Time is the test of truth; and the fallacies of the “Brotherhood in Christ” plan have been abundantly demonstrated by their consequences. Instead of being a bond of union, the doctrine of renunciation has been found to be a root of discord and rancor, and in times of need the fellowship of its converts has proved a most rotten staff. Even the wretches who betrayed their friends to the spies of the Holy Inquisition had no difficulty in palliating the infamy of their conduct with the sanction of scriptural precepts. For centuries the appeals of martyrs to the cause of freedom and Freethought have been answered with the advice of Christian submission to the “powers that be,” and our modern pharisees rarely fail to reprove the “worldliness” of a poor neighbor’s lament for the loss of his earthly possessions.
The founder of “Positivism,” the Religion of Humanity, proposes to dedicate the days of the year to the leaders of progress, and inscribe our places of worship with the names of discoverers, reformers, and philosophers rather than of bigots and world-despising saints. And for the sake of those who would not wish to repeat the mistake of sacrificing [[182]]the present to the past, the builders of those sanctuaries should add a temple of Friendship. From the adoration of self-torturing fanatics, from the worship of sorrow and the love of enemies, mankind will at last revert to the ancestral plan of elective affinities, and the dread of preferring natural to theological duties will not much longer prevent our fellow-men from recognizing their obligations to their earthly benefactors.
CHAPTER XV.
EDUCATION.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The doctrine of Pythagoras, the philosophic Messiah of Paganism, included the strange tenet of metempsychosis. After death, held the confessors of that dogma, the souls of men and brutes would reappear in new forms, higher or lower, according to the character-traits of the dying individual. Thus the soul of a wealthy glutton might be reborn in a pig-sty, that of a high-minded peasant perhaps on the throne of a king. Death and rebirth are the upper and lower spokes of a wheel that turns and turns forever, and in the persons of their neighbors the Pythagoreans saw wanderers that might have walked this earth thousands of years ago.
The strangeness of such a theory is still increased by the circumstance that its teacher was an eminent astronomer, an accomplished mathematician, and the leader of a memorable hygienic reform. Our astonishment [[183]]is not lessened by the well-established fact that, under some form or other, the doctrine of soul-migration has for ages been the accepted creed of a large plurality of our fellow-men. It is well known, however, that to his trusted disciples Pythagoras imparted an esoteric or explanatory version of his dogmas; and if we learn that the great philosopher attached a special importance to the influence of hereditary dispositions, the truth at last dawns upon us that the doctrine of metempsychosis referred to the reappearance of individual types, passions, and dispositions in the bodily and mental characteristics of the next generation. “Parents live in their children.” The instinctive recognition of that truth reconciles our dumb fellow-creatures to the prospect of death. At the end of summer the night-moth carefully deposits her eggs in a silver cradle, hidden safe in the crevice of some sheltering nook, where they will survive the rigor of the winter and answer the first summons of spring. Having thus, as it were, insured the resurrection of her type, the parent moth quietly resigns herself to the fate of sleeping her own winter-slumber in the arms of death. On the Orinoco wounded river-turtles will use their last strength to climb the slope of some bush-hidden sand-bank, and after intrusting their eggs to the protection of the deep drift sand, will reënter the water and quietly float off with the seaward currents. In the virgin-woods of Southern Mexico, where the harpy-eagle fills the maws of her hungry brood by incessant raids on the small denizens of the tree-tops, the traveler D’Armand once witnessed a curious [[184]]scene. An eagle had pounced upon a nursing mother monkey, who at first struggled desperately to free herself from the claws of the murderer; but, finding resistance in vain, she loosened her grasp on the branches, and, just as the eagle carried her off, she disengaged the arm of her baby from her neck, and shaking off the little creature with a swing of her arm, she deliberately flung it back into the sheltering foliage of the tree-top, thus taking the last possible chance of surviving in her child.
The “dread of annihilation” reveals itself in the instincts of a dying philosopher as plainly as in the instincts of a wounded animal; but, on self-examination, that fear would prove to have but little in common with a special solicitude for the preservation of material forms or combinations—conditions which the process of organic change constantly modifies in the cradle as well as in the grave. It is rather the type of the body and its correlated mental dispositions which the hope of resurrection yearns to preserve, and even childless men have often partly realized that hope by impressing the image of their soul on a younger mind, and transmitting their cherished projects and theories through the medium of education. In the consciousness of that accomplished task Socrates could as calmly die in the arms of his disciples as the Hebrew patriarch in the arms of his children and grandchildren. “You kill a sower,” cried St. Adalbert under the clubs of his assassins, “but the seed he has planted will rise and survive both his love and your hatred.”