Sir William Drummond says, "Early associations are generally the strongest in the human mind, and what we have been taught to credit as children we are seldom, disposed to question as men. Called away from speculative inquiries by the common business of life, men in general possess neither the inclination, nor the leisure to examine what they believe or why they believe. A powerful prejudice remains in the mind; ensures conviction without the trouble of thinking; and repels doubt without the aid or authority of reason. The multitude then is not very likely to applaud an author, who calls upon it to consider what it had hitherto neglected, and to stop where it had been accustomed to pass on. It may also happen that there is a learned and formidable body, which, having given its general sanction to the literal interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, may be offended at the presumption of an unhallowed layman, who ventures to hold, that the language of those Scriptures is often symbolical and allegorical, even in passages which both the Church and the Synagogue consider as nothing else than a plain statement of fact. A writer who had sufficient boldness to encounter such obstacles, and to make an appeal to the public, would only expose himself to the invectives of offended bigotry, and to the misrepresentations of interested malice. The press would be made to ring with declamations against him, and neither learning, nor argument, nor reason, nor moderation on his side, would protect him from the literary assassination which awaited him. In vain would he put on the heaven-tempered panoply of truth. The weapons which could neither pierce his buckler nor break his casque, might be made to pass with envenomed points through the joints of his armour. Every trivial error which he might commit, would be magnified into a flagrant fault; and every insignificant mistake into which he might fall, would be represented by the bigotted, or by the hireling critics of the day as an ignorant, or as a perverse deviation from the truth." Both by the Statute Law and Common Law, heresy is punishable, and many are punished for it even in the second half of the nineteenth century. A man who has been educated in, or made profession of Christianity, and who shall then deny any of the Thirty-nine Articles, is liable to indictment and imprisonment, but this course is seldom pursued; the more common practice is for the Christian to avail himself of the heretic's want of belief in order to object to his competency as a witness. Repeated instances have occurred recently in which the proposed witness has been rejected as untrustworthy, because he was too honest to pretend to hold a faith he in truth denied. Besides such open persecution, there is the constant, unceasing, paltry, petty persecuting spirit which refuses to trade with the heretic; which declines to eat with him; which will not employ him; which feels justified in slandering him, which seeks to set his wife's mind against him, and to take away the affection of his children from him.
For those who do not believe this, I will instance two clergymen of the Church of England: one (who as my teacher when a boy) set a kind father's heart against me, and drove me further in heresy than I then dreamed of marching; and the other, who in cruel wickedness tried to wound me as a man through the feelings of my wife and children, whom he most vilely and basely slandered. The first is yet unpunished, the second escaped condign punishment only by writing himself down libeller, and praying pardon for the slanderous coinage of his brain. And yet this latter Church of England clergyman, who had written a strong letter thanking me for my generous forbearance, and who from his own pulpit pretended to express his sorrow, is actually the first and only man in my neighbourhood to cry "Atheist" against me, when I mingle in political life, and he thinks the phrase may wound and injure me.
CHAPTER II. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
It requires a more practised pen than mine to even faintly sketch the progress of heresy during the past three centuries, but I trust to say enough to give the reader an idea of its rapid growth and wide extension. I say of the past three centuries, because it is only during the past three hundred years that heresy has made the majority of its converts amongst the mass of the people. In earlier times heretics were not only few, but they talked to the few, and wrote to the few, in the language of the few; and indeed it may be fairly said, that it is only during the last hundred years that the greatest men have sought to make heresy "vulgar;" that is, to make it common. One of our leading scientific men admitted recently that he had been reproved by some of his more orthodox friends, for not confining to the Latin language such of his geological opinions as were supposed to be most dangerous to the Hebrew records. The starting-point of the real era of popular heresy may be placed at the early part of the sixteenth century, when the memories of Huss and Ziska (who had really inoculated the mass with some spirit of heretical resistance a century before) aided Luther in resisting Rome.
