The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of once fertile empires still attests the physical consequences of a thousand years’ reign of Antinaturalism, but, happily, the time has already come when many of our fellow-men almost fail to credit the degree of mental abasement realized during the most orthodox centuries of that reign. It would be no overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred years the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger persuaded a plurality of the Caucasian nations to risk their lives in defense of dogmas the mere profession of which would start a modern Christian on a galloping trip to the next lunatic asylum.
Decapitated saints were believed to have emerged from their tombs and paid their respects to a newly appointed bishop; flying dragons descended through the air to snatch the bodies of unbelievers and disappeared with screams that frightened orthodox [[157]]neighbors to take refuge in their cellar-holes; swarms of angels carried bones, crosses, and whole buildings from Bethlehem to Loretto; King Philip the Second paid a thousand doubloons for a skeleton of St. Laurentius, and having been informed that a complete skeleton of the same saint was for sale in the south of Italy, he at once ratified the bargain and blessed heaven for having favored him with a duplicate of the precious relic. Thousands of unfortunates were tried and executed on a charge of having taken an aerial excursion on a broomstick or a black he-goat; of having caused a gale by churning a potful of froth and water; of having turned themselves into foxes, wolves, and tomcats.
The instinct of recognizing the absurdity of even the most glaring superstitions seems to have become wholly extinct in the minds of the forty generations from the middle of the tenth to the end of the fourteenth century; and during that millennium of madness the suppression of free inquiry encouraged thousands of pious tract-mongers to devote their lives to the wholesale forgery of saintly biographies and miracle legends, and disseminate under the name of historical records insanities too extravagant even for the readers of a modern nursery-tale.
The war against Truth was carried to the length of suppressing not only the skeptical inferences of science, but science itself; chemists, astronomers, physiologists, mathematicians, and bona fide historians could pursue their inquiries only at the risk of an inquisitorial indictment; and a cloud of ignorance, which in the days of Horace and Pliny would [[158]]have been thought disgraceful to the obscurest hamlet of the Roman empire, brooded for ages over the face of the entire Christian world.
For a series of centuries the encouragement of credulity and imposture almost annulled the value of contemporary records. Travelers and chroniclers, as well as biographers, accommodated the popular taste by dealing, not in marvels only, but in miracles; witchcraft anecdotes, preternatural resurrections, prodigies of skill and physical prowess, giants, dragons, were-wolves, and no end of spectral manifestations. It is no exaggeration to say that for a period of more than nine hundred years the dogma of the Galilean antinaturalist systematically favored the survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common sense a capital crime.
E.—REFORM.
The triumph of the Protestant revolt has ushered in a dawn which, in comparison with the preceding night, may justly vaunt its era as an Age of Reason; but the thousand years’ perversion of our moral instincts has not been wholly redeemed by the educational influences of a short century. For even eighty years ago the educational reforms of the Protestant nations attempted little more than a compromise between reason and dogma, while their southern neighbors revolted against the political influence, rather than against the dogmatical arrogance, of their priesthood. Nay, even at present the fallacies of the compromise plan still hamper the [[159]]progress of reform in manifold directions. As an American Freethinker aptly expresses it: “Truth is no longer kept under lock and key, but is kindly turned loose to roam at large—after being chained to a certain number of theological cannon-balls.” Evolution may pursue its inquiries into specific phases of organic development, but must not question the correctness of the Mosaic traditions; rationalists may inveigh against the insanities of the Middle Ages, but must pretend to overlook the fact that the doctrine of the New Testament contains the germs of all those insanities; the science of health may denounce modern fallacies, but must beware to mention the anti-physical precepts of the body-despising Galilean; Materialists must attack the hobgoblins of the Davenport brothers, but ignore the hog-goblins of Gadara; historical critics may call attention to the inconsistencies of Livy and Plutarch, but must not mention the self-contradictions of the New Testament.
Yet logic and philosophy will be little more than a farce till the axiom of a great biologist can be applied to the pursuit of every human science. “Inquiries of that sort” (the “Descent of Man”), he says, “have nothing whatever to do with personal tastes or vested interests, but only with facts. We should not ask: ‘Will it be popular?’ ‘Will it seem orthodox?’ but simply, ‘Is it true?’ ”
And in just as much as the theory of moral duties deserves the name of a science, the exponents of that science would gain, rather than lose, by the adoption of the same maxim. “Religion,” in the traditional sense of the word, needs to be purged from an enormous [[160]]percentage of spurious elements, before its ministers can be acquitted from the guilt of tempting their disciples to associate the ideas of Ethics and Imposture, and thus reject the basis of morality together with the basis of an Asiatic myth. “Truth is the beginning of Wisdom,” “Justice is Truth,” “Mendacity is the Mother of Discord,” would be fit mottoes for the ethical Sunday-schools of the Future. “What is Truth?” asks Pilate; yet even in religious controversies the fury of sectarian strife could be obviated if we would truthfully admit the uselessness of disputes about the unknowable mysteries of supernatural problems. Still, we cannot hope to eradicate the roots of discord unless we resolve with equal frankness to reject the interference of Supernaturalism with the knowable problems of secular science. Evident Truth can dispense with the indorsement of miracle-mongers, and “evident Untruth,” in the words of Ulrich Hutten, “should be exposed whether its teachers come in the name of God or of the devil.”