And so hoping, let us celebrate the venerable festival of the Sun.—The Journal, New York, December 25,1892.
SPIRITUALITY.
IF there is an abused word in our language, it is "spirituality."
It has been repeated over and over for several hundred years by pious pretenders and snivelers as though it belonged exclusively to them.
In the early days of Christianity, the "spiritual" renounced the world with all its duties and obligations. They deserted their wives and children. They became hermits and dwelt in caves. They spent their useless years in praying for their shriveled and worthless souls. They were too "spiritual" to love women, to build homes and to labor for children. They were too "spiritual" to earn their bread, so they became beggars and stood by the highways of Life and held out their hands and asked alms of Industry and Courage. They were too "spiritual" to be merciful. They preached the dogma of eternal pain and gloried in "the wrath to come." They were too "spiritual" to be civilized, so they persecuted their fellow-men for expressing their honest thoughts. They were so "spiritual" that they invented instruments of torture, founded the Inquisition, appealed to the whip, the rack, the sword and the fagot. They tore the flesh of their fellow-men with hooks of iron, buried their neighbors alive, cut off their eyelids, dashed out the brains of babes and cut off the breasts of mothers. These "spiritual" wretches spent day and night on their knees, praying for their own salvation and asking God to curse the best and noblest of the world.
John Calvin was intensely "spiritual" when he warmed his fleshless hands at the flames that consumed Servetus.
John Knox was constrained by his "spirituality" to utter low and loathsome calumnies against all women. All the witch-burners and Quaker-maimers and mutilators were so "spiritual" that they constantly looked heavenward and longed for the skies.
These lovers of God—these haters of men—looked upon the Greek marbles as unclean, and denounced the glories of Art as the snares and pitfalls of perdition.