PRUDENCE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The first germs of animal life have been traced to the soil of the
tropics, and in the abundance of a perennial summer the instincts of
pleasure and pain may long have sufficed for the protection of mere
existence. But when the progress of organic development advanced toward
the latitude of the winter-lands, the vicissitudes of the struggle for
existence gradually evolved a third instinct: The faculty of
anticipating the menace of evil and providing the means of defense. The
word Prudence is derived from a verb which literally means fore-seeing,
and that faculty of Foresight manifests itself already in that curious
thrift which enables several species of insects to survive the long
winter of the higher latitudes. Hibernating mammals show a similar
sagacity in the selection of their winter quarters. Squirrels and
marmots gather armfuls of dry moss; bears excavate a den under the
shelter of a fallen tree; and it has been noticed that cave-loving bats
generally select a cavern on the south side of a mountain or rock.
Beavers anticipate floods by elaborate dams. Several species of birds
baffle the attacks of their enemies by fastening a bag-shaped nest to
the extremity of a projecting branch. Foxes, minks, raccoons, and other
carnivora generally undertake their forages during the darkest hour of
the night. Prowling wolves carefully avoid the neighborhood of human
dwellings and have been known to leap a hundred fences rather than
cross or approach a highway.
Young birds, clamoring for food, suddenly become silent at the approach
of a hunter; and Dr. Moffat noticed with surprise that a similar
instinct seemed to influence the nurslings of the Griqua Hottentots.
Ten or twelve of them, deposited by their mothers in the shade of a
tree, all clawing each other and crowing or bawling at the top of their
voices, would abruptly turn silent at the approach of a stranger, and
huddle together behind the roots of the tree—babies of ten months as
quietly cowering and as cautiously peeping as their elders of two or
three years. Young savages, and often the children of our rustics, show
an extreme caution in accepting an offer of unknown delicacies. I have
seen a toddling farmer’s boy smelling and nibbling an orange for hours
before yielding to the temptation of its prepossessing appearance. Only
the distress of protracted starvation will induce the Esquimaux to
touch their winter stores before the end of the hunting season; and the
supposed improvidence of savages is often due to the influence of a
hereditary disposition once justified by the abundance which their
forefathers enjoyed for ages before the advent of their Caucasian
despoilers.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Civilization has partially healed the wounds of that Millennium of
Madness called the Rule of the Cross, and of all the insanities of the
Middle Ages the Improvidence Dogma has perhaps been most effectually
eradicated from the mental constitution—at least, of the
North-Caucasian nations. Instead of relying on the efficacy of prayers
and ceremonies, the dupes of the Galilean miracle-monger at last
returned to the pagan plan of self-help, and it would not be too much
to say that the progress thus achieved in the course of the last
fourteen decades far exceeds that of the preceding fourteen centuries.
Earth has once more become a fit dwelling-place for her noblest
children. Pestilential swamps have been drained. Domestic hotbeds of
disease have been expurgated. Airy, weather-proof buildings have taken
the place of the reeking hovels that housed the laborers of the Middle
Ages. Farmers no longer live from hand to mouth. The price of the
necessities and many luxuries of life has been brought within the
resources of the humblest mechanic. Affluence is no longer confined to
the palaces of kings. There is no doubt that the cottage of the average
modern city tradesman contains more comforts than could be found in the
castle of a medieval nobleman. Prudence, in the sense of economic
foresight, has become almost a second nature with the industrial
classes of the higher latitudes, and the benefits of such habits can be
best appreciated by comparing the homes of the thrifty
Northlanders—Scotch and Yankees—with those of the Spanish-American
priest-dupes: here deserts tilled into gardens, there gardens wasted
into deserts. In natural resources, South America, for instance, excels
New England as New England excels the snow-wastes of Hudson’s Bay
Territory; yet industrial statistics demonstrate the fact that the
financial resources of Massachusetts alone not only equal but far
surpass those of the entire Brazilian empire.
The contrast between Prussia and Spain is not less striking, and that
climatic causes are insufficient to explain that contrast is proved by
the curious fact that within less than five centuries Spain and North
Germany have exchanged places. Two hundred years before the conquest of
Granada the fields of Moorish Spain had been brought to a degree of
productiveness never surpassed in the most favored regions of our own
continent, while Catholic Prussia was a bleak heather. Since the
expulsion of the Moors from Spain, and the monks from northern Germany,
Prussia has become a garden and Spain a desert; the contrasting results
of prudence and superstition. While the Prussians were at work the
Spaniards were whining to their saints, or embroidering petticoats for
an image of the holy Virgin. While the countrymen of Humboldt studied
chemistry, physiology, and rational agriculture, the countrymen of
Loyola conned oriental ghost stories; while the former placed their
trust in the promises of nature, the latter trusted in the promises of
the New Testament. Prudence, rather than military prowess, has
transferred the hegemony of Europe from the Ebro to the Elbe, and
prudence alone has smoothened even the path of exile which ill-fated
Israel has pursued now for more than a thousand years. For, with all
the Spiritualistic tendency of their ethics, the children of Jacob have
long ceased to deal in miracles, and train their children in lessons of
secular realism which effectually counteract the influence of their
school-training in the lessons of the past, and as a result famine has
been banished from the tents of the exiles. Like the Corsicans and the
prudent Scots, they rarely marry before the acquisition of a
competency, but the tendency of that habit does not prevent their
numerical increase. Their children do not perish in squalor and hunger;
their patriarchs do not burden our alms-houses.
C.—PERVERSION.
There is a story of an enterprising Italian who increased the patronage
of an unpopular mountain resort by effecting an inundation of the
lowlands; and if the apostles of other-worldliness had tried to enhance
the attractions of their hereafter on the same plan, they could
certainly not have adopted a more effective method for depreciating the
value of temporal existence. The vanity of work, of thrift, of economy,
and the superior merit of reliance on the aid of preternatural
agencies, were a favorite text of the Galilean messiah. “Take no
thought of the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things
of itself.” “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? what shall we
drink? or wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these do the
gentiles seek.” “Ask and it shall be given you.”
Secular foresight was depreciated even in the form of a prudent care
for the preservation of physical health; the selection of clean in
preference to unclean food was denounced as a relic of worldliness; and
in mitigating the consequences of such insults to nature, prayer and
mystic ceremonies were recommended as superior to secular remedies. “If
any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church,
and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the
Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall
raise him up.” “And when he had called unto him his twelve disciples,
he gave them power against unclean spirits to cast them out, and to
heal all manner of disease.”
If such instructions had been followed to the letter, the human race
would have perished in a hell of madness and disease. As it was, a
thousand years’ purgatory of half insanity cured the world of its
delusion; and the sinners against the laws of common sense escaped with
the penalty of a millennium of barbarism, a barbarism which, in the
most orthodox countries of the fourteenth century, had sunk deep below
the lowest ebb of pagan savagery. The untutored hunters of the primeval
German forest were at least left to the resources of their animal
instincts; they were illiterate, but manly and generous, braving
danger, and prizing health and liberty above all earthly blessings.
Their children were dragged off to the bondage of the Christian
convents and doomed to all the misery of physical restraint, not for
the sake of their intellectual culture, not with a view of purchasing
the comforts of after years by temporal self-denial, but to educate
them in habits of physical apathy and supine reliance on the aid of
interposing saints—a habit which at last revenged itself by its
transfer to the principles of ethics, and encouraged malefactors to
trust their eternal welfare to the same expedient to which indolence
had been taught to confide its temporal interests. Where was the need
of rectitude if iniquity could be compromised by prayer? Where was the
need of industry if its fruits could be obtained by faith? Where was
the need of sanitary precautions if the consequences of their neglect
could be averted by ceremonies?
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The consequences of that dogma refuted its claims by lessons which
mankind is not apt to forget for the next hundred generations. From the
day when the doctrine of Antinaturalism succeeded in superseding the
lingering influence of pagan philosophy, progressive industry waned,
and at last almost ceased to supply even a reduced demand; commerce
lingered, and the sources of subsistence were wholly confined to the
produce of a more and more impoverished soil. With the exception of
(still half pagan) Italy, not one of the many once prosperous countries
of Christian Europe had anything like a profitable export trade. On the
international markets of the Byzantine empire the products of skilled
labor—fine clothes, fine fruits, perfume, and jewelry—were sold by
oriental merchants, while the Christian buyers had little to offer in
exchange but the spontaneous products of Nature: timber, salt, amber,
and perhaps hides and wool. Medical science had become such a medley of
vagaries and barbarisms that even the princes of Christendom could not
boast of a competent family physician, and in critical cases had to
trust their lives to the skill of Moorish or Persian doctors. Abderaman
el Hakim, a king of Moorish Spain, had so many applications for the
services of his court-doctor that he often jestingly called him the
“Savior of Christian Europe.” The prevalence of the militant type
should certainly have encouraged the manufacture of warlike implements;
yet not one of the twelve heavy-armed countries of Trinitarian Europe
had preserved the art of tempering a first-class sword, and proof-steel
had to be imported from Damascus. The traditions of architecture were
limited to the fantastic elaboration of religious edifices; peasants
dwelt in hovels, and citizens in dingy stone prisons, crowded into
crooked and cobble-paved alleys.
The unspeakable filth of such alleys produced epidemics that almost
depopulated the most orthodox countries of medieval Europe. Under the
stimulus of clerical theories, those epidemics in their turn produced
outbreaks of fanatical superstition, which in pagan Rome would
certainly have been ascribed to the influence of a contagious mental
disease. Diseases, according to a doctrine which it was deemed
blasphemy to doubt, could be averted by prayer and self-humiliation. In
spite of a diligent application of such prophylactics, diseases of the
most virulent kind became more prevalent. The logical inference seemed
that prayer had not been fervent and self-abasement not abject enough.
Hordes of religious maniacs roamed the streets of the plague-stricken
cities, howling like hyenas and lacerating their bodies in a manner too
shocking to describe. After exhausting the available means of
subsistence, the blood-smeared, wretches would invade the open country,
and by frantic appeals frighten thousands of peasants into joining
their ranks, and in carrying the seeds of mental and physical contagion
to a neighboring country. In Germany and Holland the total number of
“Flagellants” were at one time estimated at three hundred and fifty
thousand; on another occasion at more than half a million. If the
disease had exhausted its fury, the self-torturers would claim the
reward of their services by falling like hungry wolves upon the homes
of the sane survivors. If the plague refused to abate, the leading
fanatics would ascribe the failure to their followers’ want of zeal,
and enforce their theory by an indiscriminate application of a rawhide
knout, till the dispute was referred to the arbitrament of cold steel,
and the ranks of the howling maniacs were thinned by mutual slaughter.
E.—REWARDS.
The world has trusted in the doctrine of miracle-mongers till
skepticism became a condition of self-preservation, and the benefits of
open revolt are now conspicuous enough to impress even the
non-insurrected slaves of the church. With all their hereditary bias of
prejudice the victims of the miracle dogma cannot help contrasting
their lot with that of the industrial skeptic. They cannot help seeing
self-reliant science succeeds where prayer-relying orthodoxy fails. The
prosperity of Protestantism, its physical, intellectual, political, and
financial superiority to Conservatism, with the aid of all its saints,
are facts too glaringly evident to ignore their significance, and our
ethical text-books might as well plainly admit that this universe of
ours is governed by uniform laws and not by the caprice of ghosts—at
all events not of ghosts that can be influenced by rant and ceremonies.
Whatever may be the established system of other worlds, in this planet
of ours Nature has not trusted our welfare to the whims of tricksy
spooks, but has endowed our own minds with the faculty of ascertaining
and improving the conditions of that welfare; and the time cannot come
too soon when well-directed labor shall be recognized as the only
prayer ever answered to the inhabitants of this earth.
The philosophic author of the “History of Morals” remarks that the
medieval miracle-creed still lurks in the popular explanation of the
more occult phenomena. While the natural sequence of cause and effect
is, for instance, freely admitted in such plain cases as the stability
of a well-built house and the collapse of a rickety structure, the
phenomena of health and disease, of atmospheric changes or of the
(apparent) caprices of fortune in war or games of chance are still
ascribed to the interference of preternatural agencies. That bias is
undoubtedly at the bottom of the still prevalent mania for hazardous
speculation and the reckless disregard of the laws governing the
condition of our physical health.
Unconfessed, and perhaps unknown, to themselves the grandchildren of
orthodox parents are still influenced by the hope that in such cases
the event of an imprudent venture might be modified by the interceding
favor of “providence.”
Secularism should teach its converts that the most complex as well as
the simplest effect is the necessary consequence of a natural cause;
that the “power behind phenomena” acts by consistent laws, and that the
study and practical application of those laws is the only way to bias
the favor of fortune.
“Pray and you shall receive,” says Superstition. “Sow if you would
reap,” says Science. The Religion of Nature will teach every man to
answer his own prayers, and Prudence will be the Providence of the
Future.