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Vicarious Suffering.
OUR
SANCTIONS
FOR
CRUELTY.
BY
SALADIN.
(Reprinted from the “Agnostic Journal.")
May 31st, 1902.
LONDON:
W. STEWART & CO., 4b FARRINGDON ST,
E.C.
�Every Thursday.
Price Twopence.
Journal
AND ECLECTIC REVIEW.
EDITED
BY
SALADIN.
V Under name and pen-name, some of the most
scholarly and able writers of the age contribute regularly
to The Agnostic Journal ; and, although the Editorial
policy is opposed to the popular and dominant faith,
the columns of the journal are ever open to articles in
defence of Christianity from clergymen or lay Christians
of recognized ability, while considerable space is devoted
to the investigation of Theosophy, Spiritualism,
Mysticism, etc.
The Agnostic Journal can be had free by post on
the following terms :—Quarterly, 2s. 8|d.; half-yearly,
5s. 5d. ; yearly, 10s. iod. Orders should be given to
local newsagents ; but where this is impracticable they
should be sent direct to the Publishing Office.
London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�VICARIOUS SUFFERING.
“ Man’s inhumanity to man ” is the blight and canker
and bane of human life. In recent decades human
ingenuity has been, in part, directed to such benignant
inventions as the steam-engine and the electric telegraph
and telephone. But, anterior to those decades, for
century upon century, man’s mechanical ingenuity was
principally directed to the production of instruments of
torture, to contrivances which applied to those mystic
harp-strings, the human nerves, could evoke every note in
the gamut of agony.
In the Ages of Faith, in the ages in which the Church
which claimed, and still claims, to be of Christ was
supreme, we had no telescope, no gas-light, no railway, no
printing-press ; but we had the rack, the wheel, the boots,
the thumb-screw, the witch’s bridle, the Iron Virgin, and
other torture-engines too numerous and devilish to be
catalogued here. In our museums you can still behold
preserved specimens of these mechanical horrors. The
sight of them makes me shudder : then, what effect must
their hellish spectacle of rust and horror have upon you,
O Orthodoxist, when you remember that it was almost
exclusively in the service of the Church that that rack tore
human joints out of their sockets, that the boots there
�4
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
held the leg of a human being till blood from the ruptured
veins and marrow from the shattered bone splashed in
the face of him who, with swinging hammer, drove home
the merciless wedges ? Here is heresy, some incom
prehensibly subtle doctrinal distinction contemned : then,
tighten the wedges, apply the hammer ; as weighed against
the crime of heresy how trifling are blood and marrow
and anguish and agony !
Were grimly fanatical believers culpably inconsistent
with their creed in thus mangling their fellow human
beings ? Did not the Lord, at the very outset of his
career with man, shew that he preferred the red blood of
the veins to the red flush of the rose ? Did he not prefer
the fat of Abel’s veal to the fragrance of Cain’s violets ?
Cain : Poor Abel ! he was but a shepherd boy,
Who offered up the firstlings of his flocks
In order to appease Jehovah’s wrath,
Who revelled in the pangs and dying groans
Of the poor beasts who never did him wrong.
My heart revolted at the cruel sport. ’Twas I
Refused to torture gentle innocents,
But, taking fruit, I offered it to Him,
Altho’ ’twas mock’ry, seeing all was His.
Spirit : Fruit would not do. The Lord has ordered blood.
Cain : My brother, as a shepherd, offered lambs,
And I, as husbandman, did offer fruit.
Methought the offering of one’s toil is best acceptable.
Spirit : Blood, dying pangs, the torture of the innocent,
Alone appeases the Almighty’s wrath.
Cain : Ay ! to the shame of all created things,
Thou speakest true—He loveth blood I *
Did not the entire wheel of the Christians’ faith turn upon
the pivot of blood and suffering ? Was not the man-god
in whom they believed nailed, hand and foot, to the bitter
cross ? Painters, poets, theologians and historians, have
testified to the pain and ignomy of crucifixion. It was not
* Lady Florence Dixie, in “ Abel Avenged,” in Part II. of
“ The Songs of a Child.”
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
5
mere execution, as we now understand the word; it was
studied torture. In being nailed, or lashed, to the cross, no
vital organ of the victim was affected. Crucifixion was, with
hellish ingenuity, designed to elicit and stimulate all the
suffering of which the nerves of the culprit were capable,
even to the last spasm and writhe of anguish and agony.
A strong culprit has been known to hang on the cross
for several days, before exposure to the sun, hunger, slow
haemorrhage and fiery thirst brought death in merciful
relief.
And this is the revolting and horrible torture to which
the Church deliberately and dogmatically subjected her
man-deity. Lest the horror upon which her very existence
rested should be overlooked or forgotten, crucifixes with
a tortured and nude human figure nailed thereto were
exhibited everywhere, in wood, in stone, on canvas.
And, as if this were not enough of the cruel and the
horrible, the twelve “ Stations of the Cross,” each more
shudderingly revolting than the other, were invented and
forced, in all their repellant gruesomness, upon the wild
and sanguinary imagination of an unlettered public.
Blood! Blood ! Blood everywhere ! “ Without the
shedding of blood there is no remission.” “ Except
ye eat my flesh and drink my blood, there is no life in
you.”
This horrible dithyramb with the refrain of “ Blood ”
only too truculently commended itself to the fierce races
in the fields of Christian mission. Blood, not brain.
Brain was crude, credulous and inchoate, and applied its
raw rapacity to blood and the merciless shedding
thereof. Zealots, bigots, their god had been tortured, and
.they, not incoherently, took to inventing instruments “ for
His name’s sake.” Habituation to the idea of crucifixion—
“ and, being in agony, He prayed more earnestly, and
the sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling
�6
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
down to the ground”—hardened all the more gentle
and tender humanitarian instincts, as daily contemplation
of cruel and morbid topics inevitably will. And, here, in
London, only a few years ago, we had, on exhibition, a
collection of torture-engines by which, through dark and
bloody ages, on the scaffold and in the dungeon, the Gospel
had been protected in its purity against the taint of
heresy.
Perdition to the church that required such engines to pro
tect her against heresy ! Now, on every side, she is assailed
by heresy—nay, by blank unbelief; and this contumacious
journal is, every week, hurled in her teeth in defiant
scorn. Yet who will say that, in spite of this, the world
is not better than it was at the time when this serial would
have been in the flames and its editor on the rack ?
Blood! Blood ! “ There is a fountain filled with
blood.” Well, disinfect the abhorrent nuisance and fill
it up with rubble: scatter over it a layer of rich and
generous mould ; there let the wholesome green grass wave
round the rathe roses of Reason and the white lilies of
Peace. Can it be wondered at that this habituation to the
conception of the sanguinary and horrible has rendered
Christianity the bloodiest agency that has ever cursed the
earth with its presence ? I fearlessly appeal to history in
corroboration of my averment. “ I come not to bring
peace, but a sword,” is a dictum put into the mouth of
the clumsily-invented myth from whom the faith of the
vulgar takes its name. Yes, and, by Heaven, the sword
came, and came to stay; and with it came ignorance and
superstition and bigotry, and cruelty and rancour and hate.
“ The Lamb of the Great Sacrifice” was hoisted on the back
of The Ass of the Great Credulity, and the Dark Ages was
the result, and the darkness of the Dark Ages flings its
penumbra upon the vaunted illumination of to-day to a
degree that he who looks upon Society conventionally
little suspects.
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
7
Not only did the “glad tidings of great joy”—O
mordant irony !—tend to the reckless and merciless waste
of life; but, by a far hotter and more real hell than any
previous faith had known, it lent new terrors to death.
Never, before Christianity was devised, was it dis
covered that there was any sting in death worth speaking
of. Ask the death-bed memories of certain sincere
Christians of the type of John Bunyan and William
Cowper, in their raving terror, how Christianity takes
away the sting from death; and, if I, like them, were a
Christian, I feel certain that my death-bed would be as
shudderingly terrible as was theirs. There are, I know,
many Christians who feel quite sure that they will “ fall
asleep in Jesus,” and who console themselves by repeating
maudlin, nauseous, and meaningless Gospel tags. They
know that the vast majority of human kind go to perdition,
but they have the despicable self-conceit to believe
that they have been selected from that overwhelming
majority, that they are members of that select few, that
mere handful, the elect, that they have “ found Jesus,’’
that they have been “ washed in the blood of the Lamb,”
and much else of canting commonplace. And, in their
selfish meanness, they feel idiotically happy—although,
practically, the whole of the rest of the world is to be lost.
And only by this intensely selfish and self-conceited
imbecility does Christianity 11 take away the sting from
death.” Plato knew how to die, ignorant of this
sting-extracting process; and so did Socrates, so did
Cato, so did Epaminondas, so did Codes, so did Caesar,
so did Julian.
He who mercilessly drowned a multitude of swine,
after, in his superstitious ignorance, he deemed he had
put devils into them, cannot be cited as a zoophilist.
Buddha and Mahomet alike insisted upon kindness to the
“lower” animals; but where did Jesus utter one word
that can be quoted enjoining upon us kindly treatment
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
of our poor non-human fellow-mortals ? We find attri
buted to him a number of fatuous utterances like,
“ I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven ”; “I and
my father are one ” ; and “ The father is greater than I.”
But he never once said : “ Be merciful to the ass ”; “ Be
kind to the dog ”; or “ Liberate the slave.” And,
consistently enough, till this hour, the countries professing
the faith that bears his name are by far the cruellest and
zoomistic in the world.
