TRUTH.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The enemies of Nature have for ages based the favorite arguments of
their creed on the doctrine of Natural Depravity. According to the
theories of that tenet the natural instincts of the human heart are
wholly evil, and its every nobler impulse is due to the redeeming
influence of theological education. The baseness of the “unregenerate
soul” is their favorite antithesis of “holiness by grace;” and the best
test of that dogma would be a comparison of the moral characteristics
of a young child of Nature with the moral results of theological
training. We need not adduce the extreme case of a child like Kaspar
Hauser or the ape-nursed foundling of Baroda, whose propensities had
been modeled in communion with solitude or the dumb denizens of the
wilderness. For, even in the midst of “Christian civilization,”
thousands of peasants and mechanics are practically pure Agnostics, and
ignore the absurdities of the New Testament as persistently as their
deer-hunting ancestors ignored the absurdities of pagan mythology. At
the end of his sixth or seventh year the offspring of such parents
would still represent a fair specimen-child of unregenerate Nature, and
the normal bias of that Nature is revealed in the honesty, the trusting
innocence, the purity, and the cheerfulness of the young Agnostic, and
the absence of every appreciable germ of the secret vices, the
rancorous spites, and the joy-hating bigotries of the representative
Christian convent-slave.
But the most characteristic features of that contrast would perhaps be
the double-tongued hypocrisy of the old Jesuit and the artless candor
of the young peasant boy. The truthfulness of young children antedates
all moral instruction. Its motives are wholly independent of
theological, or even abstract-ethical, influences, and are based merely
on a natural preference for the simplest way of dealing with the
problems of intellectual communication. Truth is uniform, falsehood is
complex. Truth is persistent and safe; falsehood is unstable, fragile,
and precarious. Children instinctively recognize the difficulties of
plausibly maintaining the fictions of deceit, and dread the risk of
incurring the suspicion of habitual insincerity. Hence their
uncompromising loyalty to facts; their innocence of artifice and mental
reservation; hence also their extreme reluctance in conforming to the
conventional customs of social hypocrisy and polite prevarication.
“Are you not glad Mrs. D. is gone?” Master Frank once asked his mother
in my presence. “Well, yes, I am.” “Then what’s the use asking her to
call again and stay for supper? She could not help seeing that we were
tired of her gabble.” “Well, it wouldn’t do to insult her, you know.”
“Oh, no, but what’s the use telling her something she cannot believe?”
That last remark, especially, recurs to my memory whenever the
expedience of hypocrisy is defended by the conventional sophisms of
Christian civilization. That prevarications are unprofitable as well as
unpardonable is a truth which Jesuitry has shrouded with a veil of its
choicest cant, but the clear vision of childhood penetrates that cant,
and the “natural depravity” of unregenerate souls may reach the degree
of doubting the merit of simulation even in the interest of an orthodox
creed, as the reverend dogmatist might ascertain by happening to
overhear the recess comments of our American Sabbath-school youngsters.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The Utilitarians hold that motives of enlightened self-interest would
be sufficient to make a man perfectly virtuous. With the conventional
definition of “virtue,” that tenet might require certain
qualifications; but it is more than probable that perfect prudence
would insure a voluntary devotion to perfect truthfulness. In its most
aggressive form the hatred of falsehood may imperil the temporary
interests of the aggressor, but in every other sense the path of truth
is the path of safety. All the ultimate tendencies of the moral and
physical universe conspire to vindicate truth and discredit fraud.
Assertions based on fact stand erect, upheld by the evidence of
experience as an upright building by the law of gravity; deception,
with all its props of plausible sophisms, is tottering like a wall out
of plumb, or a rotten tree upheld by artificial supports which in their
turn must yield to the test of time.
