C.—PERVERSION.
The puerile supernaturalism of the pagan myth-mongers could not fail to injure their prestige, even in an age of superstition; but the antinaturalism of the Galilean fanatics not only neglected but completely inverted the proper functions of priesthood. The pretended ministers of Truth became her remorseless [[235]]persecutors; the promised healers depreciated the importance of bodily health, the hoped-for apostles of social reform preached the doctrine of renunciation. We should not judge the Christian clergy by the aberrations engendered by the maddening influence of protracted persecutions. It would be equally unfair to give them the credit of latter-day reforms, reluctantly conceded to the demands of rationalism. But we can with perfect fairness judge them by the standard of the moral and intellectual types evolved during the period of their plenary power, the three hundred years from the tenth to the end of the thirteenth century, when the control of morals and education had been unconditionally surrendered into the hands of their chosen representatives. The comparative scale of human turpitude must not include the creations of fiction. We might find a ne plus ultra of infamy in the satires of Rabelais, in the myths of Hindostan, or the burlesques of the modern French dramatists. But if we confine our comparison to the records of authentic history, it would be no exaggeration to say that during the period named the type of a Christian priest represented the absolute extreme of all the groveling ignorance, the meanest selfishness, the rankest sloth, the basest servility, the foulest perfidy, the grossest superstition, the most bestial sensuality, to which the majesty of human nature has ever been degraded. Thousands of monasteries fattened on the toil of starving peasants. Villages were beggared by the rapacity of the tithe-gatherer; cities were terrorized by witch-hunts and autos-da-fé. The crimps of the inquisitorial [[236]]tribunals hired spies and suborned perjurers by promising them a share of confiscated estates. The evidence of intellectual pursuits was equivalent to a sentence of death. Education was almost limited to the memorizing of chants and prayers. “A cloud of ignorance,” says Hallam, “overspread the whole face of the church, hardly broken by a few glimmering lights who owe almost the whole of their distinction to the surrounding darkness.… In 992, it was asserted that scarcely a single person was to be found, even in Rome itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain could address a common letter of salutation to another.” Every deathbed became a harvest-field of clerical vampires who did not hesitate to bully the dying into robbing their children for the benefit of a bloated convent. Herds of howling fanatics roamed the country, frenzying the superstitious rustics with their predictions of impending horrors. Parishioners had to submit to the base avarice and the baser lusts of insolent parish priests, who in his turn kissed the dust at the feet of an arrogant prelate. The doctrine of Antinaturalism had solved the problem of inflicting the greatest possible amount of misery on the greatest possible number of victims.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The intellectual interregnum of the Middle Ages, the era of specters and vampires, received the first promise of dawn about the middle of the fourteenth century, when the lessons of the Crusades and the influence of Moorish civilization began to react on [[237]]the nations of Christian Europe. Yet, by methods of their own, the vampires succeeded in prolonging the dreadful night. They set their owls a-shrieking from a thousand pulpits; they darkened the air with the smoke-clouds of autos-da-fé. They treated every torch-bearer as an incendiary.
But though the delay of redemption completed the ruin of some of their victims, the ghouls did not escape the deserved retribution. Their fire alarms failed to avert the brightening dawn. Daylight found its way even through the painted glass of dome-windows, and in the open air the blood-suckers had to take wing on pain of being shaken off and trampled under foot. The slaves of Hayti never rose more fiercely against their French tyrants than the German peasants against their clerical oppressor. From Antwerp to Leipzig thousands of convents were leveled with the ground; the villages of Holland, Minden, and Brunswick joined in a general priest-hunt, carried on with all the cruelties which the man-hunters of the Frankish crusade had inflicted on the pagan Saxons. In the Mediterranean Peninsulas the Jesuits were expelled as enemies of public peace, and their colleagues could maintain themselves only by an alliance with despotism against the liberal and intellectual elements of their country. To patriots of the Garibaldi type the name of a priest has become a byword implying the very quintessence of infamy. The explosion of the French Revolution struck a still deadlier blow at clerical prestige. The fagot-arguments of the Holy Inquisition were answered by [[238]]a “burning, as in hell-fire, of priestly shams and lies,” and not one out of twenty French monasteries escaped the fury of the avengers. Our Protestant clergymen see their temple walls cracked by a breach of ever-multiplying schisms, and can prop their prestige only by more and more humiliating concessions, and in every intelligent community have to purchase popularity by rank heresies against the dogmas of their predecessors. Here and there the orthodox tenets of the New Testament have survived the progress of rationalism, but haunt the shade, like specters scenting the morning air, and momentarily expecting the summons that shall banish them to the realms of their native night.
E.—REFORM.
When the harbinger of day dispels the specters of darkness, half-awakened sleepers often mourn the fading visions of dreamland, as they would mourn the memories of a vanished world, till they find that the solid earth still remains, with its mountains and forests, and that the enjoyment of real life has but just begun. With a similar regret the dupes of Jesuitism mourn the collapse of their creed and lament the decline of morality, till they find that religion still remains, with its consolations and hopes, and that the true work of redemption has but just begun.
The reign of superstition begins to yield to a religion of reason and humanity. The first forerunners of that religion appeared at the end of the sixteenth century, when the philosophers of northern Europe [[239]]first dared to appeal from dogma to nature, and since that revival of common-sense the prison walls of clerical obscurantism have been shaken by shock after shock, till daylight now enters through a thousand fissures.