the ensuing _Kultur_. The city man, as now, will bear nine-tenths of
the tax burden; the rural total immersionist will make all the laws.
With Genesis firmly lodged in the Testament of the Fathers he will be
ten times as potent as he is now and a hundred times as assiduous. No
constitutional impediment will remain to cripple his moral fancy. The
Wesleyan code of Kansas and Mississippi, Vermont and Minnesota will
be forced upon all of us by the full military and naval power of the
United States. Civilization will gradually become felonious everywhere
in the Republic, as it already is in Arkansas. What I sing, I suppose,
is a sort of Utopia. But it is not the Utopia of bawdy poets and
metaphysicians; it is not the familiar Utopia of the books. It is a
Utopia dreamed by simpler and more virtuous men--by seven millions of
Christian bumpkins, far-flung in forty-eight sovereign States. They
dream it on their long journeys down the twelve billion furrows of
their seven million farms, up hill and down dale in the heat of the
day. They dream it behind the egg-stove on Winter nights, their boots
off and their socks scorching, Holy Writ in their hands. They dream it
as they commune with _Bos taurus_, _Sus scrofa_, _Mephitis mephitis_,
the Methodist pastor, the Ford agent. It floats before their eyes
as they scan the Sears-Roebuck catalogue for horse liniment, porous
plasters and Bordeaux mixture; it rises before them when they assemble
in their Little Bethels to be instructed in the word of God, the plots
of the Pope, the crimes of the atheists and Jews; it transfigures the
chautauquan who looms before them with his Great Message. This Utopia
haunts and tortures them; they long to make it real. They have tried
prayer, and it has failed; now they turn to the secular arm. The
dung-fork glitters in the sun as the host prepares to march....
Well, these are the sweet-smelling and altruistic agronomists whose
sorrows are the _leit-motif_ of our politics, whose votes keep us
supplied with Bryans and Bleases, whose welfare is alleged to be the
chief end of democratic statecraft, whose patriotism is the so-called
bulwark of this so-called Republic!
III. HIGH AND GHOSTLY MATTERS
I
_The Cosmic Secretariat_
The argument by design, once the bulwark of Christian apologetics, is
so full of holes that it is no wonder that it has had to be abandoned.
The more, indeed, the theologian seeks to prove the wisdom and
omnipotence of God by His works, the more he is dashed by evidences
of divine incompetence and stupidity. The world is not actually well
run; it is very badly run, and no Huxley was needed to labor the
obvious fact. The human body, very adeptly designed in some details, is
cruelly and senselessly bungled in other details, and every reflective
first-year medical student must notice a hundred ways to improve it.
How are we to reconcile this mixture of finesse and blundering with
the concept of a single omnipotent Designer, to whom all problems are
equally easy? If He could contrive so efficient and durable a machine
as the human hand, then how did He come to make such botches as the
tonsils, the gall-bladder, the uterus and the prostate gland? If He
could perfect the hip joint and the ear, then why did He boggle the
teeth?
Having never encountered a satisfactory--or even a remotely
plausible--answer to such questions, I have had to go to the trouble of
devising one myself. It is, at all events, quite simple, and in strict
accord with all the known facts. In brief, it is this: that the theory
that the universe is run by a single God must be abandoned, and that
in place of it we must set up the theory that it is actually run by a
board of gods, all of equal puissance and authority. Once this concept
is grasped all the difficulties that have vexed theologians vanish, and
human experience instantly lights up the whole dark scene. We observe
in everyday life what happens when authority is divided, and great
decisions are reached by consultation and compromise. We know that the
effects at times, particularly when one of the consultants runs away
with the others, are very good, but we also know that they are usually
extremely bad. Such a mixture, precisely, is on display in the cosmos.
It presents a series of brilliant successes in the midst of an infinity
of failures.
I contend that my theory is the only one ever put forward that
completely accounts for the clinical picture. Every other theory,
facing such facts as sin, disease and disaster, is forced to admit the
supposition that Omnipotence, after all, may not be omnipotent--a
plain absurdity. I need toy with no such nonsense. I may assume
that every god belonging to the council which rules the universe is
infinitely wise and infinitely powerful, and yet not evade the plain
fact that most of the acts of that council are ignorant and foolish.
