Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

by Robert Blatchford

We come now to the idea that to teach men that all blame is unjust is to encourage them to do wrong. This idea is expressed, with characteristic clumsiness and obscurity, by Bishop Butler, in that monument of loose thinking and foggy writing, "The Analogy of Religion."

What Butler wanted to say, and tried to say, in more than 800 words of his irritating style, is simply that a child brought up to believe that praise and blame were unjust, would be a plague to all about him, and would probably come to the gallows. The reader will find it in Chapter VI. of "The Analogy."

Now, I quite believe that if the matter had to be explained to a child by Bishop Butler the effect would be fatal, because the poor bishop did not understand it himself, and was not good at explaining things he did understand. But the child would be in no danger if he were instructed by a man who knew what he was talking about, and was able to say what he knew in plain words and clear sentences. And I can say from my experience of children that I find them readier of apprehension, and clearer thinkers than I have found most clergymen.

As I have dealt with this argument in my chapter on self-control I need not go over the ground again. But I may say that we should teach a child that some things are right and some are wrong, and why they are right and why they are wrong; and that he was not to blame others because they either do not know any better, or are unable to do any better, and we should teach him that one learns to be good as one learns to write or to swim, and that the harder one tries the better one succeeds. And we should feel quite sure that the child would be just as good as his heredity and our training made him; and as for his coming to the gallows, if all children were taught on our system there would be no gallows to come to, and very few looking for that sacred instrument, the sight of which convinced Gulliver that he was "once more in a Christian country."

Is it necessary for me to answer the charge of presumption brought against me by Dr. Aked? Dr. Aked says I am presumptuous because I deny the belief of great and holy men of past ages. He says that the agreement of Cheyne and Perowne in praise of the fifty-first Psalm is typical of the world's consensus of opinion. And this Psalm is the cry of a broken heart for deliverance from sin. Dr. Aked goes on as follows:

To-day we are asked to believe that all this is a delusion.

We are told that man could not and cannot sin against God. We are invited to believe that the men of every age and nation whose hearts have bled in sorrow over accomplished sin, who have cried in anguish of soul for deliverance from the body of this death, whose joy in the realisation of divine forgiveness has flowed in strains of immortal joy over countless generations, were ignorant and foolish persons, inventing their sufferings and imagining their solace, and needing some journalist of the twentieth century to teach them that no man could really sin against God! We are, apparently, expected to believe that the author of this Psalm and the author of the "second Isaiah," that Paul and Augustine, the author of "Thomas A'Kempis," and John Bunyan, knew nothing of psychology and nothing of divinity, that they never understood their own experience, and, though they have interpreted humanity to uncounted millions of the children of men, yet lived and died in crass ignorance of the workings of the human heart The proposition is not modest. That any man should be found, however flippantly, to advance it is marvellous. That any human being should be found to accept it seriously is incredible.

Dr. Aked's argument amounts to a claim that we should believe in Free Will because most men believe in it, because many good and great men have believed in it.

But many millions of men have believed in a material hell. In which Dr. Aked does not believe. Many good and great men have believed in a material hell, and millions of men (some of them good and clever) still believe in a material hell. And Dr. Aked does not believe in it.

And when the doctrine of hell-fire was first assailed, what did the Dr. Akeds of the time declare? That without the fear of hell men would be wicked, and would do wrong in defiance of God; and that the theory that there was no hell of fire was "incredible." And what is this charge of audacity which Dr. Aked brings against me for denying sin? It is just the charge that was brought against Charles Darwin when he had the immodesty to declare that the human species was evolved from lower forms.