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pamphlets
^or the Peop/e
No* 6
THE DEVIL
CHAPMAN COHEN
THE PIONEER PRESS
�The Devil
The Devil is one of the foundation-stones of historic
Christianity. Jesus Christ is another. God the
Father lingers in the rear, and in modern Christianity
hardly appears; while the Holy Ghost forms, natur
ally, a shadowy background. But the foundations of
Christianity are Jesus Christ and the Devil. To
gether they form the two halves of what is signifi
cantly known as Christian truth. The necessity for
Jesus Christ lies in the activity of the Devil. With
out him there would have been no Fall, no Scheme of
Redemption, no Plan of Salvation, and every human
being would have had to bear the consequences of his
or her actions, instead of first blaming the Devil for
his ill-deeds and then “ passing the buck ” onto Jesus.
Without the Devil there would have been no gospel
to preach, and no Christian Churches in which to
preach it; indeed, there is considerable Christian
authority for saying that without the Devil there
would have been no human beings either to preach
or to be preached at. The whole population of the
world would have remained at two, and although
the woman might have preached at the man, the
listening half of the population would hardly have
justified the use of the term “ congregation.” At
any rate, there would have been no excuse for, and
small profit in, making a collection.
The clergy have a great deal for which to thank the
Devil. He is really their greatest benefactor. If one
studies the history of early and medieval Christianity
the Devil is the most prominent character that is men
tioned.
A multitude of stories centre round the
Devil, and most of the prominent religious characters
appear to have been engaged in constant struggles
with him, often of a personal character. Cathedral
2
<
�3
sculptures figure devils very prominently, and Devil's
Bridges, etc., are numerous in all countries. One
religious authority places the number of devils at
work in the world as 7,405,926. Such arithmetical
exactitude is very impressive. Fear of the Devil has
been responsible for very many of the benefactions
from which the Churches have benefited. The
Christian clergy have justified their existence by their
fight against the influence of the Devil, and have ex
plained their failures by his ceaseless activities. It is
one of the scandals of latter day theology that so little
is now said about him. It is monstrous that in the
whole of Christendom not a single monument has
ever been raised to the Devil in recognition of the
help he has been to the Church. It is the supreme
exhibition of Christian ingratitude.
There is the highest Christian authority for saying
that both Jesus Christ and the Devil came from the
same “ home town.” Jesus came from heaven, and
after a short and exciting stay on earth returned
thereto. The Devil also began his career in heaven,
but was “ cast out,” after which he appeared to have
enjoyed a free and wide run on earth. He is respect
fully referred to in the Bible as one of the “ sons of
God,” and appears in heaven discussing various
matters with his father. It was at one of these gather
ings that God entered into a controversy with Satan,
and a kind of wager was agreed upon as to whether
“ my servant Job ” could be weaned from his allegi
ance. Job was not consulted on the subject, and
from God’s point of view came well out of the test;
but while Job vindicated his character for steadfast
ness and God won the wager, it is quite evident that
in the discussion Satan came out on top. God was
good on boils, but weak in argument.
It may be noted that devils are common figures
in most mythologies. In primitive religions they are
THE DEVIL
�THE DEVIL
4
not so much devils as members of the numerous com
pany of gods, each ruling his particular sphere, as
princes of so many independent provinces. At a later
stage, when mankind has created definite categories
of good and bad, inferior and superior, devils are
often no more than degraded gods, who sink to a
secondary position as a result of conquest. They are
deposed kings who have been banished to another
region, but with their power little diminished and still
•bearing marks of their previous greatness. Even the
nimbus which surrounds the head of a Christian saint,
and in the old biblical pictures, of the deity, is
retained in the horns that decorate the head of Satan.
When a man is born in the purple, the “ sacredness ”
of kings will cling to him for a long while.
That the Christian devils were degraded gods was
the view of that great Christian, Justin Martyr; in
this he was following the lead of St. Paul who said
that the gods whom the pagans worshipped were
devils. But although some of the early Christian
writers modified this theory, and substituted the
Jewish rabbinical belief that devils were fallen angels,
there was no actual denial of the pagan gods as real
existences Until towards the end of the seventeenth
century. A Dutch author was the first to treat them
as completely fictitious. His book was rendered into
English by Mrs. Aphra Behn, the well-known play
wright, who appears to have had a decided streak of
heresy in her composition. But such a thing as deny
ing the existence of the pagan gods never appears
to have entered the heads of the early Christians.
They even used them as an explanation of the then
■unquestioned and unquestionable likeness between
the Christian and the Pagan doctrines, ceremonies
and symbols. Christian writers explained that the
Devil knew Christianity was coming, and in order to
discredit it he invented certain doctrines, and estab-
�5
fished them in the world before Christ came. It was
a case of “ queering the pitch,” a practice well known
in the political world of to-day.
It is only within recent years -that some leading
Christians have denied the existence of a personal
devil—but, it must be remembered that many leading
Protestants still assert his existence, and the Roman
Catholic Church affirms it as an unquestionable
dogma. Founders of sects such as Wesley, preachers
-such as Spurgeon, and a host of lesser lights, would
have considered a repudiation of a personal devil as
equivalent to a confession of Atheism. After all, hell
« part of the historic teachings of the Christian
Church as a whole, and hell implies devils just as
devils imply hell. It is also impossible to accept the
Jesus of the New Testament without also accepting a
personal devil. Jesus had personal conflicts with the
devils of the New Testament, and1 plainly accepted
as beyond doubt that all disease was caused by
devils. The clergy of the Church of England and of
the Roman Church are all endowed with the power to
cast out devils. Leave the devil out and it is impos
sible to understand a very large part of Christian
history.
