1 10 6 https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/47de5e0df331a120e9e67fff863cd239.pdf?Expires=1777507200&Signature=pSFAB67HMA4QwugeitlgBdPU9gQbDjhW5aWUxUSggtrgpu4s6GNXOUhPzaEOXdCxCGgvkmE1T-ClHaQuh4zYe0dPq7Gytm9fbh0Tc2weEABGSrZY6u-3eAPgMqqbbORQzGmESdTnD9V2-F%7E0%7EUhtJgh8OrU0soPr9cW2Ae5F-KLT6JCn6-4Mm2c08AK71Vl2Vqe5e8qqnrWdBgtqBE1lsEJejc4F9dDEbovoUofcxp7CrcE%7EeBi1s01jSDCf5GjxlAd7klqchdB%7EPyCjLI5FqXFlBa5HcZQsDnKKJ64ciQe1Z594KdPbhsQeOOrJ9NVO3QuYHhTcVlSe9xXqqHsYow__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 2d2beec380895e34e1c2ace67b1ff0d1 PDF Text Text ’ I M.AG National Secular Society Tract No. 6. Mr. RAMSAY MACDONALD on SECULAR EDUCATION. Report of a Speech delivered in support of Secular Education at a meeting held under the auspices of the Secular Education League, in the St. James1 Hall, London, December io, 1908. z | AHE case for the secular solution is a logical I case, it is a just case. This is a question which concerns more particularly the children of the working classes. I am bound to say that nothing made me'feel so1 disgusted as when I listened in the House of Commons, the other day, to gentlemen whose feet had never crossed the threshold of a Board School, who told us about the tre­ mendous amount of concern they had for the quality of the moral and religious teaching given to other people’s children. All I can say is, I wish they would look after their own children. If they had only shown the same anxiety for their own children and seen that they were well educated in morality and re­ ligion, well bred, trained in the knowledge of what was right and wrong, and had left us to do the same with our children, modern society would have been a much holier affair than it is to-day. I am not one of those who believe in peace at any price. I am in favour of a just and lasting peace, a peace that has been secured after the State and Church make up their minds to look after their own business. There is nothing more preposterous than that the State should attempt to do the work of the Church unless it is that the Church should actually expect the State to do its work. Let us suppose that we are all pro­ foundly religious and that we are simply burning with anxiety to get the minds of our children, using the word in its very best sense, converted. The children have religious instruction for three quarters of an hour each day, and we are going to say : ‘ What �a blessed religious exercise they have had. How en­ lightening it has been to their souls.’ Three quarters of an hour’s instruction in Jewish history—very ancient—and the child might say : ‘ Thank God, if I did not know that David was the King of Judah, I might have been a thief.’ We have a right to test education by results. We hear a great deal about science nowadays. I would like to hear Mr. Hal­ dane, who is a leader in science, give his genuine opinion as a scientist, from the point of view of a man who believes in the scientific method, as to the effect of Bible reading in the schools from the re­ ligious point of view. Let us begin on a secular basis. Let us secularize our schools. Let us bring in, not Bills to allow sectarian strife, but Bills to> in­ crease the efficiency of education. Let us make a real beginning in the State care of children. Let us try to devise some means by which the wisdom, knowledge and power and the financial strength of the State, can build up a physical, intellectual and moral character in our children so that when they are no longer children they shall be powerful men and women, prepared to face life in all its aspects. Bring in Bills to do that and peace will naturally follow. If we could get our education ministers to tear out from the official volumes, all records of those round table conferences and barterings, and forget them, and simply go, day after day, to our schools, see the children, see the teachers and the buildings, and go from those schools to' the factories and workshops and see the conditions under which the youth of the country has to work, and with that experience go back to the conference room, and construct an Edu­ cation Bill which would enable them to meet those conditions, then you would have an education of the right kind. You would have peace, you would have a settlement which was not a surrender, and the whole country would benefit enormously as the re­ sult of those efforts.” / Printed and Published by The National Secular Society, 62 Farringdon Street, E.C.4. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. 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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 Mr Ramsay Macdonald on secular education : report of a speech delivered in support of secular education at a meeting held under the auspices of the Secular Education League, in the St. James' Hall, London, December 10, 1908 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Macdonald, Ramsay Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: [2] p. ; 19 cm. Series: National Secular Society tract 6 Notes: Printed by The National Secular Society. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available National Secular Society Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1908 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context G5481 Subject The topic of the resource Secularism Education 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" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (Mr Ramsay Macdonald on secular education : report of a speech delivered in support of secular education at a meeting held under the auspices of the Secular Education League, in the St. James' Hall, London, December 10, 1908), 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 Education Secularism https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/af3591f80513bf9327a7c17237d6084c.pdf?Expires=1777507200&Signature=vlbR0RFlMI3vrcSTSYaU%7EOIykeyixNfgkgz366Mo6dj6aZTNyOyOHpPzkXOtyFsWuWLGcSNexLY41xZ3r2TYE4Tk9DsSYk%7EOR90ZIv8F-e3nYJq83RdXfvMpIVqjvZN6CI%7EA7wFxr-pve0SPEv5XD7qCj79jQd4q7sd-IwzAarNkaVZv-b-JgajrqKRbLQX7KpPyeYy2F%7EJRkWb1G0bvZ7UlibLnOz-ESvIosl85D4ZQUAyEnYQ%7EsoTGaeXyaWR5Qwh79Uuv66okq-aTi7zZL8l--IG7Yr83wG9WZ7OtC5CPO7jsBP6r7AfnSZjWf0M3z%7ERJ8B1lhCHKTrPX8pTH-Q__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 1c86029ef7378356f93744061fc366d2 PDF Text Text & 2-37 2- NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY PRICE TWOPENCE THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN BY THE LATE Rev. JAMES CRANBROOK (EDINBURGH) [issued for the rationalist press association, ltd.] London : WATTS & CO., 17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C. 1908 ��THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN Religion is only a form of feeling. This needs to be dis­ tinctly understood, or else we shall blunder at every step we take. But I feel I have no occasion to go into any very elaborate proof of it, as most rational thinkers have become familiar with the arguments on which it rests. They know that religion is not the observance of forms and ceremonies, inasmuch as men may observe all these most punctiliously and yet be mere hypocrites and pretenders to the religious life. Nor is religion the belief of certain creeds, inasmuch as men have held parts of every kind of orthodoxy, and yet been most atrociously impious. But, as it is generally expressed, it is a state of the heart, of the feelings, a state of faith, reverence, awe, love, dependence, or fear, according to the character of the divine object presented to the mind. No distinction can be more important than that of this modern one between theology and religion. It is necessary to the interpretation of all the religious history of the past, and to all intelligent religious action in the present. Religion is the feeling which arises when a divine object is presented to the mind ; theology is the explanation the intellect gives of that object, its nature, character, and relations, the analysis of the feeling itself, and the exposition of the forms of expres­ sion or worship to which the feeling gives rise. So that it is quite clear that religion must precede theology in the order of time; the thing analysed and explained, ?