physical nature show no signs of becoming "less definite, less consistent,
or less popular as time goes on" (p. 154). How a law of nature is to become
indefinite, or "inconsistent," passes my poor powers of imagination. But
with universal suffrage and the coach-dog theory of premiership in full
view; the theory, I mean, that the whole duty of a political chief is to
look sharp for the way the social coach is driving, and then run in front
and bark loud--as if being the leading noise-maker and guiding were the
same things--it is truly satisfactory to me to know that the laws of nature
are increasing in popularity. Looking at recent developments of the policy
which is said to express the great heart of the people, I have had my
doubts of the fact; and my love for my fellow-countrymen has led me to
reflect with dread on what will happen to them if any of the laws of nature
ever become so unpopular in their eyes as to be voted down by the
transcendent authority of universal suffrage. If the legion of demons,
before they set out on their journey in the swine, had had time to hold a
meeting and to resolve unanimously "That the law of gravitation is
oppressive and ought to be repealed," I am afraid it would have made no
sort of difference to the result, when their two thousand unwilling porters
were once launched down the steep slopes of the fatal shore of Gennesaret.
The question of the place of religion as an element of human nature, as
a force of human society, its origin, analysis, and {369} functions,
has never been considered at all from an agnostic point of view (p.
152).
I doubt not that Mr. Harrison knows vastly more about history than I do; in
fact, he tells the public that some of my friends and I have had no
opportunity of occupying ourselves with that subject. I do not like to
contradict any statement which Mr. Harrison makes on his own authority;
only, if I may be true to my agnostic principles, I humbly ask how he has
obtained assurance on this head. I do not profess to know anything about
the range of Mr. Harrison's studies; but as he has thought it fitting to
start the subject, I may venture to point out that, on evidence adduced, it
might be equally permissible to draw the conclusion that Mr. Harrison's
absorbing labours as the _pontifex maximus_ of the positivist religion have
not allowed him to acquire that acquaintance with the methods and results
of physical science, or with the history of philosophy, or of philological
and historical criticism, which is essential to any one who desires to
obtain a right understanding of agnosticism. Incompetence in philosophy,
and in all branches of science except mathematics, is the well-known mental
characteristic of the founder of positivism. Faithfulness in disciples is
an admirable quality in itself; the pity is that it not unfrequently leads
to the imitation of the weaknesses as well as of the strength of the
master. It is only such overfaithfulness which can account for a "strong
mind really saturated with the historical sense" (p. 153) exhibiting the
extraordinary forgetfulness of the {370} historical fact of the existence
of David Hume implied by the assertion that
it would be difficult to name a single known agnostic who has given to
history anything like the amount of thought and study which he brings
to a knowledge of the physical world (p. 153).
Whoso calls to mind what I may venture to term the bright side of
Christianity--that ideal of manhood, with its strength and its patience,
its justice and its pity for human frailty, its helpfulness to the
extremity of self-sacrifice, its ethical purity and nobility, which
apostles have pictured, in which armies of martyrs have placed their
unshakable faith, and whence obscure men and women, like Catherine of
Sienna and John Knox, have derived the courage to rebuke popes and
kings--is not likely to underrate the importance of the Christian faith as
a factor in human history, or to doubt that if that faith should prove to
be incompatible with our knowledge, or necessary want of knowledge, some
other hypostasis of men's hopes, genuine enough and worthy enough to
replace it, will arise. But that the incongruous mixture of bad science
with eviscerated papistry, out of which Comte manufactured the positivist
religion, will be the heir of the Christian ages, I have too much respect
for the humanity of the future to believe. Charles the Second told his
brother, "They will not kill me, James, to make you king." And if critical
science is remorselessly destroying the historical foundations of the
noblest ideal of humanity which mankind have yet {371} worshipped, it is
little likely to permit the pitiful reality to climb into the vacant
shrine.
