Heresy: Its Utility And Morality. A Plea And A Justification

by Charles Bradlaugh

During the latter portion of the eighteenth century, a new phase of popular progress was exhibited in the comparatively lively interest taken in political questions by the great body of the people inhabiting large towns. In America, France, and England, this was strongly marked; it is however in this country that we find special evidences of the connection between heresy and progress, as contradistinguished from orthodoxy and obstructiveness manifested in the struggle for the liberty of the press and platform; a struggle in which some of the boldest efforts were made by poor and heretical self-taught men. The dying eighteenth century witnessed, in England, repeated instances of State prosecutions, in which the charge of entertaining or advocating the views of the Republican heretic, Paine, formed a prominent feature, and there is little doubt that the efforts of the London Corresponding Society (which the Government of the day made strenuous endeavours to repress) to give circulation to some of Paine's political opinions in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the North, had for result the familiarising many men with views they would have otherwise feared to investigate. The step from the "Rights of Man" to the "Age of Reason" was but a short stride for an advancing inquirer. In France the end of the eighteenth century was marked by a frightful convulsion. A people starved and degraded for generations, rose in the very desperation of despair, and with a mighty force broke the yoke of traditional feudalism and habitual monarchic reverence; but in the case of France, the revolution was too sudden to be immediately beneficial or enduring, the people were as a mass too poor, and therefore too ignorant to wield the power so rapidly wrested from the class who had so long monopolised it. It is far better to grow out of a creed by the sure and gradual consciousness of the truths of existence, than to dash off a religious garb simply from abhorrence of the shameful practices of its professors, or sudden conviction of the falsity of many of the testimonies in its favour. So it is a more permanent and more complete revolution which is effectuated by educating men to a sense of the majesty and worth of true manhood, than is any mere sudden overturning a rotten or cruel usurpation. Monarchies are most thoroughly and entirely destroyed—not by pulling down the throne, or by decapitating the king, but by educating and building up with a knowledge of political duty, each individual citizen amongst the people.

It is here that heresy has its great advantage. Christianity says, "the powers that be are ordained of God, he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God." Heresy challenges the divine right of the governor, and declares that government should be the best contrivance of national wisdom to promote the national weal, to provide against national want, and alleviate-national suffering—that government which is only a costly machinery for conserving class privileges, and preventing popular freedom, is a tyrannical usurpation of power,which it is the duty of true men to destroy.

I have briefly and imperfectly alluded to a few of the men who stand out as the sign-posts of heretical progress during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries; in some future publication of wider scope fairer tribute may be paid to the memories of some of these mighty warriors in the Freethought army. My object is to show that the civilisation of the masses is in proportion to the spread of heresy amongst them, that its effect is seen in an exhibition of manly dignity and self-reliant effort which is utterly unattainable amongst a superstitious people. Look at the lazzaroni of the Neapolitan States, or the peasant of the Campagna, and you have at once the fearful illustration of demoralisation by faith in the beggar, brigand, and believer.

It is sometimes pretended that such advantages of education and position as the people may boast in England, their civil rights and social advancement, are owing to their Christianity, but in point of fact the reverse is the case. For centuries Christianity had done little but fetter tightly the masses to Church and Crown, to Priest and Baron; the enfranchisement is comparatively modern. Even in this very day, in the districts where the people are entirely in the hands of the clergy of the Established Church, there they are as a mass the most depraved. Take the agricultural counties and the agricultural labourers: there are no heretical books or papers to be seen in their cottages, no heretical speakers come amongst them to disturb their contentment; the deputy-lieutenant, the squire, and the rector wield supreme authority—the parish church has no rival. But what are the people as a mass? They are not men, they are not women, they lack men's and women's thoughts and aspirations: they are diggers and weeders, hedgers and ditchers, ploughmen and carters; they are taught to be content with the state of life, in which it has pleased God to place them.

My plea is, that modern heresy, from Spinoza to Mill, has given brain-strength and dignity to every one it has permeated—that the popular propagandists of this heresy, from Bruno to Carlile, have been the true redeemers and saviours, the true educators of the people. The redemption is yet only at its commencement, the education only lately begun, but the change is traceable already; as witness the power to speak and write, and the ability to listen and read, which have grown amongst the masses during the last 100 years. And if to-day we write with higher hope, it is because the right to speak and the right to print has been partly freed from the fetters forged through long generations of intellect-prostration, and almost entirely freed from the statutory limitations which, under pretence of checking blasphemy and sedition, have really gagged honest speech against Pope and Emperor, against Church and Throne.