>., must come before the analysis and explanation. And it is further clear that religion and theology may exist quite independently of 3 �4 THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN each other—i.e., the intellectual process which explains is quite a different thing from the emotional state which seeks for the explanation. A man may feel deeply, and yet, through defect of intellect, be entirely without the theological know­ ledge ; or he may through his power of intellect understand the whole question of the theology, and yet seldom or never in the faintest degree be the subject of the religious feeling. Bearing in mind, then, these distinctions, what is it we are inquiring into when we propose to ourselves the subject of a child’s religious education ? By religious education do we mean the education of that feeling which arises upon the perception of a divine object? or do we mean the analysis and ascertaining of the truths or facts respecting the divine object of the feeling—z.e., theo­ logy? or do we mean both the education of the feeling and of the intellectual process of its interpretation ? Now, if I mistake not, the popular idea of religious education is wholly limited to the second meaning—z.e., the learning of theology. Hence, e.g\, you will see in the prospectuses of various schools a long rigmarole about the great importance they attach to religious education, and the pains they give to it ; and then, when you come to look into the processes by which they carry on this important work, you will find that it often happens that the sole effort they make in this direction with one class for a whole year is to instruct their pupils in the question of the Christian evidences 1 Now, I admit to the fullest extent the great importance of this question. It is one of the great questions of the day. In matters of theo­ logy, it is the great question. But it is not a question of religion. It is a question of historical criticism. And historical criticism is a science of recent times, and requires more learning, hard and dry study, power of acute and accurate reasoning, and maturity of judgment than any other science of the same class. To set children, therefore, to the study of the Christian evidences, and then to call this �THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 5 proceeding their religious education, seems to me as egregious a piece of blundering as ever was perpetrated, and at the same time proves what I said—that in popular estimation religious education means, for the most part, education in theology. I do not mean to say, however, that there is no religious education. On the contrary, there is a great deal of it, Sometimes too much, and out of all proportion. But it is carried on, and especially by pious mothers, without any idea that it is education, and, consequently, without any thought or system. The only thing called and attended to as education consists of theological doctrines. But, in the sense in which I speak of religious education, it is the first of those I named—z’.e., the education of that feeling or those feelings which arise upon the presentation to the mind of a divine object, or, in other words, on the contemplation of the mystery of the universe—the education of the feelings of wonder, awe, reverence, love, and dependence. It is not forming our minds to the study of theological truth. That may be used as a means of religious education indirectly ; and we may see thereafter that it is a means. But the religious education itself is the development, direction, and promotion of the growth of the religious feeling, the purifying it from gross superstitions and sensual elements, and rendering it elevated and elevating, pure and purifying, noble and ennobling. Now, by what process is this to be effected ? I have already alluded to the means generally employed. Pious parents feel it their duty at the very earliest period to begin with teaching their children theology— notions respecting God, the soul, eternity—and in instructing them in the feelings they ought to cherish with regard to these objects. As soon as they can lisp, they teach them to say prayers ; as soon as they can repeat sentences like a parrot, they teach them a catechism. Now, not only is this most destructive to the intellect, by teaching the child to use �6 THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN words without a meaning, but it is creating in the child, so far as it awakens religious feeling at all, a merely super­ stitious religion founded on a false theology, which it will afterwards have to correct. It is sad to reflect that in most schools children receive to-day the same ideas in regard to the universe and the destiny of man which their ancestors entertained, and which are in direct contradiction to con­ temporary knowledge. Let us take as an illustration of what I mean the first two questions of the simplest and the most generally used cate­ chism for little children I know—Dr. Watts’s. I have known it taught to children three years old, and, of course, before they could read ; and have constantly heard it referred to as the very model of a manual for the purpose. And most certainly it represents the spirit—and very much of the letter —of teaching children yet in their early years. It begins with asking: “Can you tell me, child, who made you?” The answer is: “The Great God who made heaven and earth.” Now, here at the very outset are two notions involving the most recondite and difficult ideas, which lie utterly beyond a child’s comprehension. What idea can a child have of God which is not utterly false ? Whatnotion can the words convey but what is grossly superstitious? To give the word “ God ” to a young child without explanation is to teach him to use words without meaning—the greatest curse of most people’s lives. To attempt to give him an explanation is simply to call his creative fancy into play, by means of which he will form for himself a most ridiculous idol. If you awaken religion at all—i.e., feeling towards this misconceived object, this idol—it will be a religion as super­ stitious as ever was that of pagan nations. But then, in this answer there is another notion besides that of God, and as utterly incomprehensible to a child—that of a cosmogony— the generation of a world, of the universe. What are you going to say to a young child about God’s making the �THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 7 heavens and the earth? Will you explain, supposing you are able to do so? He could not comprehend. Would you leave it unexplained, and let him form his own notions? “ Oh,” you say ; “ who would think to teach a child your fine scientific ideas ? I would leave him to the plain common­ sense meaning of the words; every child knows what to make means.” To be sure ! You are quite right. A child knows what to make means, for he has seen your cook make pastry, or he has made mud houses in the streets ; so he takes the meaning of to make as thus learned—the only thing he can do, according to the laws of thought—and applies the notion to God’s making the heavens and the earth ! Is that, how­ ever, the meaning you would have him take the words in ? Do you think such a notion will produce in him any deep religion—that is, reverence, wonder, love, dependence upon him who has done for the heavens and the earth what the child knows he has done for the mud house made in the streets? It is all an absurdity together. If the child think and feel about it at all, it will be false thought and feeling. If he do not think and feel, he has learned to use words without attending to the ideas they represent. Let us now go on to the second question in the cate­ chism, recollecting we quote it, not merely because it is very generally used, but because it exactly expresses the spirit of what is called “ religious ” education where it is not used. That question is : “ What does this Great God do for you?” “He keeps me from harm by night and by day, and is always doing me good.” Now, the criticism upon this is very short and very sharp. In the only sense in which a young child could understand it, it is absolutely untrue. In the only sense in which anybody could understand it, it is partially untrue. God does not keep us from harm by night and by day, and is not always doing us good. He sometimes lets us get into a very great deal of harm, and sometimes does us a great deal of evil. “Oh, but that is all for wise and �8 THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN gracious purposes.” But the catechism does not say so ; and besides, whatever the purpose, harm is harm, evil is evil ; and, in the sense of the catechism, God does not keep us from the one and does inflict the other. What of truth would there have been in the answer if those children who lost their lives in the fire last week had repeated it before they went to bed? “ He keeps me from harm by night and by day, and is always doing me good ’’—and yet to wake up in the agony of suffocation and a horrible death by fire ! “ Oh, yes,” you say ; “ but those poor children may have been saved from worse calamities by this premature death, agonising and dreadful as it was.” Ay ! but to die and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible, warm motion to become A kneaded clod........... ’tis too horrible ! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death. But, indeed, all the poets might be quoted in the same strain, showing that our human nature shrinks from death as the greatest of earthly evils ; nor could any sophistry persuade one that it were better to die the agonising death of those children than to live on in poverty. What I say, therefore, is that that catechism does not teach truth when it teaches “God keeps us,” etc. He may have higher and wiser pur­ poses to serve than we could comprehend; but in our mortal state harm is constantly happening to us, and we constantly suffer evil. If, therefore, the child’s religion be founded upon such teaching, it will be an erring, blind, superstitious reli­ gion. It will trust God for what it will not get, depend upon him for what he will not do ; and the consequence will be, if the child ever become thoughtful, he will have to abandon, and perhaps with agonising conflicts and doubts, all you have ever taught. �THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 9 Having thus prepared the way, the next step generally taken in the child’s religious education is to introduce a catechism of a more theologically recondite character. It may be taught at school or at home. But, with any notion of religion, the idea of training a child in it at school, surrounded by a large and restless class, and all the want of seriousness which belongs to children’s nature, is simply preposterous. It is the work of home ; of solitude, if pos­ sible ; of quiet, if not sombre ; but certainly serious circumstances. However, that is of no consequence now. Let the education be conducted at home or at school, it is generally most pernicious. The catechism most commonly used in this country (Scotland) is, as everyone knows, the Assembly’s. Now, I do not speak yet of the truth or untruth of what it teaches—I speak of the capacity of the child to comprehend. And I know of no thoughtful person who would pretend that a boy or girl between eight and sixteen could comprehend the doctrines, philosophical, metaphysical, and theological, it contains. Again, I will pass over the intellectual injury done by teaching a child to handle words which convey to him no distinct or clear idea ; and I simply ask, What is the result? It is obvious throughout society. Children so taught are not even grounded in theology—they are simply furnished with theological words ; they, therefore, MS they advance in life, easily become indoctrinated with that weak, watery, and illogical form of evangelicalism which has become popular in our pulpits during recent years, and which is infinitely more detestable than the stern, consistent, daring Calvinism of the catechism. The last is the system of men of strong, trained, logical minds ; the first is pure fanaticism. But, even supposing a child could understand, what would you have gained in the way of religious education? What could the knowledge of some 500 (as I have heard say there are) difficult questions of metaphysics, physics, philosophy, and theology do towards developing in his nature the feelings �IO THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN of reverence, wonder, love, and dependence? Does feeling spring forth from metaphysics ; emotion from philosophy ; love from theology? Divine humanity, how thy history shudders at the thought I No, it is other things than dry, intellectual propositions which inspire feeling, and so long as you are occupying the mind with the propositions of the catechism you are necessarily keeping the attention from those other things. And then, when you add to these considerations the utter falsehood of the theology of the catechism, the gross and wicked representations it contains of the character and government of God, and the pernicious effect this, so far as it is understood and heartily believed, must have upon the whole character, one is forced to conclude that the so-called “ religious ” education of the masses of children in this country is altogether irreligious, and one continued misnomer and mistake. There is one other catechism used, upon which I need here only make but a passing remark. I refer to the catechism of the Church of England, used in this country also, I believe, by the Episcopalians. As an epitome of theology, it is altogether deficient. It has the advantage, however, of being entirely practical in the body of it, and, therefore, immeasurably superior to the Assembly’s as a manual for a child. But then, on the other hand, it begins and ends with the monstrous notions about the sacraments which place the system bound up with them on a level with the magic of the rain-makers of South Africa. I would rather, however, that children were taught this than to think of God under the awfully malignant aspects in which he is represented in the Assembly’s catechism. I have already referred to the additions which are made to the religious (!) education of children in some schools by instruction in the evidences of Christianity, and in the same connection may be mentioned what is called Bible history. I have shown you that teaching the evidences is not teaching religion, but �THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN ii the application of the science of historical criticism, and that, if it be done thoroughly, it requires a knowledge and a development of faculties no child can possess. And how Bible history could be thought specially connected with religion one would be at a loss to imagine, if it were not for that doctrine of inspiration which is now becoming rejected by all the more advanced of even the orthodox school. It is true that Bible history refers all events to the immediate and direct management of God ; but so do all the histories of people in their ancient, barbarous state. In the early histories of Greece and Rome, e.g., the gods were always interfering as much as in the early history of the Hebrews, and if this fact constitutes the Bible history religious, all ancient histories are religious. And then, while I grant that certain forms of religious feeling may be excited by some of the facts and events of Bible history, I must add, they are superstitious and erroneous forms, mostly connected with that doctrine of a special providence against which the whole experience of mankind protests. I do not say anything now about the intellectual mischief done by teaching Bible history as it stands ; because it is not greater than that done by teaching the events of the siege of Troy, the wanderings of Ulysses, and the stories of Romulus and Remus as true history, excepting, indeed, that the sacred element mingled with the Bible history renders it more difficult to discern the purely mythical character of the narrative. Well, then, when I consider what religion is, and what is the formal and systematic education given to a child to culti­ vate the religion, I am forced to conclude there is little of a directly systematic religious character in it; and that what little there is is of an erroneous character, only leading to mischief. Parents and teachers substitute theology for reli­ gion, and indoctrinate with a theology which I deem utterly false. But I do not mean that children therefore get no �12 THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN religious education. Nature has been to them too bountiful for that, and begins their education in religion almost as soon as it is begun in knowledge. She surrounds the child from its earliest days with objects calling forth its reverence, wonder, love, dependence, worship, and thus gradually prepares it for the devout recognition of God. Spontane­ ously, Nature furnishes the child with all that is necessary for the culture of its religious life for many years. First of all, just as in the Book of Exodus Jehovah is represented as saying to Moses, “ Lo! I have made thee God unto Pharaoh ” —z.e., by the miracles he enabled him to work—so Nature makes the parent God to the child through the miracles of power, wisdom, and goodness which the parent seems to the child to display. The parent, if of ordinary attainments and character, stands up before the child as a mysterious source of knowledge, wisdom, supply, protection, and happiness— incomprehensible to it, and calling forth all its wonder and faith, all its devotion and love, all its reverence and depen­ dence. The word of the parent is infallible ; the action of the parent is necessarily right. He has a seeming omni­ potence about him, an irresistible will. What is there a little child thinks his father cannot do? What is there his mother does not know? For what of love will he not trust her wholly? Yes, a little child has nothing greater he could imagine to make a God out of than the parent. Nothing he could imagine (seeing it would be but an imagination) could by any means call forth half the depth and intensity of reli­ gious feeling the parent calls forth. Practically the parent is the young child’s God ; he knows no other, can know no other; and no other, simply by the knowing, could do him any good. And when the mother, in her ignorance, takes him upon her knee and strives to make him understand about the God