The Teachings Of Statistics Concerning The Freedom Of The Human Will.
The enemies of Christianity are, in our days, making war upon its dogmas more fiercely and more generally than at any previous period. Materialism—the teachings of which may be summed up in the following propositions: There exists no God as a spiritual, immaterial personality; there exists no spirit as a supersensible, self-existent, immortal substance—is finding its way into every rank of society. By clothing it in a popular garb, its advocates are meeting with no small degree of success in making converts to its errors, even among the working classes and the deluded prolétaires who have a dread of labor. Materialism no longer goes to the trouble of exhibiting itself in the guise of a well-connected philosophical system: it prefers the more insidious method of appearing only occasionally, in writings and speeches whose theme is of quite another nature. It puts on an appearance of science and of devotion to genuine progress; and herein consists its principal danger. When doctrines, opposed to faith, are secreted in works on natural science, and placed side by side with evident facts, there must necessarily result a strong temptation for the unwary to look upon them all as undeniable truths.
The science of moral statistics is one of those that have been most recently perverted to the purposes of materialism. The founder of this science is Quetelet, the celebrated Belgian astronomer and statistician. He first observed that, by considering large masses of men during a long period, a certain uniformity in the manner of their accomplishment could be traced, in such voluntary acts as come under the observation of statisticians, more especially in marriages, suicides, and crimes. He even reached the conclusion that acts elicited under the influence of free-will occur with a greater degree of regularity than events which depend exclusively on the influence of physical causes. This discovery was pursued still further. Observations were made upon different nationalities, the results were compared, and upon their evidence it was thought justifiable to speak of a law of nature by which all human acts were supposed to be controlled. This new law could not but be hailed with pleasure by the disciples of materialism. They immediately took it up and adduced it as evidence in favor of their doctrines. It requires but a small amount of perception to see that, if all human acts are controlled by a law of nature, there cannot be any free-will. The denial of free-will implies the elimination of one of the essential faculties of the human soul, and it, at the same time, shakes Christianity to its foundation.. For, if everything is subjected to an immutable necessity, sin and grace, redemption and sanctification, need no longer be mentioned.
It is well worth our while to subject the new doctrine, founded on the evidence of moral statistics, to an examination and to test its tenability. We propose to do this in the following pages. Before entering, however, into the assertions and inferences of the materialists, it will be expedient to state a few of the principal results of the science of moral statistics, so that the reader may see the method by which such unexpected and surprising conclusions have been reached, and may thus be enabled to form a judgment for himself.
A glance at the statistical tables which record the sum-total of marriages contracted in a single country reveals in reality that their number is nearly the same, year after year. Even in so-called anomalous marriages, that is, marriages in which a young man allies himself to a woman much older than himself and vice versa, as well as in marriages between widows and widowers, there seems to be a certain uniformity. Thus, if we take Belgium, with a population of about four and a half millions, we find the total number of marriages, from the year 1844 to the year 1853, running as follows: 29,326,
29,210,
25,670,
24,145,
28,656,
31,788,
33,762,
33,169,
31,251,
30,636.
During the same years, the number of marriages between men of 30 years and under, with women of 30 years and under, stands thus:
13,024,
13,157,
11,578,
10,749,
12,642,
13,933,
14,440,
14,337,
13,488,
13,161.
Anomalous marriages, between men of 30 years and less, and women of from 45 to 60 years, likewise evince a perceptible regularity during the same years: