Section 1.—Popular Propaganda and Culture
1. If any one circumstance more than another differentiates the life of to-day from that of older civilizations, or from that of previous centuries of the modern era, it is the diffusion of rationalistic views among the “common people.” In no other era is to be found the phenomenon of widespread critical skepticism among the labouring masses: in all previous ages, though chronic complaint is made of some unbelief among the uneducated, the constant and abject ignorance of the mass of the people has been the sure foothold of superstitious systems. Within the last century the area of the recognizably civilized world has grown far vaster; and in the immense populations that have thus arisen there is a relative degree of enlightenment, coupled with a degree of political power never before attained. Merely to survey, then, the broad movement of popular culture in the period in question will yield a useful notion of the dynamic change in the balance of thought in modern times, and will make more intelligible the special aspects of the culture process.
This vital change in the distribution of knowledge is largely to be attributed to the written and spoken teaching of a line of men who made popular enlightenment their great aim. Their leading type among the English-speaking races is Thomas Paine, whom we have seen combining a gospel of democracy with a gospel of critical reason in the midst of the French Revolution. Never before had rationalism been made widely popular. The English and French deists had written for the middle and upper classes. Peter Annet was practically the first who sought to reach the multitude; and his punishment expressed the special resentment aroused in the governing classes by such a policy. Of all the English freethinkers of the earlier deistical period he alone was selected for reprinting by the propagandists of the Paine period. Paine was to Annet, however, as a cannon to a musket, and through the democratic ferment of his day he won an audience a hundredfold wider than Annet could have dreamt of reaching. The anger of the governing classes, in a time of anti-democratic panic, was proportional. Paine would have been at least imprisoned for his Rights of Man had he not fled from England in time; and the sale of all his books was furiously prohibited and ferociously punished. Yet they circulated everywhere, even in Protestant Ireland,[12] hitherto affected only under the surface of upper-class life by deism. The circulation of Bishop Watson’s Apology in reply only served to spread the contagion, as it brought the issues before multitudes who would not otherwise have heard of them.[13] All the while, direct propaganda was carried on by translations and reprints as well as by fresh English tractates. Diderot’s Thoughts on Religion, and Fréret’s Letter from Thrasybulus to Leucippus, seem to have been great favourites among the Painites, as was Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature; and Volney’s Ruins of Empires had a large vogue. Condorcet’s Esquisse had been promptly translated in 1795; the translation of d’Holbach’s System of Nature reached a third edition in 1817;[14] that of Raynal’s History had been reprinted in 1804; and that of Helvétius On the Mind in 1810; while an English abridgment of Bayle in four volumes, on freethinking lines, appeared in 1826.
2. Meantime, new writers arose to carry into fuller detail the attacks of Paine, sharpening their weapons on those of the more scholarly French deists. A Life of Jesus, including his Apocryphal History,[15] was published in 1818, with such astute avoidance of all comment that it escaped prosecution. Others, taking a more daring course, fared accordingly. George Houston translated the Ecce Homo of d’Holbach, first publishing it at Edinburgh in 1799, and reprinting it in London in 1813. For the second issue he was prosecuted, fined £200, and imprisoned for two years in Newgate. Robert Wedderburn, a mulatto calling himself “the Rev.,” in reality a superannuated journeyman tailor who officiated in Hopkins Street Unitarian Chapel, London, was in 1820 sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Dorchester Jail for a “blasphemous libel” contained in one of his pulpit discourses. His Letters to the Rev. Solomon Herschell (the Jewish Chief Rabbi) and to the Archbishop of Canterbury show a happy vein of orderly irony and not a little learning, despite his profession of apostolic ignorance; and at the trial the judge admitted his defence to be “exceedingly well drawn up.” His publications naturally received a new impetus, and passed to a more drastic order of mockery.
3. As the years went on, the persecution in England grew still fiercer; but it was met with a stubborn hardihood which wore out even the bitter malice of piety. One of the worst features of the religious crusade was that it affected to attack not unbelief but “vice,” such being the plea on which Wilberforce and others prosecuted, during a period of more than twenty years, the publishers and booksellers who issued the works of Paine.[16] But even that dissembling device did not ultimately avail. A name not to be forgotten by those who value obscure service to human freedom is that of Richard Carlile, who between 1819 and 1835 underwent nine years’ imprisonment in his unyielding struggle for the freedom of the Press, of thought, and of speech.[17] John Clarke, an ex-Methodist, became one of Carlile’s shopmen, was tried in 1824 for selling one of his publications, and “after a spirited defence, in which he read many of the worst passages of the Bible,” was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, and to find securities for good behaviour during life. The latter disability he effectively anticipated by writing, while in prison, A Critical Review of the Life, Character, and Miracles of Jesus, wherein Christian feelings were treated as Christians had treated the feelings of freethinkers, with a much more destructive result. Published first, strangely enough, in the Newgate Magazine, it was republished in 1825 and 1839, with impunity. Thus did a brutal bigotry bring upon itself ever a deadlier retaliation, till it sickened of the contest. Those who threw up the struggle on the orthodox side declaimed as before about the tone of the unbeliever’s attack, failing to read the plain lesson that, while noisy fanaticism, doing its own worst and vilest, deterred from utterance all the gentler and more sympathetic spirits on the side of reason, the work of reason could be done only by the harder natures, which gave back blow for blow and insult for insult, rejoicing in the encounter. Thus championed, freethought could not be crushed. The propagandist and publishing work done by Carlile was carried on diversely by such free lances as Robert Taylor (ex-clergyman, author of the Diegesis, 1829, and The Devil’s Pulpit, 1830), Charles Southwell (1814–1860), and William Hone,[18] who ultimately became an independent preacher. Southwell, a disciple of Robert Owen, who edited The Oracle of Reason, was imprisoned for a year in 1840 for publishing in that journal an article entitled “The Jew Book”; and was succeeded in the editorship by George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906), another Owenite missionary, who met a similar sentence; whereafter George Adams and his wife, who continued to publish the journal, were imprisoned in turn. Matilda Roalfe and Mrs. Emma Martin about the same period underwent imprisonment for like causes.[19] In this fashion, by the steady courage of a much-enduring band of men and women, was set on foot a systematic Secularist propaganda—the name having relation to the term “Secularism,” coined by Holyoake.