That a man should determine to devote himself to the service of
humanity--including intellectual and moral self-culture under that name;
that this should be, in the proper sense of the word, his religion--is not
only an intelligible, but, I think, a laudable resolution. And I am greatly
disposed to believe that it is the only religion which will prove itself to
be unassailably acceptable so long as the human race endures. But when the
positivist asks me to worship "Humanity"--that is to say, to adore the
generalised conception of men as they ever have been and probably ever will
be--I must reply that I could just as soon bow down and worship the
generalised conception of a "wilderness of apes." Surely we are not going
back to the days of Paganism, when individual men were deified, and the
hard good sense of a dying Vespasian could prompt the bitter jest, "Ut puto
Deus fio." No divinity doth hedge a modern man, be he even a sovereign
ruler. Nor is there any one, except a municipal magistrate, who is
officially declared worshipful. But if there is no spark of worship-worthy
divinity in the individual twigs of humanity, whence comes that godlike
splendour which the Moses of Positivism fondly imagines to pervade the
whole bush.
I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution
of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the
darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of {372} his lowly
origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other
brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not lead him to
destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence
a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toil and
battle. He attains a certain degree of physical comfort, and develops a
more or less workable theory of life, in such favourable situations as the
plains of Mesopotamia or of Egypt, and then, for thousands and thousands of
years, struggles, with varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness,
bloodshed, and misery, to maintain himself at this point against the greed
and the ambition of his fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and
otherwise persecuting all those who first try to get him to move on; and
when he has moved on a step, foolishly confers post-mortem deification on
his victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want to move a
step yet farther. And the best men of the best epochs are simply those who
make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
That one should rejoice in the good man, forgive the bad man, and pity and
help all men to the best of one's ability, is surely indisputable. It is
the glory of Judaism and of Christianity to have proclaimed this truth,
through all their aberrations. But the worship of a God who needs
forgiveness and help, and deserves pity every hour of his existence, is no
better than that of any other voluntarily selected fetish. The Emperor
Julian's project was hopeful in {373} comparison with the prospects of the
new Anthropolatry.
When the historian of religion in the twentieth century is writing about
the nineteenth, I foresee he will say something of this kind:
The most curious and instructive events in the religious history of the
preceding century are the rise and progress of two new sects called Mormons
and Positivists. To the student who has carefully considered these
remarkable phenomena nothing in the records of religious self-delusion can
appear improbable.
The Mormons arose in the midst of the great Republic, which, though
comparatively insignificant, at that time, in territory as in the number of
its citizens, was (as we know from the fragments of the speeches of its
orators which have come down to us) no less remarkable for the native
intelligence of its population than for the wide extent of their
information, owing to the activity of their publishers in diffusing all
that they could invent, beg, borrow, or steal. Nor were they less noted for
their perfect freedom from all restraints in thought, or speech, or deed;
except, to be sure, the beneficent and wise influence of the majority,
exerted, in case of need, through an institution known as "tarring and
feathering," the exact nature of which is now disputed.
There is a complete consensus of testimony that the founder of Mormonism,
one Joseph Smith, was a low-minded, ignorant scamp, and that he stole the
{374} "Scriptures" which he propounded; not being clever enough to forge
even such contemptible stuff as they contain. Nevertheless he must have
been a man of some force of character, for a considerable number of
disciples soon gathered about him. In spite of repeated outbursts of
popular hatred and violence--during one of which persecutions Smith was
brutally murdered--the Mormon body steadily increased, and became a
flourishing community. But the Mormon practices being objectionable to the
majority, they were, more than once, without any pretence of law, but by
force of riot, arson, and murder, driven away from the land they had
occupied. Harried by these persecutions, the Mormon body eventually
committed itself to the tender mercies of a desert as barren as that of
Sinai; and after terrible sufferings and privations, reached the Oasis of
Utah. Here it grew and flourished, sending out missionaries to, and
receiving converts from, all parts of Europe, sometimes to the number of
10,000 in a year; until in 1880 the rich and flourishing community numbered
110,000 souls in Utah alone, while there were probably 30,000 or 40,000
scattered abroad elsewhere. In the whole history of religions there is no
more remarkable example of the power of faith; and, in this case, the
founder of that faith was indubitably a most despicable creature. It is
interesting to observe that the course taken by the great Republic and its
citizens runs exactly parallel with that taken by the Roman Empire and its
citizens towards the early Christians, except that the Romans had a certain
legal excuse for {375} their acts of violence, inasmuch as the Christian
"sodalitia" were not licensed, and consequently were, _ipso facto_, illegal
assemblages. Until, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the
United States legislature decreed the illegality of polygamy, the Mormons
were wholly within the law.
