WHOEVER attacks a custom or a creed, will be confronted with a list of
the names of the dead who upheld the custom, or believed the creed. He
is asked in a very triumphant and sneering way, if he knows more than
all the great and honored of the past Every defender of a creed has
graven upon his memory the names of all "great" men whose actions or
words can be tortured into evidence for his doctrine. The church is
always anxious to have some king or president certify to the moral
character of Christ, the authority of the Scriptures, and the justice
of the Jewish God. Of late years, confessions of gentlemen about to be
hanged have been considered of great value, and the scaffold is regarded
as a means of grace.
All the churches of our day seek the rich. They are no longer the
friends and defenders of the poor. Poverty no longer feels at home
in the house of God. In the Temple of the Most High, garments out of
fashion are considered out of place. People now, before confessing to
God what worthless souls they have, enrich their bodies. Now words of
penitence mingle with the rustle of silk, and light thrown from diamonds
adorns the repentant tear. We are told that the rich, the fortunate, the
holders of place and office, the fashionable, the respectable, are all
within the churches. And yet all these people grow eloquent over the
poverty of Christ--boast that he was born in a manger--that the Holy
Ghost passed by all the ladies of titled wealth and fashion and selected
the wife of a poor and unknown mechanic for the Mother of God.
They admit that all the men of Jerusalem who held high positions--all
the people of wealth, influence and power--were the enemies of the
Savior and held his pretensions in contempt. They admit that he had
influence only with the poor, and that he was so utterly unknown--so
indigent in acquaintance, that it was necessary to bribe one of his
disciples to point him out to the police. They assert that he had done a
great number of miracles--had cured the sick, and raised the dead--that
he had preached to vast multitudes--had made a kind of triumphal entry
into Jerusalem--had scourged from the temple the changers of money--had
disputed with the doctors--and yet, notwithstanding all these things,
he remained in the very depths of obscurity. Surely he and his disciples
could have been met with the argument that the "great" dead were opposed
to the new religion.
The apostles, it is claimed, preached the doctrines of Christ in Rome
and Athens, and the people of those cities could have used the arguments
against Christianity that Christians now use in its support. They could
have asked the apostles if they were wiser than all the philosophers,
poets, orators, and statesmen dead--if they knew more, coming as they
did from a weak and barbarous nation, than the greatest men produced by
the highest civilization of the known world. With what scorn would the
Greeks listen to a barbarian's criticisms upon Socrates and Plato. How
a Roman would laugh to hear a vagrant Hebrew attack a mythology that had
been believed by Cato and Virgil.
Every new religion has to overcome this argument of the cemetery--this
logic of the grave. Old ideas take shelter behind a barricade of corpses
and tombstones. They have epitaphs for battle-cries, and malign the
living in the name of the dead. The moment, however, that a new religion
succeeds, it becomes the old religion and uses the same argument against
a new idea that it once so gallantly refuted. The arguments used to-day
against what they are pleased to call infidelity would have shut the
mouth of every religious reformer, from Christ to the founder of the
last sect. The general objection to the new is, that it differs somewhat
from the old, and the fact that it does differ is urged as an argument
against its truth.
Every man is forced to admit that he does not agree with all the great
men, living or dead. The average Catholic, if not a priest, as a rule
will admit that Sir Isaac Newton was in some things his superior, that
Demosthenes had the advantage of him in expressing his ideas in public,
and that as a sculptor he is far below the unknown man of whose hand and
brain was born the Venus de Milo, but he will not, on account of
these admissions, change his views upon the important question of
transubstantiation.
Most Protestants will cheerfully admit that they are inferior in brain
and genius to some men who have lived and died in the Catholic Church;
that in the matter of preaching funeral sermons they do not pretend to
equal Bossuet; that their letters are not so interesting and polished
as those of Pascal; that Torquemada excelled them in the genius of
organization, and that for planning a massacre they would not for a
moment dispute the palm with Catherine de Medici.
And yet, after all these admissions, they would insist that the Pope
is an unblushing impostor, and that the Catholic Church is a vampire
fattened by the best blood of a thousand years.
