Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of doctrines
these people do not approve. Some of your friends stop little children
in the street, and give them books, which their parents, who have had
them baptized into the Christian fold and give them what they consider
proper religious instruction, do not think fit for them. One would
say it was fair enough to talk about matters thus forced upon people's
attention.
The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be called
opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.
But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have
not made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak on
such subjects. Suppose a minister were to undertake to express opinions
on medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he was going
beyond his province?
I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's “sulphur and supplication,”
and so many other cases where ministers had meddled with
medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general rule,
with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of
admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.
I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
thinking of their certificates to patent medicines. Let us look at this
matter.
If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for thirty
or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a year,--if
he had been constantly reading and hearing read the most approved
text-books on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually practised
according to different methods, daily, for the same length of time,--I
should think, that if a person of average understanding, he was entitled
to express an opinion on the subject of medicine, or else that his
instructors were a set of ignorant and incompetent charlatans.
If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in a
considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I should
think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same, and my
ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.
Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us an
opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in a
certain number of propositions,--of which we will say this is the first:
I. All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or caries,
and, therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is extracted and
a new set is inserted according to the principles of dentistry adopted
by this Society.
I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it,
and I should say this:--Why, no, that is n't true. There are a good many
bad teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones. You must n't
trust the dentists; they are all the time looking at the people who have
bad teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache. The idea that
you must pull out every one of every nice young man and young woman's
natural teeth! Poh, poh! Nobody believes that. This tooth must be
straightened, that must be filled with gold, and this other perhaps
extracted, but it must be a very rare case, if they are all so bad as to
require extraction; and if they are, don't blame the poor soul for it!
Don't tell us, as some old dentists used to, that everybody not only
always has every tooth in his head good for nothing, but that he ought
to have his head cut off as a punishment for that misfortune! No, I
can't sign Number One. Give us Number Two.
II. We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our views
of the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of it
prescribed in our tables, as there directed.
To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer
the two following:
III. Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed
by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of disease
from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is simultaneously
affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia, and Atrophy; with
Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with Cachexia, Carcinoma, and
Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet, to Xerophthahnia and Zona,
with all possible and incompatible diseases which are necessary to make
up a totally morbid state; and he will certainly die, if he does not
take freely of our prepared calomel, to be obtained only of one of our
authorized agents.
IV. No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does not
give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named and the
following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his mouth to
certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry, to examine
whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set inserted
according to our regulations.
Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any rhubarb,
if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing them, we
express doubts (in public), about any of them, they will cut us off
from our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to discuss the
propositions before he signs them is what I should call boiling it down
a little too strong!
If we understand them, why can't we discuss them? If we can't understand
them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the Father of
Lies do they ask us to sign them for?
Just so with the graver profession. Every now and then some of its
members seem to lose common sense and common humanity. The laymen have
to keep setting the divines right constantly. Science, for instance,--in
other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion; for, if so,
then religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the antagonist of
school-divinity.
Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.
Come down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant
prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-third
of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ.
Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-eight years
B. C. Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a
tortoise. One statement is as near the truth as the other.
Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral surgery.
I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more picture to
his four stages of Cruelty. Those wretched fools, reverend divines and
others, who were strangling men and women for imaginary crimes a little
more than a century ago among us, were set right by a layman, and very
angry it made them to have him meddle.
The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain mechanical
processes as Babbage's calculating machine. The commentary of the laymen
on the preaching and practising of Jonathan Edwards was, that, after
twenty-three years of endurance, they turned him out by a vote of twenty
to one, and passed a resolve that he should never preach for them again.
A man's logical and analytical adjustments are of little consequence,
compared to his primary relations with Nature and truth: and people have
sense enough to find it out in the long ran; they know what “logic” is
worth.
In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many
men can do this. But common sense and common humanity were unfortunately
left out from their premises, and a layman had to supply them. A hundred
more years and many of the barbarisms still lingering among us will, of
course, have disappeared like witch-hanging. But people are sensitive
now, as they were then. You will see by this extract that the Rev.
