3 10 25 https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/afe45c5d1617d7ac73c386392663ed4f.pdf?Expires=1777507200&Signature=WjHHLFrZSUIYZ1Xg0Da0p-1JbPZinH4-Q--RL%7EPB1iB8Hx4QOq%7ExriJNMinoqDl0pfKH9pejWHUeCdMcgQnHyB0Y9f202wSb7gHI4pMah1Osa7B%7EV-GWxZYZC-C0lvxn9o%7E8gXlaQFuyYjj9xlKKOn4Zcr8PXoWtcbM8kRXNfVcoc-bynxoewMF4a-gGW7vko%7EHhCYMY8DEDwMcJ3hIePBz50TKt7882xzh%7ENdifaFQWFyfnIUoDRzpPMFW%7EZ2jN24EnbWVDty8vn8iMRUcmuzGnXzgnJukmSo4Ch59Jkfcam0uNv6VfQ7FckT92d%7EHodGY16UIFqLt8TvZeqHHYGg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM d99e0d6ab02cf7eeb5fd1439f487e609 PDF Text Text NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. BY ANNIE [Reprinted from the BESANT. “Westminster Review”.] LONDON : FREETHOUGHT PUBLISHING COMPANY, 63, FLEET STREET, E.C. 1 8 8 7. PRICE THREEPENCE. �I LONDON : TRINTED BY ANNIE BESANT AND CHARLES BRADLAVGH, 63, FLEET STREET, E.C, �n)(T7# THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. Some good-hearted people must have felt an uncomfortable thrill when they heard Professor Huxley declare that he would rather have been born a savage in one of the Fiji Islands than have been born in a London slum. The advantages of civilisation, from the slum point of view, must appear somewhat doubtful; and as a considerable part of the population of every large city live in the slums, the slum view has an importance of its own as a factor in the future social evolution. For it must be remembered that the slum population is not wholly composed of criminals and ne’er-do-weels—the “ good-for-nothings ” •of Herbert Spencer. The honest workman and struggling seamstress live there cheek by jowl with the thief and and the harlot; and with the spread of education has arisen an inclination to question whether, after all, every­ thing has been arranged quite as well as it might be in this best of all possible worlds. The question, Whether • on the whole civilisation has been an advantage? has been a theme of academical discussion since Rousseau won the prize for an essay on 11 Has the restoration of the • Sciences contributed to purify or to corrupt Manners ? ” ■ and laid down the audacious thesis that riches gave birth to luxury and idleness, and from luxury sprang the arts, from idleness the sciences. But it has now changed its form, and has entered the arena of practical life: men . are asking now, Is it rational that the progress of society should be as lopsided as it is ? Is it necessary that, while civilisation brings to some art, beauty, refinement— all that makes life fair and gracious—it should bring to •others drudgery, misery, degradation, such as no un­ �4 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. civilised people know; and these emphasised and rendered the bitterer by the contrast of what life is to many, thedream of what it might be to all ? For Professor Huxley is right. The savage has the forest and the open sea, the joy of physical strength, food easily won, leisure sweet after the excitement of the chase; the civilised toiler hasthe monotonous drudgery of the stuffy workshop, the hell of the gin-palace for his pleasure-ground, the pande­ monium of reeking court and stifling alley for his lullaby : civilisation has robbed him of all natural beauty and physical joy, and has given him in exchange—the slum. It is little wonder that, under these circumstances, there are many who have but scant respect for our social fabric, and who are apt to think that any change cannot land them in a condition worse than that in which they already find themselves. The tendency to think of complete social change as a possible occurrence has come down to the present genera­ tion as an inheritance of the past. Old men still dwell fondly on the hopes of the “ social missionaries ” who were preaching when the men now of middle-age were born. Some even fem ember the experiments of Fobert Owen and of his personal disciples, the hopes raised by New Lanark and Arbiston, the chill disappointment of New Harmony. The dream that glorified their youth has remained a sacred memory, and they have told how all might have been different had society been prepared in Owen’s time for the fundamental change. And the great and far-reaching co-operative movement, born of Owen’s Socialism, has kept “his memory green”, and has prepared men to think of a possible future in which co-operation should wholly re­ place competition, and Owen’s dream of universal brother­ hood become a living reality. Such part of the energy of the Owenite Socialists as was not merged in co-operative activity was swamped in the sudden rush of prosperity that followed the repeal of the Corn Laws and the English triumph of Free Trade. Now that that rush is long over, and the old misery is on the workers once .more, their minds turn back to the old schemes, and they listen readily to suggestions of a new social order. . The abnormally rapid multiplication characteristic of the very poor is at once constantly rendering the problem to be solved more difficult and more imperatively pressing. �THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. 5 Unhealthy conditions force the young into premature nubility; marriage takes place between mere lads and lasses; parenthood comes while father and mother are themselves legally infants; and the dwarfed, peaky little •mortals, with baby frames and wizened faces, that tumble -over each other in the gutters of the slums, are the un­ wholesome and unlovely products of the forcing-house of extreme poverty. The spread of education and of religious scepticism has added the last touch necessary to make the poor ripe for social change. Ignorance is a necessary condition for prolonged submission to remediable misery. The School Boards are teaching the children the beauty of order, •cleanliness, and decency, and are waking up in them desire for knowledge, hopes, and aspirations—plants unsuited for ■cultivation in the slums. They are sowing the seeds of a noble discontent with unworthy conditions, while at the same time they are developing and training the intelli­ gence, and are converting aimless, sullen grumbling into a rational determination to understand the Why of the present, and to discover the How of change. Lastly, reli­ gious scepticism has enormously increased the value put upon the life which is. So long as men believed that the present life was the mere vestibule of an endless future, it was possible to bribe them into quiescence in misery by .representing poverty as a blessing which should hereafter bring in its train the “kingdom of heaven”. But now that many look on the idea of a life beyond the grave with •doubt, and even with disbelief, this life has taken giant proportions in their eyes, and the human longing for happiness, which erstwhile fed on hopes of heaven, has fastened itself with passionate intensity on the things of •earth. Such is the soil, ploughed by misery, fertilised by edu­ cation and scepticism, ready to receive and nourish the seed of social change. While the soil has been thus preparing, the sowers who •are to scatter the seed have been fashioning. Thoughtful persons have noted the regular cycle of alternate depres­ sion and inflation trodden by industrialism during the last century. At one time industry progresses ‘ ‘ by leaps and bounds ”, employment is plentiful, wages high (as wages .go), prices of coal and iron high, profits increase, and �6 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. fortunes are rapidly built up. This inflation after a whilepasses away, and is succeeded by depression ; 11 short time is worked, wages are reduced, profits diminish, the “ market is overstocked”. This in its turn passes away, and tem­ porary prosperity returns, to be after a while succeeded by another depression, and that by another inflation. But it is noticeable that the depressions become more acute and more prolonged as they return time after time, and that there is less elasticity of revival after each. The position of England in the world’s markets becomes yearly one of diminished advantage ; other nations raise their own coaland their own iron instead of buying from us, and as thecompetition of nations becomes keener, English trade can no longer monopolise the custom of the world. The radical­ weakness of our industrial system is thus becoming patent •—no longer veiled, as it was during the first half of the century, by a monopoly which brought such enormousgains that the drain of wealth into a few hands was com­ paratively little felt. Now that there is so much less to.divide, the unfairness of the method of division is becoming obvious. Nor can we overlook, in tracing the fashioning of thosewho are to sow the seeds of change, the effect on English thought of the greatly increased communication with foreign countries, and especially with Germany. English religious thought has been largely influenced by the worksof Strauss and Eeuerbach ; philosophic thought by those of Hegel, Kant, and Schopenhauer ; scientific by the specu­ lations of Goethe, the practical labors of Vogt, Buchner, and Haeckel. English insularity has been broken down in every domain of theoretical and speculative thought ; it was inevitable that it should also be broken down in the ■ domain of practical sociology, and that German proposals-'for social change should win the attention of English students of social problems. The works of Marx, Bebel,. Liebknecht, and Engels have not reached any large num­ ber of English people ; neither have those of Strauss, Hegel, and Kant. None the less in each case have they exercised a profoundly modifying influence on religious, philosophical, and sociological thought respectively ; for, reaching a small band only, that band has in its turn in­ fluenced thought in the direction taken by itself, and has modified the views of very many who are unconscious of the.- �THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. 7 change thus wrought in their own attitude towards. pro­ gress. At the same time the German graft has been itself modified by the English stock, and English Socialism is beginning to take its own distinctive color ; it is influenced by English traditions, race, habit, and methods of public procedure. It shows, at its best, the influence of .the openair of English political life, the tolerance, of diversity of thought which is bred of free speech ; it is less arrogant, less intolerant, than it is with Germans, or witn those English who are most directly under German influence. In Germany the intolerance of oppression has caused in­ tolerance of revolt ; here the very power of the democracy has a tendency to sober its speech, and to make it take its Own way in the quiet consciousness of its resistless strength. This peculiarity of English life must modify Socialism, and incline it to resort to methods of legislation rather than to methods of dynamite. Nor has the effect of foreign thought been confined to the influence exerted by thinkers over thinkers, through the medium of the press. A potent worker for the inter­ nationalisation of thought has been silently busy for many years past. At first insular prejudices were broken down only for the wealthy and the nobles, when the ‘ grand tour ” was a necessary part of the education of the fine gentleman. Then the capitalist broke down.national fences for his own gain, feeling himself nearer in blood to his foreign colleagues than to the workers in his own land ; for, after all, common interests lie at the root of all. fellowfeeling. And the capitalist abolished nationalism for himself : he hired Germans and Erenchmen for his count­ ing-house work, finding them cheaper and better educated than English clerks ; when his English wage-workers struck for better wages he brought over foreigners to take their place, so that he might live on cheap foreign labor while he starved the English into submission. . The effect of foreign immigration and of foreign importation has not in the long run turned wholly to the advantage of the capitalist ; for his foreign clerks and his foreign workers have fraternised with the English they were brought, over to displace. They have taken part in club discussions ; they have spread their own views ; they have popularised in England the ideas current among workers on the tinent ; they have made numbers of Englishmen acquainted �8 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. with the solutions suggested abroad for social problems. Thus, the internationalism of the luxurious idle and of the wealthy capitalist has paved the way for the interna­ tionalism of the future—the internationalism of the prole­ tariat, the internationalism of Socialism. From this preliminary sketch of the conditions which make for a Socialist movement in England at the present time we must turn to an examination of the doctrines held and taught by the modern school, which claims to teach what is known as Scientific Socialism. The allegation, or even the proof, that modern civilisation is to a large ex­ tent a failure, is obviously not sufficient ground for a com­ plete social revolution. Appeals to the emotions by means of word-pictures of the sufferings and degradation of the industrious, poor, may rouse sympathy, and may even excite to. riot, but can never bring about fundamental changes in society. The intellect must be convinced ere we can look for any wise movement in the direction of organic improvement; and while the passion of the igno­ rant has its revolutionary value, it is on the wisdom and foresight of the instructed that we must rely for the work of social reconstitution. The. first thing to realise is that the Socialist move­ ment is an economic one. Despite all whirling words, and revolution fire, and poetic glamor, and passionate appeal, this one dry fact is the central one — Socialism rej ects the present industrial system and proposes an ex­ ceedingly different one. No mere abuse can shake the Socialist; no mere calling of names can move him. He holds a definite economic theory—a theory wbieb should neither be rejected without examination, nor ac­ cepted without study. The preliminary stock objection which is often held to be sufficient to wave Socialism out of court is the statement that it is “against the laws of political economy”. No statement could be more erroneous; though it may be pleaded in extenuation that the abuse levelled by ignorant Socialists at political economy has given excuse for sup­ posing that it is in antagonism to Socialism. With political economy, as the science which deals with the nature, the production, and the distribution of wealth, Socialism can have no quarrel. Its quarrel is with the present industrial �THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. 9 system, not with the science which points out the ascer­ tained sequence of events under that system. Suppose a régime of avowed slavery : political economy, dealing with the production of wealth in such a state, would lay down how slaves might be worked to the best advantage— how most might be got out of them with least expenditure. But it would be irrational to attack political economy as brutal under such conditions ; it would be the slave system which would be brutal, and blame of the science which merely dealt with the existent facts would be idle. The work of political economy is to discern and expound for any type of social system the best methods of producing and distributing wealth under that system ; and it can as easily study and develop those methods under a régime of universal co-operation such as Socialism, as under a régime of universal competition such as the present. Socialism is in antagonism to the present system, and seeks to over­ throw it ; but only the ignorant and the thoughtless con­ found in their hatred the system itself, and the science that deals with its phænomena. In truth, Socialism founds part of its disapproval of the present industrial system on the very facts pointed out by orthodox economists. It accepts Ricardo’s “iron law of wages ”, and, recognising that wages tend to fall to the minimum on which the laborer can exist, it de­ clares against the system of the hiring of workers for a fixed wage, and the appropriation of their produce by the hirer. It accepts Ricardo’s theory of rent, with such modifications as are adopted by all modern economists. It assents to, and indeed insists on, the facts that all wealth is the result of labor applied to natural agents, that capital is the result of labor and abstinence, that in all save the most primitive forms of industry capital and labor—that is, the unconsumed result of past labor and present labor—are both necessary factors in the produc­ tion of wealth. Nor does Socialism challenge the aecuracy of the deduc­ tions from the “laws of political economy” in a com­ petitive system drawn by the trading community. That a man who desires wealth should buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest ; that he should drive the hardest possible bargains ; that in selling he should be guided by the maxim, caveat emptor ; that in buying he �10 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. should take advantage of the ignorance or the necessities of the seller; that the weakest should go the wall; that feeling should not interfere with business; that labor should be bought at the lowest possible price, and as much got out of it as may be; that trade morality differs from the morality of private life—all these maxims the Socialist regards as the evil fruits of the perpetuation among men of the struggle for existence; a struggle which, however inevitable among brutes, is from his point of view unworthy of human civilisation. Recognising thus the unsatisfactory results which flow naturally and inevitably from the present system, Socialism proceeds to analyse the way in which wealth is produced and accumulated under it, to seek for the causes of the extreme wealth and. extreme poverty which are its most salient characteristics. Applying ourselves, then, to the study of the produc­ tion of wealth, we find taking part therein three things— natural agents, capital, and labor. These, under the pre­ sent system, are represented in England by three types— the landlord, the capitalist, and the proletarian. The transitional organisms need not detain us: the landlord who tills his land with his own hands, the capitalist who works in his own mill—these are exceptions ; andwe are concerned with the normal types. Abroad, the landlord pure and simple is comparatively rare. Of these three, the landlord owns the natural agents ; no wealth can be pro­ duced without his consent. John Stuart Mill (“Principles of Political Economy”, bk. ii., ch. xvi., sec. 1) remarks that “ the only person, besides the laborer and th© capitalist, whose consent is necessary to production, and who can claim a share of the produce as the price of that consent, is the person who, by the arrangements of society, possesses exclusive power over some natural agent ”. Given a person who, by possession of the natural agents from which wealth can be produced, can prevent the pro­ duction of wealth by withholding the raw material, and you have a person who can successfully claim part of the wealth to be produced as a condition of allowing produc­ tion to take place. He gains, by virtue of his position, wealth which one less fortunately placed can only acquire by prolonged labor. Nay, more ; since many capitalists will compete for the raw material when it is advantageously �THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. 11 situated, he will be able to obtain an ever higher price from the most eager bidder ; as towns increase . and. trade develops, competition will drive the price up still higher ; and this ever-mounting “ rent”, paid, to the owner of the natural agents, will enrich the lucky possessor, however idle, ignorant, or useless he may be. Thus is produced a class which has a vested right to tax industry, and which taxes it in proportion to its success. Not an improvement can be effected, nor a railway constructed, nor a road made, without toll being first paid to the owner of the soil. The whole nation is at the mercy of a comparatively small class, so long as it consents to admit that this class has a right to own the ground on which the nation lives. Here is a point at which Socialism finds itself in direct antagonism to the present system of society. Socialism declares that natural agents ought not to be private property, and that no idle class should be permitted to stand between land and labor, and demand payment of a tax before it will permit the production, of wealth. Socialism holds that the soil on which a nation is born and lives ought to belong to the nation as a whole, and not to a class within the nation ; that the soil should be cultivated by individuals, or by co-operative groups, holding directly under the State—the ‘.‘State” here meaning central organising body or district oiganising body, according as the organisation is communal or cen­ tralised. And here, among different Socialist schools, difference in detail manifests itself. All agree that the soil must in some fashion be controlled by the community, and the benefits derivable from it spread over the com­ munity. But some Socialists would have each commune practically independent, with the soil on which it lives vested in each; the agriculturists of the commune would form an organised body for cultivating the soil, and the agricultural products would be collected in the communal store, and thence distributed as each member of the commune had need of them. Nothing would here be recognised as “ rent ”, since the total produce would pass under communal control. Other Socialists favor a system of more centralised management. But all agree that in­ dividual property in land must disappear, and that in. the future land must not be used as an investment which is to bring in a profit in the shape of rent to some speculator or �12 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. idler, but must be used for purposes of production for the general good, yielding food and raw materials for clothing and other necessaries of life, but profit in the shape of rent to no individual. The extreme Radical school of politicians accepts the Socialist theory of land, and denounces private property in the soil as vigorously as does the Socialist. In fact, the Radical is a half-fledged Socialist—indignant as many would be at the description: he is in favor of the State being the landowner, but he boggles at the idea of the State being the capitalist. His attitude to the land is, however, an important factor in the Socialist move­ ment, for it familiarises the national mind with the idea of the State absorbing the functions hitherto belonging to a class. The establishment of Land Courts, the fixing of judicial rents, the legal restrictions put on the “rights” of landlords—all these make for Socialism. M. Agathon de Potter, a well-known Continental writer, rejoices over the introduction of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh’s Bill for expro­ priating landlords who keep cultivable land uncultivated, and for vesting the forfeited lands in the State, as a direct step towards Socialism. The shrinking of English poli­ ticians from the name does not prevent their advance towards the thing, and the Liberty and Property Defence League is justified in its view that politics are drifting steadily in a Socialist direction. Pass we from the landlord who holds the natural agents to the capitalist who holds the means of production. What is capital, and how has it come into existence ? Capital is any wealth which is employed for profit. On this there is no dispute. As Senior says: “Economists are agreed that whatever gives a profit is properly called capital ”. Now, as all wealth is the result of labor applied to natural agents, capital, being wealth, must have been so produced. But another factor has been at work; as Marshall says: it is “ the result of labor and abstinence ”. Wherever there is capital there has been labor, and there has also been abstinence from consumption. But in studying the origin and the accumulation of capital, this remark­ able historical fact stares us in the face—that capital is not found in the hands of the laborious and the abstemious, but is obtained by a process of confiscation of the results of labor and the imposition of privation on �THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. 13 the laborious. On this John Stuart Mill has the following pregnant passage : “ In a rude and violent state of society it continually happens that the person who has capital is not the very person who has Saved it. but someone who, being stronger, or belonging to a more powerful community, has possessed himself of it by plunder. And even in a state of things in which property was protected, the increase of capital has usually been, for a long time, mainly derived from privations which, though essentially the same with saving, are not generally called by that name, because not.voluntary. The actual producers have been slaves, compelled to produce as much as force could extort from them, and to consume as little as the self-interest or the usually very slender humanity of their taskmasters would permit. (“ Prin­ ciples of Political Economy”, bk. i., ch. v., sec. 5). Capital always has been, and it always must be, obtained by the partial confiscation of the results of labor ; that is, it must be accumulated by labor which is not paid for, or by labor of which the payment is deferred. In slave communities the slave-owner becomes a great capitalist by appropriating the total results of his slaves’ toil, and returning to them only such small portion of it as suffices to keep the wealth-producers in capable working order. That is, the wealth produced minus the amount consumed by the producers, goes to the owner, and that part of it which he does not consume is laid by to be employed as capital. And it is worth noting that no considerable accumulation of capital was made, and no rapid progress in civilisation was possible, until slavery was introduced. In a low stage of evolution men will not deny themselves present for the sake of future enjoyment, nor incur present toil for the sake of future ease. But when, as was neatly said to me, the barbarian discovered that he could utilise his conquered enemy to much greater advantage by making him work than by merely eating him, civilisation had a chance. Slavery was, in truth, a necessary stage in social evolution ; only by forced toil and forced privation was it possible to accu­ mulate capital, and without capital no forms of complex industry are realisable. At the present time that which was done frankly and unblushingly in the slave régime is done under a veil of fine phrases, among which free con­ tract, free laborer, and the like, play a striking part. But �14 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. in reality the “free laborer” only obtains as wage such portion of the results of his labor as enables him to exist at the standard of living current for his class at the time, and the remainder of his produce goes to his employer. And too often this portion of his is not sufficient to keep him in capable working order, as is shown by the sombre fact that the average age of the hand-workers at death is far less than that of the idlers. For in truth the slave of the past had this advantage over the wage-worker of the present—-that it was to his master’s interest to keep the slave in high physical condition, and to prolong his working life ; whereas it is to the modern employer’s interest to get as much work out of the “ free laborer ” as is possible in a short time, and then to fling him aside as he begins to flag, and hire in his place a younger and more vigorous competitor, to be in his turn wrung dry and thrown away. Before considering what Socialism would do with the capitalist, we must turn to the proletarian, his necessary correlative. A proletarian is a person who is possessed of labor-force, and of nothing else. He is the incarnation of the “labor” necessary for the production of wealth, the third factor in our trio. This type, in our modern society, is numerous, and is rapidly increasing. He is the very antithesis of the really free laborer, who works on his own raw material with his own instruments of production, and produces for his own subsistence. In the country the proletarian is born on somebody else’s land, and as he grows up he finds himself owner of nothing except his own body. The raw material around him is owned by the landlord ; the instruments of production are owned by the capitalist farmers. As he cannot live on his own labor force, which can only become productive in conjunction with raw material and means of production (capital), he must either sell it or starve. Nominally he may be free ; in reality he is no more free than is the slave. The slave is free to refuse to work, and to take in exchange the lash, the prison, the grave ; and such freedom only has the present proletarian. If he refuses to work, he must take the lash of hunger, the prison of the workhouse, and, on continued refusal, the actual gaol. Nor can he put his own price on this solitary property of his, his body—he must sell it at the market rate ; and in some agricultural counties of England at the present time the market rate �THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. 15 is from 7s. to 9s. a week. It is most significant of the bearing of the propertyless condition of the proletarian that many farmers obj ect to the very slight improvement made in the laborer’s position by his being permitted to rent at a high price a small allotment which he cultivates for himself. The ground of the farmer’s objection is that even such small portion of freedom makes the laborer “too independent”, and thereby drives up wages. To get the full advantage out of him, the proletarian must be wholly dependent for subsistence on the wages he earns. The town proletarian is in a similar position—neither land nor instrument of production is his; but he also has his labor force, and this he must sell, or he must starve. We have arrived at the citadel of the Socialist position. Here is this unpropertied class, this naked proletariat, face to face with landlord and capitalist, who hold in their grip the means of subsistence. It must reach those means of subsistence or starve. The terms laid down for its accep­ tance are clear and decisive : “We will place within your hands the means of existence if you will produce sufficient to support us as well as yourselves, and if you will consent that the whole of your produce, over that which is sufficient to support you in a hardy, frugal life, shall be the property of us and of our children. If you are very thrifty, very self-denying, and very lucky, you may be able to save enough out of your small share of your produce to feed yourself in your old age, and so avoid falling back on us. Your children will tread the same mill-round, and we hope you will remain contented with the position in which Providence has placed you, and not envy those born to a higher lot.” Needless to say, the terms are accepted by a proletariat ignorant of its own strength, and the way to profit is open to landlord and capitalist. The landlord, as we have seen, obtains his share of the gains by taxing the capitalist through raising his rent. The capitalist finds his profit in the difference between the. wage he pays and the value of the produce of his hired workers. The wage is fixed by the competition for employment in the labor market, and limited in its downward tendency by the standard of living. The minimum wage is that on which the worker can exist, however hardly. For less than this he will not work. Every shilling above this is fought over, and wage rises and falls by competition. At �16 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. everstage of their relationship there is contest betweèn employer and employed. If the wage is paid for a fixed day’s work—as in nearly every trade—the employer tries to lengthen the day, the employed to shorten it ; the longer the day, the greater the production of “surplus value ”—¿<?., of the difference between the wage paid and the value produced. The employer tries to increase surplus value by pressing the workers to exertion ; they lessen exertion in order not to hasten the time of their discharge. The employer tries still to increase surplus value by sup­ planting male labor with female and child labor at lower wages. The men resist such introduction, knowing that the ultimate result is to increase the amount taken by capital and to lessen that obtained by labor. Now the Socialist alleges that these antithetical interests can never be reconciled while capital and labor are the possessions of two distinct classes. He points to the results brought about by the capitalist class while it was left un­ shackled by the State. The triumph of capitalism, and of laisser-faire between employers and employed, was from 1764 to 1833. During that time not only adults but young children were worked from fifteen to sixteen hours a day, and the production of surplus value was enormous. The huge fortunes of the Lancashire “cotton-princes” were built up by these overtasked, quickly worn-out workers. The invention of machinery centupled man’s productive power, and its benefits were monopolised by a compara­ tively small class ; while those who made the wealth festered in closely crowded courts, those who appropriated the wealth luxuriated in country seats ; one side of industri­ alism is seen in the Lancashire mansions, pleasure-grounds, and hothouses ; the Other in the reeking slums within the sound of the factory bells. Under a saner system of pro­ duction, the introduction of machinery would have lightened toil, shortened the hours of necessary labor, and spread abundance where there was want. Under capitalistic in­ dustrialism it has built up huge fortunes for a few, and has reduced thousands to conditions of insanitary living and dreary degradation, worse than anything the world has hitherto known. It has poisoned our rivers, polluted our atmosphere, marred the beauty of our country’s face, bestialised large numbers of our people. Improvements in machinery, which should be hailed with joy, are regarded �THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. 17 with dread by large classes of workers, because they will throw numbers out of work, and reduce men, who were skilled laborers with the old machinery, into the ranks of the unskilled. True, the result of the introduction of machinery has been to cheapen—in consequence of com­ petition among capitalists—many commodities, especially articles of clothing. But this effect is little felt among the laboring classes. They can buy perhaps three coats where they used to buy one, but the easily worn-out shoddy, thought good enough for clothes sold in poor quarters, is but a poor exchange for the solid hand-made stuffs worn by their ancestors. What, then, is the remedy proposed by Socialism ? It is to deal with capital as it deals with land; to abolish the capitalist as well as the landlord, and to bring the means of production, as well as the natural agents on which they are used, under the control of the community. Capital is, as we have seen, the result of unpaid labor; in a complex system like our own it is the result of co­ operative—that is, of socialised—labor. It has been found Iby experience that division of labor increases productive ability, and in all forms of industry numbers now co­ operate to turn out the finished product. In each com­ modity is embodied the labor of many workers, and the Socialisation of labor has reached a very advanced stage. But while industrialism has been socialised in its aspect of labor, it has remained individualistic in its aspect of capi­ tal ; and the results of the combined efforts of many are appropriated to the advantage of one, and when the one has exhausted his power of consumption he retains the remaining results, and employs them for the further enslavement and exploitation of labor. Thus labor con­ stantly adds new links to the chain which fetters it, and is ever increasing the capital which, let out at interest by its owners, becomes ever a heavier tax upon itself. Social­ ism contends that these unconsumed results of socialised labor ought not to pass into the hands of individuals to be used by them for their own profit; but should pass either into the industrial funds of the several trades that produce them, or into a central industrial exchequer. In either case, these funds created by past labor would be used for the facilitation of present and future labor. They would be available for the introduction of improved machinery, �18 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. for the opening up of new industries, for the improvement of means of communication, and for similar undertakings. Thus, in a very real sense, capital would become only the deferred payment of labor, and the whole results of toil would be constantly flowing back upon the toilers. Under such conditions, fixed capital or plant would, like land, be held for purposes of use by the workers who used it. Its replacement would be a constant charge on the commodities it helped to produce. A machine represents so much human labor; that embodied labor takes part in producing the finished commodity as much as does the palpable labor of the human worker who superintends the machine; that worker does not produce the whole value added in the factory to the material brought into it, and has no claim to that whole value. The wear and tear of the machine is an offset, and must be charged on the products, so that when the machine is worn out there may be no difficulty in its replacement. Under such conditions also the dis­ tinction between employers and employed would disappear. All would be members of industrial communities, and the necessary foremen, superintendents, organisers, and officers of every kind, would be elected as the officers of trades unions are elected at the present time. Poverty will never cease so long as any class or any indi­ viduals have an interest in the exploitation of others. While individuals hold capital, and other individuals can­ not exist unless that capital is used for their employment, the first class will prey upon the second. The capitalists will not employ unless they can “make a profit ” out of those they hire to work for them; that is, unless they pay them less than the value of the work produced. But if one man is to have value for which he has not worked, another must have less than the value of his work; and while one class grows wealthy on unpaid labor, another must remain poor, giving labor without return. Socialism would give to each return for labor done, but it recognises no claim in the idle to grow fat on the produce of the in­ dustrious. Interest on capital, paid to individuals, has—as is obvious from the foregoing—no place in Socialism. Strongly as Socialism protests against the whole system of which land­ lords and capitalists form an integral part, it reserves its uttermost reprobation for the theory which justifies a class �THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. 19 of the latter in living solely on money drawn as interest on investments. If a man possesses three or four thousand pounds he can invest them, and live all his life long on the interest without ever doing a stroke of honest work, and can then bequeath to some one else the right to live in idleness ; and so on in perpetuity. Money in the capitalist system is like the miraculous oil in the widow’s cruse—it can always be spent and never exhausted. A man in sixty years will have received in interest at five per cent, three times his original fortune, and although he may have spent the interest, and thus have spent every penny of his for­ tune three times over, he will yet possess his fortune as large as it was when he began. He has consumed in com­ modities three times the sum originally owned, and yet is not one penny the worse. Other people have labored for him, fed him, clothed him, housed him, and he has done nothing in exchange. The Socialist argument against this' form of interest lies in a nutshell: a man earns £5 ; he gives labor for which he receives in exchange a power of possession over £5 worth of commodities; he desires only to consume £1 worth now, and to defer the consumption of the remaining £4. He buys his £1 worth of commodi­ ties, and considers himself repaid for the fifth portion of his work by possessing and consuming these. But he ex­ pects to put out his saved £4 at interest, and would con­ sider himself hardly used if, fourteen years hence, when he desired to exercise his power of consumption, deferred for his own convenience, that power had not increased although he had done nothing to increase it. Yet it can only be in­ creased by other people’s labor being left unpaid for, while he is paid twice over for his; and this arrangement the Socialist stamps as unjust. So long as capital remains in the hands of individuals, interest will be demanded by them for its use, and will be perforce paid; and so long also will exist an idle class, which will consume without producing, and will remain a burden on the industrious^ who must labor to support these as well as themselves, and must produce sufficient for all. Now, Socialism aims at rendering impossible the exist­ ence of an idle class. No healthy adult but will have to work in exchange for the things he requires. For the young, freedom from labor ; they have to prepare for life’swork. For the aged, freedom from labor: they have. �:20 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. worked, and at eventide should come rest. For the sick also, freedom from labor ; and open hospitals for all, with­ out distinction of class, where tendance and all that skill •can do shall be at the service of each. But for the strong and the mature, no bread of idleness, no sponging upon other people. With division of labor will come also divi­ sion of leisure ; the disappearance of the languid lady, full of ennui from sheer idleness, will entail the disappearance of the overworked slavey, exhausted from unending toil; and there will be two healthy women performing necessary work, and enjoying full leisure for study, for art, for recreation, where now are the over-lazy and the over­ driven. In thus condemning the existence of an idle class, Social­ ism does not assail all the individuals who now compose it. These are not to blame for the social conditions into which they have been born; and it is one of the most hopeful ■signs of the present Socialist movement, that many who are working in it belong to the very classes which will be .abolished by the triumph of Socialist principles. The man who has inherited a fortune, and has embraced Socialism, would do no good by throwing it away and plunging into the present competitive struggle; all he can do is to live simply, to utilise his position of advantage as a pedestal •on which to place his advocacy of Socialism, and to employ his money in Socialist propaganda. It is feared by some that the success of the Socialist movement would bring about the crushing of individualism and an undue restriction of liberty. But the Socialist contends that the present terrible struggle for existence is the worst enemy of individualism, and that for the vast majority individuality is a mere phrase. Exhausting toil ■and ever-growing anxiety, these crush out individuality, -and turn the eager promising lad into the harassed drudge ■of middle age. How many capable brains are wasted, how many original geniuses lost to the nations they might illuminate, by the strife for mere livelihood ? The artist .fritters away his genius in u pot-boilers ” ; the dramatist writes down to the piece that will “pay”, and harnesses h.is delicate fancy into coarse burlesque full of wretched witticisms ; in the stress of the struggle to live, patient study and straining after a great ideal become impossible. Individualism will only develop fully when Socialism has �TIIE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. 21 lifted off all shoulders the heavy burden of care, and hasgiven to all leisure to think and to endeavor. Nor is the fear of undue restriction of liberty better founded than that of the crushing out of individualism. One kind of liberty, indeed, will be restricted—the liberty to oppress and to enslave other people. But with this exception liberty will be increased. Only the very wealthy are now free. The great majority of people must work, and their choice of work is very limited. The poor. must take what work they can get, and their complaint is not that they are compelled to work, but that they often cannot get work to do. In satisfying the complex wants of the civilised human being there is room for all the most diverse capacities of work; and if it be said that there, are un­ pleasant. kinds of work that must be done, which none would willingly undertake, it may be answered that those kinds of work have to be done now, and that the com­ pulsion of the community would not be a greater restriction of personal liberty than the present compulsion of hunger; and further, that it would be easy to make a short period of unpleasant toil balance a long period of pleasant; and that it would be far better to have such tasks divided among a number, so that they would press very lightly upon each, than have them, as now, pushed on to a compara­ tively few, whose whole lives are brutalised by the pressure. The very strictest organisation of labor by the community that can be imagined, would be to the great majority far less oppressive than the present system, for at the worst, it would but control an extremely small portion of each working day, and would leave the whole of the rest of the existence free, to be used at the pleasure of the individual, untrammelled by anxiety and harassing care for the mere necessaries of life. The pride in skill, the stimulus of honorable ambition, the pleasure of success, all these would be present, as they are to-day; but instead of being the privilege of the few, they would brighten the life of all. A profound moral impulse really underlies the whole of the Socialist movement. It is a revolt against the callous indifference of the majority in the “ comfortable classes ” to the woful condition of large numbers of the workers. It is an outburst of unselfish brotherhood, which cannot bear to sit at ease while others suffer, which claims to share the common human lot, and to bear �22 TIIE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. part of the burden now pressing with crushing weight on the shoulders of the poor. It detests the theory that there must always be hewers of wood and drawers of water for a luxurious class, and proclaims that human degradation lies in idle living, not in earnest work. It would have all work, that all may have leisure, and would so distribute the necessary work of the world that none may be crushed by it, but that all may be disciplined. And this very out­ burst of human brotherhood is in itself a proof that society is evolving Socialismwards, and that the evolution of humanity is reaching a stage in which sympathy is tri­ umphing over selfishness, and the desire for equality of happiness is becoming a potent factor in human conduct. The Socialist ideal is one which could not meet with wide acceptance if humanity were not marching towards its realisation. On one matter the Socialist movement, both abroad and at home, has set itself in opposition to science and to right reason—<?.y., on the law of population. It is easy to see how this opposition has arisen, and it may be hoped that when Socialists in general disentangle the scientific state­ ment of facts from Malthus’ unwise applications of them, Socialism and prudential restraint will be seen to be indissolubly united. Malthus accurately pointed out that population has a tendency to increase beyond the means of subsistence ; that as it presses on the available means, suffering is caused ; and that it is kept within them by what he termed “positive checks ”—¿.0, a high death-rate, especially among the children of the poor, premature death from disease, underfeeding, etc. The accuracy of his state­ ment has been proved up to the hilt by Charles Darwin, who describes with abundant illustrations the struggle for existence—a struggle which is the direct result of the fact stated in the law of population, of the tendency of all animated things to increase beyond their food supply ; this has led, and still leads, to the survival of those who are fittest for the conditions of the struggle. Unhappily, Malthus added to his scientific exposition some most unfortunate practical advice ; he advised the poor not to marry until, practically, they had reached middle life. The poor felt, with natural indignation, that in addition to all their other deprivations they were summoned by Malthus to give up tfie chief of the few pleasures left to them, to surrender �TIIE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. 23 marriage, to live in joyless celibacy through, the passion­ season of life, to crush out all the impulses of love until by long repression these would be practically destroyed. Under such circumstances it is little wonder that “ Mal­ thusianism ” became a word hated by the poor and denounced by those who sympathised with them. It is true that the advice of Malthus as to the putting off of marriage has been and is very widely followed by the .middle classes; but it is perfectly well known that the putting off of marriage does not with them mean the ■observance of celibacy, and the shocking prostitution which is the curse of every Christian city is the result of the following of the advice of Malthus so far as marriage is concerned. It is obvious that Malthus ignored the strength of the sexual instinct, and that the only possible result of the wide acceptance of his teaching would be the increase of prostitution, an evil more terrible than that of poverty. But the obj ection rightly raised to the practical teaching of Malthus ought not to take the form of assailing the perfectly impregnable law of population, nor is it valid against the teachings of Neo-Malthusians, who advise early marriage and limitation of the family within the means of existence. The acceptance of this doctrine is absolutely essential to the success of Socialism. Under a system in which children are forced to labor, they may begin to “keep them­ selves ” at a very early age; but under a Socialist system, where education will occupy childhood and youth, and where old age is to be free from toil, it will soon be found that the adult working members will not permit an un­ limited increase of the mouths which they have to fill. Facilitate production as we may, it will always take more hours to produce the necessaries of life for families of ten or twelve than for families of three or four. The practi­ cal enforcement of the question will probably come from the women; highly educated women, full of interest in public work and taking their share in public duty, will not consent to spend year after year of their prime in nothing but expecting babies, bearing babies, and suckling babies. They will rebel against the constant infliction of physical discomfort and pain, and will insist on the limita­ tion of the family as a condition of marriage. The sooner this is recognised by Socialists the better, for at present �24 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. they waste much strength by attacking a doctrine which they must sooner or later accept. A glance backward over the history of our own country, since the Reform Bill of 1832 opened the gate of political power to those outside the sacred circle of the aristocracy, will tell how an unconscious movement towards Socialism has been steadily growing in strength. Our Factory Acts, our Mines Regulation Acts, our Education Acts, our Em­ ployers’ Liability Acts, our Land Acts—-all show the set of the current. The idea of the State as an outside power is fading, and the idea of the State as an organised com­ munity is coming into prominence. In the womb of time the new organism is growing: shall the new birth come in peace or in revolution, heralded by patient endeavor or by roar of cannon ? Who can tell ? But this one thing I know, that come it will, whether men work for it or hinder; for all the mighty, silent forces of evolution make for Socialism, for the establishment of the Brotherhood of Man. � 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 &amp; 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 The socialist movement Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Besant, Annie Wood [1847-1933] Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 24 p. ; 18 cm. Notes: Reprinted from the "Westminster Review". Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Freethought Publishing Company Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1887 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N070 Subject The topic of the resource Socialism 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 (The socialist movement), 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 NSS Socialism https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/6d5c0422bcccd53769bf72d3ccd7444a.pdf?Expires=1777507200&Signature=gcnOZnNvyrb4v9CJuDtlrZl2FPamigGECsqKDMVAalZ58ELPechn-wu4lF-Gq5YcC86Ji50B1LuNsI5DInFbG1NB-yw3P%7ECRHZnkMcC-gwqfJnZca1MudiKhS3MvKFx1i37jEGQGr6KhFuCshETA4slaueqsVLeRCXyN7QypKTCIcClMvcZb16kj1X%7EhQponlGHDgRhwOqR4ahf6z5d3gd3bcG%7EE%7EW95PNJZ080KVuhmF0%7Eji%7ExX3Wm8dCiv7OY2OlqU-0tTxxBfUZPGWT4MVrhQjPln4TU66LtwxB48B4a8RDCR%7ECOulJhZGyn8xnGCGqLCXN%7EKxIAo%7ESManfUPNQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 5a68a2a8850ef52a42fc40975892d4e9 PDF Text Text UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION; OR, REMARKS ON THE REV. J. M. WILSON’S “ATTEMPT TO TREAT SOME RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS IN A SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT”. [Reprinted from the “National Reformer”.] BY s. s. POPULUS VULT DECIPI, SED ILLUMINETUR. LONDON: fbeethought publishing company, 63, FLEET STREET, E.C. 1 8 8 7. PRICE FOURPENCE. �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION; OR, REMARKS ON THE REV. J. M. WILSON’S “ATTEMPT TO TREAT SOME RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS IN A SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT”. [Reprinted from the “National Reformer”.] BY s. s. POPULUS VULT DECIPI, SED ILLUMINETUR. LONDON: fbeethought publishing company, 63, FLEET STREET, E.C. 1 8 8 7. PRICE FOURPENCE. ��N574- TO THE READER. Messrs. Macmillajst and Co. having published a volume of Essays and Addresses by the Rev. James M. Wilson, this opportunity is taken of reprinting some articles that appeared in the National Reformer, after the first appearance of the essays and addresses contained in the volume referred to. The second and third articles were written concerning two sermons that Mr. Wilson preached in March, 1884, and which are not included in the volume of essays and addresses. They were published by Macmillan and Co., in pamphlet form, shortly after their delivery. The paper of most interest in Mr. Wilson’s volume is undoubtedly the “Letter to a Bristol Artisan” (p. 128175), which, though dated in 1885, is now for the first time published. This letter (which has been recently criticised with force and ability by Mr. J. M. Robertson in the columns of the National Reformer} is Mr. Wilson’s reply to the pamphlet (published by W. H. Morrish, 18, Narrow Wine St., Bristol), wherein “ A Bristol Artisan ”, took up the theme of Mr. Wilson’s two lectures to the Secularists of that city, on the reasons why men do not believe the Bible. These lectures are contained in the new volume (p. 74-127), having previously been published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The artisan had not the same facilities for making his views known, his pamphlet appeared in modest guise, and a small edition has not yet been sold. If, on our side, we had a society for promoting Secular knowledge, it might do well to bring out a second edition of this remarkable �iv TO THE READER. essay, and to ensure that every thinking man and woman in England should have a chance of mastering its contents. But at present the want of such machinery is one of the great difficulties we have to contend against. I may, however, say that this pamphlet has extorted the approval of those most opposed to the artisan’s views. Mr. Wilson says of it: “ your pamphlet has deeply interested me, not only from its singular directness, and lucidity, and general moderation of tone, but because it is full of misconceptions, etc.” Another clergyman says of it that “ it will probably be widely read and influential both for good and evil”. And the general opinion seems to be that no more discreet and inoffensive statement of the higher secular philosophy has ever been published. Those who have read Mr. Robertson’s criticisms on Mr. Wilson’s reply to the artisan will be prepared to hear that no such complimentary language, can, in its turn, be used of it. At the same time it seems to me that Mr. Robert­ son has not fully realised the enormous advantage gained for Secularism, by the admissions that the letter contains. Mr. Robertson’s own mind is clear—his horizon free from haze and mist; has he not forgotten that such clearness of vision is rare in times of transition. One of our univer­ sities, in its proud motto, offers lux and pocula, light and ceremonials. But in these days the retention of the pocula involves too often the darkening of the lux. And not only do the traditionary status and ecclesiastical endow­ ments of the Church of England, that Cambridge offers to its graduates, tend to a frame of mind that shrinks from the full blaze of the rays of truth, but other and nobler ties are at work in the same direction—so noble and so human that I should be sorry to cast up the charge of nebulous inconsistency against the man whose light faileth. Let us, however, thank Mr. Wilson for these words: “It is absolutely necessary for you to grasp the conception of religion, as being NOT a system of dogmas about the being of God and his relation to man, revealed by some external and supernatural machinery, but as being an education, an evolution, a growth of the spirit of man towards something higher, by means of a gradual revelation.” Let us, I say, ponder well these words. And let us ask Mr. Wilson to consider if he can put bounds to this growth, and say, “ Thus far! ” or predict �V TO THE READER. safely that at this time, or at that time, finality will be reached. If I were inclined to be critical, I would also ask Mr. Wilson to reconcile his use of the word religion in the above extract with the conception of it given in the sermon he preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral, hereinafter referred to. But while anxious to award to Mr. Wilson all the merit that is due to him, I am entirely at one with Mr. Robert­ son in considering that this attempt to treat matters of faith by the methods of science has been (as all such attempts must be) a complete failure. In conclusion I gratefully accept Mr. Charles Bradlaugh’s permission to dedicate to him, as one of the leaders of sincere and active freethought—active because sincere— this attempt to state the issue between Materialism on one hand, and the indefinite faltering neo-Christianity on the other, which is clerical rather than agnostic, agnostic rather than religious. s. s. July, 1887. ��UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. I.—Mr. Wilson’s Bristol Lectures. [From the National Reformer of 16th September, 1883.] The late Archbishop of Canterbury, who combined the shrewdness of a Scot with the tact of a courtier, said some years ago that Atheism should not be regarded as a heresy to be condemned, but met as an argument, to be seriously and temperately answered. The attitude thus recommended has been adopted by several enlightened clergymen, and will probably commend itself to many more. But if gentle­ men in “holy orders” quit the vantage ground of ortho­ doxy, and meet Secularists on even terms, they must take the chances of war. Real argument implies that the side which has the best of it shall carry conviction to the other; and if the clergy cannot convert us, they run the risk of being themselves converted. The game is a perilous one for the clergy, but none the less are they bound in honor to play it out. The lectures before us are the first fruits of Dr. Tait’s remark. Mr. Wilson, head master of Clifton School, is one of the most distinguished of that noble band of workers in the cause of morality that the churches of to-day are producing. It were presumption for me to speak of the character and merits of such a man: if anyone wishes to learn them, let him ask the poor of Bristol. He delivered these lectures to audiences of the working men of that city about six months ago, and they have now been repub­ lished under the auspices of the Society for Promoting �8 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. Christian Knowledge. The Spectator remarks that the Society never did a bolder or a wiser thing than this ; and many who take a broader view of the subjects discussed than the Spectator does, will probably acquiesce in that opinion. Mr. Wilson addressed himself to the question, “ Why men do not believe the Bible ”, and in the first lecture considered the intellectual difficulties ; in the second, the . moral difficulties. By intellectual difficulties, Mr. Wilson means “ those which are the consequences of a particular theory as to the necessity of a literal translation and the verbal accuracy of the Bible”. This particular theory, viz., that the Bible is verbally or mechanically inspired, is not, Mr. Wilson asserts, laid down by the Church, nor found in the Bible, nor was it taught by Jesus Christ or his apostles. Up to the time that the Roman Empire became Christian, and the Canon of Scripture was formed, “ there was no thought of a divinely-guaranteed accuracy”. Even after the Reformation, when the thirty-nine articles were promulgated, “ there was no theory of inspiration”. But as the study of the Bible became more popular, theories of inspiration were started, especially that of Calvin, who held “that from Genesis to Revelation the Bible is not only the Word of God, but the words of God ; and it is this theory that lands men in endless contradictions ”, I will leave it to the followers and admirers of Calvin to prove, as I expect they easily can prove, that the theory of inspiration, which Mr. Wilson attributes to him, was not his invention, but was commonly held in the Church centuries before his time. This does not concern us much. But before I pass on to what Mr. Wilson would have us substitute for the Calvinistic theory of inspiration, I would hint that he took an unfair advantage of us Secularists, in saying that we have no warrant for putting into the mouths of Christians a theory of verbal inspiration, when it is notorious that his assertion that the Church of England does not teach the verbal inspiration of the Bible, fell like a thunderbolt on the Christian public. Nine-tenths of the religious people in these kingdoms firmly believe the Bible to be inspired. Secularists have to deal with popular superstition, and not with the esoteric creed of a few priests. The sixth article of religion is so worded that it can perfectly cover, if needs be, the Calvinistic theory; �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 9 and if it suits Mr. Wilson and his friends to say now that “Holy Scripture” is not verbally inspired, he ought not to blame Colonel Ingersoll for addressing himself to the current belief. I strongly suspect that if these doubts as to the authority of the Bible had not reached the great mass of our countrymen, the doctrine now produced by Canon Westcott and Mr. Wilson would not have been much heard of. It is to be regretted that Archbishop Benson has, in a letter printed in the preface to these lectures, apparently supported Mr. Wilson’s complaint of Colonel Ingersoll. The fact is, that Secularists make little use of the Calvinistic theory of the Bible. It is to the book itself, and not to any theory of it, that their apprehensions point. They regard it as the history, more or less authentic, of a small nation whose social ostracism is a fitting reward for moral delinquency, and who have made themselves more detested than any other race of men. They cannot admit that the history of such a race, curious and interesting as it is, ought to be our guide and standard here and now. It was a rhetorical artifice, and nothing more, to bring into contrast Colonel Ingersoll and Canon Westcott; clever and momentarily effective, but attended with no permanent gain. Mr. Wilson’s subsequent admission (page 31), that some of his friends urged “ You will unsettle more than you will help; you will shake the faith of believers, and not convert the sceptics ”, proves that Colonel Ingersoll was right and Canon Westcott wrong, in their estimate of popular theology. Mr. Wilson would remove from the portal of the temple the bogey of Calvinism ; unsuspecting worshippers are to be invited to enter ; but once inside the temple, and belief in inspiration is the atmosphere they breathe : “ Let men read the gospels as they would read any other book, with any theory of inspiration, or with none; with the one aim of learning the truth about Jesus Christ ”, and if this is done in a proper spirit, Mr. Wilson promises that they will soon get the belief in inspiration, though they may not be able to define it. Is this so? Does an absolute rejection of the Calvinistic theory, followed by careful, patient, honest study of the Bible, lead men to be Christians, or to form such an estimate of the character of Jesus Christ as enables them to recognise him as God ? Experience �10 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. meets Mr. Wilson’s promise with, no dubious or uncertain answer. Mr. Wilson avoids any definition of that theory which he would have us substitute for Calvin’s. He says he can no more define inspiration than he can define “ God”, and that he can no more prove inspiration than he can listen to the colors of the rainbow. It is surely irrational and immoral to believe a theory that can neither be defined or proved. Some clearly defined theory may commend itself as possibly credible, even if it cannot be proved, but it seems romantic, if not impossible, to believe without defi­ nition and without demonstration. And here I would make a protest and an appeal. The late Archbishop, and clergymen like Mr. Wilson, expect, and invite us to meet them in discussion. Do they consider that we do so with halters round our necks ? We may freely discuss morality, and the non-essentials of religion, but to deny by advised speaking or printing the truth of the Christian religion, entails the penalties of that statute of William and Mary, which Lord Coleridge termed “ferocious” and “shocking”. Can not Mr. Wilson and his friends help in getting the statute law and the common law amended ? And cannot they give an earnest of their sympathies, by signing the memorial to Mr. Gladstone for Messrs. Foote and Ramsey’s release that is printed at the head of page 265 of the Freethinker for 26tli August. Our unhappy friends have now been thirty long weeks in gaol. What is left of the “Christian religion ” that the statute of William and Mary, joint defenders of the faith, so jealously guarded? The Court of Queen’s Bench has by mandamus lopped off the devil; Canon Farrar’s sermons have eliminated hell; the Trinity is threatened when the Athanasian creed is expunged; and now Mr. Wilson tells us that inspiration is no part of it. Whatever happens, let us hope that no blasphemous hand will touch the 36th Article of religion that treats of the consecration of bishops. So long as they are maintained in pomp and power, Christianity has no cause to fear. The moral difficulty in the way of belief in the Bible with which Mr. Wilson’s second lecture deals, is thus described: that as the Bible tolerates, or even approves of, various forms of immorality, such as slavery, murder, polygamy, cruelty, and treachery, it is hard to accept of �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 11 the God of the Bible as an object of worship. I don’t think that Mr. Wilson has fully guaged the depth and strength of the moral difficulty felt by Secularists and Freethinkers, but accepting his statement of it, as above summarised, let us examine his mode of meeting it. He admits that many of the persons mentioned in the Bible as objects of God’s favor, are not fair examples of moral goodness, and that some of their actions are unworthy of our imitation. To get out of the Bible the moral teaching that it contains, we must read between the lines, and dis­ cover “the working out and the development of the idea of the kingdom of God ”. From the history of the “training of a typical nation ” (the Jews) we are to “ trace the growth of a purer morality, of personal responsibility, of the spirituality of God, of the thought of a future life”. He thinks that “ facts point unmistakably to the Jews as the nation that formed the chief channel for divine influence in religion”, qualifying this by the proviso that “the morality of the Old Testament is no pattern for us, except so far as our own consciences, enlightened by the completed revelation, approve ”. This, I take it, is a fair summary, mainly in his own words, of what Mr. Wilson told the working-men of Bristol. Close observation of these two lectures will show that Mr. Wilson avoided in the second the line of argument adopted in the first. When discussing the intellectual difficulty, he said the theory of inspiration that Secularists attributed to the Church was neither taught by it nor found in the Articles of Religion, but was a man of straw, set up for the purpose of being knocked down. He might have said the same of the theory of God’s providence and moral government. The words “Kingdom of God”, “ Morality ”, and “ Providence ” do not occur in any of the Articles. The word “ moral ” occurs only once, in the seventh Article, which speaks of “ the commandments which are called moral ”. Mr. Wilson might then have spoken of the moral difficulty, in the same form of words as he used for the intellectual difficulty: “What I say will doubtless surprise some of you, both Christians and Secularists, but it is an undeniable fact that the Articles of Religion do not assert that the Bible contains a moral standard, or that God governs as well as reigns ”. That he has not adopted this line of reasoning proves the truth �12 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. of the remark recently made in these columns : “ Religion seeks to secure her frail tenure by grasping the skirt of that holy piorality who was once but her timid and shrinking handmaid”.1 Mr. Wilson had the same ground for treating the moral difficulty as a man of straw, as he had in regard to the intellectual difficulty; but instead of doing so, he has eagerly enlisted him as a valiant champion on his own side. The future of human happiness and morality, Mr. Wilson would have us believe, depends on the esoteric teaching derived by learned men from a number of treatises, written we know not by whom and know not when; in an ancient language few can read; of which no original exists (save for some possible speculation of a future Shapira); and about whose text and interpretation the best authorities seldom agree. We learn from the first lecture that their claim to inspiration is shadowy, undefined, and incapable of proof; and from the second lecture that they contain a veiled, and not a revealed, record of the will of God as governor of the world. When these treatises agree about any moral law, or in their estimate of the moral worth of any human action, we are by no means to accept this as a guide or pattern, but we must try to ascertain what indi­ cation is to be derived, from the history contained in the Bible, of the general course of God’s providence in respect to the Jews; and this indication, when obtained, is to be subject to the veto of “ conscience ”. Is this a satisfactory or practicable system of philosophy ? What is conscience ? We may regard it as a knowledge of, and fidelity to, the stored-up experience of generations of men, as to what is best for human happiness on earth. If Mr. Wilson accepts this definition of conscience, he virtually accepts the secular philosophy. But whatever definition he may give of conscience, why is it to have a veto on the morality of the Old Testament, and not on the morality of the New Testament ? Let us apply Mr. Wilson’s system to a case of every day life. The question arises whether a man may marry the sister of his deceased wife. From a purely ethical point of view the advantages preponderate over the objections. But what does the Bible say ? is at once asked. The Bible See National Reformer, 8th July, 1883, page 22. �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 13 gives an uncertain sound, but its more weighty texts are supposed to be against such marriages. But Mr. Wilson says we may not be guided by texts, but by the “ history of the development of the kingdom of God, as worked out in the case of the Jews ”. Laymen are puzzled, and refer the matter to divines. Divines differ—some say the pro­ posed marriage accords with that development, some say it does not. Eventually a clear majority decide one way or the other, it matters not which. Even then Mr. Wilson is not satisfied, but would appeal to “Conscience”. Why not let conscience decide it at first without all this ceremony ? It is hardly necessary to observe that the theory of Biblical morality set up by Mr. Wilson, is, like Canon Westcott’s theory of inspiration, new to the religious public. Both have been evolved by the “ struggle for existence ”. But for the certain and now ra,pid action of Ereethought, we should not have heard of either. A few years ago, and anyone who said that Mooses and Abraham and David were immoral characters deserving censure, would have been treated as a blasphemer. Mr. Wilson has discovered that it is right and just to submit the character and deeds of these old Jews to a tribunal and a test, that may possibly brand them as foul disgraces to humanity, and confirm the hatred with which in all ages the uncircumcised Gentiles have regarded God s chosen people, which is nearly as strong now as in the days of Pharoah, and of Nebuchadnezzar, and of Titus. Freethought has scored a considerable success in eliciting such admissions as Mr. Wilson has made. Wb are almost pre­ pared to concede to him the claim he made at last year s Church Congres, that clergymen are Freethinkers. At all events, some of them, if not actually Freethinkers, are not unwilling captives at the chariot wheels of Freethought, and will swell her approaching triumph. In these remarks I have treated only of the more im­ portant and essential parts of Mr. Wilson’s two lectures. There is much in them, and especially in the second lecture, for the adequate notice of which more space is needed than the columns of a newspaper can afford. The lectures form an important point in the struggle between Superstition and Freethought, and ought to be studied by all, on both sides, who are interested in its issue. May I express my �14 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. admiration of the learning, liberality, and rare human sympathy they breathe? In the knowledge and love of of man, they recall some high exemplars. Even if Mr. Wilson has not succeeded in the objects with which his lectures were given, he has secured the warm thanks and true well-wishing of all Secularists, not those of Bristol only.1 II.—Religion v. Revelation. [From the National Reformer, 16th November, 1884 J The Rev. Mr. Wilson, whose two lectures on “Inspira­ tion” were reviewed in these columns last year, has pub­ lished two sermons that he preached some months ago. The first, entitled “Opinion and Service”, was preached in Westminster Abbey, and reminds us that the question to be asked of us will be, What have ye done ? and not What did ye think? The second sermon, entitled “Religion and Revelation ”, was preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Both sermons—but especially the second one—prove the extent to which Church teaching has been influenced by hostile criticism, and what is now thought on these con­ troversial points by that section of enlightened Christian men that Mr. Wilson represents. In reviewing the Bristol lectures, we indicated the following concessions that they made to Freethought. (1) Mr. Wilson rejected the Calvinistic theory of inspira­ tion, and condemned it as “landing men in endless con­ tradictions”. (2) He professed himself unable to define or prove the theory of inspiration which he would have us substitute for Calvin’s. (3) He admitted that the Bible revealed no immutable standard of morality, but that its moral teaching must be sought for “ between the lines ”. And (4) that, when found, it was not supreme, but sub1 Possibly this estimate of the value of the Bristol lectures may to some persons appear too favorable, but I will leave unaltered the terms in which I expressed the opinion that I originally formed of them. Of course, my estimate refers to the lectures only, and does not apply to the other writings included in Mr. Wilson’s volume S. S. �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 15 ject to the veto of conscience. Not only are these con­ cessions still maintained in the sermon before us, but in other directions a retreat is sounded, and vantage ground gained for the implacable foe of theology. Taking that which is known as “religion” in the popular and vague meaning assigned to it, the preacher divided it into the idea, power, or spirit, which he termed “revela­ tion”, and the expression cultus or form to which he con­ fined the word “religion”. He regarded revelation as ever antagonistic to religion, describing the latter as a universal human instinct common to all races, savage and civilised; dark and terrible in its history; stained with idolatry, cruelty, and lust. On the other hand, he would have us regard revelation as a divine work, spiritual, accumulative, and imperishable, ever striving with the low religious instinct, and illuminating and guiding man.1 Here I must ask if history affords any trace of this struggle between revelation and religion, or if it exists only in Mr. Wilson’s imagination? We know of the strife between the ideas of the divine and the human, between Spiritualism and Materialism, and that for long ages it has been one-sided and unequal; we know that the idea of man and matter is at length superseding that of God and spirit; that securing the happiness of man is of more importance than ascertaining the will of God; that human affairs depend on ourselves, and not on the moral govern­ ment of a personal God. This great strife is tending to the enlightenment and advancement of our race, but it is not the strife described by Mr. Wilson. Revelation is not mastering religion as he suggests, but religion and revela­ tion combined are about to fade away before morality. The revelation that is on the winning side is not the revelation of God’s will, but the revelation of man’s reason. All so-called divine revelations rest on the religious instinct, spring from it, and strengthen it. The two are inseparable, and history gives no indication of an inter1 One great merit of scientific system is accuracy of definition and rigid adherence t > a definition once laid down. If we compare the meaning of the term “religion” given in the passages now referred to with the conception of it that is inculcated in the passage quoted in the introduction to this work we shall be able to estimate the extreme tenuity of Mr. Wilson’s claim to scientific method. S. S. �16 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. necine strife between them. On the contrary, they have ever fought side by side against human reason and Freethought. Can Mr. Wilson find any instance of a stake or rack or pillory having been used on behalf of revelation against religion, or on behalf of religion against revela­ tion ? It is surely vain for him to say that a sentence like this: “To obey is better than sacrifice” is revelation,1 while this other is religion: “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying .... He among the sons of Aaron that offereth the blood of the peace offering shall have the right shoulder. For the wave-breast and the heave shoulder have i taken of the children of Israel, and have given them unto Aaron the Priest, and unto his sons by a statute for ever.” By what process of reading between the lines does he venture to designate Samuel’s words as revelation, and God’s words as religion? Mr. Wilson says that “the cry ‘crucify him, crucify him,’ is the climax and acme of the ceaseless contest between the lower religious instincts of the human race and the higher divine light that pours on men”. But supposing that the crucifixion really occurred, that the record of it is not (as Eobert Taylor avers) a Gnostic forgery emanating from Egypt, that old hotbed of superstition and lies, why should we regard that crucified “blasphemer” as “the unique revealer of God ” ? Why should we not regard him as a son of man, himself the slave of religion, using such poor reasoning faculty as he possessed to expose the fraud and hypocrisy of a priesthood ? What Jesus Christ revealed was human, and not divine; and he died, not as a revealer at the suit of religion, but as a reasoner at the suit of revelation. For our knowledge of divinity we are indebted to the Comforter, who never died for us. Let Mr. Wilson tell us in his own words what he means by revelation: “The word ‘revelation’ implies a theory; it is a way of regarding and grouping facts. The facts are the history of man, the development, continuous and discontinuous, of the spiritual insight and forces of mankind. These facts are what 1 The 15th chapter of 1 Samuel, from which Mr. Wilson quote these words, is one we should have expected him to ignore, lhe obedience inculcated by Samuel was an awful crime, and Saul’s clear duty was to have disobeyed the order. d �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 17 they are, and we may hope by study to arrive at some know­ ledge of them. But we need theories to group facts; and the theory which is expressed by the word revelation is this, that man is, in his present condition, a partaker in some inchoate manner of that controlling universal consciousness which we call God; which illuminates the mind and conscience of man : that man is, or possesses, a ^>avepwcri9, a manifestation of God. The control of God is exhibited in its effects, and one of the effects is the moral education and evolution of man. The growth, then, and development of this manifestation of the spirit of God in man, and by man, and to man, is revelation.” I fear that Mr. Wilson’s attempt to construct a safe theory of revelation is as unsatisfactory as his attempt to deal with inspiration. Why should any “way of regarding and grouping facts ” be styled revelation and not science ? What facts are there to be grouped ? The history of man is not a fact, but a theory resting on facts. The “develop­ ment of man’s spiritual insight ” is not a fact, but a theory resting on fictions. What is “spiritual insight”? from what has it been developed ? what is it tending to ? Does not the use of the word “spiritual” beg the whole question of inspiration and revelation ? Mr. Wilson here seems to fall into the same error that led Mr. Drummond to argue for the existence of a spiritual world governed by natural law. Human history needs no belief in revelation for group­ ing the facts it records. The best historians eschew all reference to a controlling providence. Sir Archibald Alison wrote twenty volumes to prove that Providence was always on the side of the Tories; but who reads Sir Archibald Alison ? Beal history (such as Gibbon’s) cannot be written if any such theory as Mr. Wilson’s “Revela­ tion ” is used to group its facts. Let us continue our quotation from Mr. Wilson : “ To those who are deeply impressed with God’s influence on the hearts of man, to those who grasp this God-theory—this revelation-theory—it carries conviction. They read and see the history of man in its light—they see the Spirit striving with man—the Eternal Consciousness more and more revealed in the inchoate, time-bound individual. All the world of nature and history speaks of God. It is a theory which man cannot per­ fectly master, nor apply to every detail, nor prove conclusively to all minds; but in spite of this it convinces such as grasp it, �18 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. Discovery becomes indistinguishable from revelation. the work of God.” All is Passing by those parts of this quotation that are to me incomprehensible, I would ask if this reference to a “ God­ theory ” is not either a palpable truism, or a misstatement of facts. Those who worshipped the Olympian Zeus, or Venus of the Myrtle-tree, or Diana of Ephesus; those who built the great temples of Hindustan; the Mahomedans who say that there is no God but Allah; were not all these imbued with the God-idea, and did they know of this eternal strife between revelation and religion ? If on the other hand the idea of God to which Mr. Wilson refers implies a being hostile to religion, and governing mankind by a slow and partial process of revelation, then his sen­ tence simply amounts to this, that those who believe it, believe it. Does this carry conviction to the great and constantly increasing mass of mankind who cannot grasp the God-idea ? They cannot “ see the spirit striving with man”, but they see man’s reason striving with religion and superstition. Mr. Wilson elsewhere says that it is found possible by experience “ to feel all human history instinct with God”. Does he realize the fact that those who have once grasped the profound solace of Materialistic philosophy see all theological dogma instinct with man ? With reference to such men, those “who have abandoned our dogma and are indifferent to our cultus ”, Mr. Wilson remarks as follows : “It is perhaps our fault if they think that this is all that Christianity has to offer. But they do not and cannot escape from the Christian revelation, even though they call it by another name. It is light; and in that light some of them live and walk; and the cultus, the ritual, the OpytTKeia which they adopt may not be wholly dissimilar to that ‘ pure ’ cultus or ritual or 6pt}<TK£M of St. James, which consists in charity and purity and unworldliness, and is, along with the sacraments, the only Christian ritual ordained in the Bible.” Here at least is consolation; whether we believe or reject the dogma, the work of revelation will go on. Why, then, should we force and strain our reason to accept a theory which does not depend on our acceptance of it, but which must remain true whether we accept it or not ? �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 19 Better to maintain the rectitude and supremacy of our reason, knowing that we shall not lose one iota of the benefit of revelation. Is this Mr. Wilson’s advice? It seems unanswerable. Mr. Wilson’s own position as regards religion seems to be delineated in the following sentences :— “ But for the vast mass of mankind it is of far more import­ ance to hand down to them and through them the leading truths of revelation in any form, than to insist on the inade­ quacy of the form. Of course men trained, as men ought to he trained, to criticise and question everything, may feel that the cultus and dogma of Christianity in its present form, if put forward and insisted on as absolute, authoritative, exhaustive truths, are a concealment of the higher light; and their honestyr compels them to renounce and even to denounce them. But when such men come in contact with their less critical brethren, whose convictions and hopes and faiths must be clear, defined, emphatic, dogmatic, to whom vaguer and more philosophical expressions convey no meaning, they will discover that the language in which revelation is transferable to them is, to a far larger extent than they anticipated before trial, the current language of cultus and dogma. They will be powerless.to find another shell for the kernel. Nevertheless, such men will fear­ lessly purify their teaching from the grosser dogmas from which Christian teaching is by no means wholly free, and will try to contend, to a certain extent, with the lower religious instinct in the true spirit of their Master, educating their people to feel the spirit, and not only see the letter.” Some of this quotation describes the position of Secu­ larists as well as of enlightened Churchmen. But in one essential point our morality differs from theirs. Holding as we do that the whole nut, shell and kernel alike, is poisonous, we do not retain a worthless shell for the sake of the kernel, but we boldly tell our less “critical brethren ” to beware of both. So far, therefore, as Mr. Wilson represents a distinct school of thought, whose influence in the church is on the increase, we may from this sermon, preached in our great national cathedral, claim this further concession to Freethought, that religion is hateful, injurious, and of human origin, and that it is committed to a long and eventually losing strife. That is a clear advantage. It matters not that Mr. Wilson would see a divine revelation in the power that is to overcome religion. Let him cherish the delusion. �20 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. —we know that it is man’s reason and not God’s spirit that has maintained the glorious, and soon to be victorious, conflict.1 III.—Religion v. Revelation. [From the National Reformer of the 30th November, 1884.] The theory of a ceaseless strife between the spirit of God and religion, propounded in the remarkable sermon preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral and recently reviewed here, is so novel and startling as to justify a closer examination than was then attempted. It is with all the greater pleasure that we again refer to it, because Mr. Wilson’s opinions deserve, in no ordinary measure, our respect and attention ; for no English churchman has made such efforts as he has to understand the position of Secularists, or has shown such a disposition to discuss philosophy with us on terms of equality. Freethinkers are in the habit of ascribing to human reason the gradual illumination of man, and his liberation from superstition. The claim, therefore, that these benefits are due to the influence or spirit of a God who hates superstition as much as any Secularist does, is well cal­ culated to arrest our attention. I have already quoted Mr. Wilson’s definition of the revelation to which he attributes such vast results ; and I have attempted to show that before his hypothesis can be placed before us for acceptance he must state with greater precision what facts there are for theorising about. Of ourselves we have no knowledge of such facts, and are entirely dependent on him for information about them. He tells us the facts are “the history of man, and the development of the spiritual insight and forces of man­ kind ”, It is surely on the propounder of a novel theory 1 The words “Let him cherish the delusion” have a shade of bitterness, and I should prefer to say * Let biw , if be can, prove his new position; till it is proved we must hold that it is’man’s reason, and not God’s spirit, that has maintained the conflict. ”, S. S. �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 21 that the onus lies of defining the historical facts on which it rests. History contains many facts, but I can recall none for the grouping of which this hypothesis is required. Let us enumerate a few; the siege of Troy and the sacri­ fice of Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles; the rape of the Sabine women and the death of Lucretia; the invention of printing and the discovery of America; the Oxford movement and the establishment of the Divorce Court. These facts lend themselves to scientific grouping in every direction save one; they may be arranged in support of theories in morals and politics, arts and science, educa­ tion and political economy; they will even support Mr. Wilson’s theory of religion; but the one thing on which they have no apparent bearing is the ceaseless strife between a divine revelation and religion. As regards the so-called facts of spiritual development on which Mr. AVilson relies, the sermon before us does not furnish so clear a statement as is contained in a paper which he read in 1882, before the Church Congress at Derby, from which therefore we quote as follows: “ Besides these facts of history and criticism, there are other facts that cannot be traced to their ultimate origin ; the result of the evolution of human nature under the influence, as we believe, of God’s holy spirit; the facts of conscience and con­ sciousness, of hope and aspiration and worship, spiritual facts which have no verification but themselves. With these lies most of our concern. They contain the germ of the spiritual life and progress of every man, the inner life which Christian teaching fosters and trains, till it is supreme. These facts lie in a region equally beyond authority and Freethought. I submit that every phrase here used—evolution, con­ science, consciousness, aspiration, and worship—requires definition. At first sight I should say that none of them implied a fact; but it is possible I may be mistaken. Still, without definition, we know not what facts are implied and whether the facts are objective or spiritual. Here again the onus of definition and proof lies on the propounder. It is vain to tell men who profess to see no phsenomena that prove the existence of a God that from spiritual facts implied in such vague phrases as I have quoted, and which “ have no verification but themselves ”, they must admit not only the existence of a God but that he has a spirit also. �22 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. Having thus attempted to show that Mr. Wilson's theory of revelation must remain in the hypothetical stage until it is duly equipped with scientific definition and demonstration, we will turn to his a posteriori sketch of the history of revelation. The first instance he gives of its existence is when it ‘ ‘ spoke in Moses and made the two great commandments, love to God and man, stand out above all else”. I am unaware of this event. Moses is said to have received ten commandments, one of which may be read as prescribing love to God (as if love was ever a creature of command), but they contain no trace of love to man. The precedence given by Moses to an enforced and unnatural love of God. and his silence about human love, far from illumi­ nating our race, has caused much of the evil that Mi*. Wilson attributes to religion. I have already referred to the second instance of revelation mentioned in the sermon : “when it spoke in Samuel and taught the nations” that command which King Saul was dethroned for disobeying. I am confident that an impartial consideration of the chapter referred to will lead to the conclusion that Samuel’s speech was the reverse of illumination. The third instance is when “ it spoke in David and in the prophets again and again in words too familiar to need quotation ” : I know not what passages Mr. Wilson refers to. There are many verses in David and the prophets that inculcate religion in its worst form; 1 can recall none that have helped to suppress it. Then, Mr. Wilson says, from the time of Ezra, for four centuries “ the natural growth of thought and revelation was strangled by the grasp of religion”. Here surely is a new idea introduced into the theory by the use of the words “natural” and “thought”. Is the spirit of God a natural force; and has it, like man, the power of thinking ? But passing this difficulty, methinks that in these four centuries man’s reason achieved some deeds of renown. Buddha, Socrates, and Confucius taught; the Spartans fought at Thermopylae; Sophocles wrote the “Antigone”; Euclid, the “Elements”; and Lucretius, the “ Book of Nature ” ; and human art will never surpass the unknown sculptors of the Venus and the Apollo. We got on so well in those four centuries when revelation was hushed that one is tempted to ask if its revival has bettered us. Let the eighteen centuries of Christianity �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 23 and the twelve centuries of Mahomedanism answer the query. After this pause a fresh impetus was given to revelation by the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. “ Obedience to the will of God, purity, gentleness, sympathy with all, with the sinful and the suffering, these and such as these were the lessons taught by his life.” But it has been asserted that none of the lofty sayings attributed to Jesus in the three synoptic gospels were original: they are all said to have occurred in some earlier writing; and even if we give him the credit of selecting the best sentiments of those who went before him, we must not forget that it was he who said : “ I came not to send peace, but a sword ” (Matt, x., 44), and that this prediction has been fulfilled. Not even to his own Church has he brought peace, still less to the world. “He abolished ritual” ; so did Buddha. He ‘‘broke down barriers of race and caste” ; if so, why do they still exist? “He introduced no new dogma”; but the Comforter, that Spirit of God whom he sent—the same, I presume, who works for our illumination through revela­ tion—has introduced much dogma. Of this final effort of revelation and its success Mr. Wilson says truly: “The religious instinct is strong; it is deep in human nature, and at times it would seem as if it had smothered the revelation of Christ”. Mr. Wilson has declined to define God. A God who has a spirit engaged in a ceaseless strife against religion, and which has been so near failure, suggests paradoxical ideas that cannot be clothed in definite terms. But though he does not define, he believes; and on this belief or con­ sciousness he founds the theology that he preaches. Many learned divines hold that a theology resting on conscious­ ness is insufficient, and that it requires the support of the understanding as well. Whether consciousness is of itself an adequate basis for theology is a question for the theo­ logian, and does not concern us. No consciousness or belief, either in his own mind or the mind of others, can Influence the earnest student of secular philosophy. To him such a theory as this, that rests both in its d priori aspect of hypothesis and in its a posteriori aspect of history, on unverifiable faets and sentimental consciousness, must fail to commend itself, even if without it the history of man were inexplicable. �24 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. But it is not so : we do not find in our history any entanglement that is insoluble save by the theory of a divine spirit; we can group all man’s varied story, by man himself, his passions and desires, his conscience and reason. Surely that theory is better which rests on facts that can be verified, which explains our history, which solves past difficulty and future doubt—better than one which sets up an agency whose very existence is an emotion, and whose interference in mundane affairs is a mystery, for the solu­ tion of which we must eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In these two articles I have tried to look at Mr. Wilson’s theory from the point of view of a Secularist, and from the point of view of a Christian. To a Materialist it must appear illusory. But there are many Christians to whom it will be welcome as a resting-place, or half-way house. Those who recognise the hatefulness of religion, the hol­ lowness of dogma, the impossibility of miracles, the con­ tradiction of inspiration, the supremacy of morals, the one-ness of human nature, the eternity of matter, and the persistence of force; who cannot as yet relinquish the idea of a personal God who takes some interest, however partial and indirect, in our affairs, and who stands towards us in some relation that implies mutual obligation—such men may gladly accept the philosophy of this sermon. I should be inclined, however, to predict that they will find it is but a temporary refuge, and that the only secure citadel rests on the everlasting rocks. IV.—Authority v. Consent. [From, the National Reformer of 14th December, 1884.] The honest and persistent expression of secular opinion is at length producing some effect on the public mind. We address ourselves to all shades of religious thought. We meet the unprincipled assertions of interested priests and their too credulous flocks with satire and disapproval’; those who show an inclination to argue we invite freely to �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 25 discussion ; and the thoughtful men who see the instability of the popular conception of religion and who desire to understand the secular position are met half way, and are sure of our best help to enable them to grasp those truths which are our great consolation. As- befits the guardians and expositors of truth, we strive to keep our walk and conversation unspotted and free from reproach, so as to show our fellows that morality is not dependent on belief. We make all due allowance for the hereditary taint of bigotry and intolerance, feeling that religion is an instinct of primitive and uncivilised man, and that its errors arise from no divine intervention, but from the ignorance and weakness of our race. Though assured of the ultimate triumph of truth, we accept with patience and forbearance, while the contest lasts, the rude buffets, the social and political disability which the laws of this country allot to unbelievers, knowing that deep down in the heart of England lies a feeling of justice, which must eventually ensure for earnest men and women a fair hearing and no disfavor. This is all we require; and when we obtain it we shall gladly leave our own opinions and those of our opponents to stand or fall by the test of truth. I have been led to make these remarks on the present position of Secularists by some statements in a paper on the limits of Freethought and Authority read by the Rev. J. M. Wilson at the Church Congress of 1882; because I think that wide as is that gentleman’s charity, and broad as are his views, he has failed to perceive that the weight of authority is on our side, and not on that of his Church. With much of Mr. Wilson’s paper we may agree. He has accurately defined Freethought, and appreciates its value ; he recognises its natural limits, and strongly depre­ cates any artificial limits ; he properly urges that between it and authority there is not a relation of mutual exclusion, but of mutual inter-dependence ; but when he speaks of the consent of the past as an authority, and claims for it in religion and morals the weight of authority, we are bound to express our dissent. I shall first quote the sentences where expression is given to those opinions that I differ from, and having done so I will state my views as to the real meaning of the words “Authority” and “Consent”. After stating that no artificial limit can be imposed on �26 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. the mind of man, and that even the creeds and tests of a Church must from time to time be interpreted and revised so as to bring them into accordance with progressive know­ ledge, he proceeds : “Nor, again, is there any limit to authority. Heredity, education, the weight given instinctively to established beliefs’ the vast momentum of long-standing habits and institutions, give to the past an influence on the present, which secures con­ tinuity amidst change, and makes progress steady. In other words, there exists a natural authority, subtle, groundless, far stronger than any artificial authority, and resented by none. NV e are held by the past, not to our harm, but our good: nursed by it, trained by it, for growth and for the right use of freedom.” Further on, speaking of the weight of authority in dif­ ferent branches of knowledge, he uses these words : “We shall see that the weight to be assigned to a great consensus of opinion in the past depends on the subject. In objective fact it is nil............. In criticism the weight is very small............. In theology it is far higher.................. In ethics it is highest of all, because the axioms of ethics—honesty, justice, patriotism, filial obedience, monogamy, purity—rest on such an enormous mass of observed facts and experience in human nature. In these subjects it is so high that we are right in treating Free Thought, or rather its consequence, free action, as a crime.” It seems to me that Mr. Wilson has here confused the two methods by which a man unable or unwilling to investigate a subject for himself may arrive at an opinion thereon without investigation. These methods are reliance on authority, and reliance on consent. They are of very different value, but are here treated as identical. We may form an opinion on the authority of others, if we are satisfied of the observance of three conditions: (1) That their sagacity and intelligence is adequate ; (2) that they have maturely studied the subject under consideration ; and (3) that they are free from bias, interest, or compul­ sion. Given these conditions, and we bow to trustworthy authority; if they are wanting, we feel hesitation and distrust. No one would trust the advice or opinion of a professional man whose intellect, or acquirements, or integrity was doubtful. But this highest form of authority is ignored by Mr. �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 27 Wilson. When he speaks of authority, he refers to such influences as these,—heredity, education, long-standing habits, consensus of past opinion, experience of human nature. This is not authority but consent. Idle, in­ different, or superficial men may use it as a guide, but no earnest inquirer after truth can accept of it as a limit to, or substitute for, Freethought. If the “consensus of the past ” had continued to influence us, slavery would still have been legal, and scores of wretches would have been hanged every Monday morning at some modern substitute for Tyburn. Fortunately, in some respects, we are a practical people. To secure the higher form of authority I have described, absolute freedom of thought is indispensable; and no thought is free that is bound by the weight of past con­ sensus. Knowledge and experience are requisite, but they must be used as guides and not accepted as limits. Other­ wise the thought is fettered, and the opinion valueless as authority. In estimating the value of the opinion of another as authority, the third condition—that of freedom from bias, self-interest, and compulsion—is of such great importance that there is apnma facie reason for preferring the opinion of a Freethinker (I use the word in its common acceptation). Given equal intelligence and study, the opinion of a man who incurs obloquy by professing it, is more likely to be authoritative than that of a man who conforms to Mrs. Grundy and the “usages of society ”, The higher form of authority is wanting in regard to religion. Most dogmas are beyond human intellect, and no man ever existed whose opinion is authority for be­ lieving such a doctrine as the trinity. Nor is the study that Churchmen bring to bear on religious matters such as to command our confidence. It has no scientific value, and is bound by foregone conclusions. I shall wait till the third condition is seriously claimed for apologists before I dispute it, merely remarking that martyrdoms do not consecrate with the halo of authority the opinions for which men and women have died deaths of agony. Though every church has its martyr roll, it has also its black list of those who have suffered for free or for fettered thought, at its suit, and because they differed from it. Our fellow men have been so ready to die for all �28 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. sorts of irrational emotions that it is easier to inquire for oneself than to decide which of the martyrs is worthy to be followed as a guide. I admit, therefore, all the influence claimed for Consent in the first of the two extracts quoted above. The influence exists, and has some good and some bad effects : we think the bad effects preponderate, and we object to its being elevated into the position of Authority. Turning to the second extract above quoted, I shall very briefly state three objections of a more formidable nature than any hitherto made. Mr. Wilson seems desirous to impose on Freethought, in regard to morals, far more stringent bonds than he would impose in regard to religion; a course that appears to me so dangerous that I shall be very glad to learn that I have mistaken the drift of his opinion. My objections are: (1) The six “virtues” named by Mr. Wilson are not axioms of ethics nor axioms at all; an axiom must contain a statement of fact or opinion. (2) Not one of the virtues named implies an idea that can be transformed into axiomatic shape, resting on past con­ sent and adapted for future guidance. Let Mr. Wilson try, as regards “Patriotism”, to construct an axiom for the guidance of an Irish Nationalist, or, as regards “Monogamy”, to construct one for a Turkish Pasha: he will find that the light thrown by the past on the path of the future is dim, indirect, and apt to mislead; and that the “ authority ” of one man is more valuable than the consent of millions. (3) So soon as Freethought condemns an ethical rule that rests on past consent, then the crime is not (as Mr. Wilson asserts) to translate the thought into action, but to stifle the free thought by pretending that consent is an authority that supersedes it. In a word, I agree with Mr. Wilson in identifying Authority and Freethought. We differ in this, that he regards Consent as identical with Authority, and therefore identical with Freethought, while I regard Consent as opposed to and inconsistent with Authority and Freethought. �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 29 V.—On Free Discussion. [From the National Reformer of December 28th, 1884.] The following extract from the Edinburgh Review of 1850 (vol. xci., page 525) will be read with interest. The work reviewed is entitled “Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion”, and was published in 1849 by Mr. George Cornewell Lewis, afterwards Sir G. C. Lewis, Bart., who was a Cabinet Minister from 1855 till his death in 1863. A second edition appeared in 1875, and was reviewed by Mr. Gladstone in the opening article of the first volume of the A^he^ew/A Century. A reply from the pen of Sir James Stephen appears at page 270 ; and Mr. Gladstone s re­ joinder at page 902 of the same volume. The opinions on authority and consent which I recently expressed in these columns were to a great measure based on Sir G. C. Lewis s book. Times have changed since 1850, and it can no longer be said with truth that “public opinion exercises a formidable repression of infidelity ”, or that “ the avowedly infidel books that appear are few”. No dogma of religion.is now so sacred, no pretention so vital, as to preclude dis­ cussion from any point of view, however radical. Mr. Gladstone has thus described Sir G. C. Lewis’ posi­ tion : “As a Theist he did not recognise the ark of the covenant, but he recognised the presence within it as true, though undefinable ”. {Nineteenth Century, vol. i., p. 921.) “ There is one circumstance which, in England, impairs authority in matters of religion, to which Mr. Lewis has not adverted. It is the state of English law and English opinion on infidelity. “ Christianity, we are told, is parcel of the law of England ; therefore to ‘write against Christianity in general’, to use the words of Holt, or ‘to impugn the Christian religion generally’, in those of Lord Kenyon, or ‘ to impeach the esta­ blished faith, or to endeavor to unsettle the belief of others, in those of Justice Bayley, is a misdemeanor at common law, and subjects the offender, at the discretion of the court, to fine, imprisonment, and infamous corporal punishment. The statute law is rather vague. By the 9th and 10th Will. III., cap. 32, whoever, having been educated a Christian, shall bj writing, printing, teaching, or advised speaking, deny any one of the �30 UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. persons in the Holy Trinity to be God, or assert that there are more Gods than one, or deny the Christian religion to be true, or the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testa­ ment to be of divine authority, shall for the first offence, be incapable of holding any office or place of trust, civil or military, and for the second, be imprisoned for three years, and be incapable of suing in any court of law or equity, or of accepting any gift or legacy. The punishment for deny­ ing the doctrine of the Trinity was repealed in our own times ; but the remainder of the statute is in full force at this day. It is true that, in these times, neither the common law nor the statute is likely to be enforced against a sober, temperate dis­ putant. The publisher of the translation of Strauss has not been punished. But his safety is precarious. If anyone were so ill-advised as to prosecute him, he must be convicted of libel, unless the jury should think fit to save him at the expense of perjury; and we doubt whether the court would venture to inflict on him a mere nominal sentence. “ But the repression of infidelity by law is far less formidable than that which is exercised by public opinion. The author of a work professedly and deliberately denying the truth of Chris­ tianity would become a Pariah in the English world. If he were in a profession, he would find his practice fall off; if he turned towards the public service, its avenues would be barred. In society he would find himself shunned or scorned —even his children would feel the taint of their descent. To be suspected of holding infidel opinions, though without any attempt at their propagation, even without avowing them, is a great mis­ fortune. It is an imputation which every prudent man care­ fully avoids. Under such circumstances, what reliance can an Englishman place on the authority of the writers who pro­ fess to have examined into the matter, and to have ascertained the truth? Can he say, ‘Their premises and conclusions are before the public. If there were any flaw in them, it would be detected and exposed ’ ? The errors committed or supposed to be committed by writers on the evidences of Christianity may be detected, but there is little chance of their being ex­ posed. It may, perhaps be safe sometimes to impugn a false premise, or an unwarranted inference, but never to deny a con­ clusion. It is dangerous, indeed, to assert on religious matters any views with which the public is not familiar. It is to this immunity from criticism that we owe the rash assumption of premises, and the unwarranted inferences, with which many theological writings abound. Facts and arguments are passed from author to author, which in Secular matters would be dissi­ pated in the blaze of free discussion. Theological literature, at least the portion of it which relates to the doctrines which ‘ are parcel of the common law ’ has been a protected literature ; �UNSCIENTIFIC RELIGION. 31 and much of its offspring has the ricketty distorted form which belongs to the unhappy bantlings that have been swaddled by protection. “ To this state of things we owe the undue importance given to the few avowedly infidel books which actually appear. They are like the political libels which creep out in a despotism. Their authors are supposed to be at least sincere, since they peril reputation and fortune. 'What could have given popu­ larity to ‘ The Nemesis of Faith ’ but the persecution of its author ? To this also we owe the insidious form in which in­ fidelity is usually insinuated—intermixed with professions of orthodoxy, and conveyed by a hint or a sneer. If Gibbon could have ventured, in simple and express terms, to assert his dis­ belief in Christianity, all his persiflage would have been omitted ; and the reader, especially the young reader, would have known that his anti-Christian opinions were the attacks of an enemy— not the candid admissions of a friend. To this also we owe much of the scepticism which exists among educated English­ men : usiug the word scepticism in its derivative sense—to express not incredulity, but, doubt. They have not the means of making a real independent examination of the evidences of their faith. A single branch of that vast inquiry, if not aided by taking on trust the results handed down by previous inquirers, would occupy all the leisure which can be spared from a business or a profession. All that they think they have time for is to read a few popular treatises. But they know that these treatises have not been subjected to the ordeal of unfettered criticism. As little can they infer the truth of the established doctrine from the apparent acquiesence of those around them. They know that they may be surrounded by unbelieving conformists. And thus they pass their lives in scepticism—in a state of in­ decision— suspecting that what they have been taught may contain a mixture of truth and error which they are unable to decompose. If a balance could be struck between the infidelity that is prevented, and the infidelity that is occasioned, by the absence of free discussion, we have no doubt that the latter would greatly predominate.” ��iillj ihww � 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 &amp; 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 Unscientific religion, or: remarks on the Rev. J.M. Wilson's "Attempt to treat some religious questions in a scientific spirit" Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: v, 7-31 p. ; 18 cm. Notes: Reply to Essays and addresses of Rev. James M. Wilson (Macmillan, 1894). First published in the National Reformer. Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Freethought Publishing Company Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1887 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N574 Subject The topic of the resource Religion Science Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource S.S. 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 (Unscientific religion, or: remarks on the Rev. J.M. Wilson's "Attempt to treat some religious questions in a scientific spirit"), 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 James M. Wilson NSS Religion and science https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/e05f74daba8074a25d1d54a88ee6372b.pdf?Expires=1777507200&Signature=ty27uMnBMSI%7E1YExWkyK-30zf7kxMUQwYif73ZIBp13KJZwJCBNXWS-xeiobgpGalesQwH8EQiAmbwVFXQVbk6Yqz6ejD8nNFxNHhoXU5-MxUAyKo8Gnrdw-076V0SA0dai6qjlwZrDPGNCJSs5FAc-M1aZxIkbioEgFINcx86c-LBU7gHPzo%7EjH-mTK35kqi6b82iZPaA3YVa2IFVr5cjt07nVm5GEV9YMyPSp0xdANq4gfFATPC5HIMAai3n1wTxaWHtjSJDzVoGj215BY5MxEMWUTUgi-ybWKACkmdqTMJjaC4pi2ZUkrjYCkeIe3jfvhWO16SoWLk0ajvFJJ7A__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 493692d85326f07c2a0542e209785b92 PDF Text Text WHAT WAS CHRIST? JL REPLY TO JOHN STUART MILL. BY 1 : : : TWOPENCE, PRICE i 4 J : ♦ ♦ 4 4 4 4 4 t LONDON : PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY, 28 Stonecutter Street, E.C. 1887. �LONDON : POINTED AND PUBLISHED BY G. W. EOOTE, AT 28 STONECUTTER STREET, E.C. �11 national secular society WHAT WAS CHRIST? Thebe are many passages in John Stuart Mill’s Three Essays on Religion which the apologists of Christianity very prudently ignore. Orthodoxy naturally shrinks from the descrip­ tion of a God who could make a Hell as a “ dreadful idealisa­ tion of wickedness.” Nor is it pleasant to read that “ Not even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good which ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism, can the government of nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent.” But Christian lecturers are never tired of quoting the pane­ gyric on their blessed Savior, which occurs in another part of the same volume. They never mention the fact that the Essay which contains this eulogium was not revised by the author for publication, while the other two essays were finally prepared for the press. It is enough for them that the passage is found in a volume of Mill’s. Whether it harmonises with the rest of the volume, or whether the author might have considerably modified it-in revision, are questions with which they have no concern. “ Here is Mill’s testimony to Christ,” they cry, “ and we fling it like a bombshell into the Freethought camp.” We propose to pick up this bombshell, to dissect and analyse it, and to show that it is perfectly harmless. Mill’s panegyric on Christ, as Professor Newman says, “ caused surprise.”* Professor Bain, who was one of Mill’s most intimate friends, and has written his biography,f uses the very same expression. The whole of the Essay on Theism “was a surprise to his friends,” not for its attacks on orthodoxy, but for its concessions to “ modern sentimental Theism.” Professor Bain observes that these concessions have been made the most of, “ and, as is usual in such cases, the inch has been stretched to an ell.” Speaking with all the authority of his position, Professor Bain adds that the “ fact remains that in everything * “ Christianity in its Cradle,” p. 57. f “ John Stuart Mill: A Criticism; with Personal Recollections.” �(4 ) characteristic of the creed of Christendom, he was a thorough­ going negationist. He admitted neither its truth nor its utility.” How, then, did Mill come to write those passages of his Three Essays which caused such surprise to his intimate friends ? The answer is simple. “ Who is the woman ? ” asked Talley­ rand, when two friends wished him to settle a dispute. There was a woman in Mill’s case. Mrs. Taylor, afterwards his wife, and the object of his adoring love, disturbed his judgment in life and perverted it in death. He buried her at Avignon, and resided near her grave until he could lie beside her in the eternal sleep. No doubt the long vigil at his wife’s tomb shows the depth of his love, but it necessarily tended to make his brain the victim of his heart. There can be no worse offence against the laws of logic than to argue from our feelings; and when Mill began to talk about “ indulging the hope ” of immortality, he had set his feet, however hesitatingly, on the high road of senti­ mentalism and superstition. How different was his attitude in the vigor of manhood, when his intellect was unclouded by personal sorrow ! In closing his splendid Essay on fhe Utility of Religion, he wrote : “ It seems to me not only possible, but probable, that in a higher, and, above all, a happier condition of human life, not annihilation, but immor­ tality, may be the burdensome idea; and that human nature, though pleased with the present, and by no means impatient to quit it, would find comfort and not sadness in the thought that it is not chained through eternity to a conscious existence which it cannot be assured that it will always wish to preserve.” How great is the range of egoism, even with the best of us! Writing before his own great loss, Mill sees no argument for immortality in the yearning of bereaved hearts for reunion with the beloved dead ; but when- he himself craves “ the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still,” he perceives room for hope. His own passion of grief lights a beacon in the darkness, which his sympathy with the grief of others had never kindled. We can easily understand how Mill’s profound love for his wife affected his intellect after her death, when we see how it deluded him while she lived. In his Autobiography he describes her as a beauty and a wit. Mr. Maccall says that she was 'not brilliant in conversation, and decidedly plain-looking; and the same objection appears to be hinted by Professor Bain. Carlyle refers to her several times in his Reminiscences, always as a light gossamery creature. It is notorious that the Grotes regarded �( 5 ) Mill’s attachment to her as an infatuation. And certainly he did a great deal to justify their opinion. In the dedication of his Essay on Liberty, he refers to her “ great thoughts and noble feelings,” and her “ all but unrivalled wisdom. This eulogium a little astonished those who had read her Essay in the West­ minster Review, reprinted by Mill in his Dissertations and Dis­ cussions, which revealed no very wonderful ability, and assuredly did not place her beside Harriet Martineau or George Eliot. But in his Autobiography this panegyric was completely eclipsed. Mill informs the world in that volume that her mind “included Carlyle’s and infinitely more,” and that in comparison with her Shelley was but a child. Apparently seeing, however, that sceptics might inquire why a woman of such profound and original genius did not leave some memorable work, Mill con­ fidingly tells us that she was content to inspire other minds rather than express herself through the channels of literature. In other words, she played second fiddle in preference to first, which is exactly what men and women of original genius will never do. But whom did she inspire ? We know of none but Mill, and on examining his works chronologically we find that all his greatest books were composed before he fell under her influence. Mr. Gladstone explains Mill’s “ ludicrous estimate of his wife’s powers,” by saying that she was a quick receptive woman, who gave him back the echo of: his own thoughts, which he took for the independent oracles of truth. Over the tomb of this idolised wife, whom his fancy clothed with fictitious or exaggerated attributes, Mill wrote his Essay on Theism. Miss Helen Taylor says it shows “the carefullybalanced results of the deliberations of a life-time.” But she allows that— “ On the other hand, there had not been time for it to undergo the revision to which from time to time he subjected most of his writings before making them public. Not only, therefore, is the style less polished than of any other of his published works, but even the matter itself, at least in the exact shape it here assumes, has nevei' undergone the repeated examination which it certainly would have passed through before he would himself have given it to the world.” If Mill had lived, he would perhaps have made many improve­ ments and excisions in this unfortunate essay. As it stands it is singularly feeble in comparison with the two former Essays. He “hopes” for immortality, and “regrets to say” that the Design Argument is not inexpugnable, as though this were the language of a philosopher or a logician. After writing several pages on the “Marks of Design in Nature,” he passingly notices the �( 6 ) Darwinian Theory and admits that, if established, it “would greatly attenuate the evidence ” for Creation. Yet he drops this great hypothesis in the next paragraph, and talks about “ the large balance of probability in favor of creation by intel­ ligence ” in the present state of our knowledge. What he meant was, in the present state of our ignorance. Mill neither under­ stood nor felt the force of Darwinism. We shall find, in examining his panegyric on Christ, that he understood that subject just as little, and that, where his knowledge did apply, he flatly contradicted what he had written before. Let us now ascertain what were Mill’s qualifications for the task of estimating the teachings and personality of Christ. He had a subtle logical mind, strong though restricted sympathies, a singular power of mastering an opponent’s case, and remark­ able candor in stating it. But his intellect was of the purely speculative order. He possessed a “ rich storage of principles, doctrines, generalities of every degree, over several wide depart­ ments of knowledge,” as Professor Bain says ; but he “ had not much memory for detail of any kind,” although “ by express study and frequent reference he had amassed a store of facts bearing on political or sociological doctrines.” In short, “ he had an intellect for the abstract and the logical out of all pro­ portion to his hold of the concrete and the poetical.” He was cut out for a metaphysician, a political speculator and a sociologist. But he never could have become an historian or a man of letters. He had little sense of style, no faculty of literary criticism, a dislike of picturesque expression, a scanty knowledge of human nature, and an extremely feeble imagina­ tion. He was a great philosopher, but perhaps less an artist than any other thinker of the same eminence that ever lived. Now the faculties required in dealing with the origin of Christianity, including the character of its founder, are obviously those of the literary critic and the historian, in which Mill was deficient. He was, therefore, not equipped by nature for the task. Had he even the necessary knowledge ? Certainly not. There is not the slightest evidence that he had studied the relation of Christianity to previous systems, the growth of its literature, the formation of its canon, and the development of its ethics and its dogmas. He probably knew next to nothing of the oriental religions, and was only acquainted with the name of Buddhism. Nay, if we may trust Professor Bain (his friend, his biographer, and his eulogist), he knew very little of Chris- �( 7 ) inanity itself. He “ searcely ever read a theological book,” and he only knew “ the main positions of theology from our general literature.” Just when Mill’s Three Essays on Eehgwn ap­ peared, Strauss’s Old Faith and the New was published m England, and Professor Bain justly remarks that Anyone reading it would, I think, be struck with its immense superiority to Mill’s work, in all but the logic and metaphysics. Strauss speaks like a man thoroughly, at home with his subject. Mill does indeed say, in his Autobiography, that Ins. father made him, at a very early age, “a reader of ecclesiastical history ; but he does not tell us that he continued so in his after lite, and even if he did, ecclesiastical, history begins just where the problem of the origin of Christianity ends. . Another thing must be said. Professor Bain states, and we can well believe him, that Mill was “ not even well read, m the sceptics that preceded him.” He was really ignorant on both sides of the controversy. His idea of Christ was formed from a selection of the best things in the New Testament. A most uncritical process, and in fact an impossible one ; for the New Testament is not history, but an arbitrary selection from a mass of early Christian tracts, of uncertain authorship, different dates, and various value. The literature on this subject, even from the pens of eminent writers, is vast enough to show, its immense complication. Unless it is read m a cluld-like spirit which in grown men and women is childish, the New. Testament needs to be explained ; and when the process has fairly begun, you find all the familiar features shifting like the pieces in. a kaleidoscope, until at last they reassume an organic, but a dif­ ferent, form and color. Twenty Christs may be elicited from the New Testament as it stands. Mill deduced one, but the nineteen others are just as valid. . Strictly speaking, our task is completed. It would logically suffice to say that Mill’s panegyric on Christ is a mere piece of fancy. Like other men of genius, he had his special aptitudes and special knowledge, and his authority only extends as far as they carry him. Mr. Swinburne’s opinion of Newton is of no particular importance, and Newton’s famous ineptitude about Paradise Lost in no way affects our estimate of Milton. Let us go further, however, and examine Mill’s panegyric on Christ in detail. In justice to him, as well as to the subject, it should be quoted in full: “Above all, the most valuable part of the effect on the character which Christianity has produced by .holding up m a Divine Person a �ÉTotíe ufnbpH±nCe Td a m°del f01’ÍmÍtatÍOn’ bailable even to the absolute unbellever and can never more be lost to humanity. For is Christ, lather than God, whom Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of perfection for humanity. It is the God ideahsede’hTs°teithan Gfd °/ tbe JeWS or °f Nature, who being AndhXbdfh ^ken so,great and salutary a hold on the modern mind, is stiH íeft T 6lS-e mac be tak<3n aWay fr°m US by rational criticism, Christ hL fnii ’ Umq?K figUre’ n0t more unlike a11 his precursors than 4» Ins followers even those who had the direct benefit of his personal teachhiSoric« «nA th tOi Say tha\Ohrist as exhibited in the Gospels is not sunerad/lía h 7® ^°W n?tbow much of what is admirable has been suffice« Í 7 t tradition of his followers. The tradition of followers miSelf? any number °f marvels’ and may have inserted all the dSS™hlCh .rePutedt°have wrought. But who among his ascGbld + among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings SV i,eT.01; Of lma«lnin& the life and character revealed in the p ? / ertamly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St. Sil í J th® cbara<^®rand idiosyncracies were of a totally different sort: fb?f th the TTly1 9bristlan writers m whom nothing is more evident than ' fXiS F? wbicb.was m timm was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from a higher source. What could be added XJ^w rd?y a dlsclPle we may see in the mystical parts of the gospel of St John, matter imported from Philo and the Alexandrian himSí t mt° the mouth of the Savior in long speeches about tffi?™h S as?be/tber Gospels contain not the slightest vestige of, though pretended to have been delivered on occasions of the deepest interest and when his principal followers were all present; most promt, nently at the last supper. The East was full of men who could have stolen any quantity of this poor stuff, as the multitudinous Oriental sects of Gnostics afterwards did. But about the life and sayings of Jesus there • 13vVa-?P of Per®onal originaiity combined with profundity of insight, which if we abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision wheie something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even m the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration, m the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer, and martyr to that mission, who ever existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative ana guide of humanity; nor even now, would it be easy, even for ail un• a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life. Our first complaint is that the whole passage is too vague and rhetorical. What is the meaning of “ the absolute unbeliever ” m the first sentence ? If it means a person who rejects all the pretensions of Christ, the sentence is absurd. If it means a person who rejects his divinity, it is practically untrue ; for. as a matter of fact, those who have thought themselves out of Chris­ tianity (which Mill did not, as he was never in it) very seldom do take Christ as “ a standard of excellence and a model for �(9) imitation,” much less as “ the pattern of perfection for humanity.” When the supernatural glamor is dispelled, we see that Christ is no example whatever. He is simply a preacher, and his personal conduct fails to illustrate a single public or private virtue, or assist us in any of our practical diffi­ culties as husbands, fathers, sons, or citizens. Mill has himself shown that even Christians do not attempt to imitate their Savior ; and we are puzzled to understand how he could speak of Christ’s having “ taken so great and salutary hold on the modern mind ” after telling us, in his Essay on Liberty, that he has done nothing of the kind. He there says: “ By Christianity, I here mean what is acconnted such by all churches and sects, the maxims and precepts contained in the New Testament. These are considered sacred, and accepted as laws by all professing Chris­ tians. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that not one Christian in a thousand guides or tests his individual conduct by reference to those laws. . . . Whenever conduct is concerned, they look round for Mr. A and B to direct them how far to go in obeying Christ.” Had Mill forgotten this passage when he wrote the Essay on Theism, or had Christendom changed in the interval ? Scarcely the latter. John Bright has justly said that the lower classes in England care as little for the dogmas of Christianity as the upper classes care about its practice. Until Christians follow their Savior’s teachings, it is idle to expect unbelievers to do so. Yet it is perhaps as well they do not, for there are many things recorded in the Gospels which are far from redounding to his credit. It is a great pity that Mill, before eulogising Christ, could not read the chapter on “Jesus of Nazareth ” in Professor Newman’s last work. Why did Jesus consort with Publicans (or Roman tax-gatherers), rhe very sight of whom was hateful to every patriotic Jew ? .Why did he herd with Sinners, who so far despised ceremony as to dip in the dish with dirty fingers ? Why did he avoid all who were able to criticise him ? Why did he exclaim, “Ye hypocrites, why put ye me to proof?” when the Jews sought to test his claims, and to act on his own advice to “ Beware of false prophets ” ? Why did he rudely repel educated inquirers, and then solemnly thank God that “ he had hidden these things from the wise and pru­ dent, and revealed them unto babes ” ? Why did he denounce inhabitants of cities he could not convince, and prophesy that they would fare worse in the Day of Judgment than the filthy inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah ? Why did he assail his religious rivals with invectives which, as Professor Newman �( 10 ) says, “ outdo Tacitus and Suetonius in malignity,, and seem to convict themselves of falsehood and bitter slander ?” Why, in short, did he so constantly display the vanity and passion of a spoilt child ? Surely these are not characteristics we should emulate, but glaring blots in a “ pattern of perfection.” When the arrogance of Christ is countenanced by a writer like Mill, these defects must be insisted on. Professor Newman rightly says that “ If honor were claimed for Jesus as for Socrates, for Seneca, for Hillel, for Epictetus, we might apologise for his weak points as either incident to his era and country or to human nature itself—weakness to be forgiven and forgotten. But the unremitting assumption of super-human wisdom, not only made for him by the moderns, but breathing through every utterance attributed to him, changes the whole scene, and ought to change our treatment of it. Unless his prodigious claim of divine superiority is made good in fact, it betrays an arrogance difficult to excuse, eminently mischievous and eminently ignominious.” But this prodigious claim cannot be made good. As Pro­ fessor Newman says : “It is hard to point to anything in the teaching of Jesus at once new to Hebrew and Greek sages, and likewise in general estimate true.” The same view was ex­ pressed by Buckle, with more vigor if less urbanity. “ Whoever,” he said, “ asserts that Christianity revealed to the world truths with which it was previously unacquainted, is guilty either of gross ignorance or of wilful fraud.” Mill had himself, in the Essay on Liberty, shown the evil of taking Christ, or any other man, as “the ideal representative and guide of humanity.” He there charged Christianity with possessing a negative rather than a positive ideal; abstinence from evil rather than energetic pursuit of good constituting its essence, in which “ thou shalt not ” unduly predominated over “ thou shalt.” He accused it of making an idol of asceticism, of holding out “ the hope of heaven and the threat of hell as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life, and of thus “ giving to human morality an essentially selfish character.” And he added that— “ What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not fiom Christian; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high-mindedness, personal dignity, even the sense of honor, is derived from the purely human, not the religious, part of our educa­ tion, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognised, is that of obedience.” Mill does indeed throw a sop to orthodoxy by allowing that Christ and Christianity are different things ; but he is obliged �(11) to add that the Founder of Christianity failed to provide for “ many essential elements of the highest morality.” He main­ tains that “ other ethics than any which can be evolved from exclusively Christian sources must exist side by side with Christian ethics to produce the moral regeneration of mankind.” And he deprecates ihe policy of “formingthe mind and feelings on an exclusively religious type.” Surely these arguments are quite inconsistent with Mill’s later notion of taking Christ as our ideal, and living so that he would approve our life. Besides, as Professor Bain points out, the morality of Christ belongs to this exclusively religious type. Its sanctions are all religious, and if religion is dispensed with they “ must lose their suitability to human life.” Professor Bain very justly observes that “the best guidance, under such altered circumstances, would be that furnished by the wisest of purely secular teachers.” That Christ was “ probably the greatest moral reformer ” that ever lived is a statement easy to make and difficult to prove. When Mill, in the Essay on Liberty, twits the Chris­ tians with professing doctrines they never practise, he furnishes ■a catalogue of the duties they neglect. “ All Christians believe that the blessed are the poor and humble, and those who are ill-used by the world ; that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven; that they should judge not lest they should be judged; that they should swear not at all; that they should love their neighbors as themselves ; that if one take their cloak, they should give him their coat also ; that they should take no thought for the morrow; that if they would be perfect they should sell all they have and give it to the poor.” Surely Mill was aware that all these absurd and impracticable maxims were taught by Christ. Hgw, then, except on the theory we have advanced, could he call him the greatest moral reformer in history ? The “rational criticism ” by means of which Mill obtains the “ unique figure ” of Christ is a purely arbitrary process. George Eliot, who knew the subject far better, said in one of. her letters that the materials for any biography of Jesus do not exist. The Unitarians have tried Mill’s process with small success ; and, as Professoi’ Bain maliciously observes, “ It would seem in this, as in other parts of religion, that what the rationalist disapproves of most the multitude likes best.” Professor Bain’s remarks on Mill’s construction of his “ unique figure ” from the Gospels are so pertinent and happy that we venture to give them in full: �(12) “ We are, of course, at liberty to dissent from the prevailing view, which makes Christ a divine person. But to reduce a Deity to the human level, to rank him simply as a great man, and to hold ideal intercourse with him in that capacity is, to say the least of it, an incongruity. His­ torians and moralists have been accustomed to treat with condemnation those monarchs that, after being dethroned, have accepted in full the position of subjects. Either to die, or else to withdraw into dignified isola­ tion, has been accounted the only fitting termination to the loss of royal power. So, a Deity dethroned should retire altogether from playing a part in human affairs, and remain simply as an historic name.” Mill finds in Christ “ sublime genius ” and “ profundity of insight.” Surely it did not require any very sublime genius to teach those peculiar doctrines which Mill catalogued for back­ sliding Christians, nor any very great profundity of insight to see that none but paupers and lunatics could evei’ practise them. Many of the best sayings ascribed to Jesus were the common possession of the East before his birth ; but many of the worst seem more his own. “ Leave all and follow me ” is a vain and foolish command. “ Give to everyone that asketh ” is an excel­ lent rule for pauperising society. “ That industry is a human duty,” says Professor Newman, “ cannot be gathered from his doctrine: how could it, when he kept twelve religious men­ dicants around him ?” “ Resist not evil ” is a premium on tyranny. “ Blessed be ye poor ” and “• Woe unto you rich ” are the exclamations of a vulgar demagogue, a cunning agent of privilege, or an irresponsible maniac. “ By shovelling away wealth,” says Professor Newman, “ we are to buy treasures in heaven. Unless our narrators belie him, Jesus never warns hearers that to give without a heart of charity does not prepare a soul for heaven nor ‘ earn salvation ’; and that ¿elfish pre­ speculation turns virtue into despicable marketing. To forgive that we may be forgiven, to avoid judging lest we be judged, to do good that we may get extrinsic reward, to affect humility that we may be promoted, to lose life that we may gain it with advantage, are precepts not needing a lofty prophet.” - It is also from the words of Christ alone, according to the New Testa­ ment, that the doctrine of Eternal Punishment can be estab­ lished ; and he is responsible for the intellectual crime of identifying Credulity with Faith, which has been a fatal rotten­ ness at the very core of Christianity. As for the “personal originality” of Mill’s “ unique figure, ** he might be safely challenged to demonstrate it from the Gospels. We shall have something more to say about the originality of Christ’s teaching presently ; we confine our- �( 13 ) «elves now to his personal character. Take away from the Gospel story the pathetic legend of Calvary, which throws around him a glamor of suffering, and what is there in his whole life of a positive heroic quality ? He is a tame, effeminate, shrinking figure, beside hundreds of men who have not been made the -object of a superstitious cultus. His brief, ineffective career, so ■soon closed by his own madness or ambition, will not bear a moment’s comparison with the long and glorious life of Buddha. It pales into insignificance before the mighty genius of Muhammed. Doctrine apart, the Nazarene is to the Meccan as a pallid moon to a fiery sun. With the single exception of •Cromwell, who was a more original character than twenty Christs rolled into one, where shall we find Muhammed’s equal in history ? As Eliot Warburton well said, he stands almost alone in “ the sustained and almost superhuman energy with which he carried out his views, in defiance, as it would seem, of God and man.” Christ quails in his Gethsemane. Muhammed struggles through his seven years’ ordeal of obloquy and danger like a resolute swimmer, who scorns to turn back, and will reach the ■other shore or die. When his followers faint under the burning desert sun, he tells them that “Hell is hotter,” and silences their murmurs. Christ cries in ah agony of despair, “My ■God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? ” When Muhammed’s assassination is resolved on at Mecca, each of the tribes devoting a sword to drink his blood, and Abubekar, the companion of his flight, says “We are but two,” the indomitable prophet answers “We are three, for God is with us.” Christ implores “ 0 my' father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” When Muhammed is threa­ tened by the Koreishites, so that his most devoted followers remonstrate against his projects, he makes the sublime answer, “ If they should place the sun on my right hand, and the moon on my left, they should not divert me from my course.” Within a century after the Hegira, the empire of Islam had spread from Arabia eastward to Delhi and westward to Granada. Oh, it is •said, Muhammed used the sword. True, but not before it was drawn against him. The man who rode to Jerusalem, and -called himself King of the Jews, would have used the sword too had he dared. “ The sword indeed,” snorts Carlyle at this rubbish, “ but where will you get your sword ? Every new ■opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. In one man’s head alone there it dwells as yet. That Ae'take a sword •and try to propagate with that will do little for him. You �( 14 ) must first get your sword. On the whole, a thing will propa­ gate itself as it can. We do not find, of the Christian religion either, that it always disdained the sword, when once it had gotone.” True, thou sarcastic old sage of Chelsea, and the sting is in the tail. From Constantine downwards, Christianity has not been imposed on mankind without, as Sir James Stephen remarks, exhausting all the terrors of this life as well as the next. Mill tells us that Christ was a “martyr” to his “mission ” as a “moral reformer.” We should like to know how he dis­ covered the fact. Certainly not from the Gospels. It was not the Sermon on the Mount, but his vagaries at Jerusalem, that led to the crucifixion. Christ deliberately chose twelve disciples, the legendary number of the tribes of Israel, and told them that when he came into his kingdom they should sit on twelve " thrones as judges. Professor Newman answers those who call this language figurative with the just remark that “ we should call a teacher mad who used such words to simple men, and did not expect them to understand him literally.” When the dis­ ciples ask him, “ Lord, wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom ' unto Israel ?” he does not rebuke them (although it is after his resurrection), but simply says that the time is a secret. His triumphal entry into Jerusalem can only be considered as a , declaration of sovereignty, and his countenancing the shout ' of Hosanna! (the war cry of previous insurrections, and an appeal to Jehovah against the foe) could only be construed as rebellion against Rome. His conduct inside Jerusalem was that of a man intoxicated with vanity and ambition, without judg­ ment, policy, or purpose. The very inscription on the cross shows that he was believed to aim at earthly royalty. Pontius Pilate tried to save Jesus, acting wisely and humanely as the repre­ sentative of an empire that was always tolerant in matters of religion. He would not receive a charge of blasphemy, but he could not overlook a charge of sedition. Yet he still gave Jesus an opportunity of escaping. “ Come now,” he seems to say, “ your enemies want your blood. Your blasphemy is no businessof mine, and I shall not decide a squabble between your rabid sects. But I must try you if they accuse you of sedition. You are young, and cannot wish to die. Plead ‘not guilty.’ Deny the charge. Say you are not the King of the Jews and do not contemplate rebellion. One word, and I save you from death. You shall go free though all the rabbis in Jerusalem howled like mad dogs. Rome shall stand between bigotry and blood.” But- �( 15 ) Jesus actually admits the indictment, and afterwards remains contumaciously silent. Pilate had no alternative ; he sentenced Jesus to execution ; but amid all the absurd fictions of the nar­ rative, the fact shines out clearly that he did so with the utmost reluctance. To call the death of Christ, in these circumstances, a martyrdom, is to degrade the name. He died for no principle. The truth would have saved him, and he would not utter it. Either he was in a stupor of despair, or so crazed with the Messianic delusion that he still trusted to the legion of angels for his rescue. In any case it was an act of insanity. He courted his doom. It was not a martyrdom but a suicide. We may also observe that, if a cultus had not been formed around it, and men’s imaginations suborned in its favor from the cradle, the “ martyrdom ” of Christ would be obviously lesssevere than that of many persecuted reformers. Giordano Bruno’s Gethsemane was an Inquisition dungeon, where he languished in solitude for seven years, and was tortured no one knows how often. What was Christ’s few hours’ agony of weakness before death compared with this ? Bruno died by. fire, the most cruel form of murder, whilst Christ suffered the milder doom of crucifixion. Christ was watched by weeping women, whose sympathy must have alleviated his pain; and it was not until the hand of death touched his very heart that he despaired of assistance from heaven. Bruno stood alone against the world, without any sources of courage but his own quench­ less heroism. Christ quailed before the inevitable. Bruno met it with a serene smile, for he had that within him which only death could extinguish—a daring fiery spirit, that nothing could quell, that outsoared the malice of men, and outshone the flames of the stake. Mill’s remarks on the originality of Christ’s teaching betray his utter ignorance of the subject. It is of no use, he says, to assert that the Christ of the Gospels is not historical. Begging his pardon, that is the most important factor in the problem. If the Gospels are what we allege (and no scholar would dispute it), George Eliot is right in saying that the materials for a biography of Jesus do not exist, and Mill’s “ rational criticism ” is a purely fantastic process. But the reason he assigns for his position is still more absurd. Who, he asks, could have in­ vented the sayings ascribed to Jesus ? Certainly, he says, not St. Paul: a sentence which alone stamps him as an incompetent critic. No man who understood the subject would ever have thought of anticipating such a preposterous objection. “Cer­ �( 16 ) tainly not the fishermen of Galilee,” is equally futile, for no student of the origin of Christianity supposes that the Gospels were written by the first disciples. They are of much later date. But except for that fact, why might not the “ fishermen of Galilee ” have been able to invent the logia of the Gospels as well as Jesus ? He was only a carpenter, and there is no reason in the nature of things why fishermen should not equal carpenters as prophets, preachers, and moralists. Mill is alto­ gether on the wrong scent. There was no need for Christ or his disciples to invent the sayings ascribed to him. As we have already remarked, they were the common possession of the East before his birth. The Lord’s Prayer is merely a cento from the Talmud, and, as Emanuel Deutsch showed, every catchword of Christ’s was a household word of Talmudic Judaism before he began his ministry. There is not a single maxim, however good or bad, however sensible or silly, in the whole of Christ’s dis­ courses that cannot be found in the writings of Pagan moralists and poets or Jewish doctors who flourished before him; and his best sayings, if they may be called his, were all anticipated by Buddha several centuries before he was born. It is also well known that the Golden Rule, as it is called, was taught by Con­ fucius long before the time of Christ, without any of the absurdities with which the Nazarene surrounded it. “ Love your enemies,” says Christ, as though it were wise or possible to do so. Confucius corrected this exaggeration. “No,” he said, “ if I love my enemies, what shall I give to my friends ? To my friends I give my love, and to my enemies—justice.! ” We think we have said enough to show that Mill’s panegyric on Christ is utterly valueless. Mr. Matthew Arnold is far more subtle and dexterous in his eulogy; but he knows the subject as well as Mill knew it badly. If the apologists of Christianity are prudent, they will cease to make use of Mill’s tribute to their Blessed Savior, or at least employ it only before people who are in that blissful ignorance which fancies it folly to be •wise. � 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 &amp; Archives. 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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 What was Christ? a reply to John Stuart Mill Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Foote, G. W. (George William) [1850-1915] Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 16 p. ; 17 cm. Notes: Reply to passages in Mill's Three essays on religion. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Printed and published by G.W. Foote. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Progressive Publishing Company Limited Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1887 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N269 Subject The topic of the resource Jesus Christ Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <p class="western"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" name="graphics1" align="bottom" width="88" height="31" border="0" alt="88x31.png" /></p> <p class="western">This work (What was Christ? a reply to John Stuart Mill), identified by <span style="color:#0000ff;"><span lang="zxx"><u>Humanist Library and Archives</u></span></span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</p> 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 Jesus Christ John Stuart Mill NSS https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/8f6d28807ceafc657599fc1bb488aeba.pdf?Expires=1777507200&Signature=uXkFBZ6pYCoxxRhwgn93ge%7EwLubbmCO29aeC-Iy2Ei2fR3f5lg-9xmd-HSsltiVLf4lBA2JLmYuZrlZO%7EwHSTm65qba4Ap%7Ek84b-uajYu8rrRIJQS282KIYBeEgXPXNRxR-Qw5--BF0mt3PNGF-lopjFjAuKoILU3DfyOl%7E3BDbvUS4%7ESjwFH1-fBD2-bH4CPubYSEKl7pX%7E4AOKGYDN9%7E9IKF2KZMsgi4pzlUX83Z-GWgeFaMPLS1iAYsYcWcclebl8ilkVhzp-5dWjo2J1I6IYNTmZks5DLSXwyCKYZpNgCWjTn54tpSpOU52w6%7EyU%7EzE9AAgn%7E7XvjSGgZnjxag__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 9134d7056c17eb6d369fc023dc01dd2e PDF Text Text ■ 1 - - NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY WH¥ I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. BY I ANNIE BESANT. r J./ LONDON: FREETHOUGHT PUBLISHING COMPANY, 63, FLEET STREET, E.C. 1 887. PRICE THREEPENCE. . �LONDON : PRINTED BY ANNIE BESANT AND CHARLES BBADLAUGH, 63, ELEET STREET, E.C. �WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. ■There is no doubt that the majority of people in most parts of the world—save in those in which Buddhism is supreme—believe in the existence of a God. The kind of God may vary indefinitely, but there is generally “some God Or other ”. Now a growing minority in every civilised ■Country finds it intellectually impossible to make the affir­ mation which is necessary for belief in God, and this growing minority includes many of the most thoughtful and most competent minds. The refusal to believe is unfortunately not always public, so cruel is the vengeance Worked by society on those who do not bow down to its dretish.es; but as John Stuart Mill said: ‘1 The world would be. astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments—of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue—are complete sceptics in religion” (“Autobiography,” p. 45). It is sad that all should not recognise that, as the late Professor Clifford put it, Truth is a thing to be shouted from the housetops, not to be whispered over the walnuts and wine after the ladies have left; for only by plain and honest speech on this matter can liberty of thought be won. Each who speaks out makes easier speech for others, and none, however insignificant, has right of silence here. Nor is it unfair,. I think, that a minority should be chal­ lenged on its dissidency, and should be expected to state clearly and definitely the grounds of its disagreement with the majority. Ere going into detailed argument it may be well to remind the reader that the burden of affording proof lies on the afiirmer of a. proposition; the rational attitude of the human mind is not that of a boundless credulity, accepting every statement as true until it has been proved to be false, but is that of a suspension of judgment on every �4 WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. statement which, though not obviously false, is not sup­ ported. by evidence, and of an absolute rejection of a state­ ment self-contradictory in its terms, or incompatible with truth® already demonstrated. To remove this position from the region of prejudice in which theological discus­ sion is carried on, it may be well to take the following* illustration : a man asks me, “Do you believe that Jupiter is inhabited by a race of men who have one eye in the middle of their foreheads, and who walk about on three legs, with their heads under their left arms ? ” I answer “No, I do not believe it; I have no evidence that such beings exist”. If my interlocutor desires to convince mo that Jupiter has inhabitants, and that his description of; them is accurate, it is for him to bring forward evidence in support of his contention. The burden of proof evi­ dently lies on him; it is not for me to prove that no such beings exist before my non-belief is justified, but for him to prove that they do exist before my belief can be fairly claimed. Similarly, it is for the affirmer of God’s existence to bring evidence in support of his affirmation; the burden of proof lies on him. Tor be it remembered that the Atheist makes no general denial of the existence of God; he does not say, “There is no God”. If he put forward such a proposition, which he can only do intelligently if he understand the term “God”, then, truly, he would be bound to bring forth his evidence in support. But the proof of a universal negative requires the possession of perfect knowledge of the universe of discourse, and in this case the universe of discourse is conterminous with the totality of existence. No* man can rationally affirm “There is no God”, until the word “ God ” has for him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to him, and known with what Leibnitz calls “perfect knowledge”. The Atheist’s denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined or described. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd ;• never yet has a God been described so that a concept of him was made possible to human thought. Again I fall back on an illustration unconnected with theology in order to make clearly apparent the distinction drawn. If I am asked: “Do you believe in the existence of a triangle in space on the other side of Saturn?” I answer, “I neither �WHY I HO HOT BELIEVE IN GOD. 5 lielieve in, nor deny its existence; I know nothing about it”. But if I am asked: “Do you believe in the existence there of a boundless triangle, or of a square triangle ? ” -then my answer is : “I deny the possibility of the exist­ ence of such triangles”. The reason for the different answers to the two questions is that as I have never visited the other side of Saturn I know nothing about the exist­ ence or non-existence of triangles there ; but I deny the possibility of the existence of a boundless triangle, because the word triangle means a figure enclosed by three limiting lines; and I deny the possibility of the existence of a square triangle, because a triangle has three sides only while a square has four, and all the angles of a triangle taken together ar® equal to two right angles, while those of a square are equal to four. I allege that anyone who believes in a square triangle can have no clear concept either of a triangle or of a square. And so while I refuse to say “there is no God”, lacking the knowledge which would justify the denial, since to me the word God represents no .concept, I do say, “there is no infinite personality, there is no infinite creator, there is no being at once almighty and all-good, there is no Trinity in Unity, there is no -eternal and infinite existence save that of which each one • of us is mode”. Dor be it noted, these denials are justified .by our knowledge: an undefined “God” might be a limited being on the far side of Sirius, and I have no knowledge which justifies me in denying such an existence; but an infinite God, i.e., a God who is everywhere, who has no limits, and yet who is not I and who is therefore limited by my personality, is a being who is self-contra­ dictory, both limited and not-limited, and such a being ■ cannot exist. No perfect knowledge is needed here. “ God is an infinite being” is disproved by one being who is not God. “God is everywhere ” is disproved by the finding • of one spot where God is not. The universal affirmative -is disproved by a single exception. Nor is anything gained by the assertors of deity when they allege that he is incomprehensible. If “God” exists and is incompre­ hensible, his incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for being silent about him, but can never justify the affirma­ tion of self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening . of people with damnation if they do not accept them. I turn to examine the evidence which is brought forward �6 WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. in support of the existence of God, taking “ God ” to mean some undefined being other than and superior to the various forms of living and non-living things on thisearth—or those forming part of the 1 ‘material universe” in which we exist—and related to these as creator and controller. Now the existence of anything may be sensated or it may be inferred; the astronomer believed in the existence of Saturn because he saw it; but he also believed in the existence of the planet afterwards named Neptune before he saw it, attaining this belief by way of' induction from the otherwise inexplicable behavior of Uranus. Can we then by the senses or by the reason find out God ? The most common, and to many the most satisfactory and convincing evidence, is that of the senses. A child bom into the world has open to him these sense avenues of knowledge; he learns that something exists which is not he by the impressions made on his senses; he sees, he feels, he hears, he smells, he tastes, and thus he learns to know. As the child’s past and present sensations increase in number, as he begins to remember them, to compare, to mark likenesses and unlikenesses, he gathers the materials for further mental elaboration. But this sen­ sational basis of his knowledge is the limit of the area on which his intellectual edifice can be built; he may rear it upward as far as his powers will permit, but he can neverwiden his foundation, while his senses remain only what they are. All that the mind works on has reached it by these senses; it can dissociate and combine, it can break in pieces and build up, but no sensation no percept, and no percept no concept. When this fundamental truth is securely grasped it will' be seen of what tremendous import is the admitted fact that the senses wholly fail us when We seek for proof of the existence of God. Our belief in the existence of all things outside ourselves rests on the testimony of the senses. The “objective universe” is that which we sensate. When we reason and reflect, when we think of love,, and fear, when we speak of truth and honor, we know that all these are not susceptible of being sensated, thatis, that they have no objective existence; they belong to the Subject universe. Now if God cannot be sensated healso must belong to the Subject world; that is, he must �WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. 7 be a creation of the mind, with no outside corresponding reality. Granted that we can never know “the thing in itself ” ; granted that all we know is only the effect on the ■mind produced by something which differs from the effect it produces ; yet this fundamental physiological distinction remains between the Object and the Subject worlds, that the Object world announces itself by nervous action which is set up at the periphery, while the Subject world results from the centrally initiated travail of the brain. It might., indeed, be argued by the Theist that God may exist, but may be incognisable by our senses, we lacking the sense which might sensate deity. Quite so. There may be existences around us but unknown to us, there being no part of our organism differentiated to receive from them impressions. There are rays beyond the solar spectrum which are invisible to us normally, the existence of which was unknown to us some years ago, but some of which apparently serve among light rays for the ant; so there may be all kinds of existences in the universe of which we are unconscious, as unconscious as we were of the existence of the ultra-violet rays until a chemical reagent rendered them visible. But as we cannot sensate them, for us they do not exist. This, then, cannot avail the Theist, for an incognisable God, a God who can enter into no kind of relation with us, is to us a non-existent God. We cannot even conceive a sense entirely different from those we possess, let alone argue over what we should find out by means of it if we had it. It is said that of old time the evidence of the senses for the existence of God was available; the seventy elders “ saw the God of Israel” ; Moses talked with him “ face to face ”; Elijah heard his “ still small voice ”. But these experiences are all traditional; we have no evidence at first hand; no witness that we can examine ; no facts that we can investigate. There is not even evidence enough to start a respectable ghost story, let alone enough to bear the tremendous weight of the existence of God. Yet, if some finite “God” exist—I say finite, because, as noted above, the co-existence of an infinite God anda finite creature is impossible—how easy for him to prove his existence; if he be too great for our “comprehension”, as some Theists argue, he might surely bestow on us a sense which ■might, receive impressions from him, and enable us to �8 WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. reach, at least a partial, an imperfect, knowledge of him. But if he exist, he wraps himself in darkness; if he exist, he folds himself in silence. Leaning, as it were, over the edge of being, men strive to pierce the dark abyss of the unknown, above, below; they strain their sight, but they see nothing; they listen, but nothing strikes their ear; weary, dizzy, they stagger backwards, and with the dark­ ness pressing on their eyeballs they murmur 11 God! Bailing to discover God by way of the senses, we turn to such evidence for his existence as may be found by way of the reason, in order to determine whether we can establish by inference that which we have failed to establish by direct proof. As the world is alleged to be the handiwork of God, it is not unreasonable to scrutinise the phenomena of nature, and to seek in them for traces of a ruling intelligence, of a guiding will. But it is impossible even to glance at natural phenomena, much less to study them attentively, without being struck by the enormous waste of energy, the aimless destruction, the utterly unintelligent play of conflicting and jarring forces. For centuries “nature” has been steadily at work growing forests, cutting out channels for rivers, spreading alluvial soil and clothing it with grass and flowers ; at last a magnificent landscape is formed, birds and beasts dwell in its woods and on its pastures, men till its fertile fields, and thank the gracious God they worship for the work of his hands; there is a far-off growl which swells as it approaches, a trembling of the solid earth, a crash, an explosion, and then, in a darkness lightened only by the fiery rain of burning lava, all beauty, all fertility, vanish, and the slow results of thousands of years are destroyed in a night of earthquake and volcanic fury. Is it from this wild destruction of slowly obtained utility that we are to infer the existence of a divine intelligence and divine will ? If beauty and use were aimed at, why the destruction? If desolation and uselessness, why the millenniums spent in growth ? During the year 1886 many hundreds of people in Greece, in Spain, in America, in New Zealand, were killed or maimed by earthquakes and by cyclones. Many more perished in hurricanes at sea. Many more by explosions in mines and elsewhere. These deaths caused widespread misery, consigned families to hopeless poverty, cut short �WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. 9 •careers of use and of promise. They were caused by “ natural ” forces. Is “ God ” behind nature, and are all these horrors planned, carried out, by his mind and will ? •John Stuart Mill has put the case clearly and forcibly : “Next to the greatness of these cosmic forces, the quality which most forcibly strikes everyone who does not avert his •eyes from it is their perfect and absolute recklessness. They go straight to their end, without regarding what or whom they crush on the road. Optimists, in their attempts to prove that ‘ whatever is, is right ’, are obliged to maintain, not that nature ‘ ever turns one step from her path to avoid trampling us into destruction, but that it would be very unreasonable in us to •expect that she should. Pope’s ‘ Shall gravitation cease when you go by ?’ may be a just rebuke to anyone who should be so silly as to expect common human morality from nature. But if the question were between two men, instead of between a man and a natural phenomenon, that triumphant apostrophe Would be thought a rare piece of impudence. A man who should persist in hurling stones or firing cannon when another man ‘ goes by ’, and having killed him should urge a similar plea in exculpation, would very deservedly be found guilty of murder. In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature’s , ■everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recog­ nised by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives; and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow creatures. If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, and does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them ; With hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick ■ or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this, Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of Justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indiffer­ ently with the meanest and worst; upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the wellbeing of a whole people, perhaps the �10 WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. prospects of the human race for generations to come, with aslittle compunction as those whose death is a relief to them­ selves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence”" (“Three Essays on Religion,” pp. 28, 29, ed. 1874). It is not only from the suffering caused by the unde­ viating course of the phenomena which from the invariable sequence of their happening are called “laws of nature” that we infer the absence of any director or controller of these forces. There are many absurdities as well as miseries, caused by the “uniformity of nature”. Dr. Buchner tells us of a kid he saw which was born perfect in all parts save that it was headless (“Force and Matter”, page 234, ed. 1884). Here, for weeks the kid was a-forming, although life in the outer world was impossible for it. Monstrosities occur in considerable numbers, and each one bears silent witness to the unintelligence of the forces that produced it. Nay, they can be artificially produced, as has been shown by a whole series of experiments, eggstapped during incubation yielding monstrous chickens. In all these cases we recognise the blind action of unconscious forces bringing about a ridiculous and unforeseen result, if turned slightly out of their normal course. From studying this aspect of nature it is certain that we cannot find God. So far from finding here a God to worship, the whole progress of man depends on his learning to control and regulate these natural forces, so asto prevent them from working mischief and to turn them, into channels in which they will work for good. If from scrutinising the forces of nature we study the history of the evolution of life on our globe, and the physical conditions under which man now exists, it is impossible from these to infer the existence of a benevolent power as the creator of the world. Life is one vast battle­ field, in which the victory is always to the strong. More organisms are produced than can grow to maturity; they fight for the limited supply of food, and by means of this struggle the weakest are crushed out and the fittest survive to propagate their race. Each successful organism stands on the corpses of its weaker antagonists, and only by this ceaseless strife and slaying has progress been possible. As the organisms grow more complex and more developed, added difficulties surround their existence; the young of the higher animals are weaker and more defenceless at- �WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. ii ■birth than those of the lower, and the young of man, the highest animal yet evolved, is the most helpless of all, and his hold of life the most precarious during infancy. So clumsy is the “plan of creation” that among the most highly-evolved animals a new life is only possibleby peril to life already existing, and the mother must pass through long weeks of physical weariness and hours of acute agony ere she can hold her baby in her arms. All these things are so “natural” to us that weneed to think of them, not as necessary, but as deliberately planned by a creative power, ere we can realise the mon­ strous absurdity of supposing them to be the outcome of’ “design”. Nor must we overlook the sufferings caused hy the incomplete adaptation of evolving animals to the conditions among which they are developing. The human race is still suffering from its want of adaptation to theupright position, from its inheritance of a structure from quadrupedal ancestors which was suited to the horizontal position of their trunks, but is unsuited to the vertical position of man. The sufferings caused by child-birth, and by hernia, testify to the incomplete adaptation of therace to the upright condition. To believe that all the slow stages of blood-stained evolution, that the struggle for existence, that the survival of the fittest with its other side, the crushing of the less fit, together with a million subsidiary consequences of the main “plan”, to believethat all these were designed, foreseen, deliberately selected as the method of creation, by an almighty power, to believe this is to believe that “ God ” is the supreme malignity, a creator who voluntarily devises and executes a plan of the most ghastly malice, and who works it out with a cruelty in details which no human pen can adequately describe. But, again, the condition and the history of the world are not consistent with its being the creation of an almighty and perfect cruelty. While the tragedy off life negates the possibility of an omnipotent goodness asits author, the beauty and happiness of life negate equally the possibility of an almighty fiend as its creator. Thedelight of bird and beast in the vigor of their eager life the love-notes of mate to mate, and the brooding ectasy of the mother over her young; the rapture of the song which sets quivering the body of the lark as he soars upwards in the sun-rays; the gambols of the young, with every �12 WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. curve telling of sheer joy in life and movement; the beauty and strength of man and woman; the power of intellect, the glory of genius, the exquisite happiness of ■sympathy; all these things could not find place in the handiwork of a power delighting in pain. We cannot, then, from the study of life on our globe infer the exist­ ence of a God who is wholly good ; the evil disproves him: nor can we infer the existence of a God who is wholly evil; the good disproves him. All that we learn from life-conditions is that if the world has a creator his ■character must be exceedingly mixed, and must be one to be regarded with extreme suspicion and apprehension. Be it noted, however, that, so far, we have found no reason to infer the existence of any creative intelligence. Leaving the phenomena of nature exclusive of man, as yielding us no information as to the existence of God, we turn next to human life and human history to seek for traces of the “divine presence”. But here again we are met by the same mingling of good and evil, the same waste, the same prodigality, which met us in non-human nature. Instead of the “Providence watching over the affairs of men” in which Theists believe, we note that “there be just men, unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked; again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous ”. A railway accident happens, in which a useful man, the mainstay of a family, is killed, and from which a profligate escapes. An explosion in a mine slays the hardwork­ ing breadwinners at their toil, and the drunken idler whose night’s debauch has resulted in heavy morning sleep is “providentially” saved as he snores lazily at home in bed. The man whose life is invaluable to a nation perishes in his prime, while the selfish race-haunt­ ing aristocrat lives on to a green old age. The honest •conscientious trader keeps with difficulty out of the bank­ ruptcy court, and sees his smart, unscrupulous neighbor pile up a fortune by tricks that just escape the meshes of the law. If indeed there be a guiding hand amid the vicissitudes of human life, it must be that of an ironical, mocking cruelty, which plays with men as puppets for the gratification of a sardonic humor. Of course, the real ■explanation of all these things is that there is no common factor in these moral and physical propositions; the �WHY I BO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. 1® quantities are incommensurable; the virtues or vices of a man ar® not among the causes which launch, or do not launch, a chimney pot at his head. Outside these “changes and chances” of human life,, the thoughtful mind feels conscious of a profound dissatisfaction with many of the inevitable conditions of human existence: the sensative faculties are at their keenest when the intelligence is not sufficiently developed to utilise them; the perceptive faculties begin to fail as the reflective touch their fullest development; and when experience is ripest, judgment most trained, knowledge most full, old age lays its palsy on thebrain, and senility shakes down the edifice just when a life’s toil has made it of priceless value. To-, recognise our limitations, to accept the inevitable, to amend —so far as amendment is possible—both ourselves and our environment, all this forms part of a rational philo­ sophy of life ; but what has such self-controlled and keen­ eyed sternness of resolve to do with hysterical outcries for help to some power outside nature, which, if it existed as creator, must have modelled our existence at its pleasure, and towards which our attitude could be only one of bit­ terest, if silent, rebellion ? To bow to the inevitable evil, While studying its conditions in order to strive to make it the evitable, is consistent with strong hope which lightens life’s darkness; but to yield crushed before evil delibe­ rately and consciously inflicted by an omnipotent intelli­ gence—in such fate lies the agony of madness and despair. Nor do we find any reliable signs of the presence of a God in glancing over the incidents of human history. We note unjust wars, in which right is crushed by might, in which victory sides with “the strongest battalions”, in the issue of which there appears no trace of a “ God that judgeth the earth”. We meet with cruelties that sicken us inflicted on man by man; butcheries that desolate a city, persecutions that lay waste a province. In every civilised land of to-day we see wealth mocking poverty,, and poverty cursing wealth ; here, thousands wasted on a harlot, and there children sobbing themselves in hunger to sleep. Our earth rolls wailing yearly round the sun, bearing evidence that it has no creator who loves and guides it, but has only its men, children of its own womb, who by the ceaseless toil of countless genera­ �14 WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. lions are hewing out the possibility of a better and gladder world. Similar testimony is borne by the slow progress of the human race. Truth is always fighting; each new truth undergoes a veritable struggle for existence, and if Her­ cules is to live to perform his labors he must succeed in strangling the serpents that hiss round his cradle. The new truth must first be held only by one, its discoverer ; if he is not crushed at the outset, a few disciples are won; then the little band is persecuted, some are martyred, and, it may be, the movement destroyed. Or, some survive, and gain converts, and so the new truth slowly spreads, winning acceptance at the last. But each new truth must pass through similar ordeal, and hence the slowness of the up­ ward climb of man. Look backwards over the time which has passed since man was emerging from the brute, and then compare those millenniums with the progress that has been made, and the distance which still separates the race from a reasonably happy life for all its members. If a God cannot do better for man than this, man may be well content to trust to his own unaided efforts. Weturn from the phenomena of human life, as from those of non-human nature, without finding any evidence which demonstrates, or even renders probable, the existence of a God. There is another line of reasoning, however, apart from the consideration of phenomena, which must, it is alleged, lead us to believe in the existence of a God. This is the well-used argument from causation. Every effect must have a cause, therefore the universe must have a cause, is a favorite enthymeme, of which the suppressed minor is, the universe is an effect. But this is a mere begging of the question. Every effect must have a cause; granted; for a cause is defined as that which produces an effect, and an effect as that which is pro­ duced by a cause; the two words are co-relatives, and the one is meaningless separated from the other. Prove that the universe is an effect, and in so doing you will have proved that it has a cause; but in the proof of that quietly-suppressed minor is the crux of the dispute. We see that the forces around us are the causes of various effects, and that they, the causes of events which follow their action, are themselves the effects of causes which preceded such action. From the continued observation �WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. ■of these sequences, ourselves part of this endless chain, the idea of causation is worked into the human mind, and becomes, as it were, part of its very texture, so that we cannot in thought separate phsenomena from their causes, and the uncaused becomes to us the incon­ ceivable. But wo cannot rationally extend reasoning wholly based on pheenomena into the region of the noumenon. That which is true of the phsenomenal universe gives us no clue when we try to pass without it, and to penetrate into the mystery of existence per se. To call God “the first cause” is to play with words after their meaning has been emptied from them. If the argument from causation is to be applied to the existence of the universe, which is, without any proof, to be accepted as an effect, why may it not with equal force be applied to “ God ”, who, equally without any proof, may be regarded as an effect ? and so we may create an illimitable series of Gods, each an assumption unsupported by evidence. If we once begin puffing divine smoke-rings, the only limit to the exercise is our want of occupation and the amount of suit­ able tobacco our imagination is able to supply. The belief of the Atheist stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the existence of the universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate, and he finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all pheenomena. He finds no intellectual satisfaction in placing a gigantic conundrum be­ hind the universe, which only adds its own unintelligibility to the already sufficiently difficult problem of existence. Our lungs are not fitted to breathe beyond the atmosphere which surrounds our globe, and our faculties cannot breathe outside the atmosphere of the phsenomenal. If I went up in a balloon I should check it when I found it carrying me into air too rare for my respiration; and I decline to be carried by a theological balloon into regions wherein thought cannot breathe healthily, but can only fall down gasping, imagining that its gasps are inspiration. There remain for us to investigate two lines of evidence, either of which suffices, apparently, to carry conviction to a large number of minds; these are, the argument from human experience, and the argument from design. I have no desire to lessen the weight of an argument drawn from the sensus communis, the common sense, of mankind. It is on this that we largely rely in drawing �16 WIIY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. distinctions between the normal and the abnormal; it isthis which serves as test between the sane and the insane no thoughtful student can venture to ignore the tre­ mendous force of the consensus of human experience. But while he will not ignore, he must judge : he must ask, first, is this experience universal and unanimous ? Secondly, on what experimental or other evidence is it based ? The universal and unanimous verdict of human experience, based on clear verifiable experience, is one which the thinker will challenge with extreme hesitation. Yet cause may arise which justifies such challenge. Perhaps no belief has at once been so general, and so undeniably based on the evidence of the senses, as the belief in the movement of the sun and the immobility of our globe. All but the blind could daily see the rising of' the sun in the eastern sky, and its setting in the west; alL could feel the firmness of the unshaken earth, the solid unmoving steadfastness of the ground on which we tread. Yet this consensus of human experience, this universality of Tinman testimony, has been rejected as false on evidence which none who can feel the force of reasoning is able to deny. If this belief, in defence of which can be brought the no plus ultra of the verdict of common sense, be not tenable in the light of modern knowledge, how shall a belief on which the sensus communis is practically non­ existent, on which human testimony is. lacking in many cases, contradictory in all others, and which fails to main­ tain itself on experimental or other evidence, how shall it hold ground from which the other has been driven ? The reply to the question, “Is the evidence universal and unanimous ? ” must be in the negative. The religion of Buddha, which is embraced by more than a third of the population of the globe, is an Atheistic creed; many Buddhists pay veneration to Buddha, and to the statues of their own deceased ancestors, but none pretend that these objects of reverence are symbols of a divine power. Many of the lower savage tribes have no idea of &od. Darwin writes: “There is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of one or more Gods, and who have no words in their language to express such an idea” (“Descent of Man,” pp. 93, 94, ed. 1875). Buchner (“Force and �WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. 17 Matter,” pp. 382—393) has collected a mass of evidence showing that whole races of men have no idea of God at all. Sir John Lubbock has done the same. When savages reach a stage of intelligence at which they begin to seek the causes of phenomena, they invariably postulate many Gods as causes of the many objects around them. A New Zealander who was told of the existence of the one God by a missionary, asked him scoffingly if, among Europeans, one man made things of every sort; and he argued that as there were various trades among men, so there were various Gods, each with his own business, and one made trees, another the sea, another the animals, and so on. Only when intelligence has reached a comparatively high plane, is evolved the idea of one God, the creator and the rurs^of the universe. Moreover this idea of “God” is essentially an abstract, not a concrete idea, and the fancy that there ia an entity belonging to it is but a survival of Realism, a/meory which is discredited in everything save in this one theological remnant. It has been alleged by some writers that, however degraded may be the savage, he still has some idea of supernatural existences, and that error on this head has arisen from the want of thoroughly understanding the savage’s ideas. But even these writers do not allege that the belief of these savages touches on a being who can be called by the most extreme courtesy “God”. There may be a vague fear of the unknown, a tendency to crouch before striking and dangerous manifestations of natural forces, an idea of some unseen power residing in a stone or a relic—a fetish; but such things—and of the existence of even these in the lowest savages evidence is lacking— can surely not be described as belief in God. Not only is the universal evidence a-wanting, but such evidence as there is wholly lacks unanimity. What at­ tribute of the divine character, what property of the divine nature, is attested by the unanimous voice of human experience ? What is there in common between the Mumbo-Jumbo of Africa, and the “heavenly Father”, of refined nineteenth century European Theism.? What tie, save that of a common name, unites the blood-dripping Tezcatlepoca of Mexico with him “ whose tender mercy is over, all his works ” ? Even if we confine ourselves to the Gods of the Jews, the Christians, and the Mahommedans, �18 WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. how great is the clash of dissension. The Jew proclaims it blasphemy to speak of a divine Trinity, and shrinks with horror from the thought of an incarnate God. The Christian calls it blasphemy to deny the deity of the man Christ Jesus, aqd affirms, under anathema, the triune nature of the Godhead. The Mahommedan asserts the unity of God, and stamps as infidel everyone who refuses to see in Mahommed the true revealer of the divinity. Each is equally certain that he is right, and each is equally certain that the others are wrong, and are in peril of eternal damnation for their rejection of the one true faith. If the Christian has his lake of fire and brimstone for those who deny Christ, the Mahommedan has his drinks of boiling water for those who assert him. Among 'this clash of tongues, to whom shall turn the bewildered enquirer after truth ? All his would-be teachers are equally positive, and equally without evidence. All are loud in assertion, but singularly modest in their offers of proof. Now, it may be taken as an undeniable fact that where there is confusion of belief there is deficiency of evidence. Scientific men quarrel and dispute over some much con­ troverted scientific theory. They dispute because the experimental proofs are lacking that would decide the truth or the error of the suggested hypothesis. While the evidence is unsatisfactory, the controversy continues, but when once decisive proof has been discovered all tongues are still. The endless controversies over the ex­ istence of God show that decisive proof has not yet been attained. And while this proof is wanting, I remain Atheist, resolute not to profess belief till my intellect can find some stable ground whereon to rest. We have reached the last citadel, once the apparently impregnable fortress of Theism, but one whose walls are now crumbling, the argument from design. It was this argument which so impressed John Stuart Mill that he wrote in his Essay on “ Theism ” : “I- think it must be allowed that, in the present state of our knowledge, the adaptations in Nature afford a large balance of probability in favor of creation by intelligence. It is equally certain that this is no more than a probability ” (“ Three Essays on Religion ”, p. 174). This Essay was, however, written between the years 1868 and 1870, and at that time the �■WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. 19 tremendous effect of the hypothesis of evolution had not yet made itself felt; Mill speaks (p. 172) of the “recent speculations ” on “ the principle of the ‘ survival of the of the fittest’ ”, and recognising that if this principle were sound “there would be a constant though slow general improvement of the type as it branched out into many different varieties, adapting it to different media and modes of existence, until it might possibly, in countless ages, attain to the most advanced examples which now exist ” (p. 173), he admits that if this be true “ it must be acknowledged that it would greatly attenuate the evidence for ” creation. And I am prepared to admit frankly that until the “how” of evolution explained the adaptations in Nature, the weight of the argument from design was very great, and to most minds would have been absolutely decisive. It would not of course prove the existence of an omnipotent and universal creator, but it certainly did powerfully suggest the presence of some contriving intel­ ligence at work on natural phenomena. But now, when we can trace the gradual evolution of a complex and highly developed organ through the various stages which separate its origin from its most complete condition ; when we can study the retrogression of organs becoming rudimentary by disuse, and the improvement of organs becoming developed by use; when we notice as imperfections in the higher type things which were essential in the lower: what wonder is it that the instructed can no longer admit the force of the argument from design ? The human eye has often been pointed to as a trium­ phant proof of design, and it naturally seemed perfect in the past to those who could imagine no higher kind of optical instrument; but now, as Tyndall says, “Along list of indictments might indeed be brought against the eye—its opacity, its want of symmetry, its lack of achro­ matism, its absolute blindness, in part. All these taken together caused Helmholtz to say that, if any optician sent him an instrument so full of defects, he would be justified in sending it back with the severest censure” (“On Light”, p. 8, ed. 1875). It is only since men have made optical instruments without the faults of the eye, that we have become aware how much better we might see than we do. Nor is this all; the imperfections which would show incompetence on the part of a designer become inte­ �20 WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. resting and significant as traces of gradual development, and the eye, which in the complexity of its highest form seemed, notwithstanding its defects, to demand such great intelligence to conceive and fashion it, becomes more in­ telligible when we can watch it a-building, and, as it were, See it put together bit by bit. I venture to quote here from a pamphlet of my own a very brief statement of the stages through which the eye has passed in its evolution: “ The first definite eye-spot that we yet know of is a little colored speck at the base of the tentacles of some of the Hydromedusse, jelly-fish in common parlance. They are only spots of pigment, and we should not know they were attempts at eyes were it not that some relations, the Discophora, have little refractive bodies in their pigment spots, and these refractive bodies resemble the crystalline cones of animals a little higher in the scale. In the next class (Vermes), including all worms, we find only pigment spots in the lowest; then pigment spots with a nerve­ fibre ending in them; pigment spots with rod-shaped cells, with crystalline rods ; pigment spots with crystalline cones. Next, the cones begin to be arranged radially; and in the Alciopidse the eye has become a sphere with a lens and a vitreous body, layer of pigment, layer of rods, and optic nerve. To mark the evolution definitely in another way, we find the more highly developed eye of the adult appearing as a pigment spot in the embryo, so that both the evolution of the race and the evolution of the individual tell the same story. In the Echino­ derma (sea-urchins, star-fishes) we find only pigment spots in the lower forms, but in the higher the rod-shaped cells, the transparent cones projecting from pigment cells. In the Arthropoda (lobsters, insects, etc.,) the advance continues from the Vermes. The retina is formed more definitely than in the Alciopidm, and the eye becomes more complex. The compound eye is an attempt at grouping many cones together, and is found in the higher members of this sub-kingdom. In the lowest vertebrate, the Amphioxus, the eye is a mere pigment spot, but in the others the more complex forms are taken up and carried on to the comparative perfection of the mammalian eye” (“Eyes and Ears”, pp. 9, 10). And be it noted that in the most complex and highly developed eye there is still the same relation of pigment layer, rod layer, cone layer, �WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. 21 seen in its earliest beginnings in the Discophora and the worms. The line of argument here applied to the eye may be followed in every instance of so-called design. The ex­ quisite mechanism of the ear may be similarly traced, from the mere sac with otoliths of the Medusse up to the elabo­ rate external, middle, and internal ears of man. Man’s ear is a very complex thing. Its three chambers ; the curious characteristics of the innermost of these, with its three “semi-circular canals”, its coiled extension, like a snail-shell, called the cochlea, its elaborate nervous mechan­ ism ; the membrane between the middle and outer cham­ bers, which vibrates with every pulsation of the air; we can trace all these separate parts as they are added one to one to the auditory apparatus of the evolving race. If we examine the edge of the “ umbrella ” of the free-swimming Medusa, we shall find some little capsules containing one or more tiny crystals, the homologues of the inner ear; the lower forms of Vermes have similar ears, and in some there are delicate hairs within the capsule which quiver con­ stantly ; the higher worms have these capsules paired and they lie close to a mass of nervous matter. Lobsters and their relations have similar ears, the capsule being some­ times closed and sometimes open. In many insects a delicate membrane is added to the auditory apparatus, and stretches between the vesicle and the outer air, homologue of our membrane. The lower fishes have added one semi­ circular canal, the next higher two, and the next higher three : a little expansion is also seen at one part of the vesicle. In the frogs and toads this extension is increased, and in the reptiles and birds it is still larger, and is curled a little at the further end. In the lowest mammals it is still only bent, but in the higher it rolls round on itself and forms the cochlea. The reptiles and birds have the space developed between the vesicle and the membrane, and so acquire a middle ear; the crocodile and the owl show a trace of the external ear, but it is not highly developed till we reach the mammals, and even the lowest mammals, and the aquatic ones, have little of it developed. Thus step by step is the ear built up, until we see it com­ plete as a slow growth, not as an intelligent design. And if it be asked, how are these changes caused, the answer comes readily : “ By variation and by the survival of �22 WHY I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. the fittest ”. Since organisms and their environments re-act on each other, slight variations are constantly occurring; living organisms are ever in very unstable equilibrium, chemical association and disassociation are continually going on within them. Some of these changes are advantageous to the organism in the struggle for existence; some are indifferent; some are disadvantageous. Those that are advantageous tend to persist, since the organism possessing them is more likely to survive than its less fortunate com­ petitors, and — since variations are transmissible from parents to progeny—to hand on its favorable variation to its young. On the other hand the disadvantageous varia­ tions tend to disappear, since the organism which is by them placed at a disadvantage is likely to perish in the fight for food. Here are the mighty forces that cause evo­ lution ; here the “ not ourselves which makes for righteous­ ness”, i.e., forever-increasing suitability of the organism to its environment. It is, of course, impossible in so brief a statement as this to do justice to the fulness of the explanation of all cases of apparent design which can be made in this fashion. The thoughtful student must work out the line of argu­ ment for himself. Nor must he forget to notice the argu­ ment from the absence of design, the want of adaptation, the myriad failures, the ineptitudes and incompetences of nature. How, from the point of view of design, can he explain the numerous rudimentary organs in the higher animals ? What is the meaning of man’s hidden rudimen­ tary tail? of his appendix coeci vermiformis? of the branchial clefts and the lanugo of the human being dur­ ing periods of ante-natal life ? of the erratic course of the recurrent laryngeal? of the communication between the larynx and the alimentary canal ? I might extend the list over a page. The fact that uninstructed people do not appreciate these difficulties offers no explanation to the instructed who feel their force; and the abuse so freely lavished on the Atheist does not carry conviction to the intellect. I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre of an Almighty Indifference to the pain, of sentient beings. My conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality, which surround me �WHY" I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. 23 on every side. But I believe in Man. In man’s redeeming power; in man’s remoulding energy; in man’s approach­ ing triumph, through knowledge, love, and work. �� 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 &amp; 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 Why I do not believe in God Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Besant, Annie Wood [1847-1933] Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 23 p. ; 18 cm. Notes: Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Freethought Publishing Company Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1887 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N074 Subject The topic of the resource Atheism 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 (Why I do not believe in 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 Atheism God NSS https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/875249d1dc691fb934359c9db111fa42.pdf?Expires=1777507200&Signature=UL3%7EdMxyh6TbCyTL0xxUxUe0Y%7E89tx74NsO6dbsRY13YbJn8gpo%7ETYhjwDqCv1-i1o8O3WTtCIzB42a6UzKWtnQ%7EcURS%7EoyckrQFXHnv1YOpjmL7XfUUY0PL1eBnQ3CEZJOjkbiE8pdfaZDLHWcPX2FmadDcFthWsruxd9YIMB5CNjmoc4CdVikUzudLwcq3KXYt28ey8I3DqG6hmvpNrhdhxYPGD4lX0qyyYd9qeOxuLxTf8NySnVafRx0LrfmkJQsv7KkZ7BEOtb02yjvvp%7EBoljyf4RJfoNbZBltM4FhuZoOWQA2uwtDoueXgHVw7bF-i9pOB1Ew25PfcttSFxA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM ccefbc5561ec629647e7c440704b1ecb PDF Text Text WORK AND WEALTH ESSAY AN ON THE OF ECONOMICS SOCIALISM, BY J. K. INGALLS. ONE PENNY. LONDON: INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY, * r 35, NEWINGTON GREEN ROAD, N. 1887. ��WORK AND WEALTH.4 <Ti HAVE chosen the above terms in preference to Labour and W Capital, because they convey more exact ideas. Thè word labour carries with it the impression of compulsory, or servile toil. Capital is a word which economists themselves cannot satis­ factorily define, and to which they apply only an arbitrary meaning. The things signified by work and wealth are subject to no equivocal interpretation, are understood by all, and stand to each other in the relation of a natural sequence. Speaking from the standpoint of the trader, from which political economists mainly speak, Adam Smith lays down this fundamental proposition : “ It was not by gold or silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased.” For him the term labour was appropriate, because, in his time, a large proportion of the world’s work was performed by bondmen or by hirelings, even more the mere dependents of the legal possessors of the world’s wealth than are the workers of to-day. Starting from this comprehensive, but exact, proposition that work is the only source from which wealth can be produced or purchased as an axiom, the opposite of which is simply unthinkable, let us direct our attention to an inquiry into the manner in which wealth to appearance is transferred so often in exchange for no equivalent in labour. Even the trader may be interested in the attempt to account for the fact that wealth, at first purchasable only by work, comes to be possessed mainly by those who do no work. The thing which a man has produced by his work, and which is an object of desire to himself and others, can be transferred in several different ways. The natural or simplistic methods are: (r) Force, involving robbery, theft, and, in an advanced stage, cheating, over­ reaching, and advantage-taking of every description ; (2) Gift, involving partial and invidious bestowments, as well as noble gene­ rosities ; (3) Hazard, involving all kinds of gaming, and, in the progress of society, all speculative ventures. * This paper originally appeared in the Ameiican “ Radical Review.” * �4 v i The rational method, and one which is arrived at only by culture and the recognition of social obligations, is mutual exchange. With the earlier method^ as they have existed in the past, we need have no quarrel. They were the only ones possible under the con­ dition of social and moral development then obtaining. Robbery is the main element of organic and animated life. The carnivorous animals all support life by drawing it from orders less powerful or aggressive than themselves, and even the herbivorous sustain life by devouring vegetable life. Man destroys the lives of the creatures beneath him that he may eat their flesh and robe himself with their furs and skins.. He robs the sheep of its fleece, the silk-worm of its web that he may clothe himself. That he pursues a similar course with his fellow is not to be wondered at. Only a conception of the brotherhood of man and the real dignity of work can win him from his tendency to devour the substance of the weak and simple who fall into his hands, instead of producing wealth for himself. The rude man, who has spent hours in the forest gathering fagots, but lies down at night without a fire, while another enjoys the genial warmth those same fagots yield while burning, may have transferred their possession in several different ways. He may, with a certain degree of equity, have exchanged them, for different products which the other had worked to obtain ; he may have engaged in some game of chance, and lost them wholly ; or he may have been met by a stronger man, while returning laden, and deprived of his fagots by force. Or, he already may have been reduced to a bond-slave, his life having bten spared in war on condition of his submission to a life of slavery; and thus have given his captor the perpetual ability to purchase wealth with his and his childrens’ toil. From the mental state which results from such motives as sway the successful warrior and slave-holder, to that of the enlightened moralist and economist who discovers that, if another has created wealth which he himself desires, the true thing to do is to create something which the other will equally desire, that so the transfers may be mutually agreeable and beneficial, is a distance which requires ages of toil and struggle to overcome. It may be urged that in the capture and management of slaves, who would not willingly work if left to themselves, a certain necessary work was performed, and a larger production of wealth obtained. If we were to admit this as regards the past, it would serve as no justi­ fication for the continuance of slavery ; but it should also be con­ sidered that the robber class, until taught by the toil of the indus­ trious that labour will produce or purchase wealth, never seeks to subject the toilers to slavery. Besides, all experience shows that ••• �5 slavery, so far from promoting industry, begets a general repugnance to work on the part of both slave and slave owner : thus the thing urged in its justification is seen to have been caused mainly by itself. It was not till after centuries of advancement that civilized nations began to discourage chattel slavery. Its entire abolition in our country is a recent event. But by its abolition we have by no means reached any thing like an equitable system of exchange. We still have class legislation, protecting the vast accumalations of wealth and ownership of land in unlimited quantities, just as incom­ patible with justice as the older tyranny. To be able to purchase wealth with others’ labour, it is not at all necessary to own their bodies. The strong assumed “ property in ■ man ” and “ property in the soil ” at the same time. Now, since the soil is absolutely essential to the application of labour to productive uses, he who has an exclusive claim to it can labour under any tribute he pleases, or deny it opportunity to employ itself or be employed at all. Since ownership in man has been abolished, private ownership of land is the chief basis, the great fulcrum, of alt devices for purchasing wealth by the work of others. By the workers themselves this power is little understood, because it affects them indirectly. They come in immediate contact with their employers, and questions of raising or lowering wages, lengthen­ ing or shortening hours, attract their attention and divert it from more fundamental questions. They hardly reflect that their em­ ployers are also subject to the competitive struggle, and are often broken down by the operation of the same law which shortens the rations, and renders more and more precarious the employment, on which the labourer depends. The indifference of the working-men to this question of the land, and their failure to obtain even enough of it to enable them to rear homes for themselves and families, has a curious, as well as sad, result. Quite twenty-five per cent, of the earnings of labourers, clerks, and mechanics who do not own a home of their own, goes to the landlords for rent. In many instances, this is for structures which have been paid for a hundred times over, and are not worth in their material the labour of pulling down and carrying away. It is true that a portion of this rent comes back in payment of repairs, taxes, etc., but still leaving a large percentage for which labour receives no return whatever, and may almost be said to yield voluntarily, thus permitting others, to that extent, to purchase wealth with their unrequited toil. Had our Government established a system of easy access to the * �6 soil through nationalization of the land or a judicious limitation to private ownership, the questions arising between employer and em­ ployed would have a ready solution. On the recurrence of a de­ pression in business, general or special, the parties feeling themselves crowded would betake themselves to the cultivation of the soil, or some self-employment; or at least enough would do so to relieve the overstocked labour market, thus increasing the demand for the things which had been over-produced. Out of our semi-feudal land system grow also many of the giant evils which afflict our commerce and finance. The man who has no land must hire it or pay for its use, before he can apply his labours in cultivation, however willing and capable he may be. This basic necessity of borrowing is the foundation of all other borrowing ; paying for the use of land is the basis of all rent and usury and speculative profit of every description. Distressed by unnatural dis-'“*^* possession and deprivation, people are in no condition to resist the temptation to borrow anything which promises relief, and to pledge themselves to pay therefor impossible rates of interest. The poor man, to free himself from present deprivation, borrows the means to do a little business • the man of considerable means borrows that he may do more business; and for the result, we have most of the real estate and much of the personal property of both in the hands of the money-lender through foreclosures. A large proportion of all transfers of real estate, especially for the last three years, has been through foreclosures, and to avoid foreclosures. An annual half-billion does not cover the amount which goes into or through the hands of corporations in the form of interest in this country, not to mention the enormous rentals, private speculative profits, etc. The industrious man, who purchases by his work any desired wealth, gets only one-half, or less, himself,—the other half going to the usurer, landlord, or profit-monger. These are enabled to pur­ chase, or get recognized possession of, this other half through unlimited control of land, and the system of usance and annuities growing up from that basis. It may be said with too much truth that working-men get now more than they wisely use; but it is still truer that, in proportion as their share in what they have produced is diminished, they become more and more indifferent to saving, and more and more shiftless and unreliable. It is not the purpose of this paper to attempt to point out what is right and equitable between employer and employed under our system of wages. W-hen any considerable portion of mankind �7 desires equity and mutualism in industry and division, there will be no difficulty in arriving at exact conclusions. My object will be more than realized, if I draw attention to these things as they actually exist, and to the positive relation which work and wealth sustain to each other, the truth in regard to which can only be ascertained by careful analysis. Into all production of wealth only two factors enter: (i) the raw material—the soil or its spontaneous productions; (2) human effort. However complex or extended, in the last analysis only these two elements are found. It is not the carbon and nitrogen, the salts and gases, of which our food and clothing are composed, which we pro­ duce as wealth, but that specific form and aptitude for use which our work has wrought or effected. According to that ingenious political economist, Bastiat, even when we purchase things with money or by barter, we do not exchange things, but forms of service. The inference, however, which he draws from this truthful proposition—that, therefore, any one in possession of wealth to whatever amount must necessarily have rendered an equivalent service for that wealth (either by him­ self, or through an ancestor or donor)—is so monstrous as to be accepted only by specialists in 11 exact science.” On the contrary, we find mutuality of service nowhere recognized as at all requisite in the business transactions of the world. We might as well look for it under the chattel system, where men and women are bought and sold, and where labour does not have to be purchased with equiva­ lent service, but can be enforced by the lash. Adam Smith says : “ It is impossible for one to become excessively rich without making many others correspondingly poor.” This is a result which could not possibly arise from any mutual exchange of services, or from any honest transfers of equivalents, any more than we can have an equation with one side plus and the other minus. Hence it follows that, where inordinate wealth exists, it has been purchased by the labour of others than the possessors, and through transfers by force, fraud or hazard. To produce or have wealth at all, human effort must be put forth. Even the spontaneous productions of Nature cannot constitute wealth, until taken out of their natural state. The savage who has fagots and game in store for a week has wealth, as compared with him who has to gather a daily supply. Application and frugality seem the only requisites for its acquirement. By a wise division of labour and special adaptation of functions, the wealth of the world has been vastly increased; but we must not let the complexity of work and diversity of employments confuse our ideas in regard to �8 * the main question,—namely, the source of wealth, and the equity or iniquity of the present method of distribution. As society advanced from the simply savage state, the search, capture, and transportation of natural wealth was followed by various handicrafts which added value thereto. It was work, nothing less and nothing more, of hand and brain which formed social wealth from the resources of Nature. In all these elaborate transforma­ tions, we can discover no other earthly agency, nor indeed make any material distinction in the essential character of these varied services. One and all are necessary to each other. By no logic can we decide that one service is more important than another, except in the utility of its product. If one has discovered, another secured, and a third transported the prize to the place where it is needed for consumption, we can decide no otherwise than that the pay of each should be propor­ tioned to the time employed in labour and the useful result accom­ plished. Even the labour necessary to divide and distribute it comes in justly for a share. So far all must be plain in regard to the facts involved in our question. It seems to me the principles must also be clear. But it will be answered that still the distinctions in life and the inequali­ ties of distribution of which we complain have been transmitted to us from previously existing conditions, and result from the operations of forces that can be traced back through every form of civilization. This is, however, very far from proving that they exist in accordance with elementary principles or any rational interpretation of law. Really it comes to this,—whether we will continue the essential injustice, while dropping the barbaric methods of the savage, or attempt a truly scientific solution of the problem of work and wealth. In the discovery, procurance, and manipulation of natural produc­ tions, I have indicated all the steps in the production of wealth. Services in the preservation or conservation of wealth are equally entitled to consideration, but cannot be yielded a superior claim. With our inequitable division, and the disorganized methods of dis­ tribution which it begets, the number of traders becomes sadly disproportioned to the number of actual producers ; and since those despoiled are chiefly those who perform the most useful labour, the smart and shrewd seek the more indirect methods of obtaining wealth. And just here the principle of competition, which political economists seem to think ought to reconcile the wealth producers to starvation, does not work with facility, for no one can do a business at a loss, and hence society has to support numbers to do the work which one might do. �9 I may, in this connection, refer to the instrumentality of money or currency, serviceable in moving crops and the work of distribu­ tion generally. Its importance, however, is ’ mainly due to the want of mutualism in our distributive system and of equity in our methods of exchange. A charge for the time-use of this instrument, in defiance of the sentiments of all moralists from Moses and Cato to Ruskin and Palmer, has been enforced by our laws, because labour was at the mercy of the few who hold the soil, and because operations could be made to pay dividends out of the wealth purchased by the labour of the poor arid simple. Chattel slavery enabled the planter to pay interest. ‘Land monopoly enables the capitalist to assume that there is a usufruct ’to wealth. In return, usury has been the great lever by which millions of homes have been alienated, and gone to swell the domain of avarice and love of lordly domination. As war was the parent of slavery, by which whole families, tribes, and nations were reduced to bondage,—made “ hewers of wood and drawers of water” to the victors,—so it has been employed to enslave labour by the creation of immense national debts, the mere interest of which is an onerous tax upon the worker. Hazard has also played as large, if not so conspicuous, a part as war in reducing labour to the condition of dependence and distress. The liberty of self, wife, and children, in barbaric times, was often staked. And when this was not done, borrowing to prolong play was practised, as to-day in Turkey and in some Christian and even republican countries, upon conditions and at rates which can have no termina­ tion but in life-long bondage or peonage. To relieve present dis­ tress, or deluded by the hope of acquiring the ability to live by others’ labour, many people to-day, who would despise the mere gambler, fall into a similar fatuity, and wake from it only to find themselves slaves to the power they expected to use to lay others* labour under contribution. I am not urging sympathy for these dupes. I am only pointing out some of the causes, still in operation, which have resulted in making the few the actual masters of labour, and given them the ability to purchase wealth without work of their own. In our country and time we do not enforce gambling debts as they do in Turkey ; but we do enforce contracts to pay interest, often just as oppressive, and only outwardly less barbarous and inhuman. In.thus tracing the. working of these crude methods, we find that the productive labour of our time has its .inheritance, through the wage system, serfdom, and slavery, from primitive subjection to force; or through speculative trade, from the hazard which ruined �ro the victim without permanently benefiting the winner. It is not important to our purpose to inquire whether the plunderers or plundered are more to blame, or the greater sufferers. This is plain; with the land in the hands of the hereditary or speculative lord, the labourer has no resources for self-employment, however fit or unfit he may be. The working-man can obtain independence now only by the possession of exceptional powers, or by special good fortune, and then only through schemes and operations which raise one at the expense of many. The inheritance of the property class consists of a transmission of power attained by forceful conquest, or by the varied forms of hazard, fraud, and corruption. With their wealth they inherit generally the tendency to take advantage of the necessities of others, and to apply new methods of overreaching when the spirit of progress will no longer tolerate the old ones. 1 do not make this application to individuals, but only to those given to the shrewd use of wealth; well I know that many parvenus far outdo, in management, those who inherit wealth. In this country we have changed some things to suit republican prejudices. For instance, our land is no longer entailed in a family. Yet it is all falling into the hands of a class; and although the great fortunes sometimes change to other hands, they are controlled by those with still greater, and their attitude and relation to industry remain the same. Of the large fortunes now enjoyed in New York and New England, many had their foundations laid by successful privateers and slave traders ; and by other methods no less dis­ cordant with principles of natural justice. The immense fortunes made by two well-known citizens in the generation now past are quite exceptional, and yet they well illustrate the present divorced relation between work and wealth. In a certain sense, both were industrious workers. Each has said of himself that, when he worked in the ordinary way, his income was trifling. It was only after lon^ struggle, in which many worthy men went to the wall, that their fortunes began to accumulate with great rapidity. Both were greatly indebted to our civil war, which reduced whole populations to poverty, left the nation three billions in debt, and sacrificed a million lives. It is also worthy of note that a great banker at our nat onal capital was made rich by privileges granted him to trade during the Mexican war. When it is said in justifica­ tion of these men that they did not go outside the acknowledged rules of I usiness. it is admitting that our systems of trade, finance, etc., are essentially the same as in barbarous ages whose forms we have discarded. �11 Another great estate, also recently left in the city of New York was mainly inherited, being now in the possession of the third gene­ ration. In mentioning these instances I disclaim any purpose of judging the men. They were what inheritance and environment made them. My only purpose is to show the irrational and fatal policy which places in the hands of any men, however good or great, the power to purchase, ad libitum, wealth with other people’s work. I am quite well aware that for many years to come this remonstrance will remain measurably unheeded. The workers are so depressed with hardship, or so readily elated with the prospect of success in some exceptional field, that they are quite unwilling to look away from prospects of temporary relief to the consideration of broad questions of reform, even if they were less idiotically joined to party, labelled republican or democratic, by leaders who form a mutual ring, whichever party attains power, and conspire to make the plunder of public funds and public trusts a fine art. But from the operation upon the public mind of works like those of Spencer, Mill, Lewes, and Ruskin, much is to be hoped. Our own country, also, has the names of men, not unknown to fame, who are deeply impressed with the importance of this vital social and ethical problem. Its development promises to take form like this : First, As a civil right,—freedom of access to the soil and oppor­ tunity of self-employment; Second, As a principle of law,—the partnership of all concerned in the production of wealth requiring division of labour; Third, As a matter of commercial ethics,—equivalents of service in all exchanges. In connection with these developments in the intellectual and ethical field, it occurs to me that there is a probability, at least, of a movement which shall greatly hasten the downfall of our barbarous system of division, and the approach of the era when work shall be the only recognized title to wealth. Within the present century, men like Robert Owen, Peter Cooper, Gerrit Smith, and many others who could be mentioned, have shown, with more or less success, that it is “nobl-e to live for others,” and that personal interests may be subordinated to social aims. It seems to me no dream of romance to indulge the faith that, at a time near at hand, a class of true men and women will arise and form an order, which will abstain from preying on the results of others’ toil. These social knights-errant will scorn to rely on the efforts of others for their support, or to apply to their own use, in any way, that for which another has wrought. They will no more consider the necessity or �12 weakness of their toiling fellow a reason why they should overreach and plunder him, than would the model knight of the days of chivalry have considered that the weakness and defenceless state of a persecuted woman was a reason why he should outrage rather than protect her. These will organize industries on an equitable basis, promote emigration to districts where the exactions of landlords are less intolerable, and turn the current of many now questionable, though well-intended, charities into channels of self-employment and self-help. It is not too much to hope that they will be able ulti­ mately to change the application of the vast amount of labour and wealth now expended in “ plans of salvation ” to save the souls of men in a future world, into a broadly beneficent measures of indus­ trial organization and social renovation, and thus render possible the coming of the “ kingdom of heaven upon the earth,” under the equitable rule of which it<£ shall be given to every one according to his work.” PUBLICATION LIST. P. J. PROUDHON : A Biographical Sketch, with Portrait. Seymour. By Henry Post free, I ^d. SAMFUNDET DAGEN EFTER REVOLUTIONEN (Society on the Morrow of the Revolution). Translated from the French into Danish. 32 pp. and Coloured Cover Post free 2|d. THE CRIMINAL LAW AMENDMENT ACT. By “An English Anarchist.” Reprinted from “The Anarchist,” to which is added an Appendix. Post free, 1 jd. THE MALTHUSIANS. A Socialistic attack on the doctrine of Malthus. By P. J. Proudhon. Post free, i|d. EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION. A Scientific Essay on the doctrine of Evolution. By M. Elisee Reclus. Post free, i^d. LAW AND AUTHORITY. An essay on the error and usurpation of politi­ cal legislation, and its concomitant evils. By Pierre Kropotkine. Post free, 2|d. GESETZ UND AUTORITAET (Law and Authority). German Edition. Post free, 2.jd. THE PLACE OF ANARCHISM IN SOCIALISTIC EVOLUTION. By the same author. Post free, i|d. EXPROPRIATION. By the same author. Post free, i|d. WAR. By the same author. Post free, i^d. THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNISTS. By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Crimson Cover. Post free, 2|d. INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY. THE ANARCHIST, A Journal of Anti-political Socialism and advocate of the abolition of the State. EDITOR AND PUBLISHER: HENRY SEYMOUR. Price, One Penny. LONDON : 35, NEWINGTON GREEN ROAD, N. � 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 &amp; 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 Work and wealth: an essay on the economics of socialism Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ingalls, J.K. Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 12 p. ; 23 cm. Notes: Stamp on front flyleaf: South Place Chapel Finsbury, Lending Library. "This paper originally appeared in the American 'Radical Review'". Publisher's list on numbered page at the end. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available International Publishing Company Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1887 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context G4968 Subject The topic of the resource Economics 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 (Work and wealth: an essay on the economics of socialism), 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 Economics Socialism