In truth, my assumption that a council exists is tantamount to an _a
priori_ assumption that its acts are ignorant and foolish, for no
act of any conceivable council can be otherwise. Is the human hand
perfect, or, at all events, practical and praiseworthy? Then I account
for it on the ground that it was designed by some single member of
the council--that the business was handed over to him by inadvertence
or as a result of an irreconcilable difference of opinion among the
others. Had more than one member participated actively in its design it
would have been measurably less meritorious than it is, for the sketch
offered by the original designer would have been forced to run the
gauntlet of criticisms and suggestions from all the other councillors,
and human experience teaches us that most of these criticisms and
suggestions would have been inferior to the original idea--that many of
them, in fact, would have had nothing in them save a petty desire to
maul and spoil the original idea.
But do I here accuse the high gods of harboring discreditable human
weaknesses? If I do, then my excuse is that it is impossible to
imagine them doing the work universally ascribed to them without
admitting their possession of such weaknesses. One cannot imagine a
god spending weeks and months, and maybe whole geological epochs,
laboring over the design of the human kidney without assuming him to
have been moved by a powerful impulse to express himself vividly,
to marshal and publish his ideas, to win public credit among his
fellows--in brief, without assuming him to be egoistic. And one cannot
assume him to be egoistic without assuming him to prefer the adoption
of his own ideas to the adoption of any other god’s. I defy anyone to
make the contrary assumption without plunging instantly into clouds of
mysticism. Ruling it out, one comes inevitably to the conclusion that
the inept management of the universe must be ascribed to clashes of
egos, _i. e._, to petty spites and revenges, among the gods, for any
one of them alone, since we must assume him to be infinitely wise and
powerful, could run it perfectly. We suffer from bad stomachs simply
because the god who first proposed making a stomach aroused thereby
the ill-nature of those who had not thought of it, and because they
proceeded instantly to wreak that ill-nature upon him by improving, _i.
e._, botching, his work. We must reproduce our species in the familiar
arduous, uneconomic, embarrassing and almost pathological manner
because the god who devised the excellent process prevailing among the
protozoa had to be put in his place when he proposed to extend it to
the Primates.
2
_The Nature of Faith_
Many years ago, when I was more enterprising intellectually than I am
to-day, I proposed the application of Haeckel’s celebrated biogenetic
law--to wit, that the history of the individual rehearses the history
of the species--to the domain of human ideas. So applied, it leads to
some superficially startling but probably quite sound conclusions,
for example, that an adult poet is simply an individual in a state
of arrested development--in brief, a sort of moron. Just as all of
us, _in utero_, pass through a stage in which we are tadpoles, and
almost indistinguishable from the tadpoles which afterward become
frogs, so all of us pass through a stage, in our nonage, when we
are poets. A youth of seventeen who is not a poet is simply an ass:
his development has been arrested even anterior to the stage of the
intellectual tadpole. But a man of fifty who still writes poetry is
either an unfortunate who has never developed, intellectually, beyond
his teens, or a conscious buffoon who pretends to be something that he
isn’t--something far younger and jucier than he actually is--, just as
the late Richard Mansfield, in Schiller’s play, pretended, by the use
of a falsetto voice and a girlish skip, to be the eighteen-year-old Don
Carlos. Something else, of course, may enter into it. The buffoonery
may be partly conscious and deliberate, and partly Freudian. Many an
aging man keeps on writing poetry simply because it gives him the
illusion that he is still young. For the same reason, perhaps, he plays
tennis, wears green cravats, and tries to convince himself that he is
in love.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the
ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty. He may, at
forty, pursue the female of his species with great assiduity, and
he may, at fifty, sixty or even seventy, “woo” and marry a more or
less fair one in due form of law, but the impulse that moves him
to these follies at such ages is never the complex of illusions
and hallucinations that poets describe as love. This complex is
quite natural to all males between adolescence and the age of, say,
twenty-five, when the kidneys begin to disintegrate. For a youth
to reach twenty-one without having fallen in love in an abject and
preposterous manner would be for doubts to be raised as to his
normalcy. But if he does it after his wisdom teeth are cut, it is no
more than a sign that they have been cut in vain--that he is still in
his teens, whatever his biological and legal age. Love, so-called,
is based upon a view of women that is impossible to any man who has
had any experience of them. Such a man may, to the end of his life,
enjoy their society vastly, and even respect them and admire them, but,
however much he respects and admires them, he nevertheless sees them
more or less clearly, and seeing them clearly is fatal to the true
romance. Find a man of forty who heaves and moans over a woman in the
manner of a poet and you will behold either a man who ceased to develop
intellectually at twenty-four or thereabout, or a fraud who has his eye
on the lands, tenements and hereditaments of the lady’s deceased first
husband. Or upon her talents as nurse, cook, amanuensis and audience.