Cotton Mather did not like intermeddling with his business very well.
“Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions,” he says,
“and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up against them.
I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds among us know to be
true. The Godly Minister of a certain Town in Connecticut, when he had
occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from his Flock, employ'd an honest
Neighbour of some small Talents for a Mechanick, to read a Sermon out
of some good Book unto 'em. This Honest, whom they ever counted also a
Pious Man, had so much conceit of his Talents, that instead of Reading
a Sermon appointed, he to the Surprize of the People, fell to preaching
one of his own. For his Text he took these Words, 'Despise not
Prophecyings'; and in his Preachment he betook himself to bewail the
Envy of the Clergy in the Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's
People to be Prophets, and call forth Private Brethren publickly to
prophesie. While he was thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him
with horrible Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People
were forc'd with violent Hands to carry him home. I will not mention
his Name: He was reputed a Pious Man.”--This is one of Cotton Mather's
“Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,”--and the
next cases referred to are the Judgments on the “Abominable Sacrilege”
of not paying the Ministers' Salaries.
This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young friend!
We talk about our free institutions;--they are nothing but a coarse
outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought. The
President of the United States is only the engine driver of our
broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a seat
in the first-class cars behind him.
--There is something in what you say,--replied the divinity-student;
--and yet it seems to me there are places and times where disputed
doctrines of religion should not be introduced. You would not attack a
church dogma--say Total Depravity--in a lyceum-lecture, for instance?
Certainly not; I should choose another place,--I answered.--But, mind
you, at this table I think it is very different. I shall express my
ideas on any subject I like. The laws of the lecture-room, to which my
friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold here. I shall not
often give arguments, but frequently opinions,--I trust with courtesy
and propriety, but, at any rate, with such natural forms of expression
as it has pleased the Almighty to bestow upon me.
A man's opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his
arguments. These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not
believe the proposition they tend to prove,--as is often the case with
paid lawyers; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,--brain,
heart, instinct, brute life, everything all our experience has shaped
for us by contact with the whole circle of our being.
--There is one thing more,--said the divinity-student,--that I wished
to speak of; I mean that idea of yours, expressed some time since, of
depolarizing the text of sacred books in order to judge them fairly. May
I ask why you do not try the experiment yourself?
Certainly,--I replied,--if it gives you any pleasure to ask foolish
questions. I think the ocean telegraph-wire ought to be laid and will be
laid, but I don't know that you have any right to ask me to go and
lay it. But, for that matter, I have heard a good deal of Scripture
depolarized in and out of the pulpit. I heard the Rev. Mr. F. once
depolarize the story of the Prodigal Son in Park-Street Church. Many
years afterwards, I heard him repeat the same or a similar depolarized
version in Rome, New York. I heard an admirable depolarization of the
story of the young man who “had great possessions” from the Rev. Mr. H.
in another pulpit, and felt that I had never half understood it before.
All paraphrases are more or less perfect depolarizations. But I tell you
this: the faith of our Christian community is not robust enough to
bear the turning of our most sacred language into its depolarized
equivalents. You have only to look back to Dr. Channing's famous
Baltimore discourse and remember the shrieks of blasphemy with which
it was greeted, to satisfy yourself on this point. Time, time only, can
gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by
spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified. Man is an idolater or
symbol-worshipper by nature, which, of course, is no fault of his; but
sooner or later all his local and temporary symbols must be ground to
powder, like the golden calf,--word-images as well as metal and wooden
ones. Rough work, iconoclasm,--but the only way to get at truth. It is,
indeed, as that quaint and rare old discourse, “A Summons for
Sleepers,” hath it, “no doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie
occupation; veritas odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht
face; he that will be busie with voe vobis, let him looke shortly for
coram nobas.”
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think
what we like and say what we think.
--Think what we like!--said the divinity-student;--think what we like!
What! against all human and divine authority?
Against all human versions of its own or any other authority. At our own
peril always, if we do not like the right,--but not at the risk of being
hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on green fagots
for ecclesiastical treason! Nay, we have got so far, that the very word
heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among us.
