THE PRIESTHOOD OF SECULARISM.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
An instinct inherited from the habits of many generations teaches our
social fellow-creatures to entrust the welfare of their communities to
the protection of an experienced leader. Birds that become gregarious
only at a certain time of the year select a guide for that special
occasion. Others have a permanent leader, and among the more
intelligent quadrupeds that leadership becomes dual. Besides the stout
champion who comes to the front in moments of danger, wild cattle,
horses, antelopes, deer, and the social quadrumana have a veteran
pioneer who guides their migrations and sentinels their encampments.
Among the primitive tribes of our fellow-men, too, the authority of
leadership is divided between a warrior and a teacher, a chieftain and
a priest. The obstinacy of savages, who refuse to yield to reason,
suggested the plan of controlling their passions by the fear of the
unseen, but ghost-mongery was not the only, nor even the most
essential, function of primitive priesthood. The elders of the Brahmans
were the guardians of homeless children and overseers of public
charities. The Celtic Druids were the custodians of national treasures.
The rune-wardens of the ancient Scandinavians preserved the historical
traditions and law records of their nation. The priests of the
Phœnicians (like our Indian medicine men) were trained physicians. The
Egyptian hierophants were priests of knowledge, as well as of
mythology. They were the historians and biographers of their nation.
They codified the national laws. They taught geometry; they taught
grammar; they taught and practiced surgery; they devoted a large
portion of their time to astronomical observations. Their temple-cities
were, in fact, free universities, and the waste of time devoted to the
rites of superstition was more than compensated by secular studies, and
to some degree also by the political services of learned priests, who
seem to have been occasionally employed in diplomatic emergencies.
Motives of political prudence induced the law-givers of the
Mediterranean nations to circumscribe the authority of their pontiffs,
which at last was, indeed, almost limited to the supervision of
religious ceremonies. But in Rome, as well as in Greece and the Grecian
colonies of western Asia, the true functions of priesthood were assumed
by the popular exponents of philosophy, especially by the Stoics and
Pythagoreans. The weekly lectures of Zeno were attended by a
miscellaneous throng of truth-seekers; the disciples of Pythagoras
almost worshiped their master; Diagoras and Carneades traveled from
town to town, preaching to vast audiences of spell-bound admirers;
Apollonius of Tyana rose in fame till cities competed for the honor of
his visits; the clientèle of no Grecian prince was thought complete
without a court philosopher; the tyrant Dionysius, in all the pride of
his power, invited the moral rigorist Plato and submitted to his daily
repeated reproofs. Philosophers were the confessors, the comforters,
and the counselors of their patrons, and philosophic tutors were in
such request that wealthy Romans did not hesitate to procure them from
the traffickers in Grecian captives and indulge them in all privileges
but that of liberty. Centuries before a bishop of Rome contrived to
avert the wrath of King Alaric, doomed cities had been spared at the
intercession of pagan philosophers, and philosophers more than once
succeeded in allaying the fury of mutineers who would have ridiculed an
appeal to mythological traditions.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The power of filial love hardly exceeds that of the passionate
veneration which kindles about the person of a sincere teacher of
truth. The homage paid to an apostle of light is the noblest form of
hero-worship. The hosannas of idol-service overflowing upon the
idol-priest are marred by the discords of hypocrisy and the reproving
silence of reason; but the approval of wisdom is the highest reward of
its ministry. The brightness of that prestige shames the gilded halo of
the mythology-monger; the minister of Truth may lack the pomp of
consecrated temples, but his disciples will make a hermit’s cave a
Delphic grotto and will not willingly let the record of his oracles
perish. The chants of the Eleusynian festivals, the shout of the
Lupercalia, the mumblings of augurs and sibyls, have been forever
silenced; but the words of Plato still live; Socrates still speaks to
thousands of truth-seekers; the wisdom of Seneca still brightens the
gloom of adversity.
Religions founded on any basis of truth can survive the fall of their
temples. Jerusalem was wrecked in the storm of Roman conquest, but the
health-laws of the Mosaic code defied the power of the destroyer, and
of all the creeds born on the teeming soil of the East, Judaism alone
can still be preached without an alloy of cant and compromise.
The enthusiasm of progress has nothing to fear from the growth of
skepticism. Mankind will always appreciate their enlightened
well-wishers. In cities where the creed of the Galilean supernaturalist
has become almost as obsolete as the witchcraft delusion, progressive
clergymen still draw audiences of intelligent and sincere admirers, and
the apostles of social reform are haunted by anxious inquirers,
disciples whom the penalties of heresy fail to deter, and who if barred
out all day will come by night: “Master, what shall we do to be saved?”
In spite of sham saviors, the search after salvation has never ceased,
and after eighteen centuries of clerical caricatures the ideal of true
priesthood still survives in the hearts of men.
C.—PERVERSION.
The puerile supernaturalism of the pagan myth-mongers could not fail to
injure their prestige, even in an age of superstition; but the
antinaturalism of the Galilean fanatics not only neglected but
completely inverted the proper functions of priesthood. The pretended
ministers of Truth became her remorseless persecutors; the promised
healers depreciated the importance of bodily health, the hoped-for
apostles of social reform preached the doctrine of renunciation. We
should not judge the Christian clergy by the aberrations engendered by
the maddening influence of protracted persecutions. It would be equally
unfair to give them the credit of latter-day reforms, reluctantly
conceded to the demands of rationalism. But we can with perfect
fairness judge them by the standard of the moral and intellectual types
evolved during the period of their plenary power, the three hundred
years from the tenth to the end of the thirteenth century, when the
control of morals and education had been unconditionally surrendered
into the hands of their chosen representatives. The comparative scale
of human turpitude must not include the creations of fiction. We might
find a ne plus ultra of infamy in the satires of Rabelais, in the myths
of Hindostan, or the burlesques of the modern French dramatists. But if
we confine our comparison to the records of authentic history, it would
be no exaggeration to say that during the period named the type of a
Christian priest represented the absolute extreme of all the groveling
ignorance, the meanest selfishness, the rankest sloth, the basest
servility, the foulest perfidy, the grossest superstition, the most
bestial sensuality, to which the majesty of human nature has ever been
degraded. Thousands of monasteries fattened on the toil of starving
peasants. Villages were beggared by the rapacity of the tithe-gatherer;
cities were terrorized by witch-hunts and autos-da-fé. The crimps of
the inquisitorial tribunals hired spies and suborned perjurers by
promising them a share of confiscated estates. The evidence of
intellectual pursuits was equivalent to a sentence of death. Education
was almost limited to the memorizing of chants and prayers. “A cloud of
ignorance,” says Hallam, “overspread the whole face of the church,
hardly broken by a few glimmering lights who owe almost the whole of
their distinction to the surrounding darkness.... In 992, it was
asserted that scarcely a single person was to be found, even in Rome
itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a
thousand in Spain could address a common letter of salutation to
another.” Every deathbed became a harvest-field of clerical vampires
who did not hesitate to bully the dying into robbing their children for
the benefit of a bloated convent. Herds of howling fanatics roamed the
country, frenzying the superstitious rustics with their predictions of
impending horrors. Parishioners had to submit to the base avarice and
the baser lusts of insolent parish priests, who in his turn kissed the
dust at the feet of an arrogant prelate. The doctrine of Antinaturalism
had solved the problem of inflicting the greatest possible amount of
misery on the greatest possible number of victims.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The intellectual interregnum of the Middle Ages, the era of specters
and vampires, received the first promise of dawn about the middle of
the fourteenth century, when the lessons of the Crusades and the
influence of Moorish civilization began to react on the nations of
Christian Europe. Yet, by methods of their own, the vampires succeeded
in prolonging the dreadful night. They set their owls a-shrieking from
a thousand pulpits; they darkened the air with the smoke-clouds of
autos-da-fé. They treated every torch-bearer as an incendiary.
But though the delay of redemption completed the ruin of some of their
victims, the ghouls did not escape the deserved retribution. Their fire
alarms failed to avert the brightening dawn. Daylight found its way
even through the painted glass of dome-windows, and in the open air the
blood-suckers had to take wing on pain of being shaken off and trampled
under foot. The slaves of Hayti never rose more fiercely against their
French tyrants than the German peasants against their clerical
oppressor. From Antwerp to Leipzig thousands of convents were leveled
with the ground; the villages of Holland, Minden, and Brunswick joined
in a general priest-hunt, carried on with all the cruelties which the
man-hunters of the Frankish crusade had inflicted on the pagan Saxons.
In the Mediterranean Peninsulas the Jesuits were expelled as enemies of
public peace, and their colleagues could maintain themselves only by an
alliance with despotism against the liberal and intellectual elements
of their country. To patriots of the Garibaldi type the name of a
priest has become a byword implying the very quintessence of infamy.
The explosion of the French Revolution struck a still deadlier blow at
clerical prestige. The fagot-arguments of the Holy Inquisition were
answered by a “burning, as in hell-fire, of priestly shams and lies,”
and not one out of twenty French monasteries escaped the fury of the
avengers. Our Protestant clergymen see their temple walls cracked by a
breach of ever-multiplying schisms, and can prop their prestige only by
more and more humiliating concessions, and in every intelligent
community have to purchase popularity by rank heresies against the
dogmas of their predecessors. Here and there the orthodox tenets of the
New Testament have survived the progress of rationalism, but haunt the
shade, like specters scenting the morning air, and momentarily
expecting the summons that shall banish them to the realms of their
native night.
E.—REFORM.
When the harbinger of day dispels the specters of darkness,
half-awakened sleepers often mourn the fading visions of dreamland, as
they would mourn the memories of a vanished world, till they find that
the solid earth still remains, with its mountains and forests, and that
the enjoyment of real life has but just begun. With a similar regret
the dupes of Jesuitism mourn the collapse of their creed and lament the
decline of morality, till they find that religion still remains, with
its consolations and hopes, and that the true work of redemption has
but just begun.
The reign of superstition begins to yield to a religion of reason and
humanity. The first forerunners of that religion appeared at the end of
the sixteenth century, when the philosophers of northern Europe first
dared to appeal from dogma to nature, and since that revival of
common-sense the prison walls of clerical obscurantism have been shaken
by shock after shock, till daylight now enters through a thousand
fissures.
But Secularism has a positive as well as a negative mission, and after
removing the ruins of exploded idols, the champions of reform will
begin the work of reconstruction. Temples dedicated to the religion of
progress will rise from the ruins of superstition. Communities of
reformants will intrust the work of education to chosen teachers, who
will combine the functions of an instructor with those of an exhorter.
In the languages of several European nations the word “rector” still
bears that twofold significance. The ministers of Secularism will not
sacrifice physical health to mental culture. They will be gymnasiarchs,
like the Grecian pedagogues who superintended the athletic exercises of
their pupils and accompanied them on foot journeys and hunting
excursions. They will be teachers of hygiene, laboring to secure the
foundations of mental energy by the preservation of physical vigor, and
to banish diseases by the removal of their causes. They will seek to
circumscribe the power of prejudice by the extension of knowledge. They
will obviate the perils of poverty by lessons of industry and prudence.
Their doctrines will dispense with miracles; they will make experience
the test of truth, and justice the test of integrity; they will not
suppress, but encourage, free inquiry; their war against error will
employ no weapons but those of logic.
The religion of reason will limit its proper sphere to the secular
welfare of mankind, but will ask, as well as grant, the fullest freedom
of metaphysical speculation. Why should the friends of light darken the
sunshine of earth with fanatical wars for the suppression of private
theories about the mystery of the unrevealed first cause? Why should
they rage about the riddle of the veiled hereafter to please the
ordainer of the eternal law that visits such inexorable penalties upon
the neglect of the present world? Should the friends of common sense
quarrel about guesses at the solution of unknowable secrets? We need
not grudge our wonder-loving brother the luxury of meditating on the
mysteries of the unseen or the possibilities of resurrection. Shall the
soul of the dying patriarch live only in his children? Shall it wing
its way to distant stars? Shall it linger on earth:
“Sigh in the breeze, keep silence in the cave,
And glide with airy foot o’er yonder sea?”
Why should we wrangle about riddles which we cannot possibly solve? But
we might certainly have honesty enough to admit that impossibility.
Musing on the enigmas of the “land beyond the veil” may entertain us
with the visions of a dreamy hour, but should not engross the time
needed for the problems of the only world thus far revealed.
Thus, founded on a basis of health-culture, reason, and justice, the
office of priesthood will regain its ancient prestige, and the best and
wisest of men will become ministers of Secularism by devoting their
lives to the science of happiness on earth.
NOTE
[1] Weibisches Klagen, bängliches Zagen
Wendet kein Unglück, macht dich nicht frei:
Allen Gewalten zum Trotz sich erhalten,
Nimmer sich beugen, kräftig sich zeigen
Rufet die Arme der Götter herbei.