A Grammar of Freethought

by Chapman Cohen

To do Christians justice they have not usually made a secret of their aim. Right through Christian literature there runs the teaching that it is the desire of personal and immortal salvation that inspires them, and they have affirmed over and over again that but for the prospect of being paid back with tremendous interest in the next world they could see no reason for being good in this one. That is emphatically the teaching of the New Testament and of the greatest of Christian characters. You are to give in secret that you may be rewarded openly, to cast your bread upon the waters that it may be returned to you, and Paul's counsel is that if there be no resurrection from the dead then we may eat, drink, and be merry for death only is before us. Thus, what you do is in the nature of a deliberate and conscious investment on which you will receive a handsome dividend in the next world. And your readiness to invest will be exactly proportionate to your conviction of the soundness of the security. But there is in all this no perception of the truly ethical basis of conduct, no indication of the inevitable consequences of conduct on character. What is good is determined by what it is believed will save one's own soul and increase the dividend in the next world. What is bad is anything that will imperil the security. It is essentially an appeal to what is grasping and selfish in human nature, and while you may hide the true character of a thing by the lavish use of attractive phrases, you cannot hinder it working out its consequences in actual life. And the consequence of this has been that while Christian teaching has been lavish in the use of attractive phrases its actual result has been to create a type of character that has been not so much immoral as amoral. And with that type the good that has been done on the one side has been more than counterbalanced by the evil done on the other.

What the typical Christian character had in mind in all that he did was neither the removal of suffering nor of injustice, but the salvation of his own soul. That justified everything so long as it was believed to contribute to that end. The social consequences of what was done simply did not count. And if, instead of taking mere phrases from the principal Christian writers, we carefully examine their meaning we shall see that they were strangely devoid of what is now understood by the expression "moral incentive." The more impressive the outbreak of Christian piety the clearer does this become. No one could have illustrated the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice better than did the saints and monks of the earlier Christian centuries. Such a character as the famous St. Simon Stylites, living for years on his pillar, filthy and verminous, and yet the admired of Christendom, with the lives of numerous other saints, whose sole claim to be remembered is that they lived the lives of worse than animals in the selfish endeavours to save their shrunken souls, will well illustrate this point. If it entered the diseased imagination of these men that the road to salvation lay through attending to the sick and the needy, they were quite ready to labour in that direction; but of any desire to remove the horrible social conditions that prevailed, or to remedy the injustice of which their clients were the victims, there is seldom a trace. And, on the other hand, if they believed that their salvation involved getting away from human society altogether and leading the life of a hermit, they were as ready to do that. If it meant the forsaking of husband or wife or parent or child, these were left without compunction, and their desertion was counted as proof of righteousness. The lives of the saints are full of illustrations of this. Professor William James well remarks, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, that "In gentle characters, where devoutness is intense and the intellect feeble, we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the exclusion of all practical human interests.... When the love of God takes possession of such a mind it expels all human loves and human uses." Of the Blessed St. Mary Alacoque, her biographer points out that as she became absorbed in the love of Christ she became increasingly useless to the practical life of the convent. Of St. Teresa, James remarks that although a woman of strong intellect his impression of her was a feeling of pity that so much vitality of soul should have found such poor employment. And of so famous a character as St. Augustine a Christian writer, Mr. A. C. Benson, remarks:—

I was much interested in reading St. Augustine's Confessions lately to recognize how small a part, after his conversion, any aspirations for the welfare of humanity seem to play in his mind compared with the consciousness of his own personal relations with God. It was this which gave him his exuberant sense of joy and peace, and his impulse was rather the impulse of sharing a wonderful and beautiful secret with others than an immediate desire for their welfare, forced out of him, so to speak, by his own exultation rather than drawn out of him by compassion for the needs of others.

That is one of the most constant features which emerges from a careful study of the character of Christian types. St. Francis commenced his career by leaving his parents. John Fox did the same. In that Puritan classic, The Pilgrim's Progress, one of the outstanding features is the striking absence of emphasis on the value of the social and domestic virtues, and the Rev. Principal Donaldson notes this as one of the features of early Christian literature in general. Christian preaching was for centuries full of contemptuous references to "filthy rags of righteousness," "mere morality," etc. The aim of the saints was a purely selfish and personal one. It was not even a refined or a metaphysical selfishness. It was a simple teaching that the one thing essential was to save one's own soul, and that the main reason for doing good in this world was to reap a benefit from it in the world to come. If it can properly be called morality, it was conduct placed out at the highest rate of interest. Christianity may often have used a naturally lofty character, it was next to impossible for it to create one.