This, no doubt, is what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said that
every man over forty is a scoundrel.
As I say, my suggestion has not been adopted by psychologists, who,
in the main, are a very conservative and unimaginative body of men.
If they applied the biogenetic law in the field of religion they
might make some interesting observations. The chances are, indeed,
that religion belongs exclusively to an extremely early stage of
human development, and that its rapid decay in the world since the
Reformation is evidence of a very genuine progress. Reduced to its
logical essence, every religion now advocated in Christendom is
simply the doctrine that there are higher powers, infinitely wise and
virtuous, which take an active interest in the sordid everyday affairs
of men, and not infrequently intervene in them. This doctrine is not
purely romantic and _a priori_; it is based upon what is regarded by
its subscribers as objective evidence. But it must be plain that that
evidence tends to go to pieces as human knowledge widens--that it
appears massive and impressive in direct proportion as the individual
impressed is ignorant. A few hundred years ago practically every
phenomenon of nature was ascribed to superhuman intervention. The
plague, for example, was caused by God’s anger. So was war. So was
lightning. Today no enlightened man believes anything of the kind. All
these phenomena are seen to be but links in an endless chain of amoral
causation, and it is known that, given a certain quite intelligible and
usually inevitable combination of causes, they will appear infallibly
as effects. Thus religion gradually loses its old objective authority,
and becomes more and more a mere sentimentality. An enlightened man’s
view of it is almost indistinguishable from his view of the Spirit
of 1776, the Henty books, and the rosewood casket containing his
grandmother’s false teeth.
Such a man is not “dead” to religion. He was not born with a congenital
inaptitude for it. He has simply outgrown it, as he has outgrown
poetry, Socialism and love. At adolescence practically all individuals
have attacks of piety, but that is only saying that their powers
of perception, at that age, outrun their knowledge. They observe
the phenomenon, but cannot account for it. Later on, unless their
development is arrested, they gradually emerge from that romantic and
spookish fog, just as they emerge from the hallucinations of secular
romance. I speak here, of course, of individuals genuinely capable of
education--always a small minority. If, as the Army tests of conscripts
showed, nearly 50 per cent. of American adult males never get beyond
the mental development of a twelve-year-old child, then it must be
obvious that a much smaller number get beyond the mental development
of a youth at the end of his teens. I put that number, at a venture,
at 5 per cent. The remaining 95 per cent. never quite free themselves
from religious superstitions. They may no longer believe it is an
act of God every time an individual catches a cold, or sprains his
ankle, or cuts himself shaving, but they are pretty sure to see some
trace of divine intervention in it if he is struck by lightning, or
hanged, or afflicted with leprosy or syphilis. That God causes wars
has been believed by all the Presidents of the United States, save
Grover Cleveland, since Jefferson’s time. During the late war the then
President actually set aside a day for praying to God to stop what He
had started as soon as possible, and on terms favorable to American
investments. This was not done, remember, by a voodoo man in the
Congo forest, but by a sound Presbyterian, a Ph.D. of Johns Hopkins
University, and the best-dressed professor ever seen at Princeton.