she imagines, and is ready, perhaps, to burst into tears because her efforts are so much in vain, all the while great Nature is developing the child’s deepest and �1 THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 13 truest religious life through the trust and love awakened in his heart by the light and love which pour into his soul from her eyes. By and by, however, as the child’s intellectual nature is developed, the perception dawns upon him that the parent is not quite so powerful and wise as he had thought. There are things he cannot do, things he does not know ; trust gets disappointed, dependence is shaken. Then a higher object becomes necessary to call forth the perfect reverence and trust the parent can no longer do ; and, generally, that object is found in the teacher. I would not speak with the same certainty with respect to the teachers of large schools as with regard to those in smaller ones, where the connection between master and pupil is more intimate. But in a well-ordered school a boy looks up with profound reverence and trust to his master, and regards him for long years as the very embodiment of wisdom and knowledge. Here again, then, is the provision made in nature for the direct culture of the religious nature of the child—not by means of a dogma, but by bringing the mind into contact with real objects, which necessarily excite those feelings in the exercise of which religion consists. After a while, how­ ever, even the teacher’s wisdom is found sometimes to fail, and his knowledge to have its soundings. Then the sceptical period in the child’s mind is renewed. There are, however, other provisions as useful as these, which, at this later period, come into more active operation — I refer to the grander object of Nature herself, ever appearing more grand and glorious as our knowledge extends. From early years such objects make some impression on the child, and they would do more if he had judicious parents to guide his eye­ sight. But it is in after years, when science has interpreted the laws, the order, the forces of these objects to him, that they make the deepest impression and excite the deepest reverence, adoration, wonder, and dependence. It is then that inquiry leads to the perception of the grand and awful �i4 THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN . mystery which surrounds the whole universe ; and the mind takes refuge from its exhausting, fruitless questionings in the conception of an infinite, efficient, conscious force working in all and by all. It is at this point religion and theology mingle, and the latter becomes of any practical service to the former. For when the active intellect has begun seriously to inquire into the nature and origin of those deep feelings which the great objects of the universe, its order, its mystery, excite, its answers react upon these feelings according to the attributes with which the answers clothe its conception of that infinite, efficient Force into which it resolves the whole. If that force be dealt with subjectively, and so have ascribed to it human qualities and affections, there results an imagined object which excites many other feelings besides those of reverence, wonder, love, and dependence, and which may degenerate into the lowest forms of superstition to which man is liable. But if it be dealt with objectively, then it remains the sublimely generalised conception of all the forces in the universe, and is known, worshipped, and adored only as it manifests itself in man and the outer world. Now, this being the only form in which I can think of God, the course of the child’s religious education seems to me very simple. It merely consists in leading him face to face with those objects which excite religious feeling. First, as parents, by the development of his own nature to the highest, preserving his reverence, wonder, love, and depen­ dence until the last moment—which is natural ; then, as teachers, securing his devotion by the real resources of wisdom and knowledge we have treasured up in ourselves ; and then, finally, when both these fail—and even concur­ rently with them—ever lead him forth to gaze upon those wondrous objects of which physical nature is full, and those not less wondrous characters and events of which the history of humanity is full. And as he gazes and marvels, the deepest feelings of his being will be stirred, and he will �THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN i5 begin to wonder and adore. But wonder and adore what? At first blindly, and simply instinctively. But if this happen before his knowledge is matured, he will soon construct for himself a fetish. It is yours to stand by, and, by means of clear, intellectual light, beat down the fetish. And so, in the whole course of his progress, you must help him to destroy all the false gods he will create for himself whilst attempting to solve that mystery of Nature which makes him feel so deeply, until, at last, he come to rest on the only thought which remains for this and the coming age—a God who is the all-in-all, ever immanent in all that is, the one absolute force ; unknown in himself and unknowable, but recognised and felt in the forces and order of universal Nature. To sum up, then, I say : Never attempt to give a God to a child until the child’s nature asks for one. And then your work will be more destructive than positive—-the destruction of his idols as he forms them. Leave theology as much as possible alone until he learns it in history. If, in the meanwhile, you would have his religious life be growing, reverence, adoration, wonder, love, and dependence becoming deeper and more habitual, you must not create for him imaginary beings by the play of the metaphysical fancy, but you must lead him to whatever is great, sublime, glorious, and divine in this universe. To that direct his eye steadily, and by the act you will place him under the influence of all that has power to ‘ inspire a pure, religious life. WATTS AND CO., PRINTERS, 17, JOHNSON*S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. �� 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 religious education of children Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cranbrook, James Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 15 p. ; 22 cm. Notes: Published for the Rationalist Press Association. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Watts & Co. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1908 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N181 Subject The topic of the resource Education Religion Child rearing 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 religious education of children), 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 Children Education NSS Religious Education https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/2fdf19ab7161a76d3d5b16fc64c48e7c.pdf?Expires=1777507200&Signature=asFsKBrpXqNRx8Rx7dNk6nre6yFJq7t7cbI9l%7EGxvubIpU%7E-%7EpR%7E1TraQvDILIrS1hElbXqQ9Y%7EjAcniKVVMb5EJFMhqkodPrd1mTxSLT%7EfSEbFPWXWL2lzSbXVAoky9sRMYUZ7QFdhSAThQUhUYcQbPjknYpscdKYUHTnrnTGKlvoHiz9qgZhOWEVIkDNYRht8QZEsdxICODBv2H8aaYNWRikVf6CcovQsi8yHE6qv77wfk-RrcC2p%7ESyDBlQvqa0udjYgK%7EtXcy1OhxcLfmzxqniEqdzfM3c%7E8O-la19ZATXqxI6FRvH-aeAyzVAwpsyMSsbexyPXTxj7vzEfW4A__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 8127b2ddc5d56f6321ba2d81cfc2eee7 PDF Text Text THE ENCYCLICAL ON “MODERNISM.” By the Rev. SYDNEY F. SMITH, S.J. Introductory. Of our many critics who take scandal at the Encycli­ cal of 1908, which condemned Modernism, few have troubled to read it, and fewer still, having read it, have succeeded in understanding it. The mass of them have been content to assume that anything coming from the Pope and bearing the character of prohibition must needs be bad—since it is their cherished maxim that every prohibition of men’s opinions is for those who heed it an obstruction in the pathway to truth. Perhaps, if they would reflect, it might strike them as significant that, in religious communions at all events, wherever a free and unchecked latitude of belief is allowed, the ultimate consequence is an undermining of religious belief altogether. At any rate they would come to see that unwavering adherence to a code of doctrines handed down from the far past is the very foundation on which the Catholic Church is built, and from which, under God, she has derived the strength and tenacity of her existence through all these centuries. Yet, if this has been the persistent law of her being alb through, it is surely unreasonable to expect that she will abandon it now ; and so, when any doctrinal controversy arises between her and a section of her own children, those who conceive themselves entitled to judge between her and them should at least keep distinct in their minds these two questions, Is the system she condemns Catholic, and, Is it true ? If under the guidance of their own