Even while I write, in Spain, the most Christian
country in Europe, a bull-fight on a more than ordinarily
*
colossal scale is being arranged, and which will involve
reeking slaughters and horrors in which the Mahometan
could never participate, and which the Buddhist would
rather die than sanction. By far the best organized and
numerically strongest section of the Church that bears
Christ’s name formulates thus, in brutal candour, in
“ The Catholic Dictionary,” published under the
imprimatur of Cardinal Vaughan: “ The brutes are
made for man, who has the same right over them that he
has over plants and stones. He may, according to the
express permission of God, given to Noe, kill them for his
food, and this without strict necessity; it must also be
lawful to put them to death or to inflict pain on them for
any good or reasonable end, such as the promotion
of man’s knowledge, health, etc., or even for the purposes
of recreation.”
There are, however, humanitarians among the Papists,
as among the Protestants, men and women nobler than,
and unconsciously in revolt against, their creed. For
instance, the Christian pietist, Frances Power Cobbe,
denounces Vivisection as “ to the last degree un-Christian ”;
and then, by a tour de force of the glaring inconsistency
to which Christian apologists are driven, she admits:
* See p. 13.
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
9
“ This abominable sentiment, and all the cruelty to man
and brute of which it has been the promoter, remains
after twenty centuries of Christianity almost unnoticed
by the churches of Christ. No moralist—so far as my
small knowledge extends, whether Catholic or Protestant
—no father, no schoolman, no casuist of later times, no
Protestant preachers, have denounced Cruelty and the
Pleasure in Pain with anything approaching to the nature
of its moral delinquency.”
Again : “ If we really accepted the precept of Love to
all and under all conditions as the supreme Divine Law,
should we not regard the sin of positively torturing and
taking pleasure in the sight of torture as the very last and
worst of offences ? Should not the early Christian
teachers, when they mapped out the Seven Deadly Sins,
have placed Cruelty the very first on the list ? What
were they doing, and what has the Church of Rome been
doing ever since, to tell us that Sloth, Covetousness, Lust,
Anger, Envy, Pride, and even Gluttony are mortal sins,
and say not one word about Cruelty to man or beast ?
Again : 11 Even our own English minds (through whole
regions of which the old Roman theology and morals still
unconsciously dribble) rarely take in the idea that the
supreme Vice is Cruelty, that while all other vices degrade
man to the level of the beast, Cruelty sinks him to that
of the fiend. When we speak of Vice commonly, we
think of sexual vice or intemperance. We do not think
of that Vice of which—so it seems to me—we must, if
guilty, repent through all the cycles of our immortality.”*
Yes, Miss Cobbe, and to this Vice of all the vices that
“ most holy religion ” of yours is not appreciably opposed,
in either theory or practice !
That truculent Romish dictum I have quoted gives
full warranty, not only to hunting our fellow-mortals to
Contemporary Review, May, 1902.
�IO
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
death for “ sport,” but gives sanction to the hideous
horrors exposed in a brochure * which I have glanced
at and closed with a shudder. Jesus was crucified to
secure our spiritual, and now, consistently enough with
that immoral and revolting proposition, dogs and cats and
rabbits and guinea-pigs are being vivisected to secure our
physical well-being. In the name of Mercy, who and
what are we that both god and dog should suffer and die
for us ? I who, till recently, was endowed with far above
the normal strength and agility, and could leap a five-bar
gate, was wont to feel more proud of the feat than that
of writing an “ At Random ” ; but I have now, through a
nerve-malady, to move cautiously, and not over steadily,
along by the aid of a staff. Yet, even were the torture
of the mouse, exhibited in figure 447, to disclose the
neurotic secret that would again make me a swift-footed
Achilles, I should, unscathed, set the “ wee bit creepin’,
timorous beastie ” free. What right have I to make his
impotency my potency, to make his woe my weal ?
In Figure 503^, these Christian vivisectionists have
actually stuck up a rabbit with a nail through each foot
and in an attitude grimly suggestive of their man-god
upon the cross. The brutal burlesque is theirs, not
mine. But in the figures on page 158, the cat, my
favourite among all the animals, is exposed in three
attitudes of vivisectional agony. I finish this at “ the
wee short hour ayont the twal,” and go to bed to pass a
sleepless night. Visions of my lost friend, the “ Prodigal
’Catalogue of apparatus and appliances for experiments with
animals, issued by F. and M. Lautenschlager, Berlin. Translated
into English by Paul Griinfeld, who was nominated at the request
of the National Anti-Vivisection Society, by the librarian of the British
Museum. The illustrations, which have been reproduced by
photographic zinco-etching, are fac-similes of the originals, and have
been placed beside the letterpress as they appear in the original
catalogue. Second Edition.—Twentieth Thousand. Printed for
The National Anti-Vivisection Society, 92, Victoria Street, London.
j
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
II
Son,” will pass before me, between my closed but
sleepless eyes and heaven’s dome filled with the awful
stars. His remains lie affectionately interred in the small
plot of garden behind my home in London, and a giant
Scots thistle from Galloway keeps vigil over his grave.
My ever tenderly remembered “ Prodigal Son,”
who was young and happy, and to whom life was
dear, yet died like a philosopher. I feel convinced that
he knew he was dying; but he died like a hero. He
knew he was dying; but he knew nothing about the sting
having been taken from death by the reputed sacrifice
of an old-time carpenter; he did not know that death had
ever had any special sting. As I nursed him, he only
looked up with a deep and tender mournfulness into my
tearful eyes. I have among “ my puir earth-born
companions and fellow mortals,” had pet pigs, pet
bullocks, pet horses, pet rats, pet sheep, pet. crows and
pet owls. I never had the self-conceit to feel myself so
superior to any of them that I presumed to regard them
as subordinates; I regarded them as friends, and (I wish
I could say the same of the human animal) not one
of them ever betrayed me.
I read inexpressible volumes of pathos in the counten
ance of my expiring feline friend. His teeth, which he had
often used upon me playfully, were visible between his
parted lips, as he panted for laborious breath. And, as
he cast upon me his last look, there was an eloquence
therein which can never be expressed in any weak words of
mine. It meant: “ Dearest friend, Saladin, my poor green
eyes, of which you were the delight, are closing. I am in
pain. It is growing dark. My one regret is, I shall see
you no more.”
I am aware that what I here express is only the
emotionalism of an intense zoophilist who sometimes feels
inclined to doubt that “ the lower animals ” are the lower
animals at all, it being difficult to get lower than the
�12
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
average J. Smith, and impossible to get lower than the
lowest J. Smith.
If, in the awful arcanum of inexorable Fate, I cannot
have my soul saved without a tortured Christ, or my body
cured without a vivisected Cat, let soul and body perish.
I am not without egoistic self-esteem; but I have
also moral self-respect, and this latter revolts at my
accepting of weal at the cost of another’s woe. Barbaric
conception of pristine savages ! If my soul cannot be
saved without another’s blood and agony—Let it be lost.
Doom, I face thee and whatever thou mayest have in
reserve for me j and I decline to escape my weird through
the anguish of a Christ on the Cross, or, through its
natural, sequence, the agony of a Cat on the “ Operation
Board.” God, whom I cannot formulate in thought, but
whom I meet in ecstatic vision, Thou wilt not permit r
me to be lost because I decline to accept of a cruel
coward’s method of being saved.
�A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
*
The hold the ring has on Spain is enormous. There
are four weekly journals in Madrid devoted solely to the
interests and literature of the bull-ring. There are dozensof books written on the subject, and on every day of a
fight Madrid is simply painted green with copies of the
“Programa de Espectaculos,” a four-page sheet sold fora,
penny by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hawkers.
This gives pictures of the bulls to be slaughtered on theday in question, their pedigrees and owners and short
histories of the animals, together with the names of all
the performers in the day’s spectacle. About an hour
before the time for the show to begin the picadores,
dressed in their clumsy but picturesque costume, set out
from their hotel in the Puerta del Sol for the Plaza de
Toros, about a mile away.
These gentry are mounted on fine horses, not the sorry
hacks they use in the-ring, and are followed by immense
crowds of admiring men, women, and children, who con
sider it an honour to be near the heroes.
At this time of the year the spectacle begins at about
four, earlier or later, according to the number of animals
to be killed. The scene for a couple of hours before this
time beggars description. A sense of furious struggle,
wild desire, fierce eagerness hangs over the city—comes
pouring down with the rays of the hot sun, rises with the
dust from the suffocating streets, gets into the blood of
every Madrileno, and compels him or her—for women go
to bull-fights in their thousands—to make a mad rush for
the place of slaughter.
Even if he cannot afford to enter the show—and it is
an old saying that a Spaniard will sell his shirt to go
Daily Express, May 21st, 1902.
�14
A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
to a bull-fight—to be near the ring is something. Per
haps he may hear a wounded bull bellow with rage or
a dying horse scream in his agony, and he is certain
to see the chief actors come or go.
Private carriages, with well-dressed men and daintilyclad women, electric trams succeeding each other with
amazing rapidity, each laden to the full with sweltering
humanity (or inhumanity), horse and mule trams that
use no rails, but clatter madly over the cobbles, extra
omnibuses, and open cars drawn by five, six, or eight
red-tasselled mules, all dash at full gallop for the Plaza
de Toros to turn out their loads and tear back for
more.
