However, we will not waste rhetoric over the past or over an impossible future. What policy have the modern clergy, who are unable to induce the State to burn dissenters, substituted for that of their predecessors? A policy that is, to a very great extent, unjust, spiteful, and dishonourable: a policy that, in the very name of truth, is marked by a more flagrant indifference to truth than you will find in any other reputable department of modern life.
The first feature of this policy will be seen by any generally informed person who will take the trouble to read a batch of religious works or periodicals. He will find numbers of statements of the most amazing inaccuracy. It is, no doubt, an exceptional thing for a clerical writer to make a statement which is, to his conscious knowledge, untrue. The very suggestion seems prejudiced, but is there a vast difference between imposing official untruths on ignorant congregations and supporting these untruths by others? The constant repetition of these ancient and discredited formulæ does not induce a very punctilious temper in regard to truth. If it is quite lawful to repeat from the Old or the New Testament historical statements which are not true or are gravely disputed, why not other historical statements which have got into ecclesiastical currency?
Usually, however, the attitude of the writer seems to be one of culpable indifference to the truth or untruth of the statements he makes. He finds in some previous writer a statement which supports his case, and he reproduces it without inquiry. If he were a mere layman, engaged in some branch of profane culture, he would not dare to repeat, without further inquiry, statements which he found made in his own sectarian interest by men of no high authority or original scholarship. The clergy, however, do this habitually, and one is compelled to conclude that they are more or less indifferent about the truth of their assertions, if those assertions are favourable to religion. Just as I write the press reports Dr. R. F. Horton telling a congregation that a British regiment was saved at Mons by the appearance of a legion of angels, and assuring his audience that this silly myth is “repeated by so many witnesses that if anything can be established by contemporary evidence it is established.” The story has gone the round of our pulpits and religious press.
I am speaking, however, from a particularly wide experience of religious literature. For thirty years—ten years as a clerical student or professor, and twenty years as an interested observer of religious controversy—I have devoted much time to books and journals of this kind, and I repeat that there is no other branch of literature so flagrantly inaccurate and unscrupulous. A religious periodical (The Christian World, 20th August 1903), in the course of an editorial on “Candour in the Pulpit” (meaning lack of candour in the pulpit), said: “A foremost modern theologian, by no means of the radical school, has recorded his significant judgment that one of the main characteristics of apologetic literature is its lack of honesty; and no one who has studied theology can doubt that it has suffered more than any other science from equivocal phraseology.” When a journal which has to consult the feelings of a large backward clientele uses this language, we may conclude that the situation is really bad. In fact, not even political journalism betrays such gross carelessness as to the truth of the statements with which it assails its opponents. “The more sacred our ideas are, the more savagely we fight for them,” said Mr. Chesterton, defending the Inquisition. Mr. Chesterton’s own genial method (except that one recognises the taint in his Victorian Age in Literature) disproves his aphorism. There is not the slightest excuse for the gross procedure of religious writers.
I have in various works and articles given hundreds of examples of this procedure, and will be content to deal summarily with two of the chief types of misrepresentation—those relating to history and those relating to science. The classical examples in history are the clerical legends about the morality of the pagans. Here the clerical lie goes on its way from age to age without the slightest regard of the progress of historical research. Discoveries in the ruins (such as the Hammurabi Code, temple-literature, etc.) and a closer scrutiny of the sources used by the Greek historian Herodotus have made it quite clear that the old Mesopotamian civilisations were comparable to ours in moral sentiment and practice. Instead of women having to sacrifice their virginity in the temples at Babylon, we have abundant evidence that chastity was demanded and valued in brides, and that the priests insisted on purity. Every other moral sentiment was equally developed. We find the same high moral development in Egypt. All this is disregarded, and the superiority of the Hebrew and Christian sacred books is maintained by a resolute propagation of ancient fables.
In regard to Greece and Rome the practice is even worse. The exceptional features of their life are described as normal and general features, and the very abundant literature which has put in its true light the character of Athens and Rome is completely ignored. Special periods of vice under bad emperors (who, in the aggregate, ruled only seventy years out of three hundred and twenty) are spread over the whole of Roman history. The gossip and democratic rhetoric of Juvenal are pressed literally, in spite of the judgment of all serious historians. The works which exhibit the better side of Rome, and the inscriptions which show a very high degree of character and humanitarianism under the Stoics, are wholly suppressed. The balanced verdict of modern historians is scandalously flouted. At all costs it must be shown that Europe needed regeneration, and that Christian morality was far superior to pagan; and so the clergy continue, in spite of protests from some of their own lay scholars (Emil Reich, for instance), to draw a flagrantly untruthful picture of the morals of Greece and Rome.