If one examines the attack made by Christians upon Freethought morality, it is surprising how often the truth of what has been said is implied. For the complaint here is, in the main, not that naturalism fails to give an adequate account of the nature and development of morality, but that it will not satisfy mankind, and so fails to act as an adequate motive to right conduct. When we enquire precisely what is meant by this, we learn that if there is no belief in God, and if there is no expectation of a future state in which rewards and punishments will be dispensed, there remains no inducement to the average man or woman to do right. It is the moral teaching of St. Paul over again. We are in the region of morality as a deliberate investment, and we have the threat that if the interest is not high enough or certain enough to satisfy the dividend hunting appetite of the true believer, then the investment will be withdrawn. Really this is a complaint, not that the morality which ignores Christianity is too low but that it is too high. It is doubted whether human nature, particularly Christian human nature, can rise to such a level, and whether, unless you can guarantee a Christian a suitable reward for not starving his family or for not robbing his neighbour, he will continue to place any value on decency or honesty.

So to state the case makes the absurdity of the argument apparent, but unless that is what is meant it is difficult to make it intelligible. To reply that Christians do not require these inducements to behave with a tolerable amount of decency is not a statement that I should dispute; on the contrary, I would affirm it. It is the Christian defender who makes himself and his fellow believers worse than the Freethinker believes them to be. For it is part of the case of the Freethinker that the morality of the Christian has really no connection with his religion, and that the net influence of his creed is to confuse and distort his moral sense instead of developing it. It is the argument of the Christian that makes the Freethinker superior to the Christian; it is the Freethinker who declines the compliment and who asserts that the social forces are adequate to guarantee the continuance of morality in the complete absence of religious belief.

How little the Christian religion appreciates the nature of morality is seen by the favourite expression of Christian apologists that the tendency of non-religion is to remove all moral "restraints." The use of the word is illuminating. To the Christian morality is no more than a system of restraints which aim at preventing a man gratifying his appetite in certain directions. It forbids him certain enjoyments here, and promises him as a reward for his abstention a greater benefit hereafter. And on that assumption he argues, quite naturally, that if there be no after life then there seems no reason why man should undergo the "restraints" which moral rules impose. On this scheme man is a born criminal and God an almighty policeman. That is the sum of orthodox Christian morality. To assume that this conception of conduct can have a really elevating effect on life is to misunderstand the nature of the whole of the ethical and social problem.

What has been said may go some distance towards suggesting an answer to the question so often asked as to the reason for the moral failure of Christianity. For that it has been a moral failure no one can doubt. Nay, it is an assertion made very generally by Christians themselves. Right from New Testament times the complaint that the conduct of believers has fallen far short of what it should have been is constantly met with. And there is not a single direction in which Christians can claim a moral superiority over other and non-Christian peoples. They are neither kinder, more tolerant, more sober, more chaste, nor more truthful than are non-Christian people. Nor is it quite without significance that those nations that pride themselves most upon their Christianity are what they are. Their state reflects the ethical spirit I have been trying to describe. For when we wipe out the disguising phrases which we use to deceive ourselves—and it is almost impossible to continually deceive others unless we do manage to deceive ourselves—when we put on one side the "rationalizing" phrases about Imperial races, carrying civilization to the dark places of the earth, bearing the white man's burden, peopling the waste places of the earth, etc., we may well ask what for centuries have the Christian nations of the world been but so many gangs of freebooters engaged in world-wide piracy? All over the world they have gone, fighting, stealing, killing, lying, annexing, in a steadily rising crescendo. To be possessed of natural wealth, without the means of resisting aggression, has for four centuries been to invite the depredations of some one or more of the Christian powers. It is the Christian powers that have militarized the world in the name of the Prince of Peace, and made piracy a national occupation in the name of civilization. Everywhere they have done these things under the shelter of their religion and with the sanction of their creed. Christianity has offered no effective check to the cupidity of man, its chief work has been to find an outlet for it in a disguised form. To borrow a term from the psycho-analysts, the task of Christianity has been to "rationalize" certain ugly impulses, and so provide the opportunity for their continuous expression. The world of to-day is beginning to recognize the intellectual weakness of Christianity; what it has next to learn is that its moral bankruptcy is no less assured.

One of the great obstacles in the way of this is the sentimentalism of many who have given up all intellectual adherence to the Christian creed. The power of the Christian Church has been so great, it has for so long had control of the machinery of public education and information, that many find it almost impossible to conclude that the ethical spirit of Christianity is as alien to real progress as are its cosmical teachings. The very hugeness of this century-old imposture blinds many to its inherent defects. And yet the continuous and world-wide moral failure of Christianity can only be accounted for on the ground that it had a fatal moral defect from the start. I have suggested above what is the nature of that defect. It has never regarded morality as a natural social growth, but only as something imposed upon man from without. It has had no other reason for its existence than the fear of punishment and the hope of reward. Christian morality is the morality of the stock exchange plus the intellectual outlook of the savage. And with that in control of national destinies our surprise should be, not that things are as they are, but rather that with so great a handicap the world has contrived to reach its present moderate degree of development.