"In religion, What damned error but some sober brow Will bless it, and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?"
In glancing at the cause of this unchanged susceptibility to religious credulity—unchanged while the world has been making such strides in the acquisition of exact information—we may find a summing up of the situation in Macaulay's blunt declaration that "natural theology is not a progressive science; a Christian of the fifth century with a Bible is on a par with a Christian of the nineteenth century with a Bible." The "orthodox" believer in that Bible can only seek a better understanding of it by studying it himself and accepting the deductions of other students. Nothing, as the centuries have passed, has been added to his definite knowledge of his God or his own future existence. When, therefore, some one, like a Swedenborg or a Joseph Smith, appears with an announcement of an addition to the information on this subject, obtained by direct revelation from on high, he supplies one of the greatest desiderata that man is conscious of, and we ought, perhaps, to wonder that his followers are not so numerous, but so few. Progress in medical science would no longer permit any body like the College of the Physicians of London to recognize curative value in the skull of a person who had met with a violent death, as it did in the seventeenth century; but the physician of the seventeenth century with a pharmacopoeia was not "on a par with" a physician of the nineteenth century with a pharmacopoeia.
Nor has man changed in his mental susceptibilities as the centuries have advanced. It is a failure to recognize this fact which leads observers like Ferris to find it so marvellous that a belief like Mormonism should succeed in the nineteenth century. Draper's studies of man's intellectual development led him to declare that "man has ever been the same in his modes of thought and motives of action, and to assert his purpose to judge past occurrences in the same way as those of our own time."* So Macaulay refused to accept the doctrine that "the world is constantly becoming more and more enlightened," asserting that "the human mind, instead of marching, merely marks time." Nothing offers stronger confirmation of the correctness of these views than the history of religious beliefs, and the teachings connected therewith since the death of Christ.
* "Intellectual Development of Europe," Vol. II, Chap. 3.
The chain of these beliefs and teachings—including in the list only those which offer the boldest challenge to a sane man's credulity—is uninterrupted down to our own day. A few of them may be mentioned by way of illustration. In one century we find Spanish priests demanding the suppression of the opera on the ground that this form of entertainment caused a drought, and a Pope issuing a bull against men and women having sexual intercourse with fiends. In another, we find an English tailor, unsuccessfully, allotting endless torments to all who would not accept his declaration that God was only six feet in height, at the same time that George Fox, who was successful in establishing the Quaker sect, denounced as unchristian adoration of Janus and Woden, any mention of a month as January or a day as Wednesday. Luther, the Protestant pioneer, believed that he had personal conferences with the devil; Wesley, the founder of Methodism, declared that "the giving up of (belief) in witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible." Education and mental training have had no influence in shaping the declarations of the leaders of new religious sects.* The learned scientist, Swedenborg, told of seeing the Virgin Mary dressed in blue satin, and of spirits wearing hats, just as confidently as the ignorant Joseph Smith, Jr., described his angel as "a tall, slim, well-built, handsome man, with a bright pillar upon his head."
* "The splendid gifts which make a seer are usually found among
those whom society calls 'common or unclean.' These brutish beings
are the chosen vessels in whom God has poured the elixirs which amaze
humanity. Such beings have furnished the prophets, the St. Peters, the
hermits of history." BALZAC, in "Cousin Pons."
The readiness with which even believers so strictly taught as are the Jews can be led astray by the announcement of a new teacher divinely inspired, is illustrated in the stories of their many false Messiahs. One illustration of this—from the pen of Zangwill—may be given:—
"From all the lands of the Exile, crowds of the devout came to do him homage and tender allegiance—Turkish Jews with red fez or saffron-yellow turban; Jerusalem Jews in striped cotton gowns and soft felt hats; Polish Jews with foxskin caps and long caftans; sallow German Jews, gigantic Russian Jews, highbred Spanish Jews; and with them often their wives and daughters—Jerusalem Jewesses with blue shirts and head-veils, Egyptian Jewesses with sweeping robes and black head-shawls, Jewesses from Ashdod and Gaza, with white visors fringed with gold coins; Polish Jewesses with glossy wigs; Syrian Jewesses with eyelashes black as though lined with kohl; fat Jewesses from Tunis, with clinging breeches interwoven with gold and silver."
This homage to a man who turned Turk, and became a doorkeeper of the Sultan, to save himself from torture and death!
Savagery and civilization meet on this plane of religious credulity. The Indians of Canada believed not more implicitly in the demons who howled all over the Isles of Demons, than did the early French sailors and the priests whose protection the latter asked. The Jesuit priests of the seventeenth century accepted, and impressed upon their white followers in New France, belief in miracles which made a greater demand on credulity than did any of the exactions of the Indian medicine man. That the head of a white man, which the Iroquois carried to their village, spoke to them and scolded them for their perfidy, "found believers among the most intelligent men of the colony," just as did the story of the conversion of a sick Huguenot immigrant, with whose gruel a Mother secretly mixed a little of the powdered bone of a Jesuit martyr.* And French Canada is to-day as "orthodox" in its belief in miracles as was the Canada of the seventeenth century. The church of St. Anne de Beaupre, below Quebec, attracts thousands annually, and is piled with the crutches which the miraculously cured have cast aside. Masses were said in 1899 in the church of Notre Dame de Bonsecours at Montreal, at the expense of a pilots' association, to ward off wrecks in the treacherous St. Lawrence; and in the near-by provinces there were religious processions to check the attacks of caterpillars in the orchards.