lights they conclude that it is true, it is to be �2 The Encyclical on “ Modernism h expected that so far they will range themselves on the side of the condemned. Still, unless they can conclude also that there is no incompatibility, but only the relation of logical development, between the traditional Catholic doctrines and the doctrines proscribed as Modernism, they ought obviously to range themselves on the Pope’s side, so far as to acknowledge that he has only acted as a Pope must act, if he be faithful to his trust. It may seem that in thus presenting the issue we are thinking too much of our non-Catholic critics, too little of the Catholic readers who look for some guidance towards understanding the Encyclical Pascendi. But it may be useful also for Catholics to approach the subject from this standpoint. They are very liable in a country like this to fall into the same confusions of thought as those among whom they live, whereas if they learn to distinguish between the two questions just put, and to realize the necessity of answering the first in the negative, they are likely—unless, indeed, they have lost their faith—to answer the second question in the negative also, and are in a better position to appreciate the intrinsic grounds on which that negative answer rests. We shall, then, in the present tract, be occupied mainly, if not entirely, with the question whether the theory of religious belief which the Encyclical describes and condemns is not palpably opposed to the Catholic belief to which we and our forefathers have been brought up. Modernism Described. The Encyclical has three parts, of which the first, which is far the longest, gives an account of what it means by Modernism, the second assigns its causes, and the third indicates the measures to be taken for its extirpation. It is the first of these three parts with which we shall be concerned, as that is the part which most requires explanation. Indeed, we feel an excep­ tional difficulty in endeavouring to make it intelligible o our readers, for the theory itself is very abstruse, and v aU raV^ ? Very sma11 SrouP of persons, whilst the Encyclical, being addressed to Bishops, not �The Encyclical on “ Modernism" 3 to the faithful generally, is in the language of a philo­ sophical treatise, and not that of a popular explanation. Besides which, a theory like this of Modernism, which Iras not even yet been embodied by its adherents in any official statement, is necessarily understood differently in some respects by different minds, and the description of any one of its varieties is sure to be challenged by the adherents of its other varieties. We must, however, follow the lines of the Encyclical, which agrees sub­ stantially with what one finds in the books of the party, and at all events is that on which the impact of the condemnation falls. Its Philosophical Starting-point. The Pope begins by stating his intention to exhibit the theory as a connected whole, with bearings on philosophy, belief, theology, history, criticism, apolo­ getics, and Church administration. The starting-point is in philosophy, and is from the Kantian principle, or rather fallacy, which confines the limits of human knowledge to phenomena, that is, “to the things that appear to our senses, and so far forth as they appear.” According to this principle, all that lies beyond, and appertains to “ things in themselves,” is, for our reasoning faculty, the Unknowable. To that unseen sphere of being we have no sufficient grounds for assuming that the processes of our reasoning faculty apply. Accordingly, there perish straight off (1) the science of Natural Theology, which attempts to deduce the existence and some of the attributes of God, as being the First Cause without presupposing which the existence of the visible world is unintelligible ; (2) the science of Christian Evidences, which - gathers from the life of our Lord—its miraculous character, and its relation as fulfilling them to the ancient prophecies— that He came from God and spoke in the name of God ; (3) the claims of the Christian revelation to be taken as a communication from God to man. For, if our laws of inference which hold for the world of phenomena may, for aught we know, not hold for the �4 The Encyclical on “Modernism" world beyond, it must be pseudo-science which pro­ fesses to infer anything whatever about God, whether as existing, as accrediting earthly representatives, or as speaking to man through them. Hence the nickname of Intellectualists, with which the “Modernists” are wont to brand those who put trust in what they deem to be pseudo-science. The “ Religious Sentiment.” But it must not be supposed that the Modernists deny all these truths about God. They deny that we can be led to accept them by any reasoning process, but they indicate to us another process which will lead us to them more securely. It is a process to which they give the abstruse name of “ vital immanence,” and is of the following character : Religion of some kind, whether natural or supernatural, is a fact in the world, for- although individuals, and numbers of individuals, may appear to be without it, it is sufficiently general and persistent in the human race to render it a fact which requires explanation. And since, for the reasons given, it is impossible to obtain the explanation from beyond the frontier of immanence, by recourse to the principle of causality, it must be sought within that frontier, and, being a character of life, must be sought in the evolving life of man. There, however, it is found to be a certain movement or feeling (sentiment)1 of the heart, which is the outcome of a corresponding need, the need, namely, of the divine. In other words, the races which have peopled the earth have invariably felt the need of the divine, and out of this feeling has grown a “ religious sentiment which has God (in some undefined way) for its cause and God for its object, and so is able to unite the soul with God. For the better understanding of its nature there are one or two things to be observed. irst, it is not at first present to consciousness, but rather is latent in “subconsciousness,” from which it n,ThX L«in wo(d.in the Encyclical is sensus, but “sentiment” Se^Modernist^mean byh! by t0 render what �The Encyclical on “Modernism” 5 emerges into actual consciousness only when such cir­ cumstances arise as bring the Unknowable impressively before the mind. Secondly, this sentiment being the source of all religion, it is what we must understand by faith, and it is also what we must understand by revela­ tion—since, whilst a revelation coming to man from without is inconceivable, this religious sentiment exhibits all the properties of a revelation, inasmuch as, having God for its cause, it comes from God, and having God for its object, it makes God known. Thirdly—since the Unknowable, when it presents itself and is taken by the religious sentiment for the divine, does so not as some­ thing bare and isolated, but as intimately connected with some phenomena of nature or human personality, which are deemed to be inexplicable by the ordinary laws of physics or history—this religious sentiment, or faith, infuses, so to speak, its own life into the phenomenon, transfiguring it and distorting it from its true character into one which it deems more suitable for a clothing of the divine. Whence the necessity for the historian and the critic, when they have to deal with phenomena that have been thus transformed, to begin by restoring to them their true historical char­ acter ; by removing (i) the divine which faith has recog­ nized in them, and then the extras with which it has clothed them by (2) transfiguration, and (3) distortion—a threefold process which is said to constitute the foun­ dation of historical criticism. For instance, faith found its divine object in the person of Christ, and forthwith transfigured it and distorted it from the real form in which He appeared on earth, and this is why in the Gospel story, as it has come down to us, there is so much of the seemingly miraculous. But science and history, being now equipped with a sound method, realize that there cannot have been anything in the historical Christ which was not purely human. Hence, says the Encyclical, the Modernists claim that by the first canon [of criticism] deduced from agnosticism, whatever savours of the Divine must be eliminated from His history [as it has come down to us] ... by the second canon, whatever [in that �6 The Encyclical on “Modernism” history] lifts Him above historical conditions, is to be removed . . . [as] by the third canon must be removed all those discourses or deeds, all things, in short, which are not in keeping with the mind, the condition, the education, the place and time in which He lived. This explanation of what, according to the new philo­ sophy, is the task imposed on science and history by the