“Are such shams of rights, as caucus-and-ballot-boxism can give us, worth spending any more time and money and agitation upon? I ask, and I appeal to what has been most lyingly named free government in Greece, Rome, England, Venice, France, the United States, and wherever else it has been attempted to make permanent the crisis stage of progress which marks the departure from monarchy. No, my friends, art-liberty alone can be of any avail.... By art-liberty, my friends, I mean the practical application of all science and art systemized as fast as unfolded. The only law [pg 102] which can govern a free state must be discovered; it must be drawn from the whole of science and art—not ‘enacted.’ Human law can no more be ‘enacted’ than can physical law.” ... “Man's leaders must find out how to satisfy man's highest aspirations, instead of catering for his prejudices; instead of confirming him, by flattery and cajolery, in his false, supernaturalistic notions; instead of studying the trickery of representing and plundering him. And they will rapidly find this out, as soon as a knowledge (already attained) of the unity of science spreads among them, and along with it its correllate, that all mankind are one organism, no individual of which can be indifferent to each and all of the others. Enlightened, far-seeing, all-benefiting selfishness will then take the place of short-sighted, suicidal, penny-wise pound-foolish cunning; and that barricade of hypocrisy, duty, that most fallible of all guides, conscience, and ‘virtue’ and ‘vice,’ those most unscientific and mischievous expressions that have ever crept into the vocabulary of human folly, will be obsolete.”
Here is the outcome of the liberty that infidels talk so much about. “Art-liberty” is to annihilate conscience and the distinction between virtue and vice so completely that there will be no more use for the words, “they will be obsolete.” “All benefiting selfishness will then govern humanity.” Reader, are you prepared for such a state of society? “If all contracts in accordance with present ‘law’ were fulfilled to the letter, and if all the ‘duties’ enjoined by present moralism were unflinchingly performed, and if all which ‘virtue’ styles ‘vice’ was entirely abstained from, and if what is now ‘free trade’ according to ‘law,’ had a ‘fair field,’ how long would it take a millionth of the earth's inhabitants to accumulate all its wealth? In my opinion, it would not take ten generations to produce that reign of ‘law,’ ‘principle,’ ‘morality,’ ‘virtue’ and ‘free trade,’ or mind-your-own-business, and every-one-for-himself-ism, on the earth.” Are infidels down on law, down on virtue, down on principle, down on morality, etc.? It seems so. “But there must be no stealing, swindling or robbery, as legally defined, on any account; and there must be no [pg 103] sexual intercourse out of the bonds of monogamy, even for bread, and, above all, there must be no acts, or even words of treason. The laboring man and the laboring woman must patiently and slowly (nay, not very slowly, I'm thinking,) die on such wages as they who, in perfect security, hold all the wealth, choose to give; and those out of work must brave martyrdom to ‘principle,’ by starving straightway, unless they can obtain a ‘permit’ to drag out a few months, possibly years, in sack-cloth and on water-gruel in an almshouse.... Was Thomas Paine here to-day his old remedies, religious and political popular free discussion and reasoning, would be thrown aside or only used to assist science and art to displace them in religious and state affairs.” Truth will come to the surface! Here it is speaking for itself. The office of “art-liberty,” the liberty for which infidels plead, is to destroy popular free discussion and reasoning, allowing them only in order to destroy themselves, that is, allowing the infidels to use them to displace them in religious and state affairs. This is called “art-liberty;” liberty in art and science, and despotism in religion and politics or state. Such a society, plus the absence of conscience, virtue and vice, is the infidel's ideal of free government. All this means is simply “intolerance” by law; intolerance in “religious and state affairs.”
When such a state of society is brought about in this country the infidels will have more hell than they will relish. Listen once more, “Man's right to be self-governed is, equally with his desire to be so, self-evident.” How are these infidels going to have self-government and intolerance by law in matters of religion and state? This Godless infidel says, “But what is most insultingly termed ‘elective franchise’ is the farthest thing possible from self-government.... The popular free discussion of affairs of the last degree of complication, religious and state affairs, except during the crisis period of revolution, only renders that worst of despotisms, anarchy, chronic; it seats in the social organism that political gangrene, demagogism, which has always hitherto sooner or later [pg 104] required the cauterization of military despotism in order to save even civilization. Despotism is the most inveterate of all the diseases of the social organism which ignorance has inflicted; nay, it is a complication of all its diseases. What, my fellow-man, would any of you think of the physician who should consult with an individual organism with a view to taking that organism's opinion as to what course he (the physician) had best pursue in order to cure him (the organism) of scrofula, complicated with every other bodily disease to which flesh is heir?... Evidently, church and state management require art and skill infinitely superior to what ‘supernaturalism’ and its legitimate child monarchism, or its bastard issue, caucus-and-ballot-boxism, are capable of. From the dissecting-room, the chemical laboratory, the astronomical observatory, the physician's and physiologist's study—in fine, from all the schools of science and arts should human law be declared, instead of being ‘enacted’ in legislative halls by those who in every respect besides political trickery, fraud and ‘smartness,’ are perfect ignoramuses.” How is all this to be reconciled with the ideas of self-government set forth by this author and copied in this article? Who are to be the doctors, and who are to be the patients? When popular discussion is confined to art and science, only as it may be used in order to keep it out of religious and state affairs, who are to be the popular free disputants? When legislative halls are done away, along with their progenitors, elective franchise and representation, and law emanates from all the schools of science and art by “declaration,” will men be more ready to obey?