Martin Luther, born at Eisleben in Saxony, in 1483, was one of the heretics who sought popular endorsement for his heresy, and who following the example of the Ulrich Zuingle, of Zurich, preached to the people in rough plain words. While others were limited to Latin, he rang out in plain German his opposition to Tetzel and his protectors. I know that to-day, Martin Luther is spoken of by orthodox Protestants as if he were a saint without blemish, and indeed I do not want to deprive the Christian Church of the honour of his adherence; he is hardly good enough and true enough for a first-class heretic. Yet in justification of my ranking him even so temporarily amongst the heretics of the sixteenth century, it will be sufficient to mention that he regarded "the books of the Kings as more worthy of credit than the books of the Chronicles," that he wrote as follows:—"The book of Esdras I toss into the Elbe." "I am so an enemy to the book of Esther I would it did not exist." "Job spake not therefore as it stands written in his book." "It is a sheer argumentum fabulæ" "The book of the Proverbs of Solomon has been pieced together by others," of Ecclesiastes "there is too much of broken matter in it; it has neither boots nor spurs, but rides only in socks." "Isaiah hath borrowed his whole art and knowledge from David." "The history of Jonah is so monstrous that it is absolutely incredible." "The Epistle to the Hebrews is not by St. Paul, nor indeed by any Apostle." "The Epistle of James 1 account the writing of no Apostle," and "is truly an Epistle of sham." The Epistle of Jude "allegeth sayings or stories which have no place in Scripture," "of Revelation I can discover no trace that it is established by the Holy Spirit." If Martin Luther were alive to-day, the Established Church of England, which pretends to revere him, would prosecute him in the English Ecclesiastical Courts if he ventured to repeat the foregoing phrases from her pulpits. What would the writers who attack me for coarseness, say of the following passage, which occurs with reference to Melancthon, whom Luther boasts that he raised miraculously from the dead? "Melancthon," says Sir William Hamilton, to whose essay I am indebted for the extracts here given, "had fallen ill at Weimar from contrition and fear for the part he had been led to take in the Landgrave's polygamy: his life was even in danger." "Then and there," said Luther, "I made our Lord God to smart for it. For I threw down the sack before the door, and rubbed his ears with all his promises of hearing prayer, which I knew how to recapitulate from Holy Writ, so that he could not but hearken to me, should I ever again place any reliance on his promises." Martin Luther, with his absolute denial of free-will, and with his double code of morality for princes and peasants—easy for one and harsh for the other—may be fairly left now with those who desire to vaunt his orthodoxy; here his name is used only to illustrate the popular impetus given to nonconformity by his quarrel with the papal authorities. Luther protested against the Romish Church, but established by the very fact the right for some more advanced man than Doctor Martin to protest in turn against the Lutheran Church. The only consistent church in Christendom is the Romish Church, for it claims the right to think for all its followers. The whole of the Protestant Churches are inconsistent, for they claim the right to think and judge against Rome, but deny extremer Nonconformists the right to think and judge against themselves. Goethe, says Froude, declares that Luther threw back the intellectual progress of mankind by using the passions of the multitude to decide subjects which should have been left to the learned. I do not believe this to be wholly true, for the multitude once having their ears fairly opened, listened to more than the appeal to their passions, and examined for themselves propositions which otherwise they would have accepted or rejected from habit and without inquiry. Martin Luther's public discussions with pen and tongue, in Wittemberg, Augsburg, Liebenwerd, and Lichtenberg, and the protest he encouraged against Rome, were the commencement of a vigorous controversy, in which the public (who heard for the first time sharp controversial sermons preached publicly in the various pulpits by Lutheran preachers on free-will and necessity, election and predestination, &c.) began to take real part and interest; and which is still going on, and will in fact never end until the unholy alliance of Church and State is everywhere annulled, and each religion is left to sustain itself by its own truth, or to fall from its own weakness, no man being molested under the law on account of his opinions on religious matters. While Luther undoubtedly gave an impetus to the growth of Rationalism by his own appeal to reason and his reliance on reason for himself, it is not true that he contended for the right of general freedom of inquiry, nor would he have left unlimited the privileges of individual judgment for others. He could be furious in his denunciations of reason when a freer thinker than himself dared to use it against his superstitions. It is somewhat remarkable that while on the one hand one man, Luther, was detaching from the Church of Rome a large number of minds, another man, Loyola, was about the same time engaged in founding that powerful society (the Society of Jesuits), which has done so much to check free inquiry and maintain the priestly domination over the human intellect. That which Luther commenced in Germany roughly, inefficiently, and perhaps more from personal feeling for the privileges of the special order to which he belonged than from desire for popular progress, was aided in its permanent effect by Descartes, in England by Bacon, in France by Montaigne, and in Italy by Bruno.
Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, was born on the 22nd January, 1561, and died 1626. His mother, Anne, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, was a woman of high education, and certainly with some inclinations favourable to Freethought, for she had herself translated into English some of the sermons on fate and free-will of Bernard Ochino, or Bernardin Ochinus, an Italian Reforming Heretic, alike repudiated by the powers at Rome, Geneva, Wittemberg, and Zurich. Ochino, in his famous disquisition "touching the freedom or bondage of the human will, and the foreknowledge, predestination, and liberty of God," after discussing, with great acuteness, and from different points of view, these important topics, comes to the conclusion that there is no outlet to the mazes of thought in which the honest speculator plunges in the endeavour to solve these problems. Although, like other writers of that and earlier periods, many of Bacon's works were published in Latin, he wrote and published also in English, and if I am right in numbering him as one of the heretics of the sixteenth century, he must be also counted a vulgar heretic—i.e., one who wrote in the vulgar tongue, who preached his heresy in the language which the mass understood. Lewes says, "Bacon and Descartes are generally recognised as the Fathers of Modern Philosophy, although they themselves were carried along by the rapidly-swelling current of their age, then decisively setting in the direction of science. It is their glory to have seen visions of the coming greatness, to have expressed in terms of splendid power, the thoughts which were dimly stirring the age, and to have sanctioned the new movement by their authoritative genius." Bacon was the populariser of that method of reasoning known as the inductive, that method which seeks to trace back from the phenomena of the moment to the eternal noumenon or noumena—from the conditioned to the absolute. Nearly two thousand years before, the same method had been taught by Aristotle in opposition to Plato, and probably long thousands of years before the grand Greek, pre-historic schoolmen had used the method; it is natural to the human mind. The Stagirite was the founder of a school, Bacon the teacher and populariser for a nation. Aristotle's Greek was known to few, Bacon's eloquent English opened out the subject to the many whom he impregnated with his own confidence in the grand progressiveness of human thought. Lewes says; "The spirit of his philosophy was antagonistic to Theology, for it was a spirit of doubt and search; and its search was for visible and tangible results." Bacon himself, in his essay on Superstition, says: "Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men: therefore Atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further; and we see the times inclined to Atheism, as the time of Augustus Caesar were civil times; but superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile (the first motive cause), that ravisheth all the spheres of government." It is true that he also wrote against Atheism, and this in strong language, but his philosophy was not used for the purpose of proving theological propositions. He said: "True philosophy is that which is the faithful echo of the voice of the world, which is written in some sort under the dictation of things, which adds nothing of itself, which is only the rebound, the reflection of reality." It has been well said that the words "Utility and Progress" give the keynotes of Bacon's teachings. With one other extract we leave his writings. "Crafty men," he says, "contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man; and therefore, if a man write little, he need have a great memory; if he confer little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend." He was the father of experimental philosophy. In one of his suggestions as to the force of attraction of gravitation may be found the first aid to Sir Isaac Newton's later demonstrations on this head; another of his suggestions, worked out by Torricelli, ended in demonstrating the gravity of the atmosphere. But to the method he so popularised may be attributed the grandest discoveries of modern times. It is to be deplored that the memory of his moral weakness should remain to spoil the praise of his grand intellect.
Lord Macaulay, in the Edinburgh Review, after contrasting at some length the philosophy of Plato with that of Bacon, said;—"To sum up the whole: we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god. The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to provide man with what he requires while he continues to be man. The aim of the Platonic philosophy was to raise us far above vulgar wants. The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to supply our vulgar wants. The former aim was noble; but the latter was attainable. Plato drew a good bow; but, like Acestes in Virgil, he aimed at the stars; and therefore, though there was no want of strength or skill, the shot was thrown away. His arrow was indeed followed by a track of dazzling radiance, but it struck nothing. Bacon fixed his eye on a mark which was placed on the earth and within bowshot, and hit it in the white. The philosophy of Plato began in words and ended in words—noble words in deed-words such as were to be expected from the finest of human intellects exercising boundless dominion over the finest of human languages. The philosophy of Bacon began in observations and ended in arts."
In France the political heresy of Jean Bodin—who challenged the divine right of rulers; who proclaimed the right of resistance against oppressive decrees of monarchs; who had words of laudation for tyrannicide, and yet had no conception that the multitude were entitled to use political power, but on the contrary wrote against them—was very imperfect, the conception of individual right was confounded in the habit of obedience to monarchical authority. Bodin is classed by Mosheim amongst the writers who sowed the seeds of scepticism in France; but although he was far from an orthodox man, it is doubtful if Bodin ever intended his views to be shared beyond the class to which he belonged. To the partial glimpse of individual right in the works of Bodin add the doctrine of political fraternity taught by La Boetie, and then this political heresy becomes dangerous in becoming popular.
The most decided heretic and doubter of the sixteenth century was one Sanchez, by birth a Portuguese, and practising as a physician at Toulouse; but the impetus which ultimately led to the spread and popularity of sceptical opinions in relation to politics and theology, is chiefly due to the satirical romances of Rabelais and the essays of Montaigne. "What Rabelais was to the supporters of theology," says Buckle, "that was Montaigne to the theology itself. The writings of Rabelais were only directed against the clergy, but the writings of Montaigne were directed against the system of which the clergy were the offspring."