There is unquestionably nothing to be found in the world which has
undergone so little change as those great dogmas of which moral systems
are composed. To do good to others; to sacrifice for their benefit your
own wishes; to love your neighbor as yourself; to forgive your enemies;
to restrain your passions; to honor your parents; to respect those who
are set over you,--these and a few others are the sole essentials of
morals: but they have been known for thousands of years, and not one jot
or tittle has been added to them by all the sermons, homilies, and
text-books which moralists and theologians have been able to produce.
But if we contrast this stationary aspect of moral truths with the
progressive aspect of intellectual truths, the difference is indeed
startling. All the great moral systems which have exercised much
influence have been fundamentally the same; all the great intellectual
systems have been fundamentally different. In reference to our moral
conduct, there is not a single principle now known to the most
cultivated Europeans which was not likewise known to the ancients. In
reference to the conduct of our intellect, the moderns have not only
made the most important additions to every department of knowledge that
the ancients ever attempted to study, but besides this they have upset
and revolutionized the old methods of inquiry; they have consolidated
into one great scheme all those resources of induction which Aristotle
alone dimly perceived; and they have created sciences, the faintest idea
of which never entered the mind of the boldest thinker antiquity
produced.
These are, to every educated man, recognized and notorious facts; and
the inference to be drawn from them is immediately obvious. Since
civilization is the product of moral and intellectual agencies, and
since that product is constantly changing, it evidently cannot be
regulated by the stationary agent; because, when surrounding
circumstances are unchanged, a stationary agent can only produce a
stationary effect. The only other agent is the intellectual one; and
that this is the real mover may be proved in two distinct ways: first
because, being as we have already seen either moral or intellectual, and
being as we have also seen not moral, it must be intellectual; and
secondly, because the intellectual principle has an activity and a
capacity for adaptation which, as I undertake to show, is quite
sufficient to account for the extraordinary progress that during several
centuries Europe has continued to make.
Such are the main arguments by which my view is supported; but there are
also other and collateral circumstances which are well worthy of
consideration. The first is, that the intellectual principle is not only
far more progressive than the moral principle, but is also far more
permanent in its results. The acquisitions made by the intellect are, in
every civilized country, carefully preserved, registered in certain
well-understood formulas, and protected by the use of technical and
scientific language; they are easily handed down from one generation to
another, and thus assuming an accessible, or as it were a tangible form,
they often influence the most distant posterity, they become the
heirlooms of mankind, the immortal bequest of the genius to which they
owe their birth. But the good deeds effected by our moral faculties are
less capable of transmission; they are of a more private and retiring
character: while as the motives to which they owe their origin are
generally the result of self-discipline and of self-sacrifice, they
have to be worked out by every man for himself; and thus, begun by each
anew, they derive little benefit from the maxims of preceding
experience, nor can they well be stored up for the use of future
moralists. The consequence is that although moral excellence is more
amiable, and to most persons more attractive, than intellectual
excellence, still it must be confessed that looking at ulterior results,
it is far less active, less permanent, and as I shall presently prove,
less productive of real good. Indeed, if we examine the effects of the
most active philanthropy and of the largest and most disinterested
kindness, we shall find that those effects are, comparatively speaking,
short-lived; that there is only a small number of individuals they come
in contact with and benefit; that they rarely survive the generation
which witnessed their commencement; and that when they take the more
durable form of founding great public charities, such institutions
invariably fall, first into abuse, then into decay, and after a time are
either destroyed or perverted from their original intention, mocking the
effort by which it is vainly attempted to perpetuate the memory even of
the purest and most energetic benevolence.
These conclusions are no doubt very unpalatable; and what makes them
peculiarly offensive is, that it is impossible to refute them. For the
deeper we penetrate into this question, the more clearly shall we see
the superiority of intellectual acquisitions over moral feeling. There
is no instance on record of an ignorant man who, having good intentions
and supreme power to enforce them, has not done far more evil than good.
