V. FREE-RELIGIONISTS AND THE MONKS.
“Few men,” says our estimable writer, “duly feel what a debt the nineteenth century owes to the illustrious founders and cultivators of science, Aristotle, Archimedes, Kepler, Newton, and the hundreds of lesser lights in many departments. What a beneficent and herculean task they have accomplished in breaking the chains of false authority, opening the dungeons of superstition, removing the incubus of religious terror! Their sunlit and open-air minds, in harmonious working connection with nature and their race, have done much to dispel the baneful power of a celibate church, the cloistered and mephitic minds of monks and hermits, introspective dreamers, tyrannical theorizers, who, set apart from the living interests of men, had woven over Christianity a horrid web of diseased logic spun out of the entrails of their own morbid brains.”
Let free-religionists honor Aristotle, Archimedes, Kepler, Newton, and other great masters in natural science; they are worthy, and we also pay them honor. Let them be grateful to those “cultivators of science” for all the hidden truths which, by their genius and toil, they have brought to light, and in this we also sympathize. Let them join with this class the men of our own day distinguished in this line of studies: the Herschels, the Faradays, the Agassiz, the Quatrefages, the Darwins, the Secchis, the Huxleys, the Tyndalls, the Drapers, etc.; they are all worthy of honor and gratitude for every new truth which they have discovered and made known to the world. Not to love all truth unreservedly is to renounce the light of reason and to repudiate God; for he was God who said, “I am the truth.” But this grateful acknowledgment for the labors of cultivators of the sciences by no manner of means implies the acceptance of every hypothesis or theory, put forth by some of them, which for the most part are based upon insufficient data or spun out of misconceptions of religion with secret hostility to Christianity. For there are men who pass for scientists who seem to be actuated more by a spirit of opposition to religion than a sincere desire for the discovery of the secrets of nature. Hence genuine science has to suffer no less than true religion from bigots and hypocrites, who erect their untenable opinions into final decisions of scientific investigation, and cloak themselves with the honorable livery of science to put forth the ignoble doctrines of materialism. Speculations, however brilliant, ought not to pass for science, and one must be on his guard in our days, lest he allow the authority of great names to impose upon his credulity the romance of science for real science.
But could not the author of this essay honor the really great men of science and be content, without dishonoring another class of men who devoted their gifts and gave their toil as enthusiastically at least, and with an equal self-sacrificing spirit, to the contemplation and discovery of another, and even, in degree, a higher, class of truths? Could he not pay Paul without robbing Peter?
Then, again, why this bitterness of expression towards the monks? Have these monks no aspirations that are holy? no convictions that are sacred? no rights worthy of respect? Why could not the monks with equal liberty lead such lives as the highest feelings in their souls called them to do as well as a Bronson Alcott, a Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Henry Thoreau, or William R. Alger? What or who has given to these Americans the liberty to lead such lives as they chose, and deprived men of other climes of this same personal privilege? Is it a commendable thing for a Sir Isaac Newton to lead a celibate life out of devotion to mathematics, and a sin for a St. Benedict to lead a single life out of as pure a devotion, at least, to the religion of Christ? If Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson throws up his pastorate over a respectable Unitarian congregation, and retires to a remote country village to devote himself to the cultivation of literature and whatever he may please to think a more useful calling, in fidelity to his best aspirations, why may not a Bernadotti of Assisi retire from the business of a silk merchant, renounce his gay companions, and, in obedience to the voice of God in his soul, practise poverty and turn a religious reformer under the name of Francis? If Henry Thoreau repudiates the calling to be a clergyman not to be false to his highest convictions, devotes his leisure hours to the study of nature and the Greek poets, and, living for the most part on bread and water, takes up the manual labor of making lead-pencils to meet the cost of his scanty support, and in so doing not lose cast among the literary brahmins of Boston, why not let, with equal freedom, Anthony retire to the deserts of Egypt and give himself to divine contemplation and the making of baskets and mats for his innocent way of life, without being loaded with a heap of most abusive epithets? Was it heroic in Mr. Bronson Alcott to make an attempt to realize his ideal of a pure and holy life with a few choice spirits at Fruitlands, in the State of Massachusetts, while it was only the “mephitic” action of a “morbid brain” in a saintly Bernard actually to realize the ideal at Clairvaux, in the province of Burgundy in France? Are we to praise and never be weary of praising the Pilgrim Fathers for abandoning their country, their homes, their friends, and their relations to come to the wilds of inhospitable New England, in order that they might worship God according to the dictates of their consciences, and must we condemn the first pioneers in the wilderness who plunged into the solitudes of Egypt for precisely the same reason, in order to fulfil the great aspiration of their souls to God—the pilgrim saints of the desert? Who can read the riddle why the aspiration or effort of the soul to perfect itself is the result of “mephitic minds” in a Hebrew, or an Egyptian, or a Latin, or a Celt, and the same aspiration is religious, sacred, holy, when found in the soul of a New-Englander?
Did it not suggest itself to the mind of the author of this essay, when he perused the passage quoted against the monks, that he exposed himself to a flank movement? For where could you find better specimens and more plentifully of “introspective dreamers” and “tyrannical theorizers” than in the State, in the very city, nay, in the actual audience which assembled at the time to listen to Mr. Alger’s essay?
“O wad some power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
And foolish notion.”