. Knopf_. [The American Mercury, October, 1924.]
When I was a boy, in the early nineties of the last century, the
reigning hobgoblin of the United States was John P. Altgeld, Governor
of Illinois. From this distance the ill-fame that played about him
seems almost fabulous. He was a sort of horrendous combination of
Trotsky and Raisuli, Darwin and the German Crown Prince, Jesse James
and Oscar Wilde, with overtones of Wayne B. Wheeler and the McNamara
brothers. We have had, in these later years, no such communal devil.
The La Follette of 1917 was a popular favorite compared to him; the
Debs of the same time was a spoiled darling. What I gathered from
my elders, in the awful years of adolescence, when my voice began
to break and vibrissæ sprouted on my lip, was that Altgeld was a
shameless advocate of rapine and assassination, an enemy alike to
the Constitution and the Ten Commandments--in short, a bloody and
insatiable anarchist. I was thus bred to fear him even more than I
feared the anonymous scoundrels who had stolen Charlie Ross. When I
dreamed, it was of catching him in some public place and cutting off
his head, to the applause of the multitude.
The elders that I have mentioned were mainly business men, with a few
_Gelehrte_ thrown in. I learned later on, by hard experience, that
the opinions of such gentlemen, particularly of public matters and
public men, were not always sound. Nevertheless, I continued to have
a bilious suspicion of the Hon. Mr. Altgeld, and it survived even the
discovery, made much later, that men who had actually known him--for
example, Theodore Dreiser--regarded him very highly. I remember very
well how shocked I was when Dreiser made me privy to this fact. It
made a dent, I suppose, in my old view, but it surely did not dispose
of it altogether. I continued to believe that Altgeld, though perhaps
not an anarchist, as alleged, was at least a blathering Socialist, and
hence deserving of a few prophylactic kicks in the pantaloons. I was
far gone in my forties before ever I got at the truth. Then I found
it in this modest book of Mr. Browne’s--a volume that is dreadfully
written, but extremely illuminating. That truth may be put very simply.
Altgeld was not an anarchist, nor was he a Socialist: he was simply
a sentimentalist. His error consisted in taking the college yells of
democracy seriously.
I do not go into the evidence, but refer you to the book. It is very
completely documented, and it leaves little room for doubt, despite Mr.
Browne’s obvious prejudice in favor of some of Altgeld’s more dubious
ideas, especially the idea of government ownership. On the main points
his argument is quite beyond cavil. Did Altgeld pardon the Chicago
anarchists? Then it was simply because they had been railroaded to
jail on evidence that should have made the very judge on the bench
guffaw--as men are still railroaded in California to-day. Did he
protest against Cleveland’s invasion of Chicago with Federal troops
at the time of the Pullman strike? Then it was because he knew only
too well how little they were needed--and what sinister influences had
cajoled poor old Grover into sending them. In brief, Altgeld was one
of the first public men in America to protest by word and act against
government by usurers and their bashi-bazouks--the first open and
avowed advocate of the Bill of Rights since Jackson’s time. A romantic
fellow, and a firm believer in the virtues of the common people,
he couldn’t rid himself of the delusion that they would follow him
here--that after the yell of rage there would come a resounding cheer.
That belief gradually degenerated into a hope, but I doubt that it ever
disappeared altogether. The common people met it by turning Altgeld out
of office, swiftly and ignominiously. After they had got rid of him as
Governor of Illinois, they even rejected him as mayor of Chicago. His
experience taught him a lesson, but like that of the Aframerican on the
gallows, it came too late.
What lesson is in his career for the rest of us? The lesson, it seems
to me, that any man who devotes himself to justice and common decency,
under democracy, is a very foolish fellow--that the generality of men
have no genuine respect for these things, and are always suspicious of
the man who upholds them. Their public relations, like their private
relations, are marked by the qualities that mark the inferior man at
all times and everywhere: cowardice, stupidity and cruelty. They are
in favor of whoever is wielding the whip, even when their own hides
must bear the blows. How easy it was to turn the morons of the American
Legion upon their fellow-slaves! How heroically they voted for
Harding, and then for Coolidge after him--and so helped to put down the
Reds! Dog eats dog, world without end. In the Pullman strike at least
half the labor unions of the United States were against the strikers,
as they were against the more recent steel strikers, and helped to beat
them. Altgeld battled for the under dog all his life--and the under
dog bit him in the end. A pathetic career, but not without its touches
of sardonic comedy. Altgeld, in error at bottom, was often also in
error on the surface, and not infrequently somewhat grotesquely. He
succumbed to the free silver mania. He supported Bryan--nay more, he
may be said to have discovered and made Bryan. It is fortunate for him
that he was dead and in hell by 1902, and so not forced to contemplate
the later states of his handiwork. He was excessively romantic, but
certainly no ignoramus. Imagine him listening to one of good Jennings’
harangues against the elements of biology! Such men, indeed, are always
happier dead. This world, and especially this Republic, is no place for
idealists.
Another proof of it is offered by the career of Dr. Crapsey, whose
trial for heresy entertained the damned in 1906. He is still alive as
I write, and still full of steam. But I doubt that he is as sure as
he used to be that common sense and common honesty pay. Many of the
frauds who drove him out of the church, though they knew that he was
right, are bishops to-day, and licensed to bind and loose. Others have
been called by God, and sit upon His right hand. The church itself, as
it has grown more sordid and swinish, has only grown more prosperous.
In New York City its income approaches that of the bootleggers and it
is almost as well regarded. Every new profiteer, even before he tries
to horn into the Piping Rock Club, subscribes to its articles. It is
robbing the Church of Christ Scientist of all the rich Jews; they are
having their sons baptized in its fonts and christened Llewellyn,
Seymour and Murray. Certainly it would be difficult to imagine a more
gloriously going concern. The rising spires of its steel and concrete
cathedrals begin to bulge the floor of heaven; its clergy are sleek,
fat and well-oiled; its bishops come next in precedence after movie
stars and members of the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. Lately it
threw out another heretic--like Dr. Crapsey, one accused of putting the
Sermon on the Mount above the conflicting genealogies of the Preacher.
As for Crapsey himself, he has naught to console him in his old age
save the thought that hell will at least be warm.
His book is extremely amusing and instructive. Like Altgeld, he
confesses to foreign and poisonous blood. The _Stammvater_ of the
American Crapseii was a fellow named Kropps, apparently a Hessian.
But his great-great grandson, the father of the heretic, married the
daughter of a United States Senator, and so there is some amelioration
of the horror. Like Altgeld again, Crapsey went to the Civil War as a
boy scarcely out of knee breeches. Altgeld was so poor that he gladly
took the $100 offered by a patriot who had been drafted and wanted a
substitute; Crapsey volunteered. Both succumbed to camp fevers and were
discharged. Both then took to Service among the downtrodden, Altgeld in
politics and the law, and Crapsey in one of the outlying hereditaments
of Trinity parish. Both were safe so long as they appeared to be
fraudulent; the moment they began to show genuine belief in their
doctrines they found themselves in difficulties. So Altgeld became the
favorite hobgoblin of the Republic and Crapsey became its blackest
heretic.
3
_The Grove of Academe_
THE GOOSE-STEP, by Upton Sinclair, Pasadena, Calif.: _Published by
the Author_. [The Smart Set, May, 1923.]