Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.
“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. [[146]]There, too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were mangled by the fangs of those beasts.
The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.
E.—REFORM.
The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an antinatural creed is still glaringly evident [[147]]in the prevailing notions of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation, lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred widows and orphans.
Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men. Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism should insist on a truth not [[148]]unknown to the moralists of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.