Even from a standpoint of purely secular considerations, truth, like
honesty, is in the long run the best policy. Abstinence from insidious
poisons is easier than temperance, and the lessons of experience have
at all times convinced the most clear-sighted of our fellow-men that
consistent abstinence from the vice of hypocrisy is preferable to any
compromise with the interests of imposture. The non-clerical, and
almost Agnostic, education of the American wilderness seems to favor
that type of moral teetotalism, and among the hardy hill-farmers of our
New England highlands, and Southern mountain states, one may find men
almost constitutionally incapable of conscious deceit in deed or word,
and practicing veracity without the least pretense to superior
saintliness, in a quite untheological and often, indeed, decidedly
profane medium of speech. They stick to truth from habit, rather than
from moral principles, yet among their simple-hearted neighbors they
enjoy a respect withheld from unctuous hypocrisy, and in emergencies
can always rely on the practical value of a life-long reputation for
candor. Their word is sufficient security; their denial of slanderous
imputations is accepted without the aid of compurgators.
The simple religion of Mohammed has favored the development of a
similar disposition, and on the Austrian-Turkish frontier the word of a
Mussulman generally carries the weight of a casting vote. On the Indian
ocean, too, the verdict of international opinion favors a preference
for Unitarian testimony. “Wish to heaven we could fall in with some
Acheen fishermen,” Captain Baudissin heard his pilot mutter among the
reefs of the Sunda Islands, “it’s no use asking such d—— liars as those
Hindoos and Chinese.”
The love of truth compels the respect even of impostors and of
professional hypocrites, as in the case of that curate mentioned by the
German Freethinker, Weber (author of the philosophical cyclopedia,
“Democritus”). Professor Weber passed his last years in the retirement
of a small south-German mountain village, where his undisguised
skepticism made him the bugbear of the local pharisees; yet on moonless
evenings he was more than once honored by the visits of a neighboring
village priest, who risked censure, and, perhaps, excommunication, for
the sake of enjoying the luxury of a respite from the sickening cant of
his colleagues, and devoting a few hours to intellectual communion with
a champion of Secular science.
Lessing’s allegory of “Nathan” is founded on something more than
fiction, and there is no doubt that even in the midnight of the Middle
Ages the gloomy misery of the Hebrew pariahs was often cheered by the
secret visits of some intelligent Christian whom the thirst for truth
impelled to defy the vigilance of the heretic-hunter, and to prefer an
intellectual symposium in the garret of a Jewish slum alley to a feast
in the banquet hall of a Christian prelate.
“It is lucky for you that your opponents have not learned to utilize
the advantage of truth,” Mirabeau replied to the taunt of an insolent
Jesuit; and in logic that advantage can, indeed, hardly be overrated.
“They find believers who themselves believe,” and, as the philosopher
Colton observes, a sort of instinct often enables the simplest
countryman to distinguish the language of honest conviction from the
language of artful sophistry. “Our jurymen seem to appreciate a
first-class lie only from an artistic standpoint,” confessed a lawyer
of my acquaintance, “for some of them privately hinted that they could
tell it every time.”
Others, no doubt, lack that degree of acumen; but first-class orators,
as well as first-class authors, have always recognized the wisdom of
not relying on such mental defects of the public. Charles Darwin’s
works, for instance, owe their popularity to their erudition and their
grace of style, hardly more than to the absolute candor of the author,
who reviews the evidence for and against his theories with the fairness
of a conscientious judge, and by that very impartiality has succeeded
in prevailing against the partisan arguments of his adversaries. For
similar reasons our “Christian” temperance societies can date their
triumphs only from the time when they frankly repudiated the sophisms
of their predecessors, who hoped to reconcile the lessons of science
with the teachings of the alcohol-brewing Galilean. For truth prevails
against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth.
C.—PERVERSION.