We are too apt in this matter to take half-hearted
and humane believers as representative of Christians,
as a whole. They are not. There are millions of
believers in this country who still believe in a
personal devil and a literal hell. Their outlook is
as barbarous and as brutal as that of the primitive
Christians. Even with those Churches that have
ceased to preach what Harold Frederic called
“ straight flat-footed hell,” there is no definite and
explicit rejection of the belief. And there would be
a holy row in the Churches if a clear official repudia
tion of the doctrine was forthcoming. The clergy try
to keep their hold on the more backward by carefully
THE DEVIL
�6
THE DEVIL
chosen language that implies a belief in hell, and also
hope to retain the good-will of the more enlightened
by saying nothing about it.
But consider this, which up to about twenty years
ago, formed part of the Wesleyan Methodist
Catechism, and was written for “ children of tender
years.”
What sort of a place is hell?
A dark and bottomless pit, full of fire and brim
stone.
How will the wicked be punished there?
Their bodies will be tormented with fire, and their
souls by a sense of the wrath of God.
How long will their torments last?
The torments will last for ever and ever.
Or this from a Roman Catholic pamphlet, one written
for “ Children and young persons,” and published at'
one penny. It describes to a child what a room in
hell is like : —
Look into this room.
What a dreadful place it is.
The roof is red hot, the walls are red hot, the floor is
like a thick sheet of red iron.
See, on the middle of
that red-hot floor stands a girl. . . .
Look, she says(to the devil), at my burnt and bleeding feet.
Let me
go off this burning floor for one moment. . . .
The
devil answers her question. . . . No, not for one single
moment during the never-ending eternity of years shall
you ever leave this red-hot floor.
There is plenty more of this kind of thing published
by the criminals (I use the word advisedly), respon
sible for the essay, but I will return to the general
subject of hell in another pamphlet. All that it is
necessary to note now is that this was the common
doctrine of Christianity for many, many centuries.
The brutal savagery of it almost passes belief. Here
is a specimen from a Christian writer of the sixth
century, St. Fulgentius : —
Little children who have begun to live in their mother’s
womb and have there died, or who, having been born',
�THE DEVIL
7
have passed away from the world without the sacrament
of holy baptism administered in the name of Father, Son
and Holy Ghost, must be punished by the eternal torment
of undying fire.
And a greater writer than the one just cited, Peter
Lombard, wrote that “ the elect shall go forth . . .
to see the torments of the impious, and seeing this
t they will not be affected with grief, but will be
satiated with joy at the sight of the unutterable
calamity of the impious.”
Let us go to the devil, or rather let us get back u
him, although his company would certainly be pre
ferable to these “ fathers of the Church.” One
might get along with the devil with dignity; it would
be impossible to be with these “ Saints ” without
degradation. As the old lady remarked to the parson
who was trying to cheer her last moments with
thoughts of heaven, “ Heaven is all right for climate,
but hell is the place for good company.”
In many plays and tales the Devil appears as a
polished scholar.
But the pamphlet for children
from which I have just cited, presents us with the
following description of him: —
St. Francis saw him.
He was sitting on a long beam
which passed through the middle of hell.
His feet went
down into the lowest depths of hell.
They rested on
the. floor of hell.
They were fastened with great heavy
chains.
These chains were fixed to an immense ring
in the floor.
His hands were chained up to the roof.
One of his hands were turned up to heaven to blaspheme
against God. His other hand was stretched out pointing
to the lowest depths of hell. His tremendous and horrible
head was raised up on high and touched the roof. From his
head came two immense horns ... his enormous mouth
was wide open.
Out of it there was running a river of
which gave no light, but a most abominable
smell. ...
Round his neck was a collar of red-hot iron..
A burning chain tied him round the middle. The ugliness
of his face was such that no man or devil could "bear
it. . . .
One of the Saints who saw the Devil said she
�8
THE DEVIL
would rather be burnt for a thousand years than look at
the devil for one moment.
St. Francis saw him\ That guarantees the accuracy
of the description.
But most presentations of the devil are more
flattering than this one, written for children. Uncon
sciously most of the Christian biographers of the
devil have borne 'unwilling, perhaps unconscious,
testimony to his greatness and intelligence. They
have glorified God officially, but they have given their
real praise to the Devil. Thus Martin Luther refers
to “ the wonderful cleverness displayed by knowing
Satan against .poor half-witted God.” (Michelet’s
Life of Satan, Bonn’s Ed., p. 249.) Certainly, in
most of the contests between Satan and God, Satan
appears to have scored.
According to Christian theologians God made man
for his own glory. Also according to Christian theo
logians the majority of those whom God made for
himself go straight to hell and spend their best time
in serving Satan’ before going there. . God has to be
content with the fragments of the feast he prepared
for himself.
St. Augustine described the whole
human race as one damned batch and mass of per
dition.” (Cited by Alger, Critical History of the
Doctrine of a Future Life, p. 398). St. Chrysostomdoubted if of the 100,000 inhabitants of Antioch, 100
would be saved. Du Moulin, a writer of the seven
teenth century, was certain that from the time of
Adam, not more than one in a million would escape
hell. Jonathan Edwards was equally emphatic on the
limited number that would escape damnation. And
God made man for his own glory I As Martin Luther
said, “ Poor half-witted God! ” The world he made
becomes the playground of his greatest competitor.
The creatures he created for himself spend their time
in paying service to his enemy. God cast Satan out
�THE DEVIL
9
of heaven, but how much wiser it would have been to
have kept him there so that he might have had an
eye on him. It looks as though the evangelical cry
of “ Get right with God ! ” ought to give way to
“ Get right with the DevilT ”
Perhaps there is some recognition of the wisdom of
doing this in the comparatively respectful way in
which common usage treats the devil. One notes the
freely popular manner in which the name of God is
treated, from the “ Gawd blimey ” of the street to
the “ swelpmegawd ” of the police court. There is,
of course, the almost equally popular phrase, “ What
the devil ! ’ but that merely expresses uncertainty
as to what is likely to happen, or puzzlement as to
what the devil will do next. But there is a distinct
indictment implied in the common expression “ Good
God,” when one is told of a disaster at sea or an
earthquake. Such a saying as “ Trust in God, but
keep your powder dry,” is another illustration of the
riskiness of concluding That God will do the right
thing at the right time.
There is, on the other side of the ledger, such say
ings as “ having a devil of a time,” which implies a
rather jolly time. No religious writer that I know of
has ever spoken of having a jolly time with God.
There is also a popular saying that “ The Devil
looks after his own,” and it is believed he does this
in this world. But it is quite clear, from the nature
of the petitions to God that no one can rely upon him
doing what his followers would like him to do. It
really looks as though mankind has possibly been
backing the wrong horse,” and that we ought to
have paid greater attention to the devil than we have
one. Moncure Conway, in his Demonology and
Devil Lore, speaks of a lady who taught her children
always to rise and bow when the name of the devil was
mentioned. She explained that she thought it safer.
�10
THE DEVIL
We are not dealing with the natural, but the
Christian, origin of the Devil, and, according to the
Book of Revelation, he began his existence as one
of the chief angels in heaven. But there was “ war in
heaven,” and the revolt was led by the being whom
God had, with very questionable judgment, selected
as his commander-in-chief. In the end Satan lost the
war—and common sense suggests that God should
have treated Satan as the Allies did Napoleon, after
the return from Elba. Instead of that, he was given
a free pass to go where he liked and do what he
liked, and a new residence was prepared for him, the
character of which Hoes not appear to have hurt
either Satan or his followers, but was to be eternally
uncomfortable for men and women.
Satan was
really serving God as chief gaoler.
Two charges are, either directly or indirectly,
brought by the Christian Church against the Devil.
The first is that he was ambitious and wished men to
worship him. But ambition, while it may lead a man
into dubious paths, is not a very serious crime; any
person of moderate intelligence might get weary of
a place where the only form of dissipation appears to
be eternally singing songs of the Lamb. But the
Christian God does not like competition, and Satan’s
“ better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” was
bound to create friction.
For Satan to seek worship was a more serious
offence. It hit at both God and the Church. For
while the Church flourishes on belief, the gods live
on worship. All the gods of the past have lived upon
worship. While they were worshipped the gods of
Egypt, of Rome, of Greece, were fine, lusty fellows,
who gave their followers all that the Christian God
gives his worshippers. These gods of the ancient
world sent rain and gave their followers good health;
they answered prayers; they sent their faithful wor
�II
shippers to a prepared heaven and their enemies
to a prepared hell. But as man’s worship declined
so the objects of the worship declined also. Gods
are fragile things, they may be killed by a whifi
of science or a dose of common sense. They thrive
on servility and shrink before independence. They
feed upon worship as kings do upon flattery. That
is why the cry of gods at all times is “ "Worship us or
we perish.” A dethroned monarch may retain some
of his human dignity while driving a taxi foi- a living.
But a god without his thunderbolt is a poor object.
The second charge against Satan is one that reflects
credit upon him and discredit on the Christian
Church. Unconsciously the Church presented the
devil as the inspirer of knowledge, the fount of
human improvement. The first offence after the
creation of man, which the Bible attributes to Satan,
was that of inducing man to seek knowledge and
acquire independence. God had forbidden Adam and
Eve to eat of the tree of knowledge. Men were to
grow up as ignorant as cows and as docile as sheep.
And but for the devil they might have lived “ accord
ing to plan.” It was the devil that first set man on
the path of knowledge. And of all the leading figures
of the Christian mythology Satan is the most im
pressive. He is the hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost,
the central figure of Goethe’s Faust, and the most
interesting in Byron’s Vision of Judgment.
In most cases advances in scientific knowledge
were attributed to the influence of the devil. The art
and science and philosophy of ancient Greece came
undei the Christian fear of being due to the inspira
tion of the devil.
Scientific medicine was mainly
inspired by the devil because it interfered with the
traffic of the Church in miracle cures; and with St.
Gall curing epilepsy, St. Blaise curing sore throats,
St. Gervase curing rheumatism, and a special saint
THE DEVIL
�12
THE DEVIL
allotted to each disease, the inquisitiveness of medical
men was obviously a piece of Atheistic impertinence.
The printing press was an invention of the devil.
It was said that Copernicus was inspired by the devil
to teach his revival of the old Greek astronomy. In
oculation against smallpox was an invention of the
devil; part of the oppositon was that smallpox was
sent by God so that any attempt to prevent it was
inspired by Satan. The same objection was later
brought against the use of chloroform in the case of
women in child-birth, the objection here being that
God had ordained that women should bear children
in suffering, and any attempt to evade this could only
be inspired by the devil. Chemistry was clearly due
:to the same source of origin. So was the attempt to
prove that geological phenomena owed their origin
to known natural causes. When I was a youth, the
Prime Minister of England, W. E. Gladstone, was
denouncing the theory of evolution as an attempt to
turn God out of his own universe, an obvious device
of the devil.
The list need not be prolonged; there is not a single
advance in which the interests of the Christian
Church were threatened, and this at one time covered
everything not expressly sanctioned by the Bible and
the Church, that was not put down to the credit of
the devil. The things not put to the credit of the
devil were the rack, the thumbscrew, the burning of
heretics at the stake, the slaughter of thousands of
old women and children for witchcraft—these and
similar things were admittedly done to carry out
“ God’s will.”