But this misrepresentation is venial in comparison with the misrepresentation of later European history. The clerical story of the moral change that came over Europe when it embraced Christianity is one of the grossest impostures ever laid on the human mind. Even clerics like Dean Milman sufficiently refuted it decades ago, but it flourishes as profitably as ever. From the pulpit of St. Paul’s to the tin chapels of Mudville it is one of the most treasured traditions, and perhaps no picture is more familiar to Christian audiences than that of Rome, drunk with its vices, reeling to the foot of the cross and embracing sobriety. It is a calculated clerical myth in every line. The Stoics reformed Rome at a time when the Christians were a mere handful of obscure people, and the magnificent work done and institutions set up by the Stoics were not sustained by the Church. Even in regard to the persecutions the clergy still repeat the legend which modern historians recognise as based on a mass of medieval forgeries. Civilisation sank rapidly until it touched the depth of the early Middle Ages, and, as Milman candidly recognised, the claim that at least virtue increased is the reverse of the truth. The Church did not denounce or abolish slavery: it discouraged education: it abased woman: it set back a thousand years the development of culture. Yet our clerical writers repeat the medieval falsehoods as fluently as if modern history did not exist.
The later period is just as grossly falsified by Catholic writers, but here the Protestant—who has somehow convinced himself that the Holy Spirit abandoned Europe to the devil for a thousand years—begins to cry for candour. Much of the Protestant literature is uncritical and unscrupulous in its use of authorities; it is, however, instructive in comparison with the kind of history purveyed by the “Catholic Truth Society.” There is hardly a candid historian in the Church, even in Germany and the United States. The latest historian of the Papacy, Dr. L. Pastor, is certainly entitled to respect for his effort, though even he does not present all the facts; while men like Cardinal Gasquet are appallingly one-sided. I am, however, thinking mainly of the “popular” literature, on which no stricture could be too severe. Indeed, when it comes to the modern period, both Protestant and Catholic literature is scandalous. One often finds Voltaire, Rousseau, and Paine described as “atheists,” and the most slovenly observations on the Revolution. Roosevelt’s description of Paine as a “dirty little atheist” is a good indication of the kind of literature that even an educated religious man may read.
On the scientific side the inaccuracy and carelessness are just as great, but the field is too vast for consideration here. The conflict in regard to evolution has produced an extraordinary literature on the clerical side, and, to the amusement of students of science, it still flows from the religious press and refreshes suburban faith. Men who have never devoted a month to the study of science engage in conflict with the most authoritative masters of biology, and thrill their ignorant followers with the vigour and dexterity of their fencing. These Jesuit and other writers have, of course, set up a lay-figure for their valiant attacks. They misrepresent the views and motives of the man they oppose, give garbled quotations from his works, and support their own antiquated positions by quotations from scientific men who lived in the earlier phases of the controversy. No trick is more common in this class of literature than to justify obsolete statements by quoting “authorities” who died long ago, and leaving the inexpert reader to suppose that they are modern men of science; while clerics who could not distinguish a palæolithic from a civilised skull write pompous essays on such subjects as the evolution of man. Works of this kind circulate by the hundred in the churches even to-day, literally deluding millions of people, while the works of more expert writers are denounced as “against religion” and unfit to read.
Still more flagrant is the clerical behaviour in rebutting the general belief that men of science have for the most part abandoned Christianity. They—with the support of a man like Sir O. Lodge—talk glibly of the death of “Victorian materialism” and the rebirth of spiritualism; whereas Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, Darwin, Clifford, Lewes, and every other Victorian man of science repudiated materialism. When you ask who the modern men are who have abandoned the views of the Huxleian generation and come to favour religion, they produce an extraordinarily confused list of names. I have referred to their magnum opus in this department, Tabrum’s Religious Beliefs of Scientists. It actually includes two prominent members of the Rationalist Press Association; while men like Lodge and Wallace and Crookes are included among the more orthodox. Of late years it is the fashion to impress ignorant congregations with the names of W. James, Eucken, and Bergson; whereas James and Bergson are not even theists, and Eucken professes a form of theism which any Church would heatedly repudiate. The members of the various sects are literally and most scandalously duped on this point.