As the time grows short they come only part of the
way back and turn at the half-way mark to hurry on
belated stragglers. It is not gay, it is feverish, exciting,
bewildering. Men’s faces are set and keen. There is
no badinage or merriment, even if it were possible,
while thundering over the ill-paved streets. The one
idea is to get to the fight quickly. Anger is swift to the
surface, drivers are urged and sworn at, and woe be to the
wretched horse or mule that stumbles. He is greeted
with a shower of curses from roof and window of the
vehicle and flogged unmercifully by his driver.
If anyone is of opinion that bull-fighting does not
brutalize these people, let him watch the crowd that goes
to the Plaza de Toros any Sunday in Madrid. He need
not go inside the amphitheatre—he will see enough out
side to change his mind.
We are having fights nearly every day just at present.
I went to Thursday’s contest, and saw six bulls and
fifteen horses slaughtered. I was disgusted and bored,
and came away simply worn out, not with excitement,
but with a sinking stomach and fluttering heart. My
first feeling was that of anger at the men in the ring
for brutally sacrificing the poor horse, who, with his
bandaged eye on to the side towards the bull, was made
to receive broadside the cruel horns of the maddened
and worried brute. The result was sickening. The
horse was ripped open, and amidst screams of pain he
was forced to stand again with his entrails dragging on
the sand of the arena. Every step he took he trod on
�A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
15
his entrails, but was not allowed to lie down and die until
he could no longer bear the burden of the picador, who
urged him forward as long as possible with spurs while his
servant slashed the dying brute over the head with a
*
stick
I do not intend to describe the fight; you would
probably not publish the revolting details if I did. I
merely give one instance which was multiplied over a
dozen time with variations more loathing and gory as the
insistent crowd’s lust for blood grew with what it fed upon.
Finally, the bull, his fore part a crimson flood, spirit
exhausted, an easy victim for the cowards who were
torturing him, was put out of his misery by the matador.
For three hours this went on until the six bulls had been
dragged out dead by mules.
Bull-fighting is a cruel, soul-debasing sight. Men,
women, and children must become brutalised made
callous to suffering and pain. It must and does stamp
the character of the people who love it, and degrade
them. Many Spaniards will tell you that they do not
care for it, and never go. They wish to have the “ sport ”
stopped, but they are few compared to the millions here
who would cause civil war rather than their favourite
pastime should be abolished. In some parts of the United
States the law does not permit a butcher to sit on a jury
trying a prisoner for capital crime, because he is sup
posed to be accustomed to the sight of blood. If such a
law were in force here it would be hard to obtain a jury
in Madrid, where nearly everyone is a butcher, by proxy
s>t least
After witnessing a. bull-fight it is easy to understand
Spanish cruelty in Cuba and elsewhere, and to realise that
it was in this Spain that the Inquisition originated- You
may see to-day in Madrid the square, Plaza Mayor, where
thousands of persons were tortured and burned to death
to the great delight of the spectators crowding the bal
conies about the four sides of the square. It has changed
but little in appearance, except that the instruments of
torture have been removed a little further away to the Plaza
de Toros.
,, c u •
There are many laws in Spain regulating bull-fighting,
mostly in favour of the institution. As an example of its
�A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
legality, I may merely point out that should all the horses
available be killed at a corrida the law allows the managers
of the rings to go into the public streets and commandeer
the first horses at hand, paying for them, of course. There
are more than two hundred and fifty bull-rings in Spain,
About five hundred fights are held every year, in which
one thousand five hundred bulls and six thousand horses
are killed. These are average figures. It is impossible
to get any reliable figures of the expense of this national
institution, but it must be very large. Matadors of first
rank make sometimes from ^£10,000 to_^'i£)ooo a year,
and everybody finds money for the bull-fight, though
schools suffer in this country, where about fifty per cent,
of the people are illiterate.
London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farrin^don Street, E.C.
�
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Vicarious suffering : our sanctions for cruelty
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Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 16 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes A Christian holiday, article reprinted from the Daily Express, 21 May 1902. Reprinted from the Agnostic Journal, 31 May 1902. Includes bibliographical references. Annotations in ink and pencil. "by Saladin" [title page]. Saladin is the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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W. Stewart & Co.
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[1902]
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N600
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Ethics
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Vicarious suffering : our sanctions for cruelty), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Bullfighting
Cruelty
NSS
Suffering
Torture
-
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national secular society
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS,
AND JUMPERS.
PART I.
BY
SALADIN.
[reprinted from “the
secular
review.”]
London:
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
��3& &
I
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND
JUMPERS.
’
If “ God made man,” he must have made him for his
amusement; and surely much amusement he must have
got out of the featherless biped. No six-year old child
sailing his boat—a cocoa-not shell with a paper sail
can derive therefrom more real fun than Jehovah must
surely derive from the antics of the little two-pronged
nothings he has placed in this region of the universe.
To man alone Deity has given unlimited potentialities
in the way of being absurd, and an intense capacity for
being unhappy. Deity has a curious knack of making
joyous nobodies and melancholy sages. ’Arry the yokel’s
cup overflows with delight because he is graciously per
mitted to eat bread and cheese and swing on a gate;
while Thomas Carlyle, James Thomson, and William
Maccall have cups that overflow with bitterness and
misery because they have bad hepatic arrangements and
will not take Cockle’s pills. This sort of thing is a very
curious farce, and I often fancy the Father, Son, and
Ghost open their three mouths which are one, and hold
their six sides which are two, and laugh at the earth till
all heaven rings.
If God had made man sane, he would not have got
half the fun out of him he has got. True, the fun
which Deity must have had over man’s mad crusading
and inquisiting and covenanting and flagellating, and so
forth, has been no joke to man himself; but that is,
of course, a small matter, so that God be glorified. But
I do not suppose that Sarah has got a better laugh since
the day she laughed at the angel who brought her the
gestation message on the plains of Mamre than she has,
�4
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
from time to time, got at earth’s poor little two-footed
Jacks-in-the-box dancing for Godsake.
Ever since man dropped his tail, and how long before
that I know not, he has had a tendency to dance for the
love of God. On the plains of ancient Phoenicia and
Carthage there were mad dances to please the heaven
overhead; and the ancient Greeks and Romans, in their
religious rites, danced to the glory of Mars and Cybele;
and heaven looked down and hell looked up at earth
and her little pigmies indulging in saltatory gambols
and sexual riot. Poor amusement for a God! and yet
good enough for a God that could originate such a daft
and miserable ninny as man. And the best of the joke
is, this daft ninny has always been under the infatuated
impression that nothing in existence is so important as
he is, that Gods have ever been devising plans and
kicking worlds round for him—yea, that God himself
came down here and had nails hammered into him to
prove his great interest in mankind. If God would
come down, or the Devil come up, and make man sane,
it would be much more to the purpose. “ Redeem ”
him, indeed ! Surely the Gods have better work on
hand, and know their own business best. As a proof
that they do not think him worth redeeming, they, up
to the date of our going to press, never have redeemed
him. They get more amusement out of him as he is.
If he would only learn his own place, consequence, and
importance in the universe, it would take the conceit
out of him. He and his vaunted “immortal soul” are
only a link in the chain of cosmos, and all the links are
alike strong—the man driving in the carriage and pair
and the fly crawling upon the pane. Gods will come
down to get crucified for him of the carriage when they
think it worth while to come down and get crucified for
him of the pane. The flies that lit upon the gore of
Caesar, as he lay dying at the base of Pompey’s pillar,
are now where the dead are who fell in the battle of
Marathon. Their record is alike in the archives of the
universe, and they are both of alike importance in the
purposes of Cosmos and Fate. In the long day of
Eternity the last barrowful of litter wheeled out from the
cavalry stables, and the last batch of heroes, gashed and
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
5
gory, buried in the desert sands of the Soudan, will be
alike remembered.
But back to our dancing. As far as Christianity was
concerned it had much pleasure in tracing back its
Terpsichorean piety to King David, who danced a jig
naked before the Lord and the ladies,* and insulted his
wife because she ventured to reprove him for his holy
levity. The cripple that had lain at the Beautiful Gate
of the temple came next to David as a great exemplar of
pious hornpipes. It is on record that he performed the
triple function of “walking and leaping and praising
God.”t Indeed, some went so far as to assert that Christ
himself was rather partial to a good sanctified Highland
fling, and quoted triumphantly the words attributed to
him by the writer o? the third Gospel: “Rejoice ye in
that day and leap for joy.”|
Even the Book of Job§ was dragged in to favour the
light fantastic toe ; for therein is there not tall talk about
the morning stars chanting a rondel and all the sons of
God jumping out of their skins? And, again, assuming
that a person cannot shout, but he must jump also, the
dancers for Godsake had recourse to a passage in the
Book of Ezra.*11 Several other passages in Holy Writ
were relied upon to defend the propriety of a good holy
jump.
On through the centuries, more or less, went the
jumping for Godsake, till, in the thirteenth century,
it got somewhat serious. A number of children took to
it as a pious recreation, which they seemed to prefer to
the salutary but profane leap-the-frog and skipping-rope.
Religious manias were no respecters of persons ; they
seized old and young, the dotard with one foot in the
grave and the child with one foot in the cradle. An
army of child crusaders, as I have shown in another
paper|| set out for Palestine, and a child army of Reli
gious Dancers are said to have danced all the way to
Armstadt from Erfurdt in Prussian Saxony. Arrived at
Erfurdt, the dancers fell down exhausted, many of them
died, and many who survived retained till the end of
* 2 Samuel vi. 16, 20. + Acts iii. 8. J Luke vi. 23. § Job
xxxviii. 7.