4. In this evolution political activities played an important part. Henry Hetherington (1792–1849), the strenuous democrat who in 1830 began the trade union movement, and so became the founder of Chartism, fought for the right of publication in matters of freethought as in politics. After undergoing two imprisonments of six months each (1832), and carrying on for three and a half years the struggle for an untaxed Press, which ended in his victory (1834), he was in 1840 indicted for publishing Haslam’s Letters to the Clergy of all Denominations, a freethinking criticism of Old Testament morality. He defended himself so ably that Lord Denman, the judge, confessed to have “listened with feelings of great interest and sentiments of respect too”; and Justice Talfourd later spoke of the defence as marked by “great propriety and talent.” Nevertheless, he was punished by four months’ imprisonment.[20] In the following year, on the advice of Francis Place, he brought a test prosecution for blasphemy against Moxon, the poet-publisher, for issuing Shelley’s complete works, including Queen Mab. Talfourd, then Serjeant, defended Moxon, and pleaded that there “must be some alteration of the law, or some restriction of the right to put it in action”; but the jury were impartial enough to find the publisher guilty, though he received no punishment.[21] Among other works published by Hetherington was one entitled A Hunt after the Devil, “by Dr. P. Y.” (really by Lieutenant Lecount), in which the story of Noah’s ark was subjected to a destructive criticism.[22]
5. Holyoake had been a missionary and martyr in the movement of Socialism set up by Robert Owen, whose teaching, essentially scientific on its psychological or philosophical side, was the first effort to give systematic effect to democratic ideals by organizing industry. It was in the discussions of the “Association of all Classes of all Nations,” formed by Owen in 1835, that the word “Socialism” first became current.[23] Owen was a freethinker in all things;[24] and his whole movement was so penetrated by an anti-theological spirit that the clergy as a rule became its bitter enemies, though such publicists as Macaulay and John Mill also combined with them in scouting it on political and economic grounds.[25] Up till the middle of 1817 he had on his side a large body of “respectable” and highly-placed philanthropists, his notable success in his own social and commercial undertakings being his main recommendation. His early Essays on the Formation of Character, indeed, were sufficient to reveal his heterodoxy; but not until, at his memorable public meeting on August 21, 1817, he began to expatiate on “the gross errors that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to men”[26] did he rank as an aggressive freethinker. It was in his own view the turning-point of his life. He was not prosecuted; though Brougham declared that if any politician had said half as much he would have been “burned alive”; but the alienation of “moderate” opinion at once began; and Owen, always more fervid than prudent, never recovered his influence among the upper classes. Nonetheless, “his secularistic teaching gained such influence among the working classes as to give occasion for the statement in the Westminster Review (1839) that his principles were the actual creed of a great portion of them.”[27]
Owen’s polemic method—if it could properly be so called—was not so much a criticism of dogma as a calm impeachment of religion in a spirit of philanthropy. No reformer was ever more entirely free from the spirit of wrath: on this side Owen towers above comparison. “There is no place found in him for scorn or indignation. He cannot bring himself to speak or think evil of any man. He carried out in his daily life his own teaching that man is not the proper object of praise or blame. Throughout his numerous works there is hardly a sentence of indignation—of personal denunciation never. He loves the sinner, and can hardly bring himself to hate the sin.”[28] He had come by his rationalism through the influence rather of Rousseau than of Voltaire; and he had assimilated the philosophic doctrine of determinism—of all ideals the most difficult to realize in conduct—with a thoroughness of which the flawed Rousseau was incapable. There was thus presented to the world the curious case of a man who on the side of character carried rationalism to the perfection of ideal “saintliness,” while in the general application of rational thought to concrete problems he was virtually unteachable. For an absolute and immovable conviction in his own practical rightness was in Owen as essential a constituent as his absolute benevolence.[29] These were the two poles of his personality. He was, in short, a fair embodiment of the ideal formed by many people—doctrine and dogma apart—of the Gospel Jesus. And most Christians accordingly shunned and feared or hated him.
Such a personality was evidently a formidable force as against the reinforced English orthodoxy of the first generation of the nineteenth century. The nature of Owen’s propaganda as against religion may be best sampled from his lecture, “The New Religion: or, Religion founded on the Immutable Laws of the Universe, contrasted with all Religions founded on Human Testimony,” delivered at the London Tavern on October 20, 1830:[30]—