We are told that our superior civilization and high moral tone are due
to Christianity. I think that this is not true. The whole, or at
least much the larger and foundation part of the question of
civilization--where it shall grow and where only live, where it shall
drag and where scarcely exist--seems to me to be decided primarily by
environment, the basis of which is climate and soil.
Where the climate and soil are most favorable to the highest
development; where the environment is neither too hard nor too
indulgent; where man is neither enervated by heat and the absence
of necessity to labor, nor stunted by cold and hardship and the
ever-present necessity to search or labor for food and warmth; there
will be the highest types and forms of civilization.*
* See Appendix A*
If the Buddhist religion had chanced to be the one that in the process
of events took root in the climate and soil where the Hebrew Bible and
the Christian belief hold sway; and if, on the other hand, the Hebrew
and Christian religions had been the ones developed in India or China,
the civilization of the various countries would still, in the main, be
what they are to-day.
If our superior civilization were the result of our religion, then
the most civilized countries would be the most intensely Christian
countries. We all know that this is not the case. Compare the intense
Christianity of Spain or Russia, and their backward civilization, with
the easy-going religious or irreligious condition of France or America,
and their recognition of Liberty and Humanity, equalled nowhere else on
earth.
I admit unreservedly that a religion; by its inelasticity, may do much
to retard progress, or by its greater elasticity may permit a more rapid
development than a more nearly petrified or incoherent system would
allow; but what I hold is this, that the primary and controlling causes
of the various stages of civilization are climate and soil.
There are, of course, many other things which modify the social
development or civilization in any country, as its religion, its laws,
and what we may call "accidents of international or civil contest," such
as the religious or other wars--our own war in which the blacks were
freed, arbitration, and immigration. All of these, and many others, are
modifying influences; but no one of them can claim the primary place.
Soil, climate, and location determine the occupation of a nation, as
whether it shall be militant, commercial, or agricultural. In turn
occupation determines what the character of a people and their laws
shall be, whether they shall be warlike or peaceful, inventive or
receptive, stationary or roving; and these, in turn, are the matters
which determine the civil scale to which a people shall rise.
True, the religion of a people will make itself felt strongly; but
whenever a nation has found it expedient or desirable to accomplish a
feat which was in opposition to its religion, it has invariably modified
the religion to fit the case, or waived it in favor of that particular
movement.*
* "The popular religion in this, as in other cases, was
made to bend to the new vice."--Lecky's History of European
Morals, vol. il, page 311.
In keeping with this fact it is found that in those countries where the
greatest changes and modifications of government and occupation have
occurred, there have the religions undergone the greatest modification
_to fit the new order of things_. If it were the religion that
determined the matter, civilization and morals would be immovable, and
legislation would revolve around, the guidance of the Church.
According to the very theory of Divine revelation a religion would be
most perfect at its beginning. It would be without flaw when born.
It would be incapable of improvement or growth. In a word it would be
immovable. It would possess the fixation of which Emerson speaks. It
would not have to readjust itself to the changed and improved conditions
of man, and its word would be always a higher light on every movement of
progress. It would be to the Church and not to the State that the great
principles of progress, of liberty, and of justice would look for the
highest guidance and the last light. How far this is from the real
state of things in any country or in any religion all readers of history
know.*
* See Appendix B.
It is the State or Science which has proposed and made the steps of
progress, and the Church has (often after the most bitter fight and
denunciation) readjusted her creed to the new code, and then claimed
that she had that light and knew that principle before, although neither
she nor any one else had ever suspected it.
This has been the case with almost every important discovery that
Science has ever made. The Church has retarded the acceptance of the new
light, and has set her seal of "divine disapproval and damnation" on the
brow of the thinkers who strove to bless mankind. It has been the rule
in State reforms as well. It was so in the struggle to separate Church
and State. It is so in the effort to sustain the belief in the "divine
right of kings." The Church fought individual liberty and representative
government, and she still contests the questions of individual
conscience and universal equality and independence.*
* See reports of the last General Conference of the
Methodist Church held in Philadelphia, where, during a
heated debate, one member said that he was in favor of using
common-sense and the principle of justice in deciding
questions of right and wrong and of liberty of conscience;
whereupon a large majority voted him a dangerous man, and
decided that common-sense and justice had nothing to do with
religion. One member naively remarked that the whole career
and life of a good preacher fully disproved that any such
heretical doctrines obtained in the Church as that the use
of common-sense was admissible; and since the majority voted
with him it does not seem to be my place to question that
fact.
In these matters the Church has invariably been on the side that
ultimately had to go to the wall, and she has become a party to the
progress only after the principle has become an established fact.
Now it is the efforts of Science and Law towards the elevation of man
and the bettering of his condition in this world--the procuring for him
of greater personal advantages, dignity, and liberty--that have marked
the progress of civilization.