5T Ezra iii. 11.
|| See Saladin’s pamphlet, “The
Crusaders.”
�6
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
their days traces of the fearful exertions they had put
forth when acting under the influence of a religious
mania which had filled them with wild zeal and bereft
them of reason. Less than half a century after a number
of the unco guid, under a direct out-pouring of the Holy
Spirit, took to footing divine jigs on a bridge at
Utrecht. The Holy Spirit, however, did not care to
sustain the bridge, under the weight of his prancing
devotees, so it broke down under their pressure, and
many of them were drowned—to them it was graciously
permitted to dance into glory through the waters of
the Rhine.
But it was not till the year 1374 that Europe fairly
looked up to her God, adored him and kilted her coaties
and danced like daft. It can hardly be said of the holy
fanatics, as of the witches in Alloway Kirk, that—
“ They cuist their duddies to the wark,
And linket at it in their sark
although, according to the Second Book of Kings, his
majesty Davie the First of Israel had “ linket ” before the
Lord without his “sark,” and, peradventure, even without
his garters. Following in his wake, Germany in particular
began to indulge in high jinks for Godsake, and we stop
not to inquire whether the Christian Teutons danced
minus their shirt and garters ; for we are creditably
informed that they danced till they lost their reason, and
shirt and garters count as nothing to a fanatic doing a
schottische for the Lord till he tumbles down in exhaus
tion and foams at the mouth in delirium. The principal
scene of the dancing for Godsake was Aix-la-Chapelle
and its vicinity ; and from far and near the saints came
there for their pious jig.
Round and round, hand in hand, in great circles, with
the hymns of pietists and the fury of devils, whirled the
Lord’s anointed. At least, the Lord never said they were
not his anointed, and he allowed them to whirl till not
infrequently they whirled their very life out and left their
corpses among the feet of their still desperately-dancing
companions in godliness. It was a case of turn your
partner, ladies’ chain, cross over, half-right and left,
gallop, and set to partners in the kingdom of heaven.
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
7
Of all the buffoons that ever existed subjectively or
objectively to the human imagination, humanity’s god is
the most grotesque. The religions of the past will be
the best pantomimes for the children of the future. The
pantomime at Drury Lane shall yet be dancers of 1374
at Aix-la-Chapelle. But Covent Garden will beat it
hollow with poor old Jehovah flying about like a gate on
a windy day, between the prayers of Gordon on the one
hand and those of the Mahdi on the other. The grand
transformation scene will be 10,000 devout Mussulmans
who had fallen by bayonet and Gatling disporting them
selves among the houris of Paradise, while 10,000
Christians who had fallen by spear and Remington rifle
will be ushered into heaven with wings and nightshirts,
and the gods in the gallery will cry : “ I say, Bill, let us
give three b----- , b----- cheers for them there bloomin’
coves who died for the ladies, and a b----- groan for
them blokes who died for the wings !”
God, or x, or vov/jlcvov, or whatever you like to call him,
her, or it, enjoyed the religious dancing immensely, if we
are to judge from the fact that he, she, or it, never tried
to stop it. The votary of saintly strathspeys and holy
hornpipes was wont to fall down rigid and yelling with
the cramp, with some particular muscle sticking up as
large as your fist and as hard as a brick. The approved
way of assisting your yelling neighbour was to give his
rigid muscle a heavy kick or stamp with your foot. It
must have been extremely interesting to take an aim at
the hard lump on your neighbour’s calf, and give it a
hearty kick, just as a means of grace ! We have it on
the authority of Milton that they praise deity “ who only
stand and waitbut how effectively they must have
served him who rattled their boot-toes off their brother’s
shins !
To waltz with Araminta Jones or some other interest
ing sylph for your partner, although frivolous, is well
enough in its way ; but to dance with Jehovah-Jireth for
a partner, as the dancers at Aix-la-Chapelle did in 1374,
was quite another matter. In the celestial redowa it
was absolutely essential that, by phrenzy, you should
shut yourself up from the world and feel that you were
dancing with God. Through all time, if ever you wanted
�8
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
to have much to do with God, it was necessary to be
more or less demented; but to actually have the honour
of dancing with God it was necessary to lose your reason.
You had to become unconscious of whether you were
dancing upon the street or upon the clouds. Many
imagined themselves floundering in a sea of blood, in
which the only way to escape drowning was by mad jigs
and tremendous hornpipes. Others, with their feet batter
ing the ground, and their eyes turned up in phrenzy, beheld
the heavens opened, and the whole fauna of the divine
menagerie capering round the Great White Throne, upon
which sat Jehovah, the Wombwell or George Sanger of
the exceptional wild beasts mentioned in the Apocalypse.
Others beheld Mary of Bethlehem seated upon a divine
sofa, with the child Jesus upon her knee, but without
seeing anything anachronistic in a child nearly 1400 years
old, or recognising that there was anything suspicious
about girls who bear babies to ghosts.
On, rapidly, from Aix-la-Chapelle as a centre, spread
the dancing madness through Holland, Belgium, Austria,
and Italy. The magistrates of Liege, in the interests of
the dancers, issued an edict to the effect that only broad
toed shoes were to be made, and that sharp-pointed shoes
were to be utterly abolished. Peradventure the sharp
toed shoes were voted a nuisance by the brother whose
shins were kicked in the manner to which we have
alluded ; and peradventure some direct revelation from
Omnipotence concerned itself with the affairs of snip.
The God who in Mosaic times concerned himself so
much with fringes, and skirts, and candle-sticks was
likely skilled enough in bootmaking to appreciate the
difference between broad toes and narrow ones. Several
towns found it necessary to interdict the manufacture of
red-coloured garments, the sight of which was considered
inflammatory of the phrenzy of the dancers, from which
we make the interesting inference that these pious
dancers were somehow allied to mad bulls, to whom, as
is well known, a red rag is particularly odious.
And yet the dancers for Godsake were not so mad
after all. At least one little touch of sanity remained—
they hated the Beetles, and tried to squash them, just as
the Secular Review does now. Wherever the Dancers
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
9
went the Beetles fled before them like chaff before the
wind. At the sound of the pious music and holy yells
every Beetle got upon his hind legs, and, without waiting
to say his ave or his credo, ran for his life. And this was
because the clergy had, seeing their craft in danger,
ventured to allege that the Dancers were possessed of the
Devil. The Dancers of the celestial strathspeys were,
naturally enough, incensed that these celestial strathspeys
should be mistaken for infernal hornpipes. The Beetles,
however, persisted, and got hold of some of the maddest
of the Dancers, that they in their case might exorcise the
evil spirit. The jumpers for the Lord were surrounded
by a ring drawn with chalk, and there were book and
candle, and salt and rowan, and the pater nosier repeated
backwards \ but the Devil, if he were there, cared for
none of these things, and the Dancers leapt over the
chalk line and knocked the Beetles heels overhead for
their attempts to upset the jigs of the Lord and his
anointed one. And so matters went on merrily ; and let
us hope that, from looking down upon the earth, heaven
was both amused and instructed.
But the full fury of the dancing mania was reserved
for Cologne and Metz. Never wilder zeal was manifested
in the days of the Crusaders or the Flagellants. The
young and the old of both sexes, and of all ranks, were
seized with the epidemic convulsions and danced pro
miscuously in the streets, putting forth preternatural
exertions till fagged and flagging nature could bear the
stress no longer, and the dancer sank down exhausted,
and sometimes never rose again. Pimps and panders,
and black-legs and black-guards, and murderers and
prostitutes, finding that the Dancers were popular, joined
them, feigned the convulsions, practised the leaps into
the air, and danced with the best, till at length the whole
concern developed into a huge orgie of lust and devilry,
which the civil government of the Rhenish cities had to
suppress with the sword.
The curious fact in regard to the Dancers is that,
although by their dancing they glorified God, yet they
considered the irresistible impulse to dance a serious
affliction. They looked round for the source from
which the affliction sprang, and, as was usual with
�IO
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
Christians, they determined that the Jews had a handin
the matter. Indeed, they went so far as to insinuate that
the Jews had instilled an insidious poison into the food
and into the wells of Europe, and had thereby succeeded
in driving hundreds of thousands of Christians mad. To
the honour of his Holiness the Pope, be it said that here
he interposed and proclaimed the innocence of the house
of Israel from the charge brought against them. But
the papal interposition could not stay the butchering
knife of religious and racial hate, and in many places the
Jews were massacred, but particularly in Mayence and
its vicinity. Incidentally I may mention that while the
dancing was going on in its greatest fury the fearful text,
“ Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” was powerfully
insisted upon, and under its sanction vast numbers of
aged and helpless women were burnt to death.
The
religious fanatic murdered the Jews, and danced his
maniac break-down in the glare of the fire, whose hiss
and roar mingled with the shriek of agony of women
perishing at the stake.
So much for the benign influence of the heavenly
father’s Holy Word in securing the peace, happiness, and
welfare among his children upon earth. So much for the
amusement the host of heaven must have got out of the
farcical follies of the poor puppets that butchered and
burned and danced for the love of God. And heaven’s
amusement at earth’s follies is not by any means over.
From the human aspect, these celestial amusements must
ever be dashed and mingled with tragedy and pain. But
with the non- or super-human it may be different. Stab
bing Jews, burning women, and dancing maniacal break
downs may in the past have been a source of much
satisfaction to the God who “made all things for his own
glory.” But man has simply changed the manner, not
the matter, of his insanity. God is now “glorified” by
seeing hundreds die of destitution, and tens of thousands
taking to prostitution to escape destitution, while in the
world there is enough and to spare for all. We are told
in the Psalms that “he that in heaven sits shall laugh,”
and we predicate that he will burst into the thunderous
roar of a divine guffaw when he sees the Mahdi and
his flamens pitting themselves in a praying match against
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS. AND JUMPERS.
II
Canterbury and York and Little Bethel, while, in the
debateable ground between, the bayonets of the Staf
fordshire regiment rasp against the spears of the Baggara Arab. And Canterbury’s prayers to the value of
^15,000, and York’s prayers to the value of /io,ooo,
are impotent against a dusky savage clothed in a hand
kerchief round his loins. Gordon lies dead in the dust of
Khartoum, Earle is shot, Stewart expires in fever and
agony, and Burnaby gasps out his life in the rift of the
broken square.
O England of the nineteenth, laugh not at Germany
of the fourteenth century. You dance not, it is true ;
but you are quite as ludicrously interesting to any intel
ligence that is sane. Will mankind in the future never
evolve to a level in which they will turn back the pages
of history till this hour, and laugh at the record of your
Black Army at home and your Red Army abroad—at
the old State comedy of the Black-Beetle praying for the
Red Herring ?
Gradually the fury of the outbreak of 1374 died away.
But, about forty years later, the mania again burst out with
fever heat, its centre this time not being Aix-la-Chapelle,
but Strasbourg. There was one strongly-marked point
of difference between this and the preceding outbreak.
As we have seen, the Dancers of 1374 were fiercely
hostile to the clergy and the officers of the Church.
Not so the Strasbourg Dancers. Instead of the monks
having to run for their lives, they established themselves
in the local religious buildings, and said masses for the
Dancers. The saltationists themselves were grateful for
the masses, and were seized with what was a source of
profit to the Church—a faith in the efficacy of shrine
cures.
The patron-saints of the Dancers were St. John the
Baptist and St. Vitus. St. John was connected with
dancing through the dancing of the daughter of Herodias
costing him his head, which at her request was cut off
and laid upon a plate; but how St. Vitus came to be
connected with dancing has never been satisfactorily
accounted for. St. Vitus was a young Sicilian who
suffered martyrdom by decapitation, under Diocletian in
303. His church and that of the Baptist were the two
�12
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
churches in the greatest vogue among the Dancers, and
in each of them many miraculous cures were said to have
been effected. In consequence, a certain malady which
is unfortunately too well known goes under the name of
“ St. Vitus’ Dance.” How far an exceptional prevalence
of this affliction (chorea Sancti Viti) was at the root of the
Dancing Mania is a legitimate subject for historical and
pathological investigation. It is well known that fear or
terror is conducive to this disease, and ever-recurring
war, plague, and pestilence, and the preternatural awe
superinduced by religion, may have predisposed the then
■inhabitants of Europe to this frightful malady. Worms
in the alimentary canal have also been set down as a
source of St. Vitus’ Dance, and the unwholesome food
then partaken of would be sufficient to account for the
presence of intestinal worms. The disease is also
accelerated by the repulsion or drying up of cutaneous
eruptions, and the festering and unhealthy state of the
skin of mediaeval Europe is notorious. These few facts
enumerated, added to an intense religious fanaticism and
fear, may in themselves be sufficient to account for the
phenomenon of the Dancing Mania.
“ Dancing for Godsake is over long ago, and why do
you bother with it ?” queries the historical sciolist. I
reply : “ Dancing for Godsake is not over long ago ; we
have still among us on this terrene ball the Shakers and
the Jumpers, lineal descendants of the Dancers’ spas
modical fanaticism.” Devotion is not a matter of the
head; so let it go to the other somatic extremity, and be
a matter of the heels. It might be amusing to behold a
mutilated Jumper worship the Eord with two wooden
legs; but I have been in Spurgeon’s Tabernacle and
seen the Lord worshipped with more than a thousand
wooden heads, and that, to me, is quite as amusing. It
matters very little to the blockhead—and I should say
it matters still less to the blockhead’s god—whether the
blockhead worship with the upper end of him that is
covered with felt or the lower end of him which is
covered with ben leather. Moreover, worship from either
end or both is good enough for any god I have yet heard
of. Instead of drawling and praying with my felt end,
I should prefer dancing with my ben leather end, espe
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
13
cially if my partner in the waltzing worship were Miss
Araminta Jones.
Readers of ecclesiastical history are, of course, ac
quainted with the Camisars, or French prophets, a sect
that originated at Dauphine in r688. No previous dancers
were ever madder than they. They might have danced
their jig much longer, but that they heard the voice of
divine inspiration bid them take up arms against the
State. The voice of inspiration got them on the ice,
but did not trouble to get them off it: they came into
collision with the king's troops, and were overpowered
and mercilessly put to the sword. The mere handful that
escaped sought refuge in this country, which they reached
in 1706. They found England could produce fools not
inferior to those of France, and they made converts, the
principal of whom was a gentleman of the name of Lacy,
Sir Richard Bulkely, and Dr. Emms. This Dr. Emms
was an unfortunate proselyte. He died December 22nd,
1707, and, alas for the Camisars, they had staked their
reputation as a sect that the learned Doctor would come
to life and walk out of his grave on May 25th in the
same year. During the time between December and
May, with the faithful and with the sceptic alike, the ex
pectancy and excitement were intense. On May 25th
guards were placed at the grave to see that Dr. Emms
got through his resurrection properly. Loudly the faithful
invoked Dr. Emms to get up; but Dr. Emms would do
no such thing ; and, strange to say, he has not got up
even till the present hour. This refusal on the part of
Dr. Emms to leave his grave got the sect pretty well
jibed out of existence. ' And if, on a certain occasion,
a guard as wide-awake had been set to watch a certain
grave in Jerusalem, a certain party, who, of course, got
up, would have refused to rise, and this Christian super
stition, which has cost humanity rivers of tears and
oceans of human blood, would, at its very inception,
have been wiped off the face of the earth.
The Camisars had received their death-blow ; but, as
they ascended, their mantle fell upon a section of the
Quakers, and Shakerism was the result—a kind of thing
produced by tying Dr. Emms and William Penn together
by the coat-tails. The founders of the Shakers were
�14
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
James Wardley, a tailor, and Jane, his wife. It was at
Bolton, in 1747, that Wardley recognised that his awful
mission included not only the making of men’s pantaloons,
but the saving of their souls.
Flashing through between the goose and the scissors
were portent, miracle, vision, and revelation, and he left
alone the stitching of waistcoats and basted himself on
to the Lord and him crucified. But an ordinary orthodox
Lord, sitting at the right hand of a thing with no right
hand, or left one either, was too stale for this mighty
one, who threw down the needle of the snip and took up
the sword of the spirit. True, this Son was sitting at
the dexter fist of this Father of the same age as himself;
but, according to tailor Wardley and his wife Jane, Jesus
was sitting in heaven quite uneasily, just as a person
does who sits down accidentally upon an ant-hill. In
fact, according to Wardley, Jesus was busily preparing to
take a fly down to earth, even as a cock takes a fly down
from his perch in the morning. In other words, Wardley
proclaimed the immediate Second Coming of Christ and
the advent of the Millennium.
The sword of the spirit, in the puissant hand of this
tailor, clove asunder the joints and marrow of a good
many. They hailed him of the lap-board as a special
prophet of God, and stood with their hand shading their
eyes, looking up into the clouds for the advent of Jesus.
But Jesus had something better to do than to come
fluttering down heels over head from heaven to please
Wardley and his idiots. The carpenter of Nazareth
refused to oblige the tailor of Bolton.
But, if Jesus would not come, he must just leave it
alone. Wardley and his followers were not to be dismayed
by a trifle of that kind, and they went on with their
Shakerism. “ Sometimes,” we are told, “ after assembling
together and sitting a while in silent meditation, they
were taken with a mighty trembling, under which they
would express the indignation of God against all sin.
At other times they were affected, under the power of
God, with a mighty shaking; and they were occasionally
exercised in singing, shouting, or walking the floor under
the influence of spiritual signs, swiftly passing and re
passing each other, like clouds agitated by a mighty
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
15
wind.” Their enemies called them Shakers in derision ;
but they did not object to the epithet, and accepted of
it as an appropriate one.
The rather awkward delay of the Lord in his Second
Coming, and, in place of the Millennium, the fact that
men were cutting each other’s throats as usual, did not
tend to augment the influence of Shakerism. But, in
1770, although the Lord did not come, the Lady did, in
the shape of Anne Lee, of Manchester. This glorious
Anne, the morning-star of the Shakers, was the daughter
of John Lee, a blacksmith, and the wife of Abraham
Stanley, another blacksmith. She at once leapt into
the position of the recognised leader of the sect. To
her were applied the titles of the “Elect Lady” and the
“ Mother of the Electand, whether she was actually
the Mother of the Elect or not, it was gravely whispered
that she was the mother of one or two that she had no
business to be the mother to. But far be it from me to
dim the auriole on the resplendent brow of a she-saint.
To those who had the presumption to address her as
Anne Lee she drew herself up to her most holy height,
and remarked, by way of correction : “ I am Anne the
Word.” Some persons there were who hinted that “ I
am Anne the Harlot” would have been a good deal
nearer the mark; but, of course, it is very wrong for
carnally-minded people to take note of the peccadilloes
of saints.
