C.—PERVERSION.
There is a story of an enterprising Italian who increased the patronage of an unpopular mountain resort by effecting an inundation of the lowlands; and if the apostles of other-worldliness had tried to enhance the attractions of their hereafter on the same plan, they could certainly not have adopted a more effective method for depreciating the value of temporal existence. The vanity of work, of thrift, of economy, and the superior merit of reliance on the aid of preternatural agencies, were a favorite text of the Galilean messiah. “Take no thought of the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? what shall we drink? or wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these do the gentiles seek.” “Ask and it shall be given you.” [[111]]
Secular foresight was depreciated even in the form of a prudent care for the preservation of physical health; the selection of clean in preference to unclean food was denounced as a relic of worldliness; and in mitigating the consequences of such insults to nature, prayer and mystic ceremonies were recommended as superior to secular remedies. “If any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.” “And when he had called unto him his twelve disciples, he gave them power against unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal all manner of disease.”
If such instructions had been followed to the letter, the human race would have perished in a hell of madness and disease. As it was, a thousand years’ purgatory of half insanity cured the world of its delusion; and the sinners against the laws of common sense escaped with the penalty of a millennium of barbarism, a barbarism which, in the most orthodox countries of the fourteenth century, had sunk deep below the lowest ebb of pagan savagery. The untutored hunters of the primeval German forest were at least left to the resources of their animal instincts; they were illiterate, but manly and generous, braving danger, and prizing health and liberty above all earthly blessings. Their children were dragged off to the bondage of the Christian convents and doomed to all the misery of physical restraint, not for the sake of their intellectual culture, not with a view of [[112]]purchasing the comforts of after years by temporal self-denial, but to educate them in habits of physical apathy and supine reliance on the aid of interposing saints—a habit which at last revenged itself by its transfer to the principles of ethics, and encouraged malefactors to trust their eternal welfare to the same expedient to which indolence had been taught to confide its temporal interests. Where was the need of rectitude if iniquity could be compromised by prayer? Where was the need of industry if its fruits could be obtained by faith? Where was the need of sanitary precautions if the consequences of their neglect could be averted by ceremonies?
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The consequences of that dogma refuted its claims by lessons which mankind is not apt to forget for the next hundred generations. From the day when the doctrine of Antinaturalism succeeded in superseding the lingering influence of pagan philosophy, progressive industry waned, and at last almost ceased to supply even a reduced demand; commerce lingered, and the sources of subsistence were wholly confined to the produce of a more and more impoverished soil. With the exception of (still half pagan) Italy, not one of the many once prosperous countries of Christian Europe had anything like a profitable export trade. On the international markets of the Byzantine empire the products of skilled labor—fine clothes, fine fruits, perfume, and jewelry—were sold by oriental merchants, while the Christian buyers had little to offer in exchange but the spontaneous [[113]]products of Nature: timber, salt, amber, and perhaps hides and wool. Medical science had become such a medley of vagaries and barbarisms that even the princes of Christendom could not boast of a competent family physician, and in critical cases had to trust their lives to the skill of Moorish or Persian doctors. Abderaman el Hakim, a king of Moorish Spain, had so many applications for the services of his court-doctor that he often jestingly called him the “Savior of Christian Europe.” The prevalence of the militant type should certainly have encouraged the manufacture of warlike implements; yet not one of the twelve heavy-armed countries of Trinitarian Europe had preserved the art of tempering a first-class sword, and proof-steel had to be imported from Damascus. The traditions of architecture were limited to the fantastic elaboration of religious edifices; peasants dwelt in hovels, and citizens in dingy stone prisons, crowded into crooked and cobble-paved alleys.
The unspeakable filth of such alleys produced epidemics that almost depopulated the most orthodox countries of medieval Europe. Under the stimulus of clerical theories, those epidemics in their turn produced outbreaks of fanatical superstition, which in pagan Rome would certainly have been ascribed to the influence of a contagious mental disease. Diseases, according to a doctrine which it was deemed blasphemy to doubt, could be averted by prayer and self-humiliation. In spite of a diligent application of such prophylactics, diseases of the most virulent kind became more prevalent. The [[114]]logical inference seemed that prayer had not been fervent and self-abasement not abject enough. Hordes of religious maniacs roamed the streets of the plague-stricken cities, howling like hyenas and lacerating their bodies in a manner too shocking to describe. After exhausting the available means of subsistence, the blood-smeared, wretches would invade the open country, and by frantic appeals frighten thousands of peasants into joining their ranks, and in carrying the seeds of mental and physical contagion to a neighboring country. In Germany and Holland the total number of “Flagellants” were at one time estimated at three hundred and fifty thousand; on another occasion at more than half a million. If the disease had exhausted its fury, the self-torturers would claim the reward of their services by falling like hungry wolves upon the homes of the sane survivors. If the plague refused to abate, the leading fanatics would ascribe the failure to their followers’ want of zeal, and enforce their theory by an indiscriminate application of a rawhide knout, till the dispute was referred to the arbitrament of cold steel, and the ranks of the howling maniacs were thinned by mutual slaughter.