Ancillary to the churchmans immoral view of original sin is the unscientific theory that evil came into the world with Adam and his seed. Let us ask what was the state of our globe in the pre-Adamite days, when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge Saurians and other monsters, lived in perpetual strife, in a destructiveness of which we have now only the feeblest examples? What is the actual state of the world of waters, where the only object of life is death, where the Law of murder is the Law of Development?
Some will charge the Hâjî with irreverence, and hold him a lieutenant of Satan who sits in the chair of pestilence. But he is not intentionally irreverent. Like men of far higher strain, who deny divinely the divine, he speaks the things that others think and hide. With the author of Supernatural Religion, he holds that we gain infinitely more than we lose in abandoning belief in the reality of revelation; and he looks forward to the day when the old tyranny shall have been broken, and when the anarchy of transition shall have passed away. But he is an Eastern. When he repeats the Greeks Remember not to believe, he means Strive to learn, to know, for right ideas lead to right actions. Among the couplets not translated for this eclogue is:
Of all the safest ways of Life
the safest way is still to doubt,
Men win the future world with Faith,
the present world they win without.
This is the Spaniards:
De las cosas mas seguras, mas seguro es duvidar;
a typically modern sentiment of the Brazen Age of Science following the Golden Age of Sentiment. But the Pilgrim continues:
The sages say: I tell thee no!
with equal faith all Faiths receive;
None more, none less, for Doubt is Death:
they live the most who most believe.
Here, again, is an oriental subtlety; a man who believes in everything equally and generally may be said to believe in nothing. It is not a simple European view which makes honest Doubt worth a dozen of the Creeds. And it is in direct opposition to the noted writer who holds that the man of simple faith is worth ninety-nine of those who hold only to the egotistic interests of their own individuality. This dark saying means (if it mean anything), that the so-called moral faculties of man, fancy and ideality, must lord it over the perceptive and reflective powers,a simple absurdity! It produced a Turricremata, alias Torquemada, who, shedding floods of honest tears, caused his victims to be burnt alive; and an Anchieta, the Thaumaturgist of Brazil, who beheaded a converted heretic lest the latter by lapse from grace lose his immortal soul.
But this vein of speculation, which bigots brand as Doubt, Denial, and Destruction; this earnest religious scepticism; this curious inquiry, Has the universal tradition any base of fact?; this craving after the secrets and mysteries of the future, the unseen, the unknown, is common to all races and to every age. Even amongst the Romans, whose model man in Augustus day was Horace, the philosophic, the epicurean, we find Propertius asking:
An ficta in miseras descendit fabula gentes
Et timor haud ultra quam rogus esse potest?