“ Anne the Word,” she-blacksmith and Aoyos, was in
constant communication with the kingdom of heaven
and the other kingdom; and, like the apostles on the
day of Pentecost, she spake with tongues. She was
a good deal addicted to gin, and it was, possibly, when
under the influence of this spirit that her gift of tongues
was most miraculous. I myself vouch that I have seen
gin, and whiskey too, for that part of it, inspire a number
of old women with a remarkable gift of tongues—one
that would have put the Pentecostal babblement com
pletely in the shade.
But, tongues or not tongues, “ Anne the Word ” first
got into prison for blasphemy, and next into a madhouse
as a lunatic ; and thus to the holiness of saintship she
was enabled to add the glory of martyrdom. It has
�16
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
often occurred to me that a lunatic asylum, rather than
a cross, would have been the fitting haven for a certain
predecessor of “Anne the Word;” but I will allow
Pontius Pilate and the rest of them to know their own
business. She who was “ the first spiritual parent in the
line of the Covenant” died in 1784 and went to Jesus,
having waited in vain for Jesus to come to her flopping
down through the clouds, with the voice of the arch
angel and a holy tin whistle. So much for Shakerism
and the kind of persons that are capable of founding a
new religion.
Price Twopence.
Every Thursday.
THE
SECULAR
REVIEW:
A JOURNAL OF AGNOSTICISM.
EDITED BY SALADIN.
Order of your Newsagent, or send direct to the Publishers—W.
Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, London, E.C.
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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS,
AND JUMPERS.
PART II,
BY
SALADIN.
[reprinted from “the
secular
review.”]
London :
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
�1
�S?2-
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND
JUMPERS.
PART II.
The best jumping for Godsake that modern times
has produced has been found among the mountains of
Wales. The Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, about the
year 1760, became so elated anent their prospects of
being taken into Abraham’s bosom, or Sarah’s, that they
adopted the practice of “jumping, accompanied by loud
exclamations of praise, during the solemnisation of
public worship.” From their adoption of this practice,
the Welsh Methodists earned and bore the soubriquet
of Jumpers. He who jumped highest and screeched
most frantically was, of course, he upon whom the “ holy
spirit ” had been most liberally poured. What a saintly
Taffy he must have been who could utter a roof-rending
yell and leap over the head of his Beetle, cracking his
heels together in the air as he did so 1
Welsh Jumperism was jumping on its last legs when a
sudden and unexpected accession to the power and lon
gevity of Jumperism appeared in the person of Mary Ann
Girling. This saint and hierarch belongs to the same
class and has shared the same educational advantages
as did her predecessor, “Ann the Word.”
It is now about a quarter of a century since Mary
Ann ran away from her lawful husband, Girling, and
committed sanctified bigamy with the person who had
his feet wiped with Mary Magdalene’s hair. Mary Ann
does not now know where her lawful husband is ; she
does not even know whether he is dead or alive. One
of her sons by this husband, a devout yokel of about
�4
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
thirty, still hangs on by the holy petticoats of his
mamma ; and how many sons and daughter^ she has
borne to her second husband, the Lord, I know not;
for the Girlingite Jumpers are a queer community, who
have all things in common. Numbers of the younger
saints are sceptics as to who was their mamma, and are
absolute agnostics as to who was their daddy; but I
have my doubts as to whether Mary Ann Girling’s
second husband, J. Christ, formerly of Bethlehem, is
daddy to any of them.
Mary Ann Girling is believed by herself and her
followers to be the bride of Christ; and it is further
believed that she will never die, but that Christ will
come down from heaven for her with considerable fuss
and take her up to live with him on his seat at his
father’s right hand.
How the father will get along
with his astonishing daughter-in-law I will not presume
to conjecture.
If Christ really does mean to come and take Girling’s
runaway wife home to his celestial lodgings, I should
venture to suggest that he lose no time in doing so. It
is a shame to keep the affianced bride of a personage so
illustrious living under the wet and flapping canvas
of a tent in the New Forest, while in his father’s house
there are so many mansions. I have thirteen of the
letters of Lady Christ before me on the table as I write,
all written with her own heavenly hand and spelt with
her own heavenly spelling; and the burden of them all
is that she is “ The Lamb’s Wife,” and that she is
mortally hard up for a five-pound note. I do not think
it is right of the Lamb—he must be an obdurate old
tup—to keep his wife in such a state of illiteracy and
indigence. A specimen of the thirteen letters I will quote
before I have done with this subject, and I will not
presume to alter a single orthographical mannerism in
the epistles of a lady so distinguished as “ the Lamb’s
Wife,” but give them “just as they are without one
plea.”
One reason why I should urge upon “the
Lamb ” that he pull the briars out of his wool, polish
up his incipient horns, flourish his tail, and frisk down
to Tiptoe, Hordle, for his bride, is that brides, at her time
of life, do not improve in appearance. For all marital
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
5
purposes, the Lamb’s Mary Ann is already a tough
morsel, and a few years more at Tiptoe, Hordle, is likely
to make her tougher still. Even so, Lord Jesus ; come
quickly. The nearest railway station is Lymington. If
you have your angelic wings, you may use them ; if
not, being a Lamb, you can come by cattle-truck for
next to nothing.
The Girlingite Jumpers jumped with more or less
. success at Walworth and elsewhere before they finally
settled down at Hordle, in the New Forest. Their
welcome to Hordle by the inhabitants thereof was not
by any means cordial, and it is doubtful if they would
have been able to have settled down at all but for the
protection afforded to them by one or two liberal-minded
gentlemen of the neighbourhood, most conspicuous
among whom was the Hon. Auberon Herbert, brother
of the Earl of Carnarvon, and whose residence of
Arnwood is in the vicinity of Lymington and Hordle.
It must not be for a moment understood that Auberon
Herbert had a particle of sympathy with the doctrines
of Mrs. Girling and her following of ignorant enthu
siasts; but it seemed to him unjust that, in a land teeming
with unspeakable absurdities in the Black-Beetle line,
the youngest and least-befriended of these absurdities
should not have fair play.
The following, which I reproduce from a small printed
pamphlet, is the manifesto of the Girlingite Jumpers,
and from it the reader will be able to discern the outlines
of the creed which still holds together a number of
devotees and puts in its claim among the thousands of
religious sects which have each their band of adherents
in the world of to-day :—
The Close
of the
Dispensation.
The Last Message to the Church and the World.
Children, hear your Mother’s call—
There was a time in the history o the world when God, the
Great Spirit, took a woman’s body and formed out of her flesh and
blood a male child. He grew up to manhood, and God, the great
Father-and-Mother Spirit, dwelt in Him on earth. From His
childhood he was acknowledged to be the Son of God, and He was
also the son of woman ; so that he was both male and female, but
�6
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
only the male form was seen. Yet he was God-father and God
mother, or, in other words, Lord God.
When He grew up to man’s estate He declared Himself to be
the Father, plainly telling He was the Lord God dwelling among
them. But they only saw Him as a man, with a few exceptions,
and they were afraid to tell who he was for fear of the people ; for
when He told them who He was they sought to destroy Him,
because He said He was God ; which at last was accomplished, and
they crucified that body which was made of a woman ; they could
not crucify the Spirit, that not being a substance. After they had
crucified His body God the Spirit raised it up again and glorified it
by Himself, so it looked more beautiful than before.
Then He revealed Himself to some who had seen Him crucified,
and they recognised Him and knew that it was the same body which
had been crucified, now glorified, and in His glorification see him
both male and female, or, as declared, both Lord and God in one;
but yet, only the shape of man was seen.
After he had so clearly revealed himself unto many he took
that same body up to heaven with him, exactly as it had been
crucified and afterwards raised up by the Spirit.
From the time he took that body into heaven until now he has
only revealed himself to the people by his own spiritual presence
and his power, as he had done before he took upon himself a body
of flesh and blood ; or, at least, there have been but a few who
have ever seen him. His body remained in heaven from the time
he ascended until about twenty-three years ago, when the fulness
of his time had come for the same Jesus, the God-father and the
God-mother (which had remained both in one until then) to give
out of himself the mother part of that which was once a body of
flesh and blood and had been crucified. When he gave out of
himself the God-mother life it was celestial, and was then called
the Bride, the great city of light coming out of heaven from God ;
and it was God come out from the Lord God. It was the celestial
God-mother, Life, the female part, or the love life, that which once
was woman life.
This life was brilliantly adorned as a bride for her husband ; yet
it had no form or substance, being only the celestial life, the God
love, the female part.
The male part retained his celestial and terrestrial body complete,
even after he gave out of himself the life as a bride, but his celestial
and terrestrial body were one. The celestial had changed the
terrestrial into celestial before he gave out of himself the God
mother life.
Now, when the God love came as a bride she must have a terres
trial body of flesh and blood, in woman’s form, so that she might
be complete as God-mother in shape, as the male part was complete
as God-father.
It pleased the Lord God, called Jesus, the Father supreme, to
take the body of the woman called by name Mary Ann Girling to
be the terrestrial habitation for the celestial God-mother love life
to dwell in, the same life that Jesus gave out of himself, and to
make the terrestrial body of the woman the perfect form of his
�7
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
bride. Her body contains the celestial life which came out of God
from heaven.
