The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

I have claimed that the clergy are spiteful and unjust, as well as careless about truth. There are very few popular religious writers who seem capable of giving a correct account of the views they are criticising, and there are very many who manipulate quotations with the effect of grossly deceiving their readers. Worse still, the clergy habitually slander their critics, and these slanders live for years in spite of refutation. Seven years ago they began to circulate a silly and obviously incredible charge that Professor Haeckel “forged” illustrations in support of his case, and, though the libel was at once thoroughly refuted by Professor Schmidt, it is still current. Only a few months ago I received from India documents which showed that the Jesuits there were still insisting on it. A friend of mine informed me that he heard one Scottish preacher, in the course of a public lecture on Haeckel, assure his audience, on the authority of a “friend of Haeckel’s,” that that venerable scientist was a man of most licentious life! No charge is too gross to repeat, if it discredits an “enemy of the faith.” Dozens of times I have heard of the wildest calumnies about myself which circulate throughout the English-speaking world, because I have occasionally written a critical work (always grossly misrepresented in the Catholic press) about the Catholic Church. I never belonged to the Catholic priesthood: I was discharged from it for fraud: I left it in order to marry a nun I had seduced: and so on. Only the lighter of these things are put in print, and then always with the name omitted. Only a few months ago a priest (and Education-Councillor) in a Scottish town gravely assured a schoolmistress, in the presence of an acquaintance of mine, that his Church held unshakable proofs of my vicious ways. As usual, my request that they would say so in print was ignored. Most ex-priests have the same experience. One of the most refined and religious of these seceders, a man who became a most respected professor at Oxford, was pursued by the calumny (never printed) that he had shown indecent photographs to servant-girls!

This tactic of the Church militant is happily so notorious that little harm is done among the general public, but Catholics are gravely deluded, in the hope that they will be induced to refrain from reading any except their own mendacious literature.

Yet one of the most familiar themes of the men who pursue this tactic is that they alone can inspire high character! Notoriously insincere in their professions, teachers of doctrines which the higher culture of our time and many of their own leading scholars condemn, living in an atmosphere of untruth and unreality, relying on a literature which is generally as indifferent to truth as it is to grace, unscrupulously repeating idle slanders of their opponents, they ask us to believe that they are genuinely concerned about the future of society if we continue to reject their authority. It is not strange that the great cities of the modern world are unmoved by their dirges.

The third point of my indictment is that the clergy have forged the historical credentials by which they lay claim to our respect. I have already observed that their version of the history of Europe is peculiar to their own literature, and I have elsewhere (The Bible in Europe) shown in detail how worthless it is. The “conversion” of Europe to Christianity in the fourth century was, as every historian of the period shows, an enforcement of the new religion on Europe by imperial authority, accompanied by the most violent and bloody repression of all other religions. We then have the witness of contemporary Christian writers that this “conversion” was followed by a general moral and intellectual decline. The great reforms which Rome had inaugurated were destroyed, and Europe sank into the ignorance, superstition, and grossness of the Middle Ages. It is quite true that the triumph of Christianity coincided with the overthrow of civilisation by the northern tribes, but the Teutonic tribes were not inferior to the Arabs or Turks (whom Mohammedanism civilised in the course of a century or two), and the Church soon obtained despotic power over them. The Eastern Empire, I may add, was not dominated by the barbarians, yet it also suffered a grave moral and intellectual decline. The fact is, that the clergy made no effort to induce the barbarians to restore the old school-system, to reconstruct the Roman law, to free the slaves (and, later, the serfs), to adjust their high native ideal of womanhood to the new social order, or to rebuild the fine civic and philanthropic system of the Romans. Culture fell so low that the very promising germs of later Greek science were allowed to die, and nearly the whole of the surviving Greek literature was unknown in Europe for many centuries. The trade in spurious relics, the rapacity and unscrupulousness of the Papacy, the coarseness of the nobles and people, and the general sexual licence of priests and monks were almost incredible.

This dark age began to receive the first rays of new light in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and historians are agreed that the new light came from the civilisation of the Spanish Moors. This it was that, by introducing Greek literature and its Arab commentators, led to the early revival of science. But the cult of the grossest relics and superstitions continued, and the clergy repressed, or inspired rulers to repress, all dissent with more ferocity than ever. During the one general persecution of the early Christians by the Romans about two thousand had suffered for the faith; and only a few hundreds can be added from the earlier sporadic persecutions. But within fifty years of the establishment of Christianity in the Empire, tens of thousands of Donatists, Manichæans, Arians, Pagans, etc., were done to death, and hundreds of thousands ruined or maltreated, by the triumphant Christians. In later centuries it was the turn of Monophysites, Monothelites, etc., and in the first quarter of the thirteenth century alone more than a million heretics were done to death in Languedoc. If the Jews and witches and others who suffered on religious grounds be added, the “butcher’s bill” of the new religion passes ten millions; and beyond these are the countless millions of those who suffered something less than death.

We look back to-day with feelings of horror on this ghastly carnage, especially when we remember the absurd character of the doctrines which the heretics assailed and the immorality of the clergy and monks who were primarily responsible for the executions and massacres. But this savage repression of independent thought had consequences of an even more disastrous nature on European civilisation. It not only removed from the community many of the more courageous and more intelligent stocks, but it intimidated others from using their powers, except in the futile argumentation of the Schoolmen. The result was a prolonged suspension of the development of the higher culture which was destined to give Europe its supremacy. It will hardly be doubted to-day that this culture was contained in the scientific works of the Greeks, especially the Alexandrian Greeks. The Arabs brought this culture to Spain, and, chiefly through the mediation of the Jews, it was slowly introduced into Europe and inspired such scholars as Gilbert, Roger Bacon, Albert the Great, and Copernicus. Physics, chemistry, and medicine began their development. But the fate of Roger Bacon and Albert and Vesalius sufficiently reminds us of the Church’s attitude toward the new culture, and the story of the hampering of intellectual progress in the exact study of nature has been repeatedly told. The scholastic fever, which had absorbed the energies of most of the acutest minds in Europe, had to disappear, and the power of the Church to be enfeebled, before the civilisation of Europe could advance.

The further introduction of Greek literature, when the Turks drove the Greeks from Constantinople, the invention of printing, the expansion of commerce and navigation, and the weakening of Church-authority by the Reformation, opened the modern phase of the development of European civilisation. It is only for the last of these changes that a section of the clergy may plausibly claim our gratitude, and even here we must make reserves. The share of the laity in the Reformation was greater than the share of the clergy, and the aim of the Reformed clergy was by no means to free and stimulate the intelligence of Europe. They frowned on lay culture, and burned their opponents, as inhumanly as the Roman priests did. It was not until the growth of sects had further enfeebled ecclesiastical authority, and a large body of lay scholars had arisen, that Europe became civilised, even in a generous sense of the word. Then science and philosophy and history grew to the proportions which distinguish “modern times,” and a resolute social and humanitarian movement began to remove those appalling injustices of the industrial and political order which the clergy had witnessed in silence for more than a thousand years.

I repeat that this is not an eccentric view of the development of European civilisation, but the view taken by historians ever since their science was emancipated from clerical control. The view which the clergy still sedulously propagate, that the Christian religion inspired the civilisation of Europe, is the most preposterous historical sham which we still entertain. It is unintelligible how a scholar like Mr. Bryce can give even a qualified support to it. In the minds of most people it is a pitiful confusion of ideas associated with one of the most elementary fallacies known to the logician. The fallacy is the syllogism which suffices for the majority of the faithful: Europe is the great centre of civilisation, Europe was Christian during the development of this civilisation, therefore Christianity was the inspirer of the civilisation. The inference is foolish enough in itself, but it becomes ludicrous when we reflect on the facts. Europe was civilised before it became Christian; it inherited all the best culture and experience of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, and Rome. But Europe lost its civilisation when it became Christian, very largely because the new religion found culture dangerous to its superstitions and repressed it. And Europe owes its return to civilisation to the revival of pagan ideas, and it advances in civilisation in proportion as it discards Christianity.

The confusion of ideas is just as foolish as the fallacy. Europe is “great” in two very different senses. Most of the white nations are “great” in the vastness of their territory and the wealth they have derived from subject peoples. To connect this form of greatness with the Sermon on the Mount is audacious: it is a practice which really belongs to the age when English merchants who waxed fat on the negro-slave trade could complacently give the name “Jesus” to their vessels. This form of greatness frankly rested on buccaneering. Europe is great also in intellectual development, with the scientific and technical achievements to which this has led. We need not ask what particular Christian sentiment has inspired this; we know too well the share the clergy have had in repressing it.

Lastly, Europe is great in the cultivation of humane sentiment and the endeavour to practise social justice. It is here that the clergy usually claim their usefulness; and there is hardly a bolder mis-statement in their literature than this. The New Testament contains not a single moral sentiment that was unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and to the later Jews: the moral sentiments of the New Testament are so vague and elementary that not a single priest denounced slavery for nine hundred years, and not a Church has denounced war for more than eighteen hundred years: the Christian ethic was so uninspiring that Europe reeked with vice and crime and war and social injustice until the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth century: when the reform began, in the nineteenth century, hardly a single priest aided it (until it had won millions of adherents), and the bishops almost unanimously opposed it: and the humanitarianism of modern times is an almost exclusively lay movement, gaining power and fervour in proportion as we sweep the clergy aside. Europe was civilised under the Roman and Greek pagans, and it is civilised, in the same broad sense, under the modern pagans; it was not civilised in the intervening period, and the worst features of its life to-day are, not recent outgrowths, but inheritances from the Christian past.