C.—PERVERSION.
The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul. “Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to their afflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal practice of altruism (i.e., the subordination of personal to alien interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would have been only an additional motive in recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,” was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce! renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all [[167]]earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his enemies also bids him hate his father, mother, sister, brother, and friends.
“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once the rationale and the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance, [[168]]acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed to the devil.”