action of the religious sentiment on certain of their materials is an incidental digression, returning from which the Encyclical continues its account of the religious sentiment itself : [It] has sprung, as we have seen, from the recesses of subconscious­ ness by vital immanence, and is the germ of all religion and the explanation of all that has been or ever will be in any religion. This sentiment, which was at first only rudimentary and almost formless, gradually matured under the influence of the same mysterious principle from which it originated, with the progress of human life, of which, as has been said, it is itself a form. This, then, is the origin of all religions, even supernatural religion. It is only a development of this religious sentiment. Nor is the Catholic religion an exception; it is quite on a level with the rest; for it was engendered by the process of vital immanence in the consciousness of Christ, who was a man of the choicest nature, whose like has never been nor will be. The Religious Function of Intellect. If the intellect is, according to this new philosophy, unable of itself to transcend the borders of the pheno­ menal, it has its part in ministering to the evolution of the act of faith which has been identified with the action of the religious sentiment, and at the stage we have reached the Encyclical indicates what this part is held to be : S[erntlm“t • • • being sentiment, not cognition, though God mdZcWWH t0 ’V’-F6 does il in a form so confused and person Hete > Y’ •U- be discerned by the believing mined hv i n! ?ecessarytbat [*e sentiment] should be illu­ mined by some light m order that God may be clearly distinguished man first ImnS d-5 b? wbose instrumentality it is that ceptsfiand nextf exnSe he F? Ph.enomena tbat arise within him into con2 Modern^ haTa ef™ W°rd;-. HenCe the maxim common Thus then the mindI 'ehgl0?s-minded man should his faith. ’ then, the mind, supervening on this sentiment, applies itself to �The Encyclical on “ Modernism” 7 it, and—as a Modernist leader explains—works on it like a painter who works over the canvas of a faded picture to restore the brightness of its colouring. In which work the mind exercises a twofold operation, one natural and spontaneous, by which it expresses the object in some .simple and ordinary proposition; the other, reflex and profound, by which, as they put it, it elaborates its thought and expresses it in secondary propositions that are derived, indeed, from the previous simple proposition, but are more exact and distinct. And these secondary propositions, if they should in due course receive the sanction of the Church’s highest authority, are what constitute dogma. The Nature of Dogma. Here the Encyclical is led to consider the nature and purpose of dogmas in this new philosophy. They spring, we have seen, from the primitive, simple, and ordinary propositions in which the natural and spontaneous opera­ tion of the mind issues, but consist in the more elabo­ rate secondary formulas ; and their purpose is not to state what the truth is in itself, ■“ but to supply the believer with the means of rendering to himself an account of his faith.” They are tentative in fact, and find their primary and essential justification not in the arguments by which the intellect supports them, but in the success with which they satisfy the aspirations of the religious sentiment; and hence must not remain fixed and immutable, but must undergo such progressive changes as may be necessary to adapt them to the evolv­ ing phases of the religious sentiment. It is with them, it would seem, much as it is with the dishes which the cooks prepare according to the rules of the culinary art, but which have their primary justification in proportion as they are able to meet the tastes and sustain the health of the eaters ; and which, if they are to succeed in this, must be changed and made progressively more delicate to meet the changes of palate and stomach consequent on the transition from the lower to the higher stages of social refinement. This comparison is not in the Encyclical, but it may assist the reader to understand better the following important paragraph. To ascertain the nature of dogma we must first find the relation which exists between the religious formulas and the religious sentiment. This will be readily perceived by him who realizes that these formulas �8 The Encyclical on “ Modernism have no other purpose than to furnish the believer with a means of giving an account of his faith to himself. These formulas, therefore, stand midway between the believer and his faith ; in their relation to the faith they are the inadequate expression of its object and are usually called symbols; in their relation to the believer they are mere instru­ ments. Hence it is quite impossible to maintain that they express absolute truth ; for, in so far as they are symbols, they are the images of truth, and so must be adapted to the religious sentiment in its relation to man; and as instruments they are the vehicles of truth, and must, therefore, in their turn be adapted to man in his relation to the religious sentiment. But the object of the religious sentiment, since it embraces the absolute, possesses an infinite variety of aspects, of which now one, now another, may present itself. In like manner he who believes may pass through different phases. Consequently the formulas which we call dogmas must be subject to these vicissitudes, and are therefore liable to change. Thus the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. An immense collection of sophisms this that ruins and destroys all religion. Dogma is not only able, but ought, to evolve and to be changed. This is strongly affirmed by the Modernists, and as clearly flows, from their principles. For amongst the chief points of their teaching is this which they deduce from the principle of vital imma­ nence; that religious formulas, to be really religious and not merely theological speculations, ought to be living and to live the life of the religious sentiment. This, is not to be understood in the sense that these formulas, especially if merely imaginative, are made to suit the religious, sentiment itself—for their origin is of no more consequence than their number and quality—but that the religious sentiment, having if needed introduced some modification into them, should be able to assimilate them vitally. In other words, it is necessary that the primi_ five formula be accepted and sanctioned by the heart, and similarly the subsequent work from which spring the secondary formulas must pro­ ceed under the guidance of the heart. Hence it comes that these formulas, to be living should be, and should remain, adapted to the faith and to him who believes. Wherefore if for any reason this adaptation be^hanged6 l° CX1St °Se their firSt meaninS and must accordingly The Office of Modernist Faith. to,thisP°intthe Encyclical has been considering n T aS a PhdosoPher- Now it passes on t? consider him as a believer. As a philosopher all he callTflith^h thC 5eligious sentiment which he heart subJective fact in the life of the . r blcb l00ks to the divine reality aS its object As that th7srdiviSeS fUirt?er’ -nd is “ convinced and certain pendentiv of th ty eX1?S in itself and 3uite inde­ pendently of the person who believes in it.” But on �The Encyclical on “Modernism” 9 what ground ? That of •“ the private experience of the individual.” In the religious sentiment one must recognize a kind of intuition of the heart which puts man in immediate contact with the very reality of God, and infuses such a persuasion of God’s existence and His action both within and without man as to excel greatly any scientific convic­ tion. They [the Modernists] assert, therefore, the existence of a true experience, and one o'f a kind that surpasses all rational experience. If this experience is denied by some, like the rationalists, it arises from the fact that such persons are unwilling to put themselves in the moral state which is necessary to produce it. It is this experience which, when a person acquires it, makes him properly and truly a believer. And the private experience of the individual is further invoked by the Modernist to give a new explanation of the tradition of the Church. Hitherto tradition has been regarded in the Catholic Church as an external test by which to distinguish the true revelation from the false, yet now this private experience of the individual, whilst professing to sustain it, virtually supplants it. For tradi­ tion, as it understands it, cannot any longer be held to consist in the handing down of a body of truths revealed to this world by a voice speaking from beyond its borders, but must be regarded as the handing down of the stores of religious experience which, originating in the devout reflections of the most surpassing of men, Jesus Christ, have been repeated, reattested, enlarged, and in some respects'corrected, in their passage through the hearts of generations of Christian men, and so have attained to the volume and intensity of the Catholic belief of modern times. By the Modernists tradition is understood as a communication to others through preaching, by means of intellectual formulas, of an original experience. To these formulas, in addition to their represen­ tative value, they attribute a species of suggestive efficacy which acts both on the person who believes to stimulate the religious sentiment should it happen to have grown sluggish and to renew the experience once acquired, and on those who do not yet believe to awake for the first time the religious sentiment in them and to produce the experience In this way is religious experien?