Give the sore-headed, politically gangrened, conscienceless, virtueless, Godless applauders of Tom Paine what they ask, and it will simply amount to abandoning our posterity to the lowest, vilest sensualism known in Pagan geography along the line or borderland of a foul lust-gratifying, brutalizing hell. May all Christian people, and every lover of our humanity, wake up to the importance of giving these wide-mouthed, blatant infidels, who are traveling over our country howling [pg 105] about “liberty of man, woman and child,” a wide berth. They would like to be the “doctors,” and treat the “orthodox” people so as to purge “popular free discussion” out of them, and at the same time have their own stomachs crammed full of that grace, and so “steal heaven's livery to serve the devil.” The above infidelism is copied verbatim from the “concluding application” of the life of Thomas Paine by Calvin Blanchard, published in 1879, and being now peddled over our country. What do our infidel friends mean by so much ado about liberty as opposed to the present state of society in our country? Free thought belongs to all. You can't chain the mind. What is it that they want? Will they be so kind as to inform us? Is Calvin Blanchard a representative of the liberty sought for? Then may we long live to keep our heels upon it.
Did The Race Ascend From A Low State Of Barbarism?
The fact that the human mind abhors a contradiction is an evidence of the Godlike nature of man, and an objection to the old tenet of total depravity; it is also the secret of the effort, upon the part of errorists, to systematize. One assumption creates a demand for another, and thus men who start wrong, in science or religion, labor under great disadvantages. When an idea is once consecrated to science or religion in the human heart it is hard to eradicate. When you find that you have made a wrong start remember that it is the part of true manhood to make a frank surrender, and start anew.
The assumption of the “evolution of species” lays all its advocates under the necessity of assuming that a low state of barbarism lies behind the civilization known in the history of the race as the primitive or first condition of intellect. Now, as this is a question of fact, an examination of the evidence pertaining to this second assumption is a matter of primary [pg 106] importance. What are the facts bearing upon the question? With Darwinians the “primeval savage” is a stereotyped idea, finding expression in every-day language; and an idea that some scientists (rather sciolists) never get tired of promulgating. With them primitive man was little removed from the brute beasts, devoid of knowledge, art, and language—a creature in a small degree above; and in a great degree below, the anthropoid apes, from whom it is claimed he has descended by evolution. Is there any proof of this primitive inferiority, or savagery, as opposed to civilization? How does the voice of history speak? It doubtless shows many instances of improvement, of an advance from a low condition to a higher one; but what does the earliest history say as respects the primitive condition of mankind? Waiving an examination of the Bible history, we will at once proceed to other sources. In Egypt there are no indications of an early period of barbarism. All authorities agree that we find no rude or heathenish time in the far off history of Egypt out of which civilization was evolved. The first king known in Egyptian history, Menes, changes the channel of the river Nile, makes a great reservoir, and erects the Temple of Phthah at Memphis. His son Athothis is known as the builder of the Memphite Palace, and as a physician, who wrote books on anatomy. The pyramid times are early in Egyptian history; the portrayed scenes in the tombs of this early period reveal the same habits which existed in after times. That writing had been long in use is demonstrated by the hieroglyphics in the Great Pyramid. Go as far back as you may in Egyptian history, you will find no primitive barbarous mode of life. Sir Charles Lyell admitted, in “Antiquity of Man,” p. 90, that “we have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races.”
George Rawlinson says Mr. Pengelly made a similar confession at the meeting of the British Association at Bristol, in August, 1875. So far as this question of evolution is concerned, [pg 107] it is just as easy to establish involution of civilization into barbarism as evolution of civilization out of barbarism. Herodotus gives an account of the Geloni, a Greek people, who were driven from the cities on the northern coast of the Euxine, and retiring into the interior, lived in wooden huts, and used a language half Scythian and half Greek. We follow this people down to the times of Mala and find them fully barbarous, using the skins of those slain in battle as coverings both for themselves and their horses. The Copts, of our times, are degraded descendants of the ancient Egyptians. In North and South America the descendants of the Spanish conquerers are poor representatives of those Castilians who, under Pizarro and Cortez mastered the Peruvian and Mexican kingdoms, and planted the civilization of the old world in the new. Civilization is liable to decay, to wane, to deteriorate, to sink so low that it may be a question whether it is any longer civilization. In the cases we have alluded to we have a low degradation retaining evidences of something higher. In comparative philology we have cases where it is presumed by the best of critics that a higher state of civilization sank to the lowest conceivable state of heathenism. The race existing in Ceylon, known as the “Weddas,” is of this type. The language of the Weddas is regarded as a base descendant of the most complete and first known form of Aryan speech, the Sanskrit; and the Weddas are set down as descendants of the Sanskritic Aryans, who conquered India. There are no savages of a more debased type. They do not count beyond two or three; they have no idea of letters; of all the animals the dog alone is domesticated; their art consists in making bows and arrows and constructing rude huts; they are dwindling and threaten to become extinct. See “Report of the British Association for the advancement of science, for the Year 1875,” part 3, p. 175.
Civilization and barbarism are states between which men oscillate, passing from one to the other with equal ease, according to the influences brought to bear upon them.