We grieve to say that the thought which struck us immediately on reading this aphorism of Mr. Fiske’s was that, if one thing more than another could tend to make us dubious as to its truth, it would be the perusal of his own book. But revenons: “The story is a venerable one,” he proceeds in re “Jack and Jill.” “They—the children—fall away from one another as the moon wanes, and their water-pail symbolizes the supposed connection of the moon with rainstorms.”
Leaving our readers to ponder over this profound mystery so solemnly set forth by the author, dazzled and bewildered, doubtless, by this latest exhibition of moonshine, we pass from it to other things. It is of a piece with all the author’s deductions, and as fair a sample as any other of the ingenuity of his argument and the profundity of his conclusions. We do not attempt to refute them; that task is above us; we leave such questions to be argued out in their more fitting sphere, where the characters in the story are best known and believed in—the nursery.
To all this sort of thing we do not object; it is very harmless, and though scarcely the style of study and method of deduction one might expect from a professor of philosophy at what is esteemed the leading university in the United States, we can only arrive, however regretfully, at the conclusion that we had perhaps made a false estimate of the intellectual standing of that university, and of the calibre, mental and moral, of its professors. Still, Mr. Fiske may argue all his lifelong in this fashion, and we can only wish him better employment. But unfortunately he does not stop here.
All the unravelling of these worthless myths has one aim and tendency: the connecting with them true religion, Judaism first, and afterwards Christianity, the belief in Christ, the Christian sacraments, Christian observances, Christian practices; not as the one truth of which all these myths formed so many broken and distorted fragments, but—hear it, Christian fathers who send your sons to Harvard to learn wisdom and truth from such men as the one under our notice—a myth with the rest of them!
Ulysses, Achilles, Ormutz, Thor, Tell, William of Cloudeslee, the sun, Jesus Christ—“These be thy gods, O Israel!”
A mad world, my masters! We are all wrong; living in a myth, worshipping a myth, teaching a myth, our social and political state to-day built upon a myth. “We may learn anew the lesson, taught with fresh emphasis by modern scholarship, that in the deepest sense there is nothing new under the sun.” So says Mr. Fiske. There is nothing sure but scientific faith as expounded by M. Littré and—Mr. Fiske. All the rest is myth.
It would be no surprise to us if Mr. Fiske were indignantly to reject the construction which the Catholic, or the Christian reader of whatever denomination, who possesses any knowledge of Christianity, must put upon his words. Apparently he himself is not sufficiently acquainted with Christianity to understand the meaning of those words; and yet he is a “professor of philosophy” at a presumably Christian university. He is, to judge him by this book, of that school of would-be atheists so fashionable tod-ay, who talk mild infidelity over their tea, and take it down with their muffins—a toast-and-water infidelity, nice to take hob-and-nob with and to the admiration of some antiquated Blue-Stocking. Mr. Fiske, like his class, might be considered an atheist did he only possess the faintest conception of what Christianity meant. An atheist is not a man who does not, but who will not, know God—a rebellious spirit who, like the fallen archangel who has seduced him, rejects God, flings back his offering, and cries out: “I will not serve!”
Such is atheism—negation, not unconsciousness; denial, not lack of knowledge. Mr. Fiske’s toast-and-water stuff partakes of the latter character. It is so very weak, so very thin, so supremely unconscious of its feebleness, so full of self-sufficiency, so sublimely ignorant of the fact that the poor little hobby-horse which it rides astride of, and on which it pranks out, with “all the pomp and circumstance” of mimic warfare, to have a tilt with the church, has been long ago ridden to death by far doughtier champions than Mr. Fiske, but with a like result—a tumble in the dust. Like the carpet-knight, who, “but for those vile guns, might himself have been a soldier,” but for the vile faith, these carpet-atheists might themselves have become Christian. Did we not recollect that they possess immortal souls destined for one of two eternities, we might almost congratulate ourselves on their defection.
But not to lay so very serious a charge at Mr. Fiske’s door without just grounds, we proceed to give a few instances of that gentleman’s mythical contortions, which will sufficiently vindicate the severe strictures we feel compelled to pass upon his book—a book, indeed, which should have passed unnoticed, only that it is typical of the tone and tendency of the class of writers remarked upon above.
Mr. Fiske would seem to have received some sort of a Christian education, if we may so call it, in his youth; for he tells us “of that burning Calvinistic hell with which his childish imagination had been unwisely terrified.” Calvinism probably drove him into revolt against Christianity, as it has driven so many others, and, instead of returning, and examining, and searching for truth, he has adopted the easier course of saying that it was all a sham—the devil was only a bogy conjured up by nurses to frighten children and make them good. Christianity was an excellent religion for children and timid old maids; but for MEN, men of the XIXth century, it was a little too much. On reading the fables of the pagans, he found that they had their bogies to frighten their children, as the heathen possesses them still. All the same, all the same, all the way down to the cradle, if there be such, of the race.