*
*
*
*
*
Now, may I ask the whole human family, as my children, if they
have any pleasure in my suffering for them any longer ? This may
reach the whole world, and as each one lays it before God in prayer
He will bear witness to it by giving each the divine evidence of its
truth, even in their true and holy relationship with him, even he,
the God-father and God-mother, known by name as
Jesus First
and
Last
(Mary Ann Girling).
Tiptoe, Hordle,
Near Lymington, Hants, 1883.
Mary Ann Girling claims that she writes to the dictation
of the Holy Spirit. If that be true, the Holy Ghost
does not possess much of the literary faculty, and is not
likely to distinguish himself as an author. Albeit, in the
foregoing, somebody has helped the Ghost very con
siderably with his spelling, as will be observed on com
paring the manifesto with an autograph letter which will
follow. What deep cavern in Tophet will awrait him who
had the presumption to correct the spelling of Omni
science ?
And now I have to deal with the lady who signs herself
“Jesus First and Last, Mary Ann Girling.” The vision
ary phase of mental aberration which has originated all
formulated religions is not extinct; and I make bold to
say that no better type of the founder of a religious sect
could be found in the whole range of history than the
seer of visions and dreamer of dreams who writes her
puerile rhapsodies from Tiptoe, Hordle, which, if Mrs.
Girling had only lived a few centuries earlier, instead of
being a hamlet that nobody has ever heard of, would
have been one of history’s hierarchical centres, like
Jerusalem, Mecca, or Benares.
The handwriting of Mrs. Girling (we have thirteen of
her autograph letters before us) is exactly of the order of
that of the Cat-and-Ladleites who, when I first began to
lay my hand upon the helm of this journalistic Argosy,
were wont to write to me to give me gratuitous instruc
tions as to how to edit, and who used to emphasise their
advice by the minatory clause that they would cease to
subscribe if I did not follow their directions. In short,
the handwriting of Mrs. Girling, the female part of
�8
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
Jehovah Nissi, is the handwriting of Sarah the maid
servant ; and, as all the world knows, the handwriting of
Sarah the maid-servant is that of a drunken spider who
has tumbled into the ink and staggered across the
foolscap, leaving his awful cryptographs behind him. If
Mrs. Girling be really “ the female part of God,” as she
asserts—and with quite as much warranty as the carpenter
of Nazareth asserted that he was the son of God—-bad
handwriting may possibly run in the whole family of
Father, Son, Ghost, and Girling. For I have observed
that handwriting frequently does run in families, all the
members of the family of Muggeridge, for instance,
writing well, and all the family of Higgins writing
execrably.
The spelling of the female part of God is most
accursed. But, as I subjoin a specimen, I will allow her
orthography to speak for itself. Some may ask why I
give such raving rubbish at all. Let me assure such that
there is much wisdom in giving it. Tame and turgid
though it be, inane and insane though it appear, the
epistolary correspondence of Female-part-of-God-Girling
is of deep significance to the psychological student, and
to him who is prepared to follow up the stream of Devo
tion till he find its inevitable source between the moun
tain peaks of Ignorance and Insanity.
I am well aware that I may be branded as sacrilegious
and irreverent when I state, as a mere psychological fact
quite remote from prejudice or bias, that Jesus Christ
himself belonged to precisely the same mental and moral
type as does Mrs. Girling. He shared with her the same
generous hullucinations, the same kind of irascible amia
bility, and the same kind of crass ignorance which rushes
forward to dogmatise and assert where knowledge pauses
to speculate and wonder. It is a far cry chronologically,
but certainly not ethnologically, between the seamless
garment of Jesus and the homely drugget of Girling—
between the haddock-fishers of Galilee and the rustics of
Tiptoe, Hordle; yet they are linked together by an un
broken chain of moral sympathy, an inexorable destiny.
Distance lends enchantment to the view, and Judea
sounds more sacred than Hampshire ; but which of them
is the more sacred, if we could take away alike the halo
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
9
of legend and romance from the tangled vines of the
one and the turnip-fields of the other? I have never
seen anything to lead me to infer that Jesus was not as
ignorant as Girling; and, if I could get hold of his real
letters (not his forged letter to Abgarus), assuming that
he could write at all, I question whether he would be
found to spell one whit better than Girling does. He
lived in an age of Ignorance; she lives in an age of
comparative Intelligence.
The flash of his fanatical
enthusiasm set fire to the dry tinder of surrounding credu
lity ; the blaze of her religious phrenzy fails to ignite the
damp brushwood of environing scepticism. Each has to
suffer according to the form and fashion of the time in
which they live—Girling is neglected; Christwas crucified.
Say you : “ But Jesus was of a higher type of intelli
gence than Girling.” I ask you to produce your evidence
to support your allegation. Christ, as we know him, is
only what his biographers make] of him. In the first
three gospels he is simply a well-meaning but uneducated
preaching mechanic; in the Fourth Gospel he developes
into a mystical Logos, a metaphysical shadow flung upon
the curtain of Neo-Platonism. Let the tiara of royalty,
the sceptre of empire, and the wealth and erudition take
Girling by the hand as they ultimately took Jesus, and
her voice will yet shake the welkin and her petticoat over
shadow the world. The original Jesus of the first three
Gospels has long been lost sight of. Like the victim in
ancient story, out of compliment, his warriors have flung
their shields upon him till they have crushed him to
death.
Scholarship has heaped her mountain of dry
bones upon the poor Galilean, who was no scholar ; and
preachers and commentators in thousands have woven
their esoterics and their subtleties round the name and
over the few recorded sayings of the simple-minded son
of Mary. Make it the interest of some Constantine and
some St. Augustine to do for Girling what they did for
Jesus, and see what Girlingism would be under the
purple of empire and the cowl of monasticism. If it
were the interests of even a single scholar, of the type of
our own Julian, to write learned notes and commentaries
on these illiterate effusions of Girling, and some bene
volent admirer were found who would build a Beetle
�IO
'THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
house and salary a Beetle, heaven only knows how or
when Girlingism would end. For some other learned
pundit would write to controvert Julian, and another
would write to reconcile the doctrines held respectively
by Julian and his opponent, and others in dozens,
especially if it paid as Christianity did, would rush into
the polemical conflict with all the thousand side-lights and
cross-fires of controversy. Meanwhile a few martyrs for
the isms insisted upon by certain of the leading dispu
tants would perish at the stake, and a hundred Secular
Reviews toiling for a hundred years would not rid the
world of Girlingism. Poor Jesus would simply open
wide his dark lustrous eyes and let fall his jaw in dumbfoundered astonishment at the subtlety and learning of
Augustine and Tertullian alone, never to speak of the
thousands of philosophers and divines who have explained
that which needed no explanation till it required ten
thousand explanations to explain the explanation. This
is the way religious systems are built up. Jesus would do
for the centre of one, so would Girling; and, if properly
manipulated, a good broom-stick would do nearly as
well as either.
Here is a letter, verbatim et literatim, from the Holy
Ghost through his amanuensis, Mary Ann :—
tiptoe Hordle near Lymington Hants.
Son beloved of the Lord
As you so kindly ofered to send the Lord £$. o. o
the Lord direct me to ask you if you have forgot to send it tohim
as God your Holy farther always expect when any thing is
Promised to him that his beloved children meen what they say
Or have you changed your mind and think as many do that it zj
better to use {Gods) silver and Gold to build Temples of stone and
Bricks and morter that can never returne the gratitude to him. for
they cannot ether see or hear or feel and yet thousands are expended
upon them dayly while the true and liveing Temples of God are left
to suffer the want of the common nesessaries of human Life
I writ this in Obedence to the true and holy spirit of god the
great farther of you all trusting the love of Honesty of hart
towards him whom you look for so goyfully will lead you to answer
it. for I love him to dearly to see him dishonerd by any meens that
can be Prevented and thinking it forgitfulness on your part in the
Multitude of thoughts and Business
Yours most respectfully
Mary An Girling
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
II
The Lord formerly had Mary, and “ the other Mary,”
and ever so many other Maries, one of whom was orna
mented in the inside with seven devils, and now he has
got “Ann the Word” and Mary An Girling. This last
“ An,” who is too frugal to waste two ris on her name,
is wonderfully useful to the Lord in looking after his petty
cash, as will be seen from the above epistle. It is
apparently no joke to owe the Lord ^5 when he commits
the collecting of it into the hands of An of Tiptoe,
Hordle. There are thirteen fearfully-written and terriblyspelt letters before me, and they are all about gentle
Jesus and this irrepressible ^5.
The “ Holy farther ” must be in rather low water when
he is permitting his female part, An, to kick up such a
fuss about the sum of ^5. Perhaps he is hard up for
some new pen-feathers for his left wing, or a good kid
glove for his right hand at which his son sits in such
glory, with a halo or hoop round his head. I hope my
Secular friend, to whose courtesy I am indebted for the
sight of the letters, sent on the money. It grieves me
to think of a penniless and destitute God trudging about
“ the sweet fields of Eden ” with dilapidated boots, and
his stockings not neighbours, and advising his female
part, An, to say, in the deep pathos of indigent sim
plicity : “ The Lord direct me to ask you if you have
forgot to send it to him.” The Omniscient does not
know whether the debtor has forgotten to pay, and wants
to know. Application is made to An to illumine the
ignorance of Omniscience.