And whenever the intentions have been very eager, and the power very
extensive, the evil has been enormous. But if you can diminish the
sincerity of that man, if you can mix some alloy with his motives, you
will likewise diminish the evil which he works. If he is selfish as well
as ignorant, it will often happen [that] you may play off his vice
against his ignorance, and by exciting his fears restrain his mischief.
If, however, he has no fear, if he is entirely unselfish, if his sole
object is the good of others, if he pursues that object with enthusiasm,
upon a large scale, and with disinterested zeal, then it is that you
have no check upon him, you have no means of preventing the calamities
which in an ignorant age an ignorant man will be sure to inflict. How
entirely this is verified by experience, we may see in studying the
history of religious persecution. To punish even a single man for his
religious tenets is assuredly a crime of the deepest dye; but to punish
a large body of men, to persecute an entire sect, to attempt to
extirpate opinions which, growing out of the state of society in which
they arise, are themselves a manifestation of the marvelous and
luxuriant fertility of the human mind,--to do this is not only one of
the most pernicious, but one of the most foolish acts that can possibly
be conceived. Nevertheless it is an undoubted fact that an overwhelming
majority of religious persecutors have been men of the purest
intentions, of the most admirable and unsullied morals. It is impossible
that this should be otherwise. For they are not bad-intentioned men who
seek to enforce opinions which they believe to be good. Still less are
they bad men who are so regardless of temporal considerations as to
employ all the resources of their power, not for their own benefit, but
for the purpose of propagating a religion which they think necessary to
the future happiness of mankind. Such men as these are not bad, they are
only ignorant; ignorant of the nature of truth, ignorant of the
consequences of their own acts. But in a moral point of view their
motives are unimpeachable. Indeed, it is the very ardor of their
sincerity which warms them into persecution. It is the holy zeal by
which they are fired that quickens their fanaticism into a deadly
activity. If you can impress any man with an absorbing conviction of the
supreme importance of some moral or religious doctrine; if you can make
him believe that those who reject that doctrine are doomed to eternal
perdition; if you then give that man power, and by means of his
ignorance blind him to the ulterior consequences of his own act,--he
will infallibly persecute those who deny his doctrine; and the extent of
his persecution will be regulated by the extent of his sincerity.
Diminish the sincerity, and you will diminish the persecution; in other
words, by weakening the virtue you may check the evil. This is a truth
of which history furnishes such innumerable examples, that to deny it
would be not only to reject the plainest and most conclusive arguments,
but to refuse the concurrent testimony of every age. I will merely
select two cases, which, from the entire difference in their
circumstances, are very apposite as illustrations: the first being from
the history of Paganism, the other from the history of Christianity; and
both proving the inability of moral feelings to control religious
persecution.
I. The Roman emperors, as is well known, subjected the early Christians
to persecutions which, though they have been exaggerated, were frequent
and very grievous. But what to some persons must appear extremely
strange, is, that among the active authors of these cruelties we find
the names of the best men who ever sat on the throne; while the worst
and most infamous princes were precisely those who spared the
Christians, and took no heed of their increase. The two most thoroughly
depraved of all the emperors were certainly Commodus and Elagabalus;
neither of whom persecuted the new religion, or indeed adopted any
measures against it. They were too reckless of the future, too selfish,
too absorbed in their own infamous pleasures, to mind whether truth or
error prevailed; and being thus indifferent to the welfare of their
subjects, they cared nothing about the progress of a creed which they,
as Pagan emperors, were bound to regard as a fatal and impious delusion.
They therefore allowed Christianity to run its course, unchecked by
those penal laws which more honest but more mistaken rulers would
assuredly have enacted. We find, accordingly, that the great enemy of
Christianity was Marcus Aurelius; a man of kindly temper, and of
fearless, unflinching honesty, but whose reign was characterized by a
persecution from which he would have refrained had he been less in
earnest about the religion of his fathers. And to complete the argument,
it may be added that the last and one of the most strenuous opponents of
Christianity who occupied the throne of the Cæsars was Julian; a prince
of eminent probity, whose opinions are often attacked, but against whose
moral conduct even calumny itself has hardly breathed a suspicion.
