In other words, the free spirits do not care to compromise their position. They take pride in their own intellectual integrity. They agree with Christ in some respects. But they look upon the Christian pill as altogether too large for a sane man to swallow. In fact, to be free with you, they think that Christ was a little bit too much inspired by Himself—by His own divinity—and that He allowed emotion to cloud what might have been a superior intellect.
But the free spirits go one step further. They believe that to find fault with human nature for not responding to Christianity (in the strict sense of the word) is but to blame the patient for not being cured by the medicine. For instance, this love of your neighbor—that fictitious personage who haunts the domicile of the imagination, dressed in a black suit and a derby—this love of neighbor, is nothing but one of those abstractions which the later day Christians—the amorphous Christians—have made in order to satisfy the dictates of strict Christianity. The free spirits say: “There is nothing we would rather do than love our neighbor, if you mean by that, one, or even several, individuals. Such a love makes life worth while. But we refuse, quite frankly, to love our Neighbor, meaning thereby a whole city, or a nation, or a continent. Such love only gives rise to international jealousies, and is a cause of wars.” In other words, the free spirits think that only fools and fanatics can be in love with grand, sweeping, meaningless abstractions. We can love individuals. But to love an abstraction (such as Humanity, the Poor, the Nation, Evolution), is to marry oneself to nihilism, mechanism and metaphysics: it is to immerse one’s personality in an ocean of imagination. What is Humanity, anyway? Who has ever seen it? For the past hundred years the Christians have been romantically chanting about the salvation of it. But it is time now that the world wake up to the fact that Humanity is not an inclusive term meaning all individuals: it is, rather, a generalization meaning non-individuality.
So we take our stand, not only against that distortion of the Christian doctrine which permits of calling “all good men” Christians; not only against the strict Christian doctrine which stands for the effete virtues of Faith, Charity, Love, and Humility; but also against a more pernicious mixture of the two which is tending, by means of Dry Laws and Common Freshman Years, to undermine the integrity of the individual. You say, we are not idealists. Ah, but we are idealists. But we believe that ideals are only vital in so far as they are individualized (i.e., belong to an individual). And Christianity makes hash out of the individual.
What! We are no longer to deal in subtleties? Of course we are to deal in subtleties—(away with your blunt, hard-headed American who talks by statistical tables!). But although subtle and delicate, we are yet to be honest. That is the point: we are to be truthful. But Truth is essentially a pagan virtue. When men are truthful, Christianity becomes superfluous.
RUSSELL W. DAVENPORT.
Autumn Lament
We speak, ah much, pale Corydon of thee,
Far flung in distant lands and evil times.