If we are guided by Christian records we are war
ranted in considering the devil as the patron saint of
intelligence, invention, and discovery. The Church
never ceased to dwell upon his cunning, his mental
alertness, his readiness to induce men to tread new
�13
and unfamiliar paths. M?en like Bishop Barnes, who
profess to believe in the adventures of science, and
who somehow manage to still believe in a God, ought
to pray daily, “ Thank God for the Devil! ” With
out the devil, man might have been fit for heaven,
but not for anywhere else.
I only know of one case in which the Christian
Church has persistently cast discredit on the intelli
gence of Satan. This is the ever-recurring instance
in which the Church has depicted him as taking extra
ordinary means, and paying an enormous price in
order to capture the soul of a monk or a priest.
After all, there should be some kind of relation
between the value of the object purchased and the
price paid.
Robert Buchanan rightly made Satan say (in his
The Devil’s Case): —
THE DEVIL
In spite of the Almighty,
I have leavened its afflictions,
Teaching men the laws of Nature,
Wisdom, Love and Self-control.
This I have achieved entirely,
By the very means forbidden—
At the first by the Almighty—
Teaching men to see and know.
I’m the father of all Science,—
Master-builder, stock-improver,
First authority on drainage,
Most renowned in all the arts.
While the priests have built their Churches,
To a God who does not heed them,
I have fashioned decent dwellings,
Public hospitals and baths.
Thus for ages after ages,
I, the Devil, have drained the marshes,
Cleansed the cesspools, taught the people,
Like a true progressionist.
By the living soul within me, ■
I have conquered—tho’ for ages
I have been most grossly libelled
By the foolish race of mortals.
�14
THE DEVIL
A greater than Buchanan, Carducci, in his Hymn
to Satan, makes Satan say: —
I animate all who fight against servitude and
somnolence. The heroes and martyrs of liberty and pro■ gress in every age have drunk of the strength of my
spirit.
I inspire the revolter, the scorner, the sceptic,
the satirist. I still distribute the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge.
I am the soul of the world.
The fire of
my inspiration may consume, but it gives unspeak
able rapture.
I am the Prometheus of the universe,
and keep it from stagnating under the icy hand of
power.
Milton, Goethe and Byron made me the hero of
their greatest poems, and felt my power in despite of
themselves.
Burns spoke of me with a tenderness
he never displayed towards God.
Wits and humorists
own my sway.
I moved the minds of Aristophanes
and Lucian, of Erasmus and Rabelais, and through
the pen of Voltaire I shattered the mental slavery of
Europe. I am the lightning of the human mind.
I level thrones and altars, and annihilate binding customs.
With the goad of a restless aspiration I urge
men on, until they outgrow faith and fear, until the
•Slave stands erect before the Tyrant and defies his
curse.
But just as mankind is indebted to the Devil for the
development of the thirst for knowledge, so the
Church owes him all its power and the larger part of
its wealth. Fear of hell is responsible for a much
larger proportion of gifts and legacies to the Church
than is love of heaven. The only thing that could
possibly have made heaven worth entering was that
there was a hell to keep out of. It was for the sake of
securing release from purgatory, that most of the
legacies fell to the Church, and if the number of this
species of legacy has been fewer in recent times, it is
because the fear of hell has waned. The Church very
early seized upon hell as a powerful weapon for its
enrichment, and the following from Dr. G. G.
Coulton’s Medieval Studies, is worth noting in this
connexion: —
�THE DEVIL
15
Apart from the very small minority who were rich
enough to make written wills, every man was
obliged to dispose of his property on his death-bed by
word of mouth, in the presence of the parish priest.
Let us put ourselves for a moment in the dying man's
place. Whatever else the poor wretch may believe or
disbelieve of hell and purgatory he has never been allowed
to doubt. . . . Whenever he entered his parish church,
there stood the ghastly picture of the Last Judgment
staring down on him from the walls—blood and fire and
devils in such pitiless realism that, when they come to
light nowadays, even sympathetic restorers are often fain
to cover them again under decent whitewash.
A picture
of that kind, seen once or twice a week for fifty years,
is indelibly branded into the soul of the dying man, and
however little he may have allowed these things to influence
the conduct of his life, however deliberately he may have
overreached and cheated and robbed in his generation to
scrape his little hoard together, here on his death-bed he
has at least the faith of a devil—he believes and trembles.
He knows that gifts to the Church are universally held
to be one of the surest preservatives against the pains of
purgatory; he has even seen men burned at the stake for
denying a truth so essential to the Roman Catholic creed.
What wonder then if death-bed legacies to the clergy and
to the churches became so customary that the absence of
such pious gifts was taken for proof presumptive of heresy,
and that in some districts the dying man was compelled
as a matter of course to leave a third of his goods to the
Church. Moreover, this laudable custom, when once
established, would exercise a practically binding fore® over
the written wills, which were themselves also invalid until
they had been duly “ proved ” in the Church courts,
(pp. 135-6).
At the hands of the Christian Churches the Devil
has had what the Americans call a “ raw deal.” For
centuiies this historic figure, the subject of sculp
ture, song and story, has not a single monument in
any of the Churches, which without him would never
have been. Man’s ingratitude to man is said to be
great enough to make angels, weep. But what is this
compared with the ingratitude of the Church to the
greatest of its benefactors ?
�l6
THE DEVIL
But ingratitude brings its nemesis. The devil and
God are the components of a Siamese twin. Neither
has any existence apart from the other. In denying
the existence of the one, Christians have helped to
kill the other. If there need to be no fear of hell,
people may well ask what is the attraction of heaven ?
Gods and devils were born together.