II. The second illustration is supplied by Spain; a country of which it
must be confessed, that in no other have religiuos feelings exercised
such sway over the affairs of men. No other European nation has produced
so many ardent and disinterested missionaries, zealous self-denying
martyrs, who have cheerfully sacrificed their lives in order to
propagate truths which they thought necessary to be known. Nowhere else
have the spiritual classes been so long in the ascendant; nowhere else
are the people so devout, the churches so crowded, the clergy so
numerous. But the sincerity and honesty of purpose by which the Spanish
people, taken as a whole, have always been marked, have not only been
unable to prevent religious persecution, but have proved the means of
encouraging it. If the nation had been more lukewarm, it would have
been more tolerant. As it was, the preservation of the faith became the
first consideration; and everything being sacrificed to this one object,
it naturally happened that zeal begat cruelty, and the soil was prepared
in which the Inquisition took root and flourished. The supporters of
that barbarous institution were not hypocrites, but enthusiasts.
Hypocrites are for the most part too supple to be cruel. For cruelty is
a stern and unbending passion; while hypocrisy is a fawning and flexible
art, which accommodates itself to human feelings, and flatters the
weakness of men in order that it may gain its own ends. In Spain, the
earnestness of the nation, being concentrated on a single topic, carried
everything before it; and hatred of heresy becoming a habit, persecution
of heresy was thought a duty. The conscientious energy with which that
duty was fulfilled is seen in the history of the Spanish Church. Indeed,
that the inquisitors were remarkable for an undeviating and
uncorruptible integrity may be proved in a variety of ways, and from
different and independent sources of evidence. This is a question to
which I shall hereafter return; but there are two testimonies which I
cannot omit, because, from the circumstances attending them, they are
peculiarly unimpeachable. Llorente, the great historian of the
Inquisition, and its bitter enemy, had access to its private papers: and
yet, with the fullest means of information, he does not even insinuate a
charge against the moral character of the inquisitors; but while
execrating the cruelty of their conduct, he cannot deny the purity of
their intentions. Thirty years earlier, Townsend, a clergyman of the
Church of England, published his valuable work on Spain: and though, as
a Protestant and an Englishman, he had every reason to be prejudiced
against the infamous system which he describes, he also can bring no
charge against those who upheld it; but having occasion to mention its
establishment at Barcelona, one of its most important branches, he makes
the remarkable admission that all its members are men of worth, and that
most of them are of distinguished humanity.
These facts, startling as they are, form a very small part of that vast
mass of evidence which history contains, and which decisively proves the
utter inability of moral feelings to diminish religious persecution. The
way in which the diminution has been really effected by the mere
progress of intellectual acquirements will be pointed out in another
part of this volume; when we shall see that the great antagonist of
intolerance is not humanity, but knowledge. It is to the diffusion of
knowledge, and to that alone, that we owe the comparative cessation of
what is unquestionably the greatest evil men have ever inflicted on
their own species. For that religious persecution is a greater evil than
any other, is apparent, not so much from the enormous and almost
incredible number of its known victims, as from the fact that the
unknown must be far more numerous, and that history gives no account of
those who have been spared in the body in order that they might suffer
in the mind. We hear much of martyrs and confessors--of those who were
slain by the sword, or consumed in the fire: but we know little of that
still larger number who by the mere threat of persecution have been
driven into an outward abandonment of their real opinions; and who, thus
forced into an apostasy the heart abhors, have passed the remainder of
their lives in the practice of a constant and humiliating hypocrisy. It
is this which is the real curse of religious persecution. For in this
way, men being constrained to mask their thoughts, there arises a habit
of securing safety by falsehood, and of purchasing impunity with deceit.
In this way fraud becomes a necessary of life; insincerity is made a
daily custom; the whole tone of public feeling is vitiated, and the
gross amount of vice and of error fearfully increased. Surely, then, we
have reason to say that, compared to this, all other crimes are of small
account; and we may well be grateful for that increase of intellectual
pursuits which has destroyed an evil that some among us would even now
willingly restore.