C.—PERVERSION.
The superstition which dooms its votaries to a worship of sorrow has for centuries treated pleasure and sin as synonymous terms. In the era of the Cæsars the licentious passions of a large metropolis gave that asceticism a specious pretext; but its true purpose was soon after revealed by the suppression of rustic pastimes, of athletic sports, and at last, even of the classic festival which for centuries had assembled the champions of the Mediterranean nations on the isthmus of Corinth. With a similar rancor of bigoted intolerance the Puritans suppressed the sports of “merry old England,” and their fanatical protests against the most harmless amusements would be utterly incomprehensible if the secret of Christian asceticism had not been unriddled by the study of the Buddhistic parent-dogma. The doctrine which the apostle of Galilee thought it wisest to veil in parables and metaphors, the Indian messiah of anti-naturalism reveals in its ghastly nakedness as an attempt to wean the hearts of mankind [[208]]from their earth-born loves and reconcile them to the alternative of annihilation—“Nirvana”—the only refuge from the delusions of a life outweighing a single joy by a hundred sorrows. Not life only, but the very instincts of life were to be suppressed, to prevent their revival in new forms of re-birth; and in pursuit of that plan the prophet of Nepaul does not hesitate to warn his disciples against sleeping twice under the same tree, to lessen the chance of undue fondness for any earthly object whatever. The indulgements of life-endearing desires, that creed denounced as the height of folly and recommended absolute abstinence from physical enjoyments as the shortest path to the goal of redemption. In its practical consequences, if not in its theoretical significances, the same principle asserts itself in the doctrine of the New Testament, and justified the dread of the life-loving pagans in realizing the stealthy growth of the Galilean church, and anticipating the ultimate consequences of that gospel of renunciation whose ideal of perfection was the other-worldliness of an earth-despising fanatic. More or less consciously, the suppression of earthly desires has always been pursued as the chief aim of Christian dogmatism; the “world” has ever been the antithesis of the Christian kingdom of God, the “flesh” the irreconcilable antagonist of the regenerate soul. Hence that rancorous fury against the “worldliness” of naturalism, against the pagan worship of joy, against the modern revivals of that worship. Hence the grief of those “whining saints who groaned in spirit at the sight of Jack in the Green;” hence the crusade [[209]]against Easter-fires, May-poles, foot-races, country excursions, round-dances, and picnics; hence the anathemas against the athletic sports of ancient Greece and the entertainments of the modern theater.