Gods and
devils will die together.
PAMPHLETS FOR THE PEOPLE
By CHAPMAN COHEN
1. Did Jesus Christ Exist?
2. Morality Without God.
3. What is the Use of Prayer?
4. Christianity and Woman.
5. Must We Have a Religion ?
6. The Devil.
7. What Is Freethought ?
8. Gods and Their Makers.
9. Giving ’em Hell.
10. The Church’s Fight for the Child.
11. Deity and Design.
12. What is the Use of a Future Life?
13. Thou shalt not suffer a Witch to Live.
14. Freethought and the Child.
15. Agnosticism or ... ?
16. Atheism.
17. Christianity and Slavery.
Other Pamphlets in this Series to be published shortly
Twopence Each; Postage One Penny.
ZsswecZ for the Secular Society Limited, and
Printed and Published by
The Pioneer Press (G-. W. Foote & Co., Ltd.),
2 & 3, Furnival Street, London, E.C.4,
ENGLAND.
�
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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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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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The devil
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Cohen, Chapman [1868-1954]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 16 p. ; 18 cm.
Series title: Pamphlets for the People
Series number: No. 6
Notes: Published for the Secular Society. Publisher's series list on back page. Tentative date of publication from KVK. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Pioneer Press
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[1910?]
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N142
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Devil
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English
Devil-Christianity
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CHAPMAN COHEN
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MORALITY
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��Pamphlets
for the People
No. 2
MORALITY
WITHOUT
GOD
CHAPMAN COHEN
THE PIONEER PRESS
��Morality Without God
i.
Christianity is what is called a “revealed” religion. That
is, God himself revealed that religion to man. In other
religions man sought God—some god—and eventually
found him, or thought he did. In the case of Christianity
God sought man and revealed himself to him. The revela
tion, judging by after events, was not very well done, for
although a book made its appearance that was said to
have been dictated or inspired by God so that man might
know his will, yet ever since mankind has been in some
doubt as to what God meant when he said it. Evidently
God’s way of making himself known by a revelation is
not above criticism. There seems a want of sense in giving
man a revelation he could not understand. It is like
lecturing in Greek to an audience that understands nothing
but Dutch.
What was it God revealed to man? He did not reveal
science. The whole structure of physical science was built
up very gradually and tentatively by man. He did not
teach man geology, or astronomy, or chemistry, or biology.
He did not teach him how to overcome disease, or its
nature and cure. He did not teach him agriculture, or
how to develop a wild grass into the life nourishing wheat.
He did not teach man how to drain a marsh or how to dig
a canal so that he might carry water where it was needed.
He did not teach him arithmetic or mathematics. He
taught him none of the arts and sciences. Man had no
revelation that taught him how to build the steam engine,
or the aeroplane, or the submarine, the telegraph or the
wireless. All these and a thousand other things which we
regard as indispensable, and without which civilization
would be impossible, man had to discover for himself.
There is not a Christian parson who would to-day say that
3
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
God gave these things to man. That, perhaps, is not quite
true. Some of the clergy will say that God gave every
thing to man, inasmuch as he let him find them out. But
at any rate none of the things I have named is said to
have been revealed to man. He had to discover or invent
the lot. And in inventing them or discovering them he
behaved just as he might have behaved had he never heard
of God at all.
What was there left for God to give man? Well, it is
said, he gave man morality. He gave man the ten com
mandments. He told him he must not steal, he must not
commit murder, he must not bear false witness; he told
children they must honour their fathers and their mothers,
but somehow he forgot the very necessary lesson that
parents ought also to honour their children. He mixed up
with these things the command that people should honour
him, and he was more insistent upon that than upon any
thing else. Not to honour him was the one unforgivable
crime. But, and this is the important thing, while there
is no need for an inspired arithmetic or an inspired geo
metry, while there was no inspired chemistry or geology,
there had to be, apparently, an inspired morality, because
without God moral laws would be without authority, and
decency would disappear from human society.
Now that, put bluntly, lies behind the common state
ment that morality depends upon religious belief. It is
not always put quite so plainly as I have put it—very
absurd things are seldom put plainly—but it is put very
plainly by the man in the street and by the professional
evangelist. It is also put in another way by those people
who delight in telling us what blackguards they were till
Christ got hold of them, and it is put in expensive volumes
in which Christian writers and preachers wrap up the
statement in such a way that to the unwary it looks as
though there must be something in it, and at least it is
sufficiently unintelligible to look as though it were good
sound theological philosophy.
4
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
Is the theory inherently credible? Consider what it
means. Are we to believe that if we had never received
a revelation from God, or even if there were no belief
in God, a mother would never have learned to love her
child, men and women would never have loved each other,
men would never have placed any value upon honesty or
truthfulness, or loyalty? After all we have seen an animal
mother caring for its young, even to the extent of risking
its life for it. We have seen animals defend each other
from a common enemy, and join together in running down
prey for a common meal. There is a courting time for
animals, there is a mating time, and there is a time how
ever brief when the animal family of male, female and
young exist. All this happened to the animals without
God. Why should man have to receive a revelation before
he could reach the moral stage of the higher animal life?
Broadly, then, the assertion that morality would never
have existed for human beings without belief in a God
or without a revelation from God is equal to saying that
man alone would never have discovered the value of being
honest and truthful or loyal. He would not even have
had such terms as good and bad in his vocabulary, for
the use of those words implies a moral judgment, and
there would have been no such thing—at least, so we are
told.
I am putting the issue very plainly, because it is only
by avoiding plain speech that the Christian can “get away”
with his monstrous and foolish propositions. I am saying
in plain words what has been said by thousands upon
thousands of preachers since Paul laid down the principle
that if there was no resurrection from the dead, “let us eat
and drink for to-morrow we die”.
Sometimes the theory I have been stating is put in a
way that throws a flood of light on the orthodox conception
of morality. It is so glaringly absurd to say that without
religion man would not know right from wrong, that it
is given a very slight covering in the expression, “destroy
5
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
religion and you remove all moral restraints”. Restraints!
That expression is indeed a revelation. To the orthodox
Christian morality stands for no more than a series of
restraints, and restraints are unpleasant things, because they
prevent a man doing what he would like to do. It is acting
in defiance of one’s impulses that makes one conscious
of “restraints”. A pickpocket in a crowd is restrained by
the knowledge that there is a policeman at his elbow7. A
burglar is restrained from breaking into a house by hearing
the footsteps of a policeman. Each refrains from doing as
he would like to do because he is conscious of restraints.
It may be God; it may be a policeman. God is an un
sleeping policeman—I do not say an unbribable one,
because the amount of money given to his representatives
every year, the Churches that are built or endowed in the
hopes of “getting right with God”, totals a very con
siderable sum.
From this point of view, what are called moral rules
are treated much as one may treat the regulation that one
must not buy chocolates after a certain hour in the evening.
The order is submitted to because of the “sanctions” that
may be applied if we do not. So to the type of Christian
with whom we are dealing the question of right or wrong
is entirely one of coercion from without. If he disobeys
he may be punished, if not here, then hereafter. He asks,
“Why should a man impose restraints on himself if there
is no future life in which he is to be rewarded or punished?
Why not enjoy oneself and be done with it?” On this
view a drunkard may keep sober from Monday morning
till Friday night on the promise of a good “drunk” on
Saturday. But in the absence of this prospect he may say,
paraphrasing St. Paul, “If there be no getting drunk on
Saturday, why should we keep sober from Monday to
Friday? If there is to be no drunkenness on Saturday,
then let us get drunk while we may, for the day cometh
when there will be no getting drunk at all”.
But all this is quite wrong. The ordinary man is not
conscious of restraint when he behaves himself in a decent
6
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
manner. A mother is not conscious of restraint when she
devotes herself to nursing her sick child, or goes out to work
to supply it with food. A man who is left in the house of
a friend is not conscious of restraint when he refrains from
pocketing the silver, or when he does not steal a purse that
has been left on the mantelpiece. A person sent to the
bank to cash a cheque does not feel any restraint because
he returns with the money. The man who is conscious
of a restraint when he does a decent action is not a “good”
man at all. He is a potential criminal who does not com
mit a crime only because he is afraid of being caught. And
when he is caught the similarity of the Christian frightened
into an outward decency and the detected pickpocket with
the policeman’s hand on his shoulder is made the more
exact by the cry of, “O Lord be merciful to me a miserable
sinner”, in the one case, and “It’s a fair cop” in the
other.
The religious theory of mortality simply will not do. It
turns what is fundamentally simple into a “mystery”, and
then elevates the mystery into a foolish dogma. It talks at
large of the problem of evil, when outside theology no
such problem exists. The problem of evil is that of re
conciling the existence of wrong with that of an all-wise
and all-good God. It is the idea of God that introduces
the conundrum. The moral problem is not how does
man manage to do wrong, but how does he find out what
is right? When a boy is learning to ride a bicycle the
problem is not how to fall off, but how to keep on. We
can fall off without any practice. So with so many oppor
tunities of doing the wrong thing the moral problem is
how did man come to hit on the right one, and to make
the treading of the right road to some extent automatic?
But in the philosophy of orthodox Christianity man is a
potential criminal, kept from actual criminality only from
fear of punishment or the expectation of reward in a future
life. If the Christian teacher of morals does not actually
mean this when he says that without the belief in God no
such thing as “moral values” exists, and that if there is
7
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
no after-life where rewards and punishments follow, moral
practice would not endure, then he is more than mistaken;
he is a deliberate liar. Fortunately for the world,
Christians, lay and clerical, are better than their creed.
11.
We are back again with the old and simple issue of the
natural versus the supernatural. This is one of the oldest
divisions in human thought, and there is no logical com
promise between them. Morality either has its foundations
in the natural or in the supernatural. In asserting the first
alternative I do not mean to imply that there is a morality
in nature at large. There is not. Nature takes no more
heed of our moral rules and judgments than it does of
our tastes in art or literature. A man is not blessed with
good health because he is an example of a lofty morality,
nor is he burdened with disease because he is a criminal
in thought and act. Nature is neither moral nor immoral.
Such terms are applicable only when there is conscious
action to a given end. Nature is amoral, that is, it is with
out morality. The common saying that nature “punishes”
us or “rewards” us for this or that is merely a picturesque
way of stating certain things; it has no literal relation to
actual fact. In nature there are no rewards or punishments,
there are only actions and consequences. We benefit if we
act in one way; we suffer if we act in another. That is
the natural fact; there is no ethical quality in natural
happenings. Laws of morals are human creations; they
are on all fours with “laws” of science—that is, they are
generalizations from experience.
So morality existed in fact long before it was defined
or described in theory. Man did not first discover the
laws of physiology in order to realize the need for eating
or breathing, to digest food or to inhale oxygen. Nor did
the rules, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, etc.,
first make stealing and killing wrong. A moral law makes
8
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
explicit in theory what is implicit in fact. The fact creates
the rule; it is not the rule that creates the fact.
Non-recognition of this simple truth is mainly respon
sible for the rubbish that is served up by so many teachers
of ethics, and also for the unintelligent attack on ethics
by those who, because they are, often enough, dissatisfied
with existing standards of moral values, feel justified in
denouncing moral values altogether. As we shall see
later, moral rules stand to human society pretty well as
laws of physiology do to the individual organism. They
constitute the physiology of social life, with the distinction
that whatever rules we have must be modified in form
from time to time to meet changing circumstances.
