FREETHOUGHT.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The Brahmans have a legend that the first children of man ascended Mount Gunganoor, to visit the castle of Indra and inquire into the secret of their origin. Speculations on the source of life, on the mystery of creation, the cause of good and evil, and similar problems which we might sum up under the name of religious inquiries, seem, indeed, to have occupied the attention of our ancestors at a very early period. An irrepressible instinct appears to prompt the free discussion of such questions, and in a normal state of social relations the attempt to suppress that instinct would have appeared as preposterous as the attempt to enforce silence upon the inquirers into the problems of health or astronomy. A thousand years before the birth of Buddha, the [[125]]Sakyas, or ethic philosophers, of northern Hindostan visited the mountain-passes of Himalaya to converse with travelers and seek information on the religious customs and traditions of foreign nations. The book of Job, probably the oldest literary product of the Semitic nations, records a series of free and often, indeed, absolutely agnostic discussions of ethical and cosmological problems.
“Canst thou by searching find out God?” says Zophar. “It is as high as heaven: what canst thou do? It is deeper than hell: what canst thou know?”
“Is it good unto thee that thou shouldst oppress the work of thy own hand?” Job asks his creator; “thine hands have made me; why dost thou destroy me? Thou huntest me like a fierce lion. Wherefore, then, hast thou brought me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had given up the ghost and no eye had seen me! I should have been as though I had not been; I should have been carried from the womb to the grave. Are not my days few? Cease, then, and let me alone, that I may take comfort a little, before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death.”
And again: “Man dieth and wasteth away; man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fall from the sea and the flood dryeth up: so man lieth down and riseth not; till the heavens be no more he shall not awake nor be raised out of his sleep.”… “If a man die, shall he live again?” “Wherefore is light given unto them that are in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul? who long [[126]]for death, but it cometh not; who rejoice exceedingly and are glad when they can find the grave?”
Or Elihu’s interpellation: “Look up to heaven and see the clouds which are higher than thou: If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? If thou be righteous, what givest thou to him, or what can he receive of thine hand?”
Could a committee of modern skeptics and philosophers discuss the problems of existence with greater freedom?
For a series of centuries the monkish custodians of the literary treasures of Greece and Rome expurgated the writings of the bolder Freethinkers, and for the sake of its mere parchment destroyed more than one work that would have been worth whole libraries of their own lucubrations; yet even the scant relics of pagan literature furnish abundant proofs of the ethical and metaphysical liberty which the philosophers of the Mediterranean nations enjoyed for nearly a thousand years. The marvelous development of Grecian civilization in art, science, politics, literature, and general prosperity coincided with a period of almost unlimited religious freedom. Speculations on the origin of religious myths were propounded with an impunity which our latter-day Freethinkers have still cause to envy. The possibility of all definite knowledge of the attributes of the deity was boldly denied two thousand years before the birth of Emmanuel Kant. The Freethinker Diagoras traveled from city to city, propagating his system of Agnosticism with a publicity which seems to imply a degree of tolerance never [[127]]yet re-attained in the progress of the most intellectual modern nations. The skeptic Pyrrho ridiculed the absurdity of all our modern Secularists would include under the name of other-worldliness. A Roman actor was applauded with cheers and laughter for quoting a passage to the effect that “if the gods exist, they seem to conduct their administration on the principle of strict neutrality in the affairs of mankind!”