I have said that all modern religions are based, at least on their
logical side, on this notion that there are higher powers which observe
all the doings of man, and constantly take a hand in them. It should
be added that a corollary is almost always appended, to the effect
that these higher powers also pronounce ethical judgments upon such
human acts as happen to be performed without this intervention, and are
themselves animated by a lofty and impeccable morality. Most religions,
of course, also embrace a concept of higher powers that are not benign,
but malignant--that is, they posit the existence of demons as well
as of gods. But there are very few in which the demons are regarded
as superior to the gods, or even as their full equals. The great
majority of creeds, East and West, savage and so-called civilized, put
the gods far above the demons, and teach that the gods always wish
the good of man, and that man’s virtue and happiness run in direct
ratio to his obedience to their desires. That is, they are all based
upon the doctrine of what is called the goodness of God. This is true
pre-eminently of the chief oriental faiths: Buddhism, Brahminism and
Confucianism. It is true even of Christianity, despite its luxuriant
demonology. No true Christian can believe that God ever deliberately
and wantonly injures him, or could conceivably wish him ill. The slings
and arrows of God, he believes, are brought down upon him by his own
ignorance and contumacy. He believes that if he could be like God he
would be perfect.
This doctrine of the goodness of God, it seems to me, is no more, at
bottom, than an evidence of arrested intellectual development. It
does not fit into what we know of the nature and operations of the
cosmos today; it is a survival from a day of universal ignorance. That
it is still given credit in the Far East is not surprising, for the
intellectual development of the Far East, despite all the nonsense that
is talked about Indian and Chinese “philosophy,” is really no further
advanced than that of Europe was in the time of St. Louis. The most
profound Hindoo or Chinese “philosopher” believes, as objective facts,
things that would make even a Georgia Fundamentalist snicker, and so
his “philosophy” is chiefly worthless, as was that of the Greeks. The
Greeks sometimes guessed right, just as the swamis and yoghis of Los
Angeles sometimes guess right, but in the main their speculations,
being based upon false observations, were valueless, and no one would
pay any attention to them today if it were not for the advertising they
get from theologians, who find them to their taste, and professional
“philosophers,” who make a living trying to teach them to sophomores.
But if the belief in the goodness of God is natural to misinformed
orientals, as it was natural to the singularly ignorant Greeks, it is
certainly _not_ natural to the enlightened races of the West today, for
all their science is simply a great massing of proofs that God, if He
exists, is neither good nor bad, but simply indifferent--an infinite
Force carrying on the operation of unintelligible processes without the
slightest regard, either one way or the other, for the comfort, safety
and happiness of man.
Why, then, does this belief survive? Largely, I am convinced, because
it is supported by another hoary relic from the adolescence of the
race, to wit, the weakness for poetry. The Jews fastened their religion
upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the
religions of their contemporaries--as a matter of fact, it was vastly
less reasonable than many of them--, but because it was far more
poetical. The poetry in it was what fetched the decaying Romans, and
after them the barbarians of the North; not the so-called Christian
evidences. For the Jews were poets of a truly colossal eloquence,
and they put their fundamental superstitions into dithyrambs of such
compelling loveliness that they disarmed the common sense even of
skeptical Romans, and so knocked out all other contemporary religions,
many of which were in far closer accord with what was then known of
the true operations of the universe. To this day no better poetry has
ever been written. It is so powerful in its effects that even men who
reject its content in toto are more or less susceptible to it. One
hesitates to flout it on purely æsthetic grounds; however dubious it
may be in doctrine, it is nevertheless almost perfect in form, and so
even the most violent atheist tends to respect it, just as he respects
a beautiful but deadly toad-stool. For no man, of course, ever quite
gets over poetry. He may seem to have recovered from it, just as he may
seem to have recovered from the measles of his school-days, but exact
observation teaches us that no such recovery is ever quite perfect;
there always remains a scar, a weakness and a memory.