Let us feel our way gradually, and in as simple a manner
as possible. We begin with the meaning of two words,
“good” and “bad”. What is their significance? There
are many religious writers and many of those who aim
at founding a religion of ethics—as though the association
of religion with moral teaching had not already done
sufficient harm in the world-—who speak of certain actions
as being good in themselves, and who profess a worship
of the “Good” as though it were a substitute for “God”.
There are others who puff themselves out with a particu
larly foolish passage from Tennyson that to follow right
because it’s right “were wisdom in the scorn of conse
quence”, and there is a very misleading sentence cited from
the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, expressing his “awe” at
man’s moral sense. We should always be on our guard
when the sayings of great men become very popular. It
is long odds that they embody something that it not very
wise, or that its wisdom has been lost in the popularization.
It should be very obvious that it is the height of stupidity
to do things in “scorn of consequence”, since it is the
consequences of actions that give them their quality of
goodness or badness. If getting drunk made people happ;er,
better, and wiser, would anyone consider drunkenness a
bad thing? In such circumstances the moral rule would
be “Blessed is he that gets drunk”, and the more drunken
9
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
he was, the better the man. If we can picture any actions
that are without consequences, they would not come within
the scope of morals at all.
The first point to remember is that there is no such
thing as good in the abstract. A thing is good in relation
to its consequences, or as it realizes the end at which we
are aiming. Tennyson was talking nonsense. These ethical
and religious philosophers who “blather” about the
“reality” of good in itself, are talking nonsense. It is not
possible to do right in scorn of consequences because it
is the consequences that make the action either good or
bad. It may be unpleasant or dangerous to do what is
right, and we admire the one who does right in such cir
cumstances, but this does not affect our standard of value.
It must also be remembered when we are seeking a
natural basis for morals, that—if the teleological language
may be permitted—nature requires but one thing of all
living creatures. This is efficiency. The “moral” quality
of this efficiency does not matter in the least. A Church
without a lightning conductor is at a disadvantage with a
brothel that possesses one. A man who risks his life in a
good cause has, other things equal, no advantage over a
man who risks his life in a bad one. Leave on one side
this matter of efficiency and there is not the slightest
attention paid to anything that we consider morally worthy
in the organism that survives.
Finally, efficiency in the case of living beings is to be
expressed in terms of adaption to environment, a fish to
water, an air-breathing animal to land, a carnivorous
animal to its capacity to stalk its prey, a vegetable feeder
to qualities that enable it to escape the attack of the
carnivora, and so forth. An animal survives as it is able
to adapt itself, or as it becomes adapted to its environment.
It is well to bear in mind this principle of efficiency,
because while what constitutes efficiency varies from time
to time, the fact of its being the main condition determining
survival remains true whether we are dealing with organic
structure or with mental life.
10
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
Now if we take ethical terminology, it is plain that the
language used implies a relation, and one of a very definite
kind. The part of the environment to which these terms
are related is that of other and like individuals. Kindness,
truthfulness, justice, mercy, honesty, etc., all imply this.
A man by himself—if we can picture such a thing—could
not be kind; there would be no one to whom to be kind.
He could not be truthful; there would be none to whom
he could tell a lie. He could not be honest, or generous,
or loyal; there would be none to whom these qualities
would have any application. Every moral quality implies
the existence of a group of which an individual is a
member. And as the group enlarges so moral qualities
take on a wider application. But this cardinal fact, that
ethical qualities, whether they be good or bad, have no
significance apart from group life, remains constant
throughout.
Now let us revert to man as a theoretically solitary
animal, a condition that has nowhere existed, for the
sociality of man is only a stage in advance of the gre
gariousness of the animal world from which man has
descended. But as an animal he must develop certain
habits and tastes in order to merely exist. Somehow man
must usually avoid doing things that threaten his existence.
Even in matters of food he must develop a taste for things
which preserve life and a distaste for things that destroy it;
and, as a matter of fact, there are a number of capacities
developed in the body that automatically offer protection
in the case of food against things that are too injurious to
life. But it is quite obvious that if a man developed a
taste for prussic acid, such a taste would not become
hereditary.
Human life, in line with animal life in general, has to
develop not merely a dislike for such things as threaten
life, but also a liking for their opposite. The development
of this last capacity means that in the long run the actions
which promote pleasure, and those which preserve life,
roughly coincide. This is the foundation and the evolu
11
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
tionary basis of the theory of Utilitarianism, or one may
say, of Neo-utilitarianism.
But man never does exist as an individual only, one
that is fighting for his own hand, and whose thoughts
and tendencies are consciously or unconsciously concerned
only with his own welfare. Man is always a member of
a group, and the mere fact of living with others imposes
on the individual a kind of discipline that gives a definite
direction to the character of his development. The law of
life is, that to live an organism must be adapted to its
environment, and the important part of the environment
here is that formed by one’s fellow-beings. The adaption
need not be perfect, any more than that the food one eats
need be of the most nutritious kind. But just as the food
eaten must contain enough nutrition to maintain life, so
conduct must be such as to maintain some kind of harmony
between an individual and the rest of the group to which
he belongs. If an individual’s nature is such that he will
not or cannot adapt himself to his fellows then he is, in
one stage of civilization, killed off, and in another he is
subjected to pains and penalties, and various kinds of
restraints that keep his anti-social tendencies in check.
There is a selective process in all societies, and even more
rigid in low societies than in the higher ones, in which
those ill-adapted to the common life of the group are
placed at a disadvantage even in procreating their kind.
And side by side with this process of selection within
the group there is going on another eliminative process
on a larger scale in the contest of group with group. A
group in which the members show little signs of a com
mon action, of loyalty to each other, is most likely to be
subjugated, or wiped out and replaced by a group in which
the cohesion is greater and the subordination of purely
individualistic tendencies to the welfare of the whole is
greater.
The nature of the process by which man becomes a
moral animal is therefore given when we say that man
12
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
is a social animal. Social life is in itself a kind of disci
pline, a training which fits a man to work with his fellows,
to live with them, and to their mutual advantage. There
are rules of the social game which the individual must
observe if he is to live as a member of the tribe. Man is
not usually conscious of the discipline he is undergoing,
but neither is any animal conscious of the process of the
forces which adapt it to its environment. The moralizing
of man is never a conscious process, but it is a recognizable
process none the less.
It may also be noted that the rules of this social game
are enforced with greater strictness in primitive societies
than is the case with later ones. It is quite a mistake to
think of the life of savages as free, and that of civilized
man as being bound down by social and legal rules. Quite
the opposite is the case. The life of uncivilized man is
bound by customs, by taboos, that leave room for but
little initiative, and which to a civilized man would be
intolerable.
But from the earliest times there is always going on a
discipline that tends to eliminate the ill-adapted to social
life. Real participation in social life means more than an
abstention from injurious acts, it involves a positive con
tribution to the life of the whole. A type of behaviour
that is not in harmony with the general social characteristics
of the groups sets up an irritation much as a foreign sub
stance does when introduced into the tissues of an organ
ism. Thus we have on the one hand, a discipline that
forces conformity with the social structure, and on the
other hand a revolutionary tendency making for further
improvement.
There are still other factors that have to be noted if we
are properly to appreciate the forces that go to mould
character and to establish a settled moral code. To a
growing extent the environment to which the human being
has to adapt himself is one of ideas and ideals. There
are certain ideals of truthfulness, loyalty, obedience, kind
13
�MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
ness, etc., which surround one from the very moment of
birth. The society which gives him the language he speaks
and the stored-up knowledge it possesses, also provides
him with ideals by which he is more or less compelled to
guide his life.
There are endless differences in the form of these social
ideals, but they are of the same mental texture, from the
taboo of the savage to the “old school tie”.
The last phase of this moral adaption is that which
takes place between groups. From the limited family
group to which moral obligations are due, we advance to
the tribe, from thence to the group of tribes that constitute
the nation, and then to a stage into which we are now
entering that of the relations between nations, a state
wherein, in its complete form, there is an extension of
moral duties to the whole of humanity.
But wherever and whenever we take it, the substance
of morality is that of an adaption of feelings and ideas
to the human group, and to the animal group so far as
they can be said to enter into some form of relationship
with us. There is no alteration in the fundamental
character of morality. Its keynote is always, as I have
said, efficiency, but it is an efficiency, the nature of which
is determined by the relations existing between groups of
human beings.
If what has been said is rightly apprehended, it will be
understood what is meant by saying that moral laws are
to the social group exactly what laws of physiology are
to the individual organism. There is nothing to cause
wonder or mystification about moral laws; they express
the physiology of social life. It is these laws that are
manifested in practice long before they are expressed in
set terms. Human conduct, whether expressed in life or
formulated in “laws”, represents the conditions that make
social life possible and profitable. It is this recognition
that forms the science of morality; and the creation of
conditions that favour the performance of desirable actions
14
�MORALITY WITHOUT COD
and the development of desirable feelings constitutes the
art of morality.
Finally, in the development of morality as elsewhere,
nature creates very little that is absolutely new. It works
up again what already exists. That is the path of all
evolution. Feelings of right and wrong are gradually ex
panded from the group to the tribe, from the tribe to
the nation, and from the nation to the whole of human
society. The human environment to which man has to
adapt himself becomes ever wider. “My neighbour’’ ceases
to express itself in relation to those immediately surround
ing me, begins to extend to all with whom I have any rela
tions whatsoever. It is that stage we are now entering,
and much of the struggle going on in the world is due
to the attempts to adapt the feeling already there to its
wider environment. The world is in the pangs of child
birth. Whether civilization will survive those pangs remains
to be seen, but the nature of the process is unmistakable
to those who understand the past, and are able to apply its
lessons to the present and the future.
There is, then, nothing mysterious about the fact of
morality. There is no more need for supernaturalism here
than there is room for it in any of the arts and sciences.
Morality is a natural fact; it is not created by the formula
tion of “laws”; these only express its existence and our
sense of its value. The moral feeling creates the moral
law; not the other way about. Morality has nothing to do
with God; it has nothing to do with a future life. Its
sphere of application and operation is in this world; its
authority is derived from the common sense of mankind
and is born of the necessities of corporate life. In this
matter, as in others, man is thrown back upon himself
and if the process of development is a slow one there is
the comforting reflection that the growth of knowledge
and of understanding has placed within our reach the
power to make human life a far greater and better thing.
If we will! !
Printed by G. T. Wray Ltd. (T.U.), 332 Goswell Road, London, E.C.l,
and Published by G. W. Foote and Company Ltd.,
103 Borough High Street, London, S.E.l.
����
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
A name given to the resource
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
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
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
A name given to the resource
Morality without God
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Cohen, Chapman [1868-1954]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 15 p. ; 19 cm.
Series title: Pamphlets for the People
Series number: No. 2
Notes: Printed by G.T. Wray Ltd., London; published by G.W. Foote and Company Ltd. Tentative date of publication from KVK. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Pioneer Press
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1910?]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N160
Subject
The topic of the resource
God
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<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 (Morality without God), 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
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Moral values
Morality
NSS