And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion,
which we will not make a quarrel. I trust you know, or will learn, a
great many things in your profession which we common scholars do not
know; but mark this: when the common people of New England stop talking
politics and theology, it will be because they have got an Emperor to
teach them the one, and a Pope to teach them the other!
That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student.
The next morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very
good-naturedly, as people return to a matter they have talked out.
You must look to yourself,--said the divinity-student,--if your
democratic notions get into print. You will be fired into from all
quarters.
If it were only a bullet, with the marksman's name on it!--I said.--I
can't stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.
Right, Sir! right!--said the Little Gentleman. The scamps! I know the
fellows. They can't give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes, but they
must have it jingled along through everybody's palms all the way, till
it reaches him,--and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the water out of
the fire-buckets passed along a “lane” at a fire;--but when it comes
to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's mouths, and
then advertising those people through the country as the authors of
them,--oh, then it is that they let not their left hand know what their
right hand doeth!
I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir. He comes along with
a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his “secret errand unto thee,” and
his “message from God unto thee,” and then pulls out his hidden knife
with that unsuspected hand of his,--(the Little Gentleman lifted his
clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on the ring-finger,)--and
runs it, blade and haft, into a man's stomach! Don't meddle with these
fellows, Sir. They are read mostly by persons whom you would not reach,
if you were to write ever so much. Let 'em alone. A man whose opinions
are not attacked is beneath contempt.
I hope so,--I said.--I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs flung
at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former years.
When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the professional
public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance of poison from
one young mother's chamber to another's,--for doing which humble office
I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing else good
should ever come of my life,--I had to bear the sneers of those whose
position I had assailed, and, as I believe, have at last demolished, so
that nothing but the ghosts of dead women stir among the ruins.--What
would you do, if the folks without names kept at you, trying to get a
San Benito on to your shoulders that would fit you?--Would you stand
still in fly-time, or would you give a kick now and then?
Let 'em bite!--said the Little Gentleman,--let 'em bite! It makes 'em
hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as ever and
twice as savage. Do you know what meddling with the folks without names,
as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the quintaan. You run
full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of sand
on an arm that balances it. The board gives way as soon as you touch
it; and before you have got by, the bag of sand comes round whack on the
back of your neck. “Ananias,” for instance, pitches into your lecture,
we will say, in some paper taken by the people in your kitchen. Your
servants get saucy and negligent. If their newspaper calls you names,
they need not be so particular about shutting doors softly or boiling
potatoes. So you lose your temper, and come out in an article which you
think is going to finish “Ananias,” proving him a booby who doesn't know
enough to understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells
lies. Now you think you 've got him! Not so fast. “Ananias” keeps still
and winks to “Shimei,” and “Shimei” comes out in the paper which they
take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow.
If you meddle with “Shimei,” he steps out, and next week appears
“Rab-shakeh,” an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out
what good sense there was in Hezekiah's “Answer him not.”--No, no,--keep
your temper.--So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left fist and
looked at it as if he should like to hit something or somebody a most
pernicious punch with it.
Good!--said I.--Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at, after
seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.
--Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious sects,
about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to deal and
to live with.
--There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among
the men, in every denomination.
--The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:
1. The comfortably rich.
2. The decently comfortable.
3. The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
4. The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.
--The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
clinch.
--The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute
were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.
--Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.
--Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the
belief of a large one.
The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth while
all this was going on. She broke out in speech at this point.
I hate to hear folks talk so. I don't see that you are any better than a
heathen.
I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,--I said.--Dying
for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than scolding for
it; and the history of heathen races is full of instances where men have
laid down their lives for the love of their kind, of their country, of
truth, nay, even for simple manhood's sake, or to show their obedience
or fidelity. What would not such beings have done for the souls of men,
for the Christian commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived
in days of larger light? Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates
drinking his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that
old New England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling
over his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in
his own town, going “roaring out of one fire into another”?