E.—REFORM.
The triumph of the Protestant revolt has ushered in a dawn which, in comparison with the preceding night, may justly vaunt its era as an Age of Reason; but the thousand years’ perversion of our moral instincts has not been wholly redeemed by the educational influences of a short century. For even eighty years ago the educational reforms of the Protestant nations attempted little more than a compromise between reason and dogma, while their southern neighbors revolted against the political influence, rather than against the dogmatical arrogance, of their priesthood. Nay, even at present the fallacies of the compromise plan still hamper the [[159]]progress of reform in manifold directions. As an American Freethinker aptly expresses it: “Truth is no longer kept under lock and key, but is kindly turned loose to roam at large—after being chained to a certain number of theological cannon-balls.” Evolution may pursue its inquiries into specific phases of organic development, but must not question the correctness of the Mosaic traditions; rationalists may inveigh against the insanities of the Middle Ages, but must pretend to overlook the fact that the doctrine of the New Testament contains the germs of all those insanities; the science of health may denounce modern fallacies, but must beware to mention the anti-physical precepts of the body-despising Galilean; Materialists must attack the hobgoblins of the Davenport brothers, but ignore the hog-goblins of Gadara; historical critics may call attention to the inconsistencies of Livy and Plutarch, but must not mention the self-contradictions of the New Testament.
Yet logic and philosophy will be little more than a farce till the axiom of a great biologist can be applied to the pursuit of every human science. “Inquiries of that sort” (the “Descent of Man”), he says, “have nothing whatever to do with personal tastes or vested interests, but only with facts. We should not ask: ‘Will it be popular?’ ‘Will it seem orthodox?’ but simply, ‘Is it true?’ ”
And in just as much as the theory of moral duties deserves the name of a science, the exponents of that science would gain, rather than lose, by the adoption of the same maxim. “Religion,” in the traditional sense of the word, needs to be purged from an enormous [[160]]percentage of spurious elements, before its ministers can be acquitted from the guilt of tempting their disciples to associate the ideas of Ethics and Imposture, and thus reject the basis of morality together with the basis of an Asiatic myth. “Truth is the beginning of Wisdom,” “Justice is Truth,” “Mendacity is the Mother of Discord,” would be fit mottoes for the ethical Sunday-schools of the Future. “What is Truth?” asks Pilate; yet even in religious controversies the fury of sectarian strife could be obviated if we would truthfully admit the uselessness of disputes about the unknowable mysteries of supernatural problems. Still, we cannot hope to eradicate the roots of discord unless we resolve with equal frankness to reject the interference of Supernaturalism with the knowable problems of secular science. Evident Truth can dispense with the indorsement of miracle-mongers, and “evident Untruth,” in the words of Ulrich Hutten, “should be exposed whether its teachers come in the name of God or of the devil.”