D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,” says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the [[169]]catechism of such a religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic colleges.”
Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.
“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful.… The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”
The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of escape from the horrors of existence.
E.—REFORM.
The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosophical friends, directed the keenest shafts of their logic against the doctrine of eternal punishment, and never [[170]]wearied of repeating that the belief in a merciless God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless bigots. “How insignificant,” they argued, “the occasional sufferings of a transient life on earth must appear to the converts of John Calvin, who held that about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed to an eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures. How absurd they must deem the complaints of a life-weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look back to the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness of a lost Eden.” The Universalists are fond of enlarging on the moral of that theme, yet from a wider point of view their objections might be extended to the entire doctrine of other-worldliness, since Holbach’s argument might find its exact analogue in the dogma of post mortem compensation. “His soul will be the gainer,” thought the Crusader who had demonstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a Moorish skull, “and if he should die his spirit will enter the gates of the New Jerusalem.” “Oh, the ingratitude,” actually said a priest of the Spanish-American land robbers, “the ingratitude of the wretches who grudge us the territories of their base earthly kingdoms and forget that our gospel offers them a passport to the glorious kingdom of heaven!” “The ingratitude!” repeats the modern pharisee, “the base ingratitude of those factory children who grudge me the privileges of my position, and clamor for an increase of wages to gratify their worldly desires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should not the rich promises of the gospel compensate such temporal inconveniences, and have I not founded a [[171]]Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of their unregenerate souls?”
Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher acquainted us with the verdict of his countrymen on the “gospel of love” that sends its missionaries on ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by armadas for the demolition of seaports that might refuse to admit the cargo of spirituous and spiritual poisons.