The truth is, that in favor of almost every sect, the names of some
great men can be pronounced. In almost every church there have been
men whose only weakness was their religion, and who in other directions
achieved distinction. If you call men great because they were emperors,
kings, noblemen, statesmen, millionaires--because they commanded vast
armies and wielded great influence in their day, then more names can be
found to support and prop the Church of Rome than any other Christian
sect.
Is Protestantism willing to rest its claims upon the "great man"
argument? Give me the ideas, the religions, not that have been advanced
and believed by the so-called great of the past, but that will be
defended and believed by the great souls of the future.
It gives me pleasure to say that Lord Bacon was a great man; but I do
not for that reason abandon the Copernican system of astronomy, and
insist that the earth is stationary. Samuel Johnson was an excellent
writer of latinized English, but I am confident that he never saw a
real ghost. Matthew Hale was a reasonably good judge of law, but he
was mistaken about witches causing children to vomit crooked pins. John
Wesley was quite a man, in a kind of religious way, but in this country
few people sympathize with his hatred of republican government, or with
his contempt for the Revolutionary Fathers. Sir Isaac Newton, in the
domain of science, was the colossus of his time, but his commentary on
the book of Revelation would hardly excite envy, even in the breast of
a Spurgeon or a Talmage. Upon many questions, the opinions of Napoleon
were of great value, and yet about his bed, when dying, he wanted to
see burning the holy candles of Rome. John Calvin has been called
a logician, and reasoned well from his premises, but the burning of
Servetus did not make murder a virtue. Luther weakened somewhat the
power of the Catholic Church, and to that extent was a reformer, and
yet Lord Brougham affirmed that his "Table Talk" was so obscene that no
respectable English publisher would soil paper with a translation. He
was a kind of religious Rabelais; and yet a man can defend Luther in his
attack upon the church without justifying his obscenity. If every man
in the Catholic Church was a good man, that would not convince me that
Ignatius Loyola ever met and conversed with the Virgin Mary. The
fact is, very few men are right in everything. Great virtues may
draw attention from defects, but they cannot sanctify them. A pebble
surrounded by diamonds remains a common stone, and a diamond surrounded
by pebbles is still a gem. No one should attempt to refute an argument
by pronouncing the name of some man, unless he is willing to adopt all
the ideas and beliefs of that man. It is better to give reasons and
facts than names. An argument should not depend for its force upon the
name of its author. Facts need no pedigree; logic has no heraldry, and
the living should not be awed by the mistakes of the dead.
The greatest men the world has produced have known but little. They had
a few facts, mingled with mistakes without number. In some departments
they towered above their fellows, while in others they fell below the
common level of mankind.
Daniel Webster had great respect for the Scriptures, but very little for
the claims of his creditors. Most men are strangely inconsistent. Two
propositions were introduced into the Confederate Congress by the same
man. One was to hoist the black flag, and the other was to prevent
carrying the mails on Sunday. George Whitefield defended the slave
trade, because it brought the negroes within the sound of the gospel,
and gave them the advantage of associating with the gentlemen who stole
them. And yet this same Whitefield believed and taught the dogma
of predestination. Volumes might be written upon the follies and
imbecilities of great men. A full rounded man--a man of sterling
sense and natural logic--is just as rare as a great painter, poet, or
sculptor. If you tell your friend that he is not a painter, that he has
no genius for poetry, he will probably admit the truth of what you say,
without feeling that he has been insulted in the least. But if you tell
him that he is not a logician, that he has but little idea of the value
of a fact, that he has no real conception of what evidence is, and
that he never had an original thought in his life, he will cut your
acquaintance. Thousands of men are most wonderful in mechanics, in
trade, in certain professions, keen in business, knowing well the
men among whom they live, and yet satisfied with religions infinitely
stupid, with politics perfectly senseless, and they will believe that
wonderful things were common long ago, such things as no amount of
evidence could convince them had happened in their day. A man may be a
successful merchant, lawyer, doctor, mechanic, statesman, or theologian
without one particle of originality, and almost without the ability to
think logically upon any subject whatever. Other men display in some
directions the most marvelous intellectual power, astonish mankind with
their grasp and vigor, and at the same time, upon religious subjects
drool and drivel like David at the gates of Gath.