Nothing can present a greater contrast to all this than the history of the
Positivists. This sect arose much about the same time as that of the
Mormons, in the upper and most instructed stratum of the quick-witted,
sceptical population of Paris. The founder, Auguste Comte, was a teacher of
mathematics, but of no eminence in that department of knowledge, and with
nothing but an amateur's acquaintance with physical, chemical, and
biological science. His works are repulsive on account of the dull
diffuseness of their style, and a certain air, as of a superior person,
which characterises them; but nevertheless they contain good things here
and there. It would take too much space to reproduce in detail a system
which proposes to regulate all human life by the promulgation of a Gentile
Leviticus. Suffice it to say, that M. Comte may be described as a
syncretic, who, like the Gnostics of early Church history, attempted to
combine the substance of imperfectly comprehended contemporary science with
the form of Roman Christianity. It may be that this is the reason why his
disciples were so very angry with some obscure people called Agnostics,
whose views, if we may judge by the account left in the works of a great
Positivist controversial writer, were very absurd. {376}
To put the matter briefly, M. Comte, finding Christianity and Science at
daggers drawn, seems to have said to Science, "You find Christianity rotten
at the core, do you? Well, I will scoop out the inside of it." And to
Romanism: "You find Science mere dry light--cold and bare. Well, I will put
your shell over it, and so, as schoolboys make a spectre out of a turnip
and a tallow candle, behold the new religion of Humanity complete!"
Unfortunately neither the Romanists nor the people who were something more
than amateurs in science, could be got to worship M. Comte's new idol
properly. In the native country of Positivism, one distinguished man of
letters and one of science, for a time, helped to make up a roomful of the
faithful, but their love soon grew cold. In England, on the other hand,
there appears to be little doubt that, in the ninth decade of the century,
the multitude of disciples reached the grand total of several score. They
had the advantage of the advocacy of one or two most eloquent and learned
apostles, and, at any rate, the sympathy of several persons of light and
leading--and, if they were not seen, they were heard all over the world. On
the other hand, as a sect, they laboured under the prodigious disadvantage
of being refined, estimable people, living in the midst of the worn-out
civilisation of the old world; where any one who had tried to persecute
them, as the Mormons were persecuted, would have been instantly hanged. But
the majority never dreamed of persecuting them; on the contrary, they were
rather {377} given to scold and otherwise try the patience of the majority.
The history of these sects in the closing years of the century is highly
instructive. Mormonism ...
But I find I have suddenly slipped off Mr. Harrison's tripod, which I had
borrowed for the occasion. The fact is, I am not equal to the prophetical
business, and ought not to have undertaken it.