^ propagated among the nations, and not merely among contemporaries by preaching, but among future, generations both by books and by oral transmission from one to another. �IO The Encyclical on “ Modernism ” The Relation of Faith to Science. If such is faith, what is the relation of faith to science ? It is replied that there can no longer be a possibility of antagonism, inasmuch as they move in planes altogether separate and never crossing each other. Faith occupies itself solely with something which science declares to be unknowable for it. Hence each has a separate field assigned to it: science is entirely concerned with the reality of phenomena, into which faith does not enter at all; faith, on the contrary, concerns itself with the Divine reality, which is entirely unknown to science. Thus the conclusion is reached that there can never be any dissension between faith and science, for if each keeps on its own ground they can never meet, and therefore never be in contradiction. And if it be objected that in the visible world there are some things which appertain to faith, as the human life of Christ, the Modernists reply by denying this. For though such things come within the category of phenomena, still, in as far as they are lived by faith, and in the way described have been by faith transfigured and distorted, they have been removed from the world, of sense and translated to become material for the divine. Hence should it be further asked whether Christ has wrought real miracles and made real prophecies, whether He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, the answer of agnostic science will be in the negative and the answer of faith in the affirmative—yet there will not be, on any account, any conflict between them. For it will be denied by the philosopher as philosopher, speaking to philosophers, and considering Christ only in His historical reality; and it will be affirmed by the believer speaking as a believer and to believers, and considering the life of Christ as lived again by faith and in faith. It turns out, however, that much which one would have naturally referred to the plane of faith has to be referred to the plane of science—with the result that, as the Encyclical puts it, practically, though science is made independent of faith, faith is not made independent of science but subject to it. For in the first place it must be observed that in every religious fact when you take away the divine reality and the experience of it which the believer possesses, all things else, and especially its religious for­ mulas, belong to the sphere of phenomena, and therefore fall under the control of science. . . . Further, whefi it is said that God is the object SJ”?th®^at®ment refers only to the divine reality, not to the to f u-°d’ • Tu1S -atter a!so ls subject to science, which, while it phuosophizes in what is called the logical order, attains even to what is �The Encyclical on “Modernism” n absolute and ideal. It is, therefore, the right of philosophy and of science to form conclusions concerning the idea of God, to direct it in its evolution, and to purify it of any extraneous elements which may become confounded with it. Finally, man does not suffer a dualism to exist in him, and the believer, therefore, feels within him an impelling need to harmonize faith with science, that it may never oppose the general conception which science sets forth concerning the universe. The Scope of Modernist Theology. In what it has said about the Modernist as a philo­ sopher and as a believer, the Encyclical has laid down for us the fundamental principles of the new theory, and, these once accepted, rigidly predetermine the character of their application in the fields of theology, history and criticism, apologetics and Church reform. The Encyclical carries its examination into these fields, and insists with some minuteness on the conclusions within them at which the Modernist arrives. In the present tract it will be best not to burden the readers with more than they can take in 'at one time : we shall confine ourselves, therefore, to what the Encyclical says about Modernist theology, or rather to a brief summary of it. As hitherto understood, the office of theology proper, as distinguished from faith, is to take the truths which faith certifies as data from which to start, and make a profound study of their meaning and signifi­ cance, of their accurate definition, of their inter-relations as elements in a complete doctrinal system, as well as of the further conclusions which can be gathered from them by rational deduction. Theology, as the Modernist theory would reconstruct it, has for its task to reconcile faith with science, that is to say, the demands of the religious sentiment with the demands made by contemporary science on those religious formulas by which, as we have seen, the intellect assists the believer to give an account of his faith, And to effect this reconciliation it has, says the Encyclical, three principles at its service—the principle of im­ manence, according to which the religious sentiment is the �12 The Encyclical on “Modernism" final judge of what is true in the plane of religion, but science is the final judge in regard to the religious formulas with which the religious sentiment is fur­ nished by the intellect, these formulas not belonging to the plane of religion; the principle of symbolism, according to which these religious formulas, not reach­ ing directly the unseen realities, are but symbolic, ten­ tative, and provisional representations of the same, which may with the advance of knowledge be- found inconsistent with the truth of visible facts, and have to be “re-stated”—that is, remodelled and transformed ; and thirdly, the principle of divine permanence, which is akin with tradition in the relation it bears to vital immanence, and, according to which “all Christian consciousnesses were ... in a manner virtually in­ cluded in the consciousness of Christ as the plant is included in the seed ; [and] as the shoots live the life of the seed, so, too, all Christians are to be said to live the life of Christ ”—or, in other words, the divine life of Christ persists and is permanent in the life of the Church. Some Doctrinal Transformations. To apply these principles of reconciliation. First, as regards the origin of the Sacraments. For a sacrament to be such it has been believed to be essential that it should have been instituted by Jesus Christ Himself. But for various reasons it is contended that this can no longer be maintained. Agnosticism sees nothing in Chiist more than a man whose religious consciousness has been formed by degrees; the law of immanence rejects the idea of the historical Christ having done anything involving an exercise of superhuman authority ; the law of evolution requires that institutions shall not have come full-grown into being, but shall have deveoped gradually and slowly from initial germs : and :Ti,StOrj-1S4. said to testify against the supposition of an mmediate institution of the Sacraments by Christ. Ser dates Were inst»“ted at atei dates b/ the Church, or, rather, brought in by the �The Encyclical on “Modernism" 13 gradual evolution of her life, which life, however, being by the principle of divine permanence a persistence and expansion of the life of Christ, faith is justified in referring the institution to Christ Himself. As regards dogma sufficient has been already indi­ cated. It is not to be ascribed to any revelation made by our Lord to His Church the nature of which the Church has been solicitous to understand accurately, to guard, and to expand by logical deductions. Rather it is bom of the species of impulse or necessity, by virtue of which the believer is constrained to elaborate his religious thought so as to render it clearer for himself and others ; [and] this elaboration consists entirely in the process of penetrating and refining the primitive formula, not indeed in itself and according to logical development, but as required by circumstances, or vitally, as the Modernists more abstrusely put it. ! ; f I r In regard to worship, we