The climate and soil decided man's occupation; his occupation determined
what his higher needs should be; and his higher needs and the gained
results of his occupations enabled him to strive for the bettering of
his condition and surroundings. The man who lived in a climate favorable
to mental and physical activity, and in a country with a rich and
varied soil, was enabled to accomplish his ends as his less fortunate
brother-lacking such support and stimulus and motive--has been unable to
do.
If such a thing had been possible, thirty years ago, as that all
knowledge of our religion had been utterly wiped out of America, and
a thorough knowledge of Buddhism or Mohammedanism instilled into every
Yankee brain in its stead, the Yankee brain would have simply adjusted
its religion to its surroundings and not its surroundings to its
religion; and America would have gone right on in the front rank of
liberty and toleration and progress. There would have been social
and political and religious contests over "caste" or "harems" or
"Tripitaka," instead of over slavery as a divine institution, the right
of a mother to her own offspring, or the inspiration of the Bible. The
wheels of progress would have been blocked some days by devotees who
preached damnation for those who believed in the "Trinity" instead of
for those who did not. Hell would have been as freely promised to the
man who suggested that Newton knew more than Mohammed, as it is to-day
to any one who makes the same odious comparison between Darwin and
Moses. The timid would have been terrified by sermons to prove the
lost condition of a man who touched one of lower rank, in place of
the edification our clergy offer in the shape of eternal damnation
for unbaptized infants. And there would have been so little difference
between the arguments for the divinity of the Tripitaka and the Bible,
and for the miracles of each, that if any devout Presbyterian had by
accident left his barrel of sermons on the latter subject behind him,
his Buddhist brother could have utilized them without the change of an
argument. But the wheel would turn and the devotee would either go
down or change his creed, and it would depend chiefly upon his age and
consequent flexibility which course he would adopt.
No known religion could transfer the conditions of civilization in China
to America or England or France, and no amount of christianizing (if
such a thing were possible) could transform China into a like condition
with us, so long as her climate, her soil, and her population remain
what they are to-day. You may make the Arab or the Jap digest the whole
Westminster catechism, but he will, he _must_, be an Arab or a Jap
still--if he lives through it all. If his constitution is good, and he
gets over it, his condition and grade of civilization will continue to
conform to his environment; and the trifling difference involved between
turning-off prayers on a wheel and counting them off on beads will be
simply the difference between tweedledee and tweedledum.
Notwithstanding this as a primary fact, the religion of a country has a
modifying influence on the rapidity of its progress, and the more fixed
a religion--the more certainly it claims perfection, the greater claim
it lays to holding the final word; _and the more fully this claim is
accepted by the people_, the greater influence will it have, the greater
check will it be to the development of any new thought, discovery,
invention, or principle that arises in the process of evolution toward
a freer atmosphere and a broader understanding of individual liberty and
dignity and life. William Kingdon Clifford, F. R. S., in his delightful
book on the "Scientific Basis of Morals," says:
"It is sometimes said that moral questions have been authoritatively
settled by other methods; that we ought to accept this decision, and
not to question it by any method of scientific inquiry; and that reason
should give way to revelation on such matters.
"I hope before I have done to show just cause why we should pronounce on
such teaching as this no light _sentence of moral condemnation_: first,
because it is our duty to form those beliefs which are to guide our
actions by the two scientific modes of inference, and by these alone;
and, secondly, because the proposed mode of settling ethical questions
by authority is contrary to the very nature of right and wrong.
"The worship of a deity who is represented as unfair or unfriendly to
any portion of the community is a wrong thing, however great may be
the threats and promises by which it is commended. And still worse, the
reference of right and wrong to his arbitrary will as a standard, _the
diversion of the allegiance of the moral sense from the community to
him, is the most insidious and fatal of social diseases_.
"_The first principle of natural ethics is the sole and supreme
allegiance of conscience to the community_.
"Secondly, veracity to the community depends upon faith in man. Surely I
ought to be talking platitudes when I say that it is not English to
tell a man a lie, or to suggest a lie by your silence or your actions,
because you are afraid that he is not prepared for the truth, because
you don't quite know what he will do when he knows it, because perhaps
after all this lie is a better thing _for him_ than the truth would be,
this same man being all the time an honest fellow-citizen whom you have
every reason to trust. Surely I have heard that this craven crookedness
is the object of our national detestation. _And yet it is constantly
whispered that it would be dangerous to divulge certain truths to the
masses_. 'I know the whole thing is untrue: but then it is so useful for
the people; you don't know what harm you might do by shaking their faith
in it.' Crooked ways are none the less crooked because they are meant
to deceive great masses of people instead of individuals. If a thing is
true, let us all believe it, rich and poor, men, women, and children. If
a thing is untrue, let us all disbelieve it, rich and poor, men, women,
and children. Truth is a thing to be shouted from the housetops, not to
be whispered over rose-water after dinner when the ladies are gone away.
"Even in those whom I would most reverence, who would shrink with horror
from such actual deception as I have just mentioned, I find traces of
a want of faith in man. Even that noble thinker, to whom we of this
generation owe more than I can tell, seemed to say in one of his
posthumous essays that in regard to questions of great public importance
we might encourage a hope in excess of the evidence (which would
infallibly grow into a belief and defy evidence) if we found that life
was made easier by it. _As if we should not lose infinitely more by
nourishing a tendency to falsehood than we could gain by the delusion of
a pleasing fancy_. Life must first of all be made straight and true;
it may get easier through the help this brings to the commonwealth. And
Lange, the great historian of materialism, says that the amount of false
belief necessary to morality in a given society is a matter of taste. _I
cannot believe that any falsehood whatever is necessary to morality_. It
cannot be true of my race and yours that to keep ourselves from becoming
scoundrels we must needs believe a lie. _The sense of right grew up
among healthy men and was fixed by the practice of comradeship. It has
never had help from phantoms and falsehoods, and it never can want any_.
By faith in man and piety toward men we have taught each other the right
hitherto; with faith in man and piety toward men we shall never more
depart from it."
If religion decided and produced the civilization of a people, what sort
of civilization would exist to-day among the Jews? All Jews would be
bigamists, and murder would be their pastime. No people would be free
from their rapine, no woman safe from their lust. But fortunately they
have followed their scientific and political leaders instead of their
Prophets, and the consequence is that they are so far above and
superior to their religion and their Bible, that only in its trivial and
immaterial dictates is it their guide and law to-day.
And we, building upon the same foundation, with an added story to our
edifice, modify, to suit legislation and a higher public sentiment and a
broader conception of justice, both the foundation and the roof whenever
a new principle is born or some great soul floods the world with light.
And so the world moves on, those nations in advance that possess the
climate to stimulate and the soil to support to the best advantage their
citizens--philosophers and scientists who grope towards perfection and
stumble on the way over real and imaginary obstacles, but still bring
each generation nearer the goal, and freer to brush aside the cobwebs
of superstition and ignorance, and to look fairly out on the light that
breaks in the East.
There is another feature of the subject that will bear looking at.
Christians are the last to give credit to other religions for the
development and advance of civilization in the countries possessing
them. What Christian will admit that it is the religion of the Chinese
that makes them the most orderly, law-abiding, mob-avoiding people on
the globe? Will any Christian admit that it is the inferior moral tone
of Christ and his teachings which enables the followers of Confucius
and Buddha to offer this superior showing? Is he prepared to say that
Mohammedanism is superior to Christianity because its followers outdo
the Christians in honesty?* Is it owing to the superior blessings of the
Mormon faith that its followers are more thrifty, and that paupers are
few or unknown among them?
* Travelers tell us that a native can leave an order
together with a bag of uncounted gold at the shop of a
dealer, and upon the return of the buyer his order will be
exactly filled, his gold properly and honestly divided, and
all where he had left them, even though the shop be open to
the street and unattended and unguarded.
Is it because their religion is superior to ours that the Lapp women
are better treated; that their comparative status is higher, and their
family life purer than with ourselves?*
* "Though Norway with Ladies." By W. Mattieu Williams.
F.R.A.S., F.C.S.
The claim that superiority of civilization is due to Christianity,
and that to it we owe the good things of the nations where it is the
prevailing religion, proves too much. _It will work just as well for
any other religion as for our own_. Its reach is too extended, its
conclusion too comprehensive for its purpose. Christianity could not be
made its sole terminus. It reminds one of the story of the brakeman who
was persuaded to go to church. When he came out his friend asked him
how he liked the preacher. He said, "Very well, on the main line. He
had good wheels, his track was straight and level, and he carried a good
head of steam, but he seemed to _lack terminal facilities_."
Horace Seaver recently wrote the following:
"ALL OWING TO THE BIBLE.
"It is a very common argument with Christians, that only
those nations which have had the Bible were refined,
civilized, and learned. A Christian paper, now before us,
exultingly says:
"'Take the map of the world, draw a line around those
countries that have enjoyed the highest degree of
refinement, and you will encircle just those nations that
have received the Bible as their authority in religion.'
"From this language the plain inference is, that those
nations have been indebted to the influence of the Bible for
the positions to which they have attained. Let us follow out
a little this line of argument and see where it will lead.
"The ancient Egyptians stood as far in advance of their
contemporaries as do the nations of Christendom at the
present day, as the remains of Egyptian cities and temples
fully attest. And if the argument is good, they were
indebted for that superiority to their worship of cats,
crocodiles, and onions!
"The ancient Greek might have exclaimed, as he beheld the
proud position to which Greece had attained--'See what we
owe to a belief in our glorious mythology; we have reached
the highest point of enlightenment the world has ever
witnessed; we stand unequalled in power, wealth, the
cultivation of the arts, and all that makes a nation
refined, polished, and great!'"