CONTENTS.
PAGE.
PHYSICAL MAXIMS.
| CHAP. | ||
| I. | [Health], | 18 |
| II. | [Strength], | 33 |
| III. | [Chastity], | 45 |
| IV. | [Temperance], | 56 |
| V. | [Skill], | 73 |
MENTAL MAXIMS.
| VI. | [Knowledge], | 85 |
| VII. | [Independence], | 95 |
| VIII. | [Prudence], | 106 |
| IX. | [Perseverance], | 116 |
| X. | [Freethought], | 124 |
MORAL MAXIMS.
| XI. | [Justice], | 137 |
| XII. | [Truth], | 148 |
| XIII. | [Humanity], | 160 |
| XIV. | [Friendship], | 172 |
| XV. | [Education], | 182 |
OBJECTIVE MAXIMS.
| XVI. | [Forest Culture], | 194 |
| XVII. | [Recreation], | 203 |
| XVIII. | [Domestic Reform], | 212 |
| XIX. | [Legislative Reform], | 221 |
| XX. | [The Priesthood of Secularism], | 231 |
[[9]]
THE BIBLE OF NATURE; OR, THE PRINCIPLES OF SECULARISM.
INTRODUCTION.
From the dawn of authentic history to the second century of our chronological era the nations of antiquity were beguiled by the fancies of supernatural religions. For fifteen hundred years the noblest nations of the Middle Ages were tortured by the inanities of an antinatural religion. The time has come to found a Religion of Nature.
The principles of that religion are revealed in the monitions of our normal instincts, and have never been wholly effaced from the soul of man, but for long ages the consciousness of their purpose has been obscured by the mists of superstition and the systematic inculcation of baneful delusions. The first taste of alcohol revolts our normal instincts; nature protests against the incipience of a ruinous poison-vice; but the fables of the Bacchus priests for centuries encouraged that vice and deified the genius of intemperance. Vice itself blushed to mention the immoralities of the pagan gods whose temples invited the worship of the heavenly-minded. Altars were erected to a goddess of lust, to a god of wantonness, to a god of thieves. [[10]]
That dynasty of scamp-gods was, at last, forced to abdicate, but only to yield their throne to a celestial Phalaris, a torture-god who cruelly punished the gratification of the most natural instincts, and foredoomed a vast plurality of his children to an eternity of horrid and hopeless torments. Every natural enjoyment was denounced as sinful. Every natural blessing was vilified as a curse in disguise. Mirth is the sunshine of the human mind, the loveliest impulse of life’s truest children; yet the apostle of Antinaturalism promised his heaven to the gloomy world-despiser. “Blessed are they that mourn.” “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily.” “Be afflicted, and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness.” “Woe unto you that laugh.” “If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”
The love of health is as natural as the dread of pain and decrepitude. The religion of Antinaturalism revoked the health laws of the Mosaic code, and denounced the care even for the preservation of life itself. “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” “Bodily exercise profiteth but little.” “There is nothing from without a man that, entering him, can defile him.”
The love of knowledge awakens with the dawn of reason; a normal child is naturally inquisitive; the wonders of the visible creation invite the study of [[11]]every intelligent observer. The enemies of nature suppressed the manifestations of that instinct, and hoped to enter their paradise by the crawling trail of blind faith. “Blessed are they that do not see and yet believe.” “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.” “He that believeth not is condemned already.”
The love of freedom, the most universal of the protective instincts, was suppressed by the constant inculcation of passive resignation to the yoke of “the powers that be,” of abject submission to oppression and injustice. “Resist not evil.” “Of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again.” “Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” “Submit yourselves to the powers that be.”
The love of industry, the basis of social welfare, that manifests itself even in social insects, was denounced as unworthy of a true believer: “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? what shall we drink? or wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the gentiles seek.” “Take no thought of the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” “Ask and it shall be given you,” i.e., stop working and rely on miracles and prayer.
The hope for the peace of the grave, the last solace of the wretched and weary, was undermined by the dogmas of eternal hell, and the preördained damnation of all earth-loving children of nature: “He that hateth not his own life cannot be my disciple.” “The children of the kingdom shall be cast out into [[12]]utter darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” “They shall be cast into a furnace of fire, there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” “They shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb.” “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth forever and ever, and they have no rest day nor night.”
For fifteen centuries the pilot of the church lured our forefathers to a whirlpool of mental and physical degeneration, till the storms of the Protestant revolt enabled them to break the spell of the fatal eddies, and, like a swimmer saving his naked life, mankind has struggled back to the rescuing rocks of our mother earth. Lured by the twinkle of reflected stars, we have plunged into the maelstrom of Antinaturalism, and after regaining the shore, by utmost efforts, it seems now time to estimate the expenses of the adventure.
The suppression of science has retarded the progress of mankind by a full thousand years. For a century or two the Mediterranean peninsulas still lingered in the evening twilight of pagan civilization, but with the confirmed rule of the church the gloom of utter darkness overspread the homes of her slaves, and the delusions of that dreadful night far exceeded the worst superstitions of pagan barbarism. “The cloud of universal ignorance,” says Hallam, “was broken only by a few glimmering lights, who owe almost the whole of their distinction to the surrounding darkness. We cannot conceive of any state of society more adverse to the intellectual improvement [[13]]of mankind than one which admitted no middle line between dissoluteness and fanatical mortifications. No original writer of any merit arose, and learning may be said to have languished in a region of twilight for the greater part of a thousand years. In 992 it was asserted that scarcely a single person was to be found, in Rome itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain, about the age of Charlemagne, could address a common letter of salutation to another.” In that midnight hour of unnatural superstitions every torch-bearer was persecuted as an enemy of the human race. Bruno, Campanella, Kepler, Vanini, Galilei, Copernicus, Descartes, and Spinoza had to force their way through a snapping and howling pack of monkish fanatics who beset the path of every reformer, and overcame the heroism of all but the stoutest champions of light and freedom. From the tenth to the end of the sixteenth century not less than 3,000,000 “heretics,” i.e., scholars and free inquirers, had to expiate their love of truth in the flames of the stake.