are brought again to the consideration of the Sacraments—that is, this time of their nature. They are born, according to this recon­ structed version of them, of two needs, the need of giving to religion some sensible manifestation, and the need of propagating it by some sensible acts. Norare they efficacious channels through which grace is given to the soul ex opere op erat0, but “ mere symbols and signs,” having no other kind of efficacy save that of phrases '‘which, having had the good fortune to impress minds, have proved to be powerful instru­ ments for propagating certain great and impressive ideas.” The character of the Sacred Scriptures is similarly explained. They are a “ collection of experiences, not indeed of those that may come to anybody, but of those choice and extraordinary experiences which may have happened in any religion.” Nor must their inspiration be set down to the voice of God speaking from without, but “ of God speaking from within through the impulse of vital immanence and permanence,” only more vehe­ mently than in the ordinary case of the religious senti­ ment declaring its beliefs. �14 The Encyclical on “ Modernism" The Modernist Idea of the Church. So, too, is the character of the Church and of its authority radically transformed. No longer must it be held that the Church owes its existence and the authority of its rulers to the direct and immediate institution of Jesus Christ. Rather it is the outcome of a double need, “the need of the individual believer, especially if he has had some original and special experience, to communicate his faith to others ; and the need of the mass, when faith has become common to many, to form itself into a society, and to guard, increase, and propagate the common good” ; and it is “ the product of the collective conscience,1- that • is to say, of the society of individual consciences which, by virtue of the principle of vital permanence, all de­ pend on one first believer, who for Catholics is Christ ” ; whilst Church authority has its origin in the “ need ” which this society, like every other, has of “a directing authority to guide its members towards the common end, and to conserve prudently the elements of cohesion, which in a religious society are doctrine and worship.” This of course means that “ authority, like the Church, has its origin in the religious conscience, and that being so, is subject to it.” It cannot, then, without tyranny, oppose itself to the demands of the public conscience, and since u the public conscience,” in the present age, has introduced popular government in the civil order,” and there are not two consciences in man any more than there are two lives,” “it is for the ecclesiastical authority to shape itself to democratic forms, unless it wishes to provoke and foment an intestine conflict in the consciences of mankind.” And again, although no religious society can be a real unit unless the religious conscience of its members be one, and one also the formula they adopt” ; and although • Tve ^vtin WOfd conscientia denotes all kinds of consciousness whaUs^ood oJbad^’' kind ,which is concerned with the sense of wnat.is good or bad in conduct, and in English is expressed bv In the.transIation> therefore, according to the needs of the context, now consciousness now conscience is employed. �The Encyclical on “ Modernism ” 15 this double unity requires a common mind, whose office it is to find and determine the formula that corresponds best with the common conscience—and it must have, moreover, an authority sufficient to impose on the community the formula which has been decided upon ; still, as this magisterium springs in its last analysis from the individual con­ sciences, and possesses its mandate of public utility for their benefit, it follows that ... to prevent individual consciences from revealing freely and openly the impulses they feel, to hinder Criticism from impelling dogmas towards their necessary evolutions—this is not a legitimate use but an abuse of a power given for public utility. The Evolution of Doctrine. The Encyclical next has a passage on the evolution of doctrine. According to the older theology doctrine, being the expression of absolute truth communicated by external revelation, is unchangeable in itself, though the faithful by study and meditation may attain to a progressively fuller penetration into its meaning. Ac­ cording to the new theology, “ in a living religion every­ thing is subject to change according to the law of evolution, dogma, Church, sacred books, faith itself— the changes being brought about not by the accretion of new and purely adventitious forms from without ” (e.g., by the revelations of Jesus Christ) but “ by an increasing penetration of the religious sentiment into the conscience,” under the stimulus of the new needs and necessities emerging with the onward course of events. Thus faith changes from cruder to more refined forms of belief—from fetichism, for instance, to monotheism, from monotheism to Christianity, from primitive to modern Catholicism—that it may adapt itself to the general intellectual and moral refining by which “those men have been elevated and these changes are wrought, particularly through the action of religious geniuses called prophets, of whom Christ was the greatest,” geniuses “ whose lot it was to have new and original experiences fully in harmony with the needs of their time.” Dogma changes under the stimulus of the obstacles faith has to surmount and the �16 The Encyclical on “ Modernism " contradictions it has to repel, this stimulus inciting to the elaboration of formulas better able to consist with them. Worship changes under the need of adapting itself to the use and customs of peoples. The Church changes that it may accommodate itself to historical conditions and existing forms of society. Catholicism and Modernism Contrasted. With the section on the Evolution of Doctrine the Encyclical ends its consideration of the Modernist as a theologian. The nature of what follows in regard to his procedure as a historian and critic, as an apologist and a Church Reformer, can be sufficiently gathered from the foregoing. We have then sufficiently before us the outlines of this new religious system as expounded to us by Pius X, and may judge of it for ourselves from the standpoint suggested at the beginning of this tract. That is, we may leave alone for the present the question whether the system is or is not well founded in itself, and ask only, is it Catholic ? Can it be called a con­ sistent development of Catholic faith and teaching as we have known it up to now, or must it be set down as directly opposed to Catholic faith and teaching and altogether incompatible with it ? It is difficult to see how the second of these alternative answers can be resisted. Let us note particularly the following points of contrast. I. IN REGARD TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. According to Catholicism, as we have known it hitherto, the human intellect is not under limitations which oblige it to treat all that lies beyond the world of appearances as unknowable. On the contrary it can through the principle of causality, over-pass that border-line and attain to a knowledge not indeed ex­ haustive, but absolutely correct and certain as far as it goes, of many important truths relating to the unseen, and among them of the existence and attributes of God. lhis is laid down in the most formal manner by the �The Encyclical on “ Modernism ” 17 Vatican Council : “ If any one says that the one true God cannot be known with certainty by the natural light of reason by means of the things that are made, let him be anathema.” Nor is this canon in other than the clearest conformity with the doctrine expressed by the whole line of theologians—Fathers, sacred writers, from the author of the Book of Wisdom1 downwards— all of whom appeal to the self-same argument of caus­ ality, and hold for blameworthy those who will not yield to its force. Yet the new Modernist theory flatly denies the validity of this mode of argument. Starting from its Kantian principle of Agnosticism, it lays down that the invisible world is the unknowable world, and we can repose no trust whatever in the conclusions our reason may arrive at concerning God or anything else that appertains to that hidden region. 2. IN REGARD TO THE CLAIMS OF CHRIST. According to Catholicism, as we have known it hitherto, Jesus Christ, came into the world claiming to be the ambassador of God and even the Son of God. In support of these claims He appealed, as involving a divine attestation of their justice, to the miracles He wrought and the prophecies He fulfilled ; and, having thus established His claim to speak in God’s name and deliver God’s message, He taught us the code of doctrinal truths which we call the Christian revelation. This also is affirmed in the clearest terms by the Vatