Views and Opinions

by Ouida

Christianity has been cruel in much to the human race. It has quenched much of the sweet joy and gladness of life; it has caused the natural passions and affections of it to be held as sins; by its teaching that the body should be despised, it has brought on all the unnamable filth which was made a virtue in the monastic orders, and which in the Italian, the Spanish, the Russian peoples, and the poor of all nations is a cherished and indestructible habit. In its permission to man to render subject to him all other living creatures of the earth, it continued the cruelty of the barbarian and of the pagan, and endowed these with what appeared a divine authority—an authority which Science, despising Christianity, has yet not been ashamed to borrow and to use.

Let us, also, endeavour to realise the unutterable torments endured by men and maidens in their efforts to subdue the natural desires of their senses and their affections to the unnatural celibacy of the cloister, and we shall see that the tortures inflicted by Christianity have been more cruel than the cruelties of death. Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness, and bade the woman whose lips were warm with the first kisses of her lover believe herself accursed and ashamed. Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation. The words of the Christian nuptial service expressly say so. Love, the winged god of the immortals, became, in the Christian creed, a thrice-damned and earth-bound devil, to be exorcised and loathed. This has been the greatest injury that Christianity has ever done to the human race. Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction. It cut the wings of Eros. Man, believing that he must no longer love his mistress, woman, believing that she must no longer love her lover, loved themselves, and from the cloisters and from the churches there arose a bitter, joyless, narrow, apprehensive passion which believed itself to be religion, but was in truth only a form of concentrated egotism, the agonised desire to be ‘saved,’ to ascend into the highest heaven, let who else would wait without its doors or pine in hell. The influence of this is still with the world, and will long be with it; and its echo is still loud in the sibilant voices which hiss at the poet who sings and the poet who glorifies love.

And herein we approach that spurious offspring of Christianity which is called cant.

Other religions have not been without it. The Mosaic law had the Pharisee, who for a pretence made long prayers. The Greek and the Latin had those who made oblations to the gods for mere show, and augurs who served the sacred altars with their tongue in their cheek. But from Christianity, alas! has arisen and spread a systematic hypocrisy more general, more complete, more vain, more victorious than any other. The forms of the Christian religion facilitate this. Whether in the Catholic form of it, which cleanses the sinner in the confessional that he may go forth and sin again freely, or in the Protestant form, which, so long as a man listens to sermons and kneels at sacraments, does not disturb him as to the tenor of his private life, the Christian religion says, practically, to all its professors: ‘Wear my livery and assemble in my courts; I ask no more of you in return for the moral reputation which I will give to you.’

Its lip-service and its empty rites have made it the easiest of all tasks for the usurer to cloak his cruelties, the miser to hide his avarice, the lawyer to condone his lies, the sinner of all social sins to purchase the social immunity from them by outward deference to churches.

The Christian religion, outwardly and even in intention humble, does, without meaning it, teach man to regard himself as the most important of all created things. Man surveys the starry heavens and hears with his ears of the plurality of worlds; yet his religion bids him believe that his alone out of these innumerable spheres is the object of his master’s love and sacrifice. To save his world—whose common multitudes can be no more in the scale of creation than the billions of insects that build up a coral-reef beneath the deep sea—he is told that God himself took human shape, underwent human birth, was fed with human food, and suffered human pains. It is intelligible that, believing this, the most arrogant self-conceit has puffed up the human crowd, and that with the most cruel indifference they have sacrificed to themselves all the countless suffering multitudes which they are taught to call ‘the beasts which perish.’ It is this selfishness and self-esteem which, fostered in the human race by Christianity, have far outweighed and overborne the humility which its doctrines in part strove to inculcate and the mercy which they advocated.

It is in vain that the human race is bidden to believe that its Creator cares for the lilies of the field and for the birds of the air: it is the human race alone for which its God has suffered and died, so it believes, and this solitary selection, this immense supremacy, make it semi-divine in its own sight. It is the leaven of egotism begotten by the Christian creed which has neutralised the purity and the influence of its teachings. Here and there saintly men and women have been guided by it solely in the ways of holiness and unselfishness; but the great majority of mankind has drawn from it chiefly two lessons—self-concentration and socialism. ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me,’ sighs the Christian; and this ‘immense Me’ is, as Emerson has said of it, the centre of the universe in the belief of the unconscious egotist.

Christians repeat like a parrot’s recitative the phrase that no sparrow falls uncounted by its Creator, and they go to their crops and scatter poison, or load fowling-pieces with small shot to destroy hundreds of sparrows in a morning. If they believed that their God saw the little birds of the air fall, would they dare to do it? Of course they would not; but they do not believe: it only suits them to use their formula, and they are never prevented by it from strewing bird-poison or setting bird-traps.

Behold their priests taking on themselves the vows of poverty, of chastity, and of renunciation, and whether they be the Catholic cardinal, stately, luxurious and arrogant, or whether they be the Protestant bishop, with his liveried servants, his dinner parties, and his church patronage, what can we see more widely removed in unlikeness from all the precepts of the creed which they profess to obey? What fiercer polemics ever rage than those which wrangle about the body of religion? What judge would not be thought a madman who should from the bench counsel the man who has received a blow to bear it in meekness and turn the other cheek? What missionary would be excused for leaving his wife and children chargeable on parish rates because he pointed to the injunction to leave all that he had and follow Christ?

What attempt on the part of any community to put the precepts of Christianity into practical observance would not cause them to be denounced to magistrates as communists, as anarchists, as moonstruck dreamers, as lunatics? There are sects in Russia which endeavour to do so, and the police hunt them down like wild animals. They are only logically trying to carry out the precepts of the gospels, but they are regarded therefore as dangerous lunatics. They can have no place in the conventional civilisation of the world. What judge who should tell the two litigants in any lawsuit concerning property that they were violating every religious duty in wrangling with each other about filthy lucre would not be deemed a fool, and worse? The French Republic, in tearing down from its courts of law and from its class-rooms the emblems of Christianity, has done a rough, but sincere and consistent, act, if one offensive to a great portion of the nation; and it may be alleged that this act is more logical than the acts of those nations who open their tribunals with rites of reverence towards a creed with which the whole legislature governing these tribunals is in entire and militant contradiction. ‘Religion is one thing; law is another,’ said a lawyer once to whom this strange discrepancy was commented on; but so long as law is founded on assumptions and principles wholly in violence with those of religion, how can such religion be called the religion of the state? It is as absurd a discrepancy as that with which the Italian nation, calling itself Catholic, drove out thousands of Catholic monks and Catholic nuns from their religious houses and seized their possessions by the force of the secular arm. It is not here the question whether the suppression of the male and female monastic orders was or was not right or necessary; what is certain is that the state, enforcing this suppression, can with no shadow of sense or of logic continue to call itself a Catholic state; as it still does continue to call itself in the person of its king and in its public decrees.