Now, there is reason for maintaining that the taste for poetry, in
the process of human development, marks a stage measurably later than
the stage of religion. Savages so little cultured that they know no
more of poetry than a cow have elaborate and often very ingenious
theologies. If this be true, then it follows that the individual, as he
rehearses the life of the species, is apt to carry his taste for poetry
further along than he carries his religion--that if his development
is arrested at any stage before complete intellectual maturity that
arrest is far more likely to leave him with poetical hallucinations
than it is to leave him with theological hallucinations. Thus, taking
men in the mass, there are many more natural victims of the former
than of the latter--and here is where the talent of the ancient Jews
does its execution. It holds countless thousands to the faith who are
actually against the faith, and the weakness with which it holds them
is their weakness for poetry, _i. e._, for the beautiful but untrue.
Put into plain, harsh words most of the articles they are asked to
believe would revolt them, but put into sonorous dithyrambs the same
articles fascinate and overwhelm them. It is not the logical substance
of the Old Testament that continues to hold the mind of modern man,
for that logical substance must often revolt him, even when he is of
sub-normal intelligence; it is the sonorous strophes of the ancient
bards and prophets. And it is not the epistemology, or the natural
history, or the ethical scheme, or the system of jurisprudence of the
New Testament that melts his heart and wets his eyes; it is simply the
poetical magic of the Sermon on the Mount, the exquisite parables, and
the incomparable story of the Child in the Manger.
This persistence of the weakness for poetry, no doubt, explains the
great growth of ritualism in an age of skepticism. Almost every
day theology gets another blow from science. So badly has it been
battered during the past century, indeed, that educated men now give
it little more credence than they give to sorcery, its ancient ally.
But squeezing out the logical nonsense does no damage to the poetry; on
the contrary, it frees, and, in a sense, dignifies the poetry. Paul’s
chief doctrines, clearly stated, offend the intelligence intolerably,
but clothed and concealed by the gorgeous vestments of the mass they
separate themselves from logic entirely and take on something of the
witchery of beauty. Thus there is a constant movement of Christians,
and particularly of newly-intellectual Christians, from the more
literal varieties of Christian faith to the more poetical varieties.
The normal Babbitt, in the United States, is born a Methodist or a
Baptist, but when he begins to lay by money he and his wife tend to
go over to the American branch of the Church of England, which is not
only more fashionable but also less revolting to the higher cerebral
centers. His daughter, when she emerges from the finishing-school,
is very High Church; his grand-daughter, if the family keeps its
securities, will probably go over to Rome.
In view of all this, I am convinced that the Christian church, as a
going concern, is quite safe from danger, despite the rapid growth
of agnosticism. The theology it merchants is full of childish and
disgusting absurdities; practically all the other religions of
civilized and semi-civilized man are more plausible. But all of these
religions, including even Moslemism, contain the fatal defect that they
appeal primarily to the reason. Christianity will survive not only
Modernism but also Fundamentalism, a much more difficult business.
It will survive because it makes its first and foremost appeal to
that moony sense of the poetic which is in all men--to that elemental
sentimentality which, in men of arrested mental development, which is
to say, in the average men of Christendom, passes for the passion to
seek and know beauty.
3
_The Devotee_
If religion is thus charming to the more enlightened modern Christian
only in proportion as it is poetical, _i. e._, as it is regarded as
not literally true, it is charming to the enlightened spectator only
when it is formal and hence more or less insincere. A devotee on her
knees in some abysmal and mysterious cathedral, the while solemn music
sounds, and clouds of incense come down the wind, and priests in
luxurious, levantine costumes busy themselves with stately ceremonials
in a dead and not too respectable language--this is unquestionably
beautiful, particularly if the devotee herself be sightly. But the
same devotee aroused to hysterical protestations of faith by the
shrieks and contortions of a Methodist dervish in the costume of a
Southern member of Congress, her knees trembling with the fear of
God, her hands clenched as if to do combat with Beelzebub, her lips
discharging hosannahs and hallelujahs--this is merely obscene.
4
_The Restoration of Beauty_