Mr. Harry Thurston Peck is different: he is a scholar, a professor of
Latin in a leading college, an incisive if not very profound thinker,
and a charming writer. He is a capable editor, too, and has conducted
one of our foremost literary magazines, in which, as compelled by the
nature of the business, he has commonly concerned himself mightily
with the little men capering nimbly between yesterday the begetter and
to-morrow the destroyer. Sometimes a larger figure strides into the
field of his attention, but not for long, nor with any very notable
accretion of clarity in the view. The lenses are not adjusted for large
objects, which accordingly seem out of focus and give no true image.
So the observer turns gladly to his ephemera, and we who read him are
the gainers by his loyalty to his habit and to his public who fixed it
upon him. But he so far transcended his limitations as to review in
the late Col. Ingersoll’s the work of a pretty large man. The result
is, to many of Prof. Peck’s admirers, of whom I am one, profoundly
disappointing. In both spirit and method it suggests the question, Of
what real use are the natural gifts, the acquirements and opportunities
that do so little for the understanding? Surely one must sometimes
dissent from the generally accepted appraisement of “the things we
learn in college,” when one observes a man like Prof. Peck (a collegian
down to the bone tips) feeling and thinking after the fashion of a
circuit-riding preacher in Southwestern Missouri. Let us examine some
of his utterances about the great agnostic. Speaking of the purity of
his personal character, this critic says:
No one has questioned this; and even had it been so questioned
the fact could not be pertinent to our discussion. Indeed, it is
not easy to perceive just why his private virtues have been so
breathlessly brought forward and detailed with so much strenuous
insistence; for surely husbands who are faithful, fathers who are
loving, and friends who are generous and sympathetic are not so
rare in this our world as to make of them phenomena to be noted in
the annals of the age.
It seems to me entirely obvious why Ingersoll’s friends and supporters
have persisted in putting testimony on these matters into the forefront
of the discussion; and entirely relevant such testimony is. Churchmen
and religionists in all ages and countries have affirmed the necessary
and conspicuous immorality of the irreligious. No notable unbeliever
has been safe from the slanders of the pulpit and the church press. And
in this country to-day ninety-nine of every one hundred “professing
Christians” hold that public and personal morality has no other basis
than the Bible. In this they are both foolish and wise: foolish because
it is so evidently untrue, and wise because to concede its untruth
would be to abandon the defense of religion as a moral force. If men
can be good without religion, and scorning religion, then it is not
religion that makes men good; and if religion does not do this it is
of no practical value and one may as well be without it as with it,
so far as concerns one’s relations with one’s fellow men. We are told
that Christianity is something more than a body of doctrine, that it
is a system of ethics, having a divine origin; that it has a close and
warm relation to conduct, generating elevated sentiments and urging to
a noble and unselfish life. If in support of that view it is relevant
to point to the blameless lives of its “Founder” and his followers it
is equally relevant in contradiction to point to the blameless lives
of its opponents. If Prof. Peck finds it “not easy to perceive” this
he might profitably make some experiments in perception on a big, red
Pennsylvanian barn.
Prof. Peck tries to be fair; he concedes the honesty of Ingersoll’s
belief and acknowledges that
It is entitled to the same respect that we accord to the unshaken
faith of other men. Indeed, for the purpose of the moment we
may even go still further and assume that he was right; that
Christianity is in truth a superstition and its history a fable;
that it has no hold on reason; and that the book from which
it draws in part its teaching and its inspiration is only an
inconsistent chronicle of old-world myths. Let us assume all this
and let us still inquire what final judgment should be passed
upon the man who held these views and strove so hard to make them
universal.