An does not say how she is going to remit the money
to her poor destitute deity. Is there any ready way of
sending a crossed cheque from Tiptoe, Hordle, to
Heaven ? Possibly An herself may spend it in “ this
poor perishing world,” and, somehow or other, account
for it to the “ Holy farther ” when she goes aloft and
joins the “souls of just men made perfect” and the
sanctified beasts of the Apocalypse. “ He who giveth
to the poor lendeth to the Lord,” so possibly what is gin
for An may be gelt for Jehovah ; and no man knoweth
what glory awaits you in heaven if here on earth you
have given the poor a shilling to get drunk with. I have
paid in poor rates many a pound I could ill spare, and
�12
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
have thereby lent to the Lord. He will have a tidy
account to settle with me some day; but I understand
from the parson that the Lord has also some entries
against me, which it may be a trifle difficult for me to
square up, and which may occasion some dispute as to
the climate of my everlasting lodgings.
Meantime the painfully-impressive words, “ The Lord
direct me to ask you if you have forgot to send it to
him,” thrills the tenderest chord of my sympathy. I
must sell some back numbers of the Secular Review,
and send the proceeds at once to An of Tiptoe, Hordle,
with an urgent request that it may be immediately
forwarded to the kingdom of heaven. Is impecunious
and destitute Deity wandering about in the New Jerusalem
with ragged pants, that hardly cover his hurdies, that
he advises so urgently the collection of ^5 by his
glorious Mary An of Tiptoe, Hordle ?
One of these days he may present himself at the door
of the Lambeth Workhouse, and, when asked who he
is, may reply: “ I was your God till yesterday ; but I
am insolvent and ruined. I had outstanding debts to
the amount of ^5, and I entrusted the collection of the
same to my friend, Mary An, and she cannot get a stiver.”
We shall never thoroughly realise the significance ot
allowing things to come to such a pass till, some morning,
the earth stands stock-still, God no longer being in heaven
to keep it birling round with unremitting kicks from his
great toe.
The following account of his visit to Mrs. Girling has
been communicated to me by my friend Virtus :—
“ As you are dealing with religious dancing manias in
your ‘ At Random ’ notes, I may as well give you a short
account of what I saw and heard at the Shaker’s camp
at Hordle, near Lymington, in the New Forest, some
seven or eight years ago.
“ I may first mention that, although of late not much
has been heard of Mother Girling and her followers, yet
some few years back they were occasionally brought
prominently into public notice by their reverses and other
circumstances. The wolves, profiting by. a State-paid
system of absurdities and superstitions, not really less
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
IJ
contemptible, being jealous of the attractions offered by
these poor Shakers, did all they could to remove the
rivals by taking petty legal proceedings against them.
“ It was while on an autumn visit with friends at
Brockenhurst that my host there kindly proposed that
his son should drive me over to the Shakers’ camp on a
Sunday morning—a distance of six miles. Nearing the
place, we passed little parties, chiefly women, who were
also on their way to the Hordle camp for morning
worship, with whom my young friend and jarvey wag
cracked some very queer jokes, which were evidently
appreciated, and no less readily than rudely parried. All
this was, of course, without my approval.
“ Our journey was completed in about half an hour,
and I found within an enclosure adjoining the high road a
few slight erections, conspicuous among which was the
chapel. This was a wooden structure, but well propor
tioned and well constructed, and capable perhaps of
seating about 150 persons. At the further end was a
gallery or platform, reached by two little flights of stairs.
This was already well filled by about forty men, women,
and children, members of the camp, all looking clean
and decently dressed. Sitting together, with a very small
harmonium in their midst, were some fresh-coloured
and rather good-looking young women and several mensingers, the latter being of ages from about thirty to
forty-five. I was particularly struck with the apparently
intelligent expression of some of these men’s faces. I
had been told that a gentleman of the Isle of Wight—a
person of means—had recently joined the community,
leaving his wife and children behind him. The gallery,
then, was devoted to the members of the camp, the body
of the room to outside members and other worshippers.
Moveable seats, with railed backs, were placed upon the
floor, with a middle passage-way, and with space enough
in front of the stage for dancing, etc. We had not long
taken our places with the congregation of simple country
people assembled when proceedings commenced. The
general form of the service was much the same as that
usually followed at other conventicles. The singing—
very rude and primitive—was still far superior to similar
performances that I have many times heard at Methodist
�14
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
and other country Bethels—less split-throat and excru
ciating. The first hymn over, one of the men came to
the front and addressed a prayer to the Deity, presumed
to be present, in a most familiar fashion and in execrable
English.
“ But now another hymn, and Mother Girling steps
forward and gives out a text. During a rigmarole, ex
tending over three quarters of an hour, not the slightest
reference is made to the text. The whole thing is a
miserable effort to string together doggerel rhymes. If
the nonsense could be said to mean anything at all, it
amounted to this : ‘ We only are God’s people; yield to
my warnings and be saved, doubt and go to hell.’ To
say that I never heard anything so stupidly absurd,
rambling, and nonsensical would perhaps be saying too
much, remembering what I have heard during my time
from country Methodist locals. But, after about ten
minutes of this, the prophetess descended into the space
below, being carefully assisted by the man who had
prayed. She now appeared to be in a mesmerised state,
with her eyes closed. She groped her way slowly up the
narrow passage, turned into the opening in which my
friends and I sat, and stood for a considerable time, with
her petticoats so close to my knees to be anything
but agreeable.
She had evidently ‘ spotted ’ us, and
hoped to make some impression, probably having a
thought of our pockets. But Mrs. Girling had found
her way back to the platform, rhyming all the while, when
one of the girls appeared to have fallen into a kind of
swoon, setting up a most unearthly and unmusical howl
as she attempted to sing. Now, Mrs. Girling interprets
the gutteral and inarticulate sounds of the girl. This is
interrupted by another of the girls descending the stairs
and commencing to dance. A little old woman—an
outsider—springs forward, and, hugging the girl, joins in
the dance. This produces a most ridiculous and laugh
able effect j but it is not long continued before one of the
men descends and enters upon an extravagantly vigorous
performance. In an open letter to Mr. S. Morley, M.P.,
which appeared in the Secular Review of December 20th
last, I have alluded to this dance as a hornpipe; but it
was really a simple hob-nail dance, consisting of one
�THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
15
figure only, a bang of the left foot followed by a double
stroke with the right-heel and flat-foot.
During this
rough and noisy feat a sympathetic rustic near me said:
‘I’ve a know’den peep et op ber dree quarters of a
hower.’ This performance and the orthodox singing
and prayer brought up the close. The dancing did not
surprise me so much, as I understood in my early days
the diversion was more or less commonly practised by
the Ranters in my native county of Somersetshire.
Having to drive over six miles of very rough road to our
dinner, I was unable to seek any conversation either
with Mother Girling or any of her followers, which I
much regretted. She is a tall, spare woman, well up in
years, but looking (she was at that time) much younger
at a distance, having plenty of black hair, and this worn
over the neck at the back, and confined by neither
bonnet nor cap. How the camp is maintained I am
unable to say; but I presume that they are principally
supported by soft people, and, possibly, to an extent that
we should think scarcely credible; for what craze does
not find adherents ? Of the private and domestic rela
tions of the persons forming the camp I, of course,
cannot speak, except that they are said to disavow any
distinction of sex. There is neither male nor female in
Jesus Christ.
I ought to mention that during the
summer months the village and camp are enlivened by
parties coming from far and near in waggonettes and
vehicles of almost every kind, and that during this
more cheering season the doings at the services are of a
more vigorous character.”
And so goes round the whirligig of the world. If
Virtus had lived some eighteen centuries ago, and had
visited Christ at Capernaum instead of Girling at Hordle,
and had furnished a descriptive account like the fore
going, his would have been the guerdon of immortal
renown; the auriole of the saint would have blazed
round his head; canonised, if not, indeed, apotheosised,
millions of tongues would have invoked his name for
his intercessory help in their appeals to God; cathedrals
would be dedicated to his glory, and myriads of candles
would light up the splendour upon the thousand altars
consecrated to St. Minson of Tooting.
�16
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS, AND JUMPERS.
But far otherwise is the fate of our single-hearted friend
and his descriptive record. He went out into the wilder
ness to see a reed shaken with the wind. He saw “Jesus
First and Last, Mary Ann Girling;” but the day of
Jesuses is over : the old ones are dying, and the new
ones meet with neglect and derision. And the record
of Virtus simply reads like an account of a visit to a
crazy woman, instead of sounding like the rattle of sacred
thunder which should herald the epiphany of God.
Saints forfend that religion proper should ever die; but
it will flourish all the more majestically and sublimely
when theology and sacerdotalism are no more; when, in all
civilised lands, the religious dogmas and religious cere
monials of the past can be learnt only from volumes of anti
quarian lore, and by peering under the glass cases in
historical museums. Some antiquary may yet, in daring
metaphor, describe the religious section of his museum
as the umbilical cord of the world in utero.
Price Twopence.
Every Thursday.
THE
SECULAR
REVIEW:
A JOURNAL OF AGNOSTICISM.
EDITED BY SALADIN.
Order of your Newsagent, or send direct to the Publishers—W.
Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, London, E.C.
RECENT PAMPHLETS.
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London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The dancers, shakers, and jumpers, by Saladin
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 2 v. ; 17 cm.
Notes: Reprinted from the Secular Review. "By Saladin"[title page], the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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W. Stewart & Co.
Date
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[n.d.]
Identifier
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N581
N582
Subject
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Religious practice
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The dancers, shakers, and jumpers, by Saladin), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Dance
Dance-Religious Aspects
NSS
Shakers