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. [[155]]
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 [[156]]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.