Prof. Peck is not called upon to make any such concessions and
assumptions. As counsel for the defense, I am as willing to make
admissions as he, and “for the sake of argument,” as the meaningless
saying goes, to confess that the religion attacked by my client is
indubitably true. His justification depends in no degree upon the
accuracy of his judgment, but upon his honest confidence in it; and
that is unquestioned; that is no assumption; it is not conceded but
affirmed. If he believed that in these matters he was right and a
certain small minority of mankind, including a considerable majority
of his living countrymen, wrong it was merely his duty as a gentleman
to speak his views and to strive, as occasion offered or opportunity
served, to “make them universal.” In our personal affairs there is
such a thing as righteous suppression of the truth—even such another
thing as commendable falsehood. In certain circumstances avowal of
convictions is as baleful and mischievous as in other circumstances
dissimulation is. But in all the large matters of the mind—in
philosophy, religion, science, art and the like, a lesser service to
the race than utterance of the truth as he thinks he sees it, leaving
the result to whatever powers may be, a man has no right to be content
with having performed, for it is only so that truth is established. It
was only so that Prof. Peck’s religion was enthroned upon the ruins of
others—among them one so beautiful that after centuries of effacement
its myths and memories stir with a wonderful power the hearts of
scholars and artists of the later and conquering faith. Of that
religion it might once have been said in deprecation of St. Paul, as,
in deprecation of Ingersoll, Prof. Peck now says of religion in general:
Its roots strike down into the very depths of human consciousness.
They touch the heart, the sympathies and the emotions. They lay
strong hold on life itself, and they are the chords to which all
being can be made to vibrate with a passionate intensity which
nothing else could call to life.
I have said that Prof. Peck tries to be fair; if he had altogether
succeeded he would have pointed out, not only that Ingersoll sincerely
believed the Christian religion false, but that he believed it
mischievous, and that he was persuaded that its devotees would be
better off with no religion than with any. Had Prof. Peck done that
he could have spared himself the trouble of writing, and many of
his admirers the pain of reading, his variants of the ancient and
discreditable indictment of the wicked incapable who can “tear down,”
but not “build up.” Agnosticism may be more than a mere negation.
It may be, as in Ingersoll it was, a passionate devotion to Truth,
a consecration of self to her service. Of such a one as he it is
incredibly false to say that he can only “destroy” and “has naught to
give.” As well and as truthfully could that be said of one who knocks
away the chains of a slave and goes his way, imposing no others. One
may err in doing so. There are as many breeds of men as of dogs and
horses; and as a cur can not be taught to retrieve nor herd sheep,
nor a roadster to hunt, so there are human tribes unfit for liberty.
One’s zeal in liberation may be greater than one’s wisdom, but faith
in all mankind is at least an honorable error, even when manifested by
hammering at the shackles of the mind. What Ingersoll thought he had
to “give” was Freedom—and that, I take it, is quite as positive and
real as bondage. The reproach of “tearing down” without “building up”
is valid against nobody but an idolatrous iconoclast. Ingersoll was
different.
Prof. Peck has a deal to say against Ingersoll’s methods; he does not
think them sufficiently serious, not to say reverent. This objection
may be met as Voltaire met it—by authorizing his critic to disregard
the wit and answer the argument. But Prof. Peck will not admit that
Ingersoll was witty. He sees nothing in his sallies but “buffoonery,”
a word meaning wit directed against one’s self or something that one
respects. This amazing judgment from the mouth of one so witty himself
could, but for one thing, be interpreted no otherwise than as evidence
that he has not read the works that he condemns. That one thing is
religious bigotry which, abundantly manifest everywhere in the article
under review, is nowhere so conspicuous as in the intemperate, not
to say low, language in which the charge of “buffoonery” is made.
Who that has an open mind would think that it was written of Robert
Ingersoll that he “burst into the sacred silence of their devotion with
the raucous bellowing of an itinerant stump-speaker and the clowning
of a vulgar mountebank”? To those who really know the character of
Robert Ingersoll’s wit—keen, bright and clean as an Arab’s scimetar;
to those who know the clear and penetrating mental insight of which
such wit is the expression and the proof; to those who know how much
of gold and how little of mud clung to the pebbles that he slung at
the Goliaths of authority and superstition; to those who have noted
the astonishing richness of his work in elevated sentiments fitly
expressed, his opulence of memorable aphorism and his fertility of
felicitous phrase—to these it will not seem credible that such a man
can be compared to one who, knowing the infidelity of a friend’s wife,
would “slap his friend upon the back and tell the story with a snicker,
in the coarsest language of the brothel, interspersed with Rabelaisian
jokes.” It is of the nature of wit mercifully to veil its splendors
from the eyes of its victim. The taken thief sees in his captor an
unheroic figure. The prisoner at the bar is not a good judge of the
prosecution. But it is difficult distinctly to conceive a scholar,
a wit, a critic, an accomplished editor of a literary magazine,
committing himself to such judgments as these upon work accessible to
examination and familiar to memory. To paraphrase Pope,
Who would not laugh if such a man there be?
Who would not weep if Harry Peck were he?
Another “point” that Prof. Peck is not ashamed to make is that
Ingersoll lectured on religion for money—“in the character of a
paid public entertainer, for his own personal profit.” And in what
character, pray, does anybody lecture where there is a charge for
admittance? In what character have some of the world’s greatest
authors, scientists, artists and masters of crafts generally lectured
when engaged to do so by “lyceums,” “bureaus,” or individual
“managers”? In what character does Prof. Peck conduct his valuable and
entertaining magazine for instruction and amusement of those willing to
pay for it? In what character, indeed, does the Defender of the Faith
put upon the market his austere sense of Ingersoll’s cupidity?
Obviously the agnostic’s offence was not lecturing for pay. It was not
lecturing on religion. It was not sarcasm. It was that, lecturing for
pay on religion, his sarcasm took a direction disagreeable to Prof.
Peck, instead of disagreeable to Prof. Peck’s opponents. As a ridiculer
of infidels and agnostics Ingersoll might have made a great fame and
not one of his present critics would have tried to dim its lustre with
a breath, nor “with polluted finger tarnish it.”
Religions are human institutions; at least those so hold who belong to
none of “the two-and-seventy jarring sects.” Religious faiths, like
political and social, are entitled to no immunity from examination and
criticism; all the methods and weapons that are legitimate against
other institutions and beliefs are legitimate against them. Their
devotees have not the right to shield themselves behind some imaginary
special privilege, to exact an exceptional exemption. A religion of
divine origin would have a right to such exemption; its devotees might
with some reason assist God to punish the crime of _lèse majesté_; but
the divinity of the religion’s origin is the very point in dispute,
and in holding that it shall be settled his way as an assurance of
peace its protagonist is guilty of a hardy and impenitent impudence.
Blasphemy has been defined as speaking disrespectfully of _my_ phemy;
one does not observe among the followers of one faith any disposition
to accord immunity from ridicule to the followers of another faith. The
devoutest Christian can throw mud at Buddha without affecting his own
good standing with the brethren; and if Mahomet were hanged in effigy
from the cross of St. Paul’s, Protestant Christianity would condemn the
act merely as desecration of a sacred edifice.
Here is one more quotation from Prof. Peck, the concluding passage of
his paper:
Robert Ingersoll is dead. Death came to him with swiftness and
without a warning. Whether he was even conscious of his end no
man can say. It may be that before the spark grew quite extinct
there was for him a moment of perception—that one appalling moment
when, within a space of time too brief for human contemplation,
the affrighted mind, as it reels upon the brink, flashes its vivid
thought through all the years of its existence and perceives the
final meaning of them all. If such a moment came to him, and as
the light of day grew dim before his dying eyes his mind looked
backward through the past, there can have been small consolation in
the thought, that in all the utterances of his public teaching, and
in all the phrases of his fervid eloquence, there was nothing that
could help to make the life of a man on earth more noble, or more
spiritual, or more truly worth living.
This of a man who taught all the virtues as a duty and a delight!—who
stood, as no other man among his countrymen has stood, for liberty,
for honor, for good will toward men, for truth as it was given to him
to see it, for love!—who by personal example taught patience under
falsehood and silence under vilification!—who when slandered in debate
answered not back, but addressed himself to the argument!—whose entire
life was an inspiration to high thought and noble deed, and whose
errors, if errors they are, the world can not afford to lose for the
light and reason that are in them!
The passage quoted is not without eloquence and that literary
distinction which its author gives to so much of what he writes. Withal
it is infinitely discreditable. There is in it a distinct undertone
of malice—of the same spirit which, among bigots of less civility and
franker speech, affirms of an irreligious person’s sudden death that
it was “a judgment of Heaven,” and which gloats upon the possibility
that he suffered the pangs of a penitence that came, thank God! too
late to command salvation. It is in the same spirit that conceived
and keeps in currency the ten-thousand-times-disproved tales of the
deathbed remorse of Thomas Paine, Voltaire and all the great infidels.
Indubitably posterity will enjoy the advantage of believing the same
thing of Ingersoll; and I can not help thinking that in suggesting
his remorse as only a possibility, instead of relating it as a fact
attested by piteous appeals for divine mercy, Prof. Peck has committed
a sin of omission for which on his own deathbed he will himself suffer
the keenest regret.
1899.