Since the dawn of rationalism perhaps no other literary product of
Freethought has provoked the enemies of Nature to that degree of
rancorous fury excited by the appearance of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.” The
hero of that famous drama is an old pharisee whose resolve to renounce
the “vanities of earth” is constantly tripped by the promptings of his
physical instincts, and who resorts to all kinds of ludicrous sophisms
to palliate the antagonism of two ever irreconcilable principles:
Le ciel défend, de vrai, certain contentements,
Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements—
and the drama never failed to attract a jubilant audience; but the
French priesthood moved heaven and earth to stop the performance, and
can, indeed, hardly be blamed for rejecting the apologies of the
author’s friends; for the irony of Tartuffe ridicules the shams, not
only of the Catholic clergy, but of their creed and the creed of their
Protestant colleagues: it is, in fact, a scathing satire on the
absurdities of Christian Antinaturalism. The impossibility of
reconciling the demands of Nature with the precepts of a
world-renouncing fanatic has, indeed, made the worship of that fanatic
a systematic school of hypocrisy and subverted the moral health of its
victims as effectually as the unnatural restraints of convent life
subverted the basis of physical health.
God is paid when man receiveth;
To enjoy is to obey;
says Nature with the poet of reason. “God delights in the self-torture
of his creatures—crucify your flesh, despise your body, disown the
world; renounce! renounce!” croaks the chorus of Christian dogmatists,
and can silence protest only by turning health into disease or candor
into hypocrisy.
The dogma of salvation by faith offers an additional premium on mental
prostitution. By punishing honest doubt as a crime and inculcating the
merit of blind submission to the authority of reason-insulting
doctrines, the defenders of those doctrines struck a deadly blow at the
instinct of free inquiry, and for a series of generations actually
succeeded in eradicating that instinct from the mental constitution of
their victims.
“The persecutor,” says W. H. Lecky, “can never be certain that he is
not persecuting truth rather than error, but he may be quite certain
that he is suppressing the spirit of truth. And, indeed, it is no
exaggeration to say that the doctrines I have reviewed represent the
most skilful and at the same time most successful conspiracy against
that spirit that has ever existed among mankind. Until the seventeenth
century, every mental disposition which philosophy pronounces to be
essential to a legitimate research was almost uniformly branded as a
sin, and a large proportion of the most deadly intellectual vices were
deliberately inculcated as virtues.... In a word, there is scarcely a
disposition that marks the love of abstract truth and scarcely a rule
which reason teaches as essential for its attainment that theologians
did not for ages stigmatize as offensive to the Almighty.”
And those perversions culminated in the miracle-mongery of the wretched
superstition. If the material universe was at the mercy of witches and
tricksy demons, no man could for a moment trust the evidence of his own
senses and was naturally driven to complete his mental degradation by
an absolute surrender of common sense to dogma. The history of
Christian dogmatism is the history of an eighteen hundred years’ war
against Nature and Truth.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of once fertile empires
still attests the physical consequences of a thousand years’ reign of
Antinaturalism, but, happily, the time has already come when many of
our fellow-men almost fail to credit the degree of mental abasement
realized during the most orthodox centuries of that reign. It would be
no overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred years the priests
of the Galilean miracle-monger persuaded a plurality of the Caucasian
nations to risk their lives in defense of dogmas the mere profession of
which would start a modern Christian on a galloping trip to the next
lunatic asylum.
Decapitated saints were believed to have emerged from their tombs and
paid their respects to a newly appointed bishop; flying dragons
descended through the air to snatch the bodies of unbelievers and
disappeared with screams that frightened orthodox neighbors to take
refuge in their cellar-holes; swarms of angels carried bones, crosses,
and whole buildings from Bethlehem to Loretto; King Philip the Second
paid a thousand doubloons for a skeleton of St. Laurentius, and having
been informed that a complete skeleton of the same saint was for sale
in the south of Italy, he at once ratified the bargain and blessed
heaven for having favored him with a duplicate of the precious relic.
Thousands of unfortunates were tried and executed on a charge of having
taken an aerial excursion on a broomstick or a black he-goat; of having
caused a gale by churning a potful of froth and water; of having turned
themselves into foxes, wolves, and tomcats.
The instinct of recognizing the absurdity of even the most glaring
superstitions seems to have become wholly extinct in the minds of the
forty generations from the middle of the tenth to the end of the
fourteenth century; and during that millennium of madness the
suppression of free inquiry encouraged thousands of pious tract-mongers
to devote their lives to the wholesale forgery of saintly biographies
and miracle legends, and disseminate under the name of historical
records insanities too extravagant even for the readers of a modern
nursery-tale.
The war against Truth was carried to the length of suppressing not only
the skeptical inferences of science, but science itself; chemists,
astronomers, physiologists, mathematicians, and bona fide historians
could pursue their inquiries only at the risk of an inquisitorial
indictment; and a cloud of ignorance, which in the days of Horace and
Pliny would have been thought disgraceful to the obscurest hamlet of
the Roman empire, brooded for ages over the face of the entire
Christian world.
For a series of centuries the encouragement of credulity and imposture
almost annulled the value of contemporary records. Travelers and
chroniclers, as well as biographers, accommodated the popular taste by
dealing, not in marvels only, but in miracles; witchcraft anecdotes,
preternatural resurrections, prodigies of skill and physical prowess,
giants, dragons, were-wolves, and no end of spectral manifestations. It
is no exaggeration to say that for a period of more than nine hundred
years the dogma of the Galilean antinaturalist systematically favored
the survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution
and making common sense a capital crime.
E.—REFORM.
The triumph of the Protestant revolt has ushered in a dawn which, in
comparison with the preceding night, may justly vaunt its era as an Age
of Reason; but the thousand years’ perversion of our moral instincts
has not been wholly redeemed by the educational influences of a short
century. For even eighty years ago the educational reforms of the
Protestant nations attempted little more than a compromise between
reason and dogma, while their southern neighbors revolted against the
political influence, rather than against the dogmatical arrogance, of
their priesthood. Nay, even at present the fallacies of the compromise
plan still hamper the progress of reform in manifold directions. As an
American Freethinker aptly expresses it: “Truth is no longer kept under
lock and key, but is kindly turned loose to roam at large—after being
chained to a certain number of theological cannon-balls.” Evolution may
pursue its inquiries into specific phases of organic development, but
must not question the correctness of the Mosaic traditions;
rationalists may inveigh against the insanities of the Middle Ages, but
must pretend to overlook the fact that the doctrine of the New
Testament contains the germs of all those insanities; the science of
health may denounce modern fallacies, but must beware to mention the
anti-physical precepts of the body-despising Galilean; Materialists
must attack the hobgoblins of the Davenport brothers, but ignore the
hog-goblins of Gadara; historical critics may call attention to the
inconsistencies of Livy and Plutarch, but must not mention the
self-contradictions of the New Testament.
Yet logic and philosophy will be little more than a farce till the
axiom of a great biologist can be applied to the pursuit of every human
science. “Inquiries of that sort” (the “Descent of Man”), he says,
“have nothing whatever to do with personal tastes or vested interests,
but only with facts. We should not ask: ‘Will it be popular?’ ‘Will it
seem orthodox?’ but simply, ‘Is it true?’”
And in just as much as the theory of moral duties deserves the name of
a science, the exponents of that science would gain, rather than lose,
by the adoption of the same maxim. “Religion,” in the traditional sense
of the word, needs to be purged from an enormous percentage of spurious
elements, before its ministers can be acquitted from the guilt of
tempting their disciples to associate the ideas of Ethics and
Imposture, and thus reject the basis of morality together with the
basis of an Asiatic myth. “Truth is the beginning of Wisdom,” “Justice
is Truth,” “Mendacity is the Mother of Discord,” would be fit mottoes
for the ethical Sunday-schools of the Future. “What is Truth?” asks
Pilate; yet even in religious controversies the fury of sectarian
strife could be obviated if we would truthfully admit the uselessness
of disputes about the unknowable mysteries of supernatural problems.
Still, we cannot hope to eradicate the roots of discord unless we
resolve with equal frankness to reject the interference of
Supernaturalism with the knowable problems of secular science. Evident
Truth can dispense with the indorsement of miracle-mongers, and
“evident Untruth,” in the words of Ulrich Hutten, “should be exposed
whether its teachers come in the name of God or of the devil.”