The systematic suppression of freedom, in the very instincts of the human mind, turned Christian Europe into a universal slave-pen of bondage and tyranny; there were only captives and jailers, abject serfs and their inhuman masters. Freedom found a refuge only in the fastnesses of the mountains; in the wars against the pagan Saxons the last freemen of the plains were slain like wild beasts; a thousand of their brave leaders were beheaded on the market square of Quedlinburg, thousands were imprisoned in Christian convents, or dragged away to the bondage [[14]]of feudal and ecclesiastic slave farms where they learned to envy the peace of the dead and the freedom of the lowest savages. “One sees certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scattered over the country and attached to the soil, which they root and turn over with indomitable perseverance. They have, as it were, an articulate voice; and when they rise to their feet they show a human face. They are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the labor of plowing, sowing, and harvesting, and, therefore, deserve some small share of the bread they have grown. Yet they were the fortunate peasants—those who had bread and work—and they were then the few” (while half the arable territory of France was in the hands of the church). “Feudalism,” says Blanqui, “was a concentration of all scourges. The peasant, stripped of the inheritance of his fathers, became the property of ignorant, inexorable, indolent masters. He was obliged to travel fifty leagues with their carts whenever they required it; he labored for them three days in the week, and surrendered to them half the product of his earnings during the other three; without their consent, he could not change his residence or marry. And why, indeed, should he wish to marry, if he could scarcely save enough to maintain himself? The Abbot Alcuin had twenty thousand slaves called serfs, who were forever attached to the soil. This is the great cause of the rapid depopulation observed in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of convents which sprang up on [[15]]every side. It was doubtless a relief to such miserable men to find in the cloisters a retreat from oppression; but the human race never suffered a more cruel outrage; industry never received a wound better calculated to plunge the world again into the darkness of the rudest antiquity. It suffices to say that the prediction of the approaching end of the world, industriously spread by the rapacious monks at this time, was received without terror.”
The joy-hating insanities of the unnatural creed blighted the lives of thousands, and trampled the flowers of earth even on the bleak soil of North Britain, where the children of nature need every hour of respite from cheerless toil. “All social pleasures,” says Buckle, “all amusements and all the joyful instincts of the human heart, were denounced as sinful. The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”
The dogma of exclusive salvation by faith made forcible conversion appear an act of mercy, and stimulated those wars of aggression that have cost the lives of more than thirty millions of our fellow-men. In the Crusades alone five millions of victims were sacrificed on the altar of fanaticism; the extermination of the Moriscos reduced the population of Spain by seven millions; the man-hunts of the Spanish-American priests almost annihilated the native population [[16]]of the West Indies and vast areas of Central and South America, once as well-settled as the most fertile regions of Southern Europe. The horrid butcheries in the land of the Albigenses, in the mountain homes of the Vaudois, and in the Spanish provinces of the Netherlands exterminated the inhabitants of whole cities and districts, and drenched the fields of earth with the blood of her noblest children.
The neglect of industry and the depreciation of secular pursuits proved the death-blow of rational agriculture. The garden-lands of the Old World became sand-wastes, the soil of the neglected fields was scorched by summer suns and torn by winter floods till three million square miles of once fruitful lands were turned into hopeless deserts. “The fairest and fruitfulest provinces of the Roman empire,” says Professor Marsh—“precisely that portion of terrestrial surface, in short, which about the commencement of the Christian era was endowed with the greatest superiority of soil, climate, and position, which had been carried to the highest pitch of physical improvement—is now completely exhausted of its fertility. A territory larger than all Europe, the abundance of which sustained in bygone centuries a population scarcely inferior to that of the whole Christian world at the present day, has been entirely withdrawn from human use, or, at best, is thinly inhabited.… There are regions, where the operation of causes, set in action by man, has brought the face of the earth to a state of desolation almost as complete as that of the moon; and though within [[17]]that brief space of time which we call the historical period, they are known to have been covered with luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and fertile meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be reclaimable by man, nor can they become again fitted for his use except through great geological changes or other agencies, over which we have no control.… Another era of equal improvidence would reduce this earth to such a condition of impoverished productiveness as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and, perhaps, even the extinction of the human species” (Man and Nature, pp. 4, 43).
The experience of the Middle Ages has, indeed, been bought at a price which the world cannot afford to pay a second time. The sacrifices of fifteen centuries have failed to purchase the millennium of the Galilean Messiah, and the time has come to seek salvation by a different road.
The Religion of the Future will preach the Gospel of Redemption by reason, by science, and by conformity to the laws of our health-protecting instincts. Its teachings will reconcile instinct and precept, and make Nature the ally of education. Its mission will seek to achieve its triumphs, not by the suppression, but by the encouragement of free inquiry; it will dispense with the aid of pious frauds; its success will be a victory of truth, of freedom, and humanity; it will reconquer our earthly paradise, and teach us to renounce the Eden that has to be reached through the gates of death. [[18]]