* * * * *
{378}
X
THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS
Charles, or, more properly, Karl, King of the Franks, consecrated Roman
Emperor in St. Peter's on Christmas Day, A.D. 800, and known to posterity
as the Great (chiefly by his agglutinative Gallicised denomination of
Charlemagne), was a man great in all ways, physically and mentally. Within
a couple of centuries after his death Charlemagne became the centre of
innumerable legends; and the myth-making process does not seem to have been
sensibly interfered with by the existence of sober and truthful histories
of the Emperor and of the times which immediately preceded and followed his
reign, by a contemporary writer who occupied a high and confidential
position in his court, and in that of his successor. This was one Eginhard,
or Einhard, who appears to have been born about A.D. 770, and spent his
youth at the court, being educated along with Charles's sons. There is
excellent contemporary testimony not only to Eginhard's existence, but to
his abilities, and to the place which he occupied in the circle of the
intimate friends of the great ruler whose life he subsequently wrote. {379}
In fact, there is as good evidence of Eginhard's existence, of his official
position, and of his being the author of the chief works attributed to him,
as can reasonably be expected in the case of a man who lived more than a
thousand years ago, and was neither a great king nor a great warrior. The
works are--1. _The Life of the Emperor Karl._ 2. _The Annals of the
Franks._ 3. _Letters._ 4. _The History of the Translation of the Blessed
Martyrs of Christ, SS. Marcellinus and Petrus._
It is to the last, as one of the most singular and interesting records of
the period during which the Roman world passed into that of the Middle
Ages, that I wish to direct attention.[93] It was written in the ninth
century, somewhere, apparently, about the year 830, when Eginhard, ailing
in health and weary of political life, had withdrawn to the monastery of
Seligenstadt, of which he was the founder. A manuscript copy of the work,
made in the tenth century, and once the property of the monastery of St.
Bavon on the Scheldt, of which Eginhard was Abbot, is still extant, and
there is no reason to believe that, in this copy, the original has been in
any way interpolated or otherwise tampered with. The main features of the
strange story contained in the _Historia Translationis_ are set forth in
the following pages, in which, in regard to all matters of importance, I
shall adhere as closely as possible to Eginhard's own words.
{380}
While I was still at Court, busied with secular affairs, I often
thought of the leisure which I hoped one day to enjoy in a solitary
place, far away from the crowd, with which the liberality of Prince
Louis, whom I then served, had provided me. This place is situated in
that part of Germany which lies between the Neckar and the Maine,[94]
and is nowadays called the Odenwald by those who live in and about it.
And here having built, according to my capacity and resources, not only
houses and permanent dwellings, but also a basilica fitted for the
performance of divine service and of no mean style of construction, I
began to think to what saint or martyr I could best dedicate it. A good
deal of time had passed while my thoughts fluctuated about this matter,
when it happened that a certain deacon of the Roman Church, named
Deusdona, arrived at the Court for the purpose of seeking the favour of
the King in some affairs in which he was interested. He remained some
time; and then, having transacted his business, he was about to return
to Rome, when one day, moved by courtesy to a stranger, we invited him
to a modest refection; and while talking of many things at table,
mention was made of the translation of the body of the blessed
Sebastian,[95] and of the neglected tombs of the martyrs, of which
there is such a prodigious number at Rome; and the conversation having
turned towards the dedication of our new basilica, I began to inquire
how it might be possible for me to obtain some of the true relics of
the saints which rest at Rome. He at first hesitated, and declared that
he did not know how that could be done. But observing that I was both
anxious and curious about the subject, he promised to give me an answer
some other day.
When I returned to the question some time afterwards, he immediately
drew from his bosom a paper, which he begged me to read when I was
alone, and to tell him what I was disposed to think of that which was
therein stated. I took the paper and, as he desired, read it alone and
in secret. (Cap. i. 2, 3.)
{381}
I shall have occasion to return to Deacon Deusdona's conditions, and to
what happened after Eginhard's acceptance of them. Suffice it, for the
present, to say that Eginhard's notary, Ratleicus (Ratleig), was despatched
to Rome and succeeded in securing two bodies, supposed to be those of the
holy martyrs Marcellinus and Petrus; and when he had got as far on his
homeward journey as the Burgundian town of Solothurn, or Soleure,[96]
notary Ratleig despatched to his master, at St. Bavon, a letter announcing
the success of his mission.
As soon as by reading it I was assured of the arrival of the saints, I
despatched a confidential messenger to Maestricht to gather together
priests, other clerics, and also laymen, to go out to meet the coming
saints as speedily as possible. And he and his companions, having lost
no time, after a few days met those who had charge of the saints at
Solothurn. Joined with them, and with a vast crowd of people who
gathered from all parts, singing hymns, and amidst great and universal
rejoicings, they travelled quickly to the city of Argentoratum, which
is now called Strasburg. Thence embarking on the Rhine, they came to
the place called Portus,[97] and landing on the east bank of the river,
at the fifth station thence they arrived at Michilinstadt,[98]
accompanied by an immense multitude, praising God. This place is in
that forest of Germany which in modern times is called the Odenwald,
and about six leagues from the Maine. And here, having found a basilica
recently built by me, but not yet consecrated, they carried the sacred
remains into it and deposited them therein, as if it were to be their
final resting-place. As soon as all this was reported to me I travelled
thither as quickly as I could. (Cap. ii. 14.)
{382}
Three days after Eginhard's arrival began the series of wonderful events
which he narrates, and for which we have his personal guarantee. The first
thing that he notices is the dream of a servant of Ratleig, the notary,
who, being set to watch the holy relics in the church after vespers, went
to sleep, and during his slumbers had a vision of two pigeons, one white
and one gray and white, which came and sat upon the bier over the relics;
while, at the same time, a voice ordered the man to tell his master that
the holy martyrs had chosen another resting-place and desired to be
transported thither without delay.
Unfortunately, the saints seem to have forgotten to mention where they
wished to go; and, with the most anxious desire to gratify their smallest
wishes, Eginhard was naturally greatly perplexed what to do. While in this
state of mind, he was one day contemplating his "great and wonderful
treasure, more precious than all the gold in the world," when it struck him
that the chest in which the relics were contained was quite unworthy of its
contents; and after vespers he gave orders to one of the sacristans to take
the measure of the chest in order that a more fitting shrine might be
constructed. The man, having lighted a wax candle and raised the pall which
covered the relics, in order to carry out his master's orders, was
astonished and terrified to observe that the chest was covered with a
blood-like exudation (_loculum mirum in modum humore sanguineo undique
distillantem_), and at once sent a message to Eginhard. {383}
Then I and those priests who accompanied me beheld this stupendous
miracle, worthy of all admiration. For just as when it is going to
rain, pillars and slabs and marble images exude moisture, and, as it
were sweat, so the chest which contained the most sacred relics was
found moist with the blood exuding on all sides. (Cap. ii. 16.)
Three days' fast was ordained in order that the meaning of the portent
might be ascertained. All that happened, however, was that at the end of
that time the "blood," which had been exuding in drops all the while, dried
up. Eginhard is careful to say that the liquid "had a saline taste,
something like that of tears, and was thin as water, though of the colour
of true blood," and he clearly thinks this satisfactory evidence that it
was blood.
The same night another servant had a vision, in which still more imperative
orders for the removal of the relics were given; and, from that time forth,
"not a single night passed without one, two, or even three of our
companions receiving revelations in dreams that the bodies of the saints
were to be transferred from that place to another." At last a priest,
Hildfrid, saw, in a dream, a venerable white-haired man in a priest's
vestments, who bitterly reproached Eginhard for not obeying the repeated
orders of the saints, and upon this the journey was commenced. Why Eginhard
delayed obedience to these repeated visions so long does not appear. He
does not say so in so many words, but the general tenor of the narrative
leads one to suppose that Mulinheim (afterwards Seligenstadt) is the
"solitary place" in which he had built the church which awaited dedication.
{384} In that case, all the people about him would know that he desired
that the saints should go there. If a glimmering of secular sense led him
to be a little suspicious about the real cause of the unanimity of the
visionary beings who manifested themselves to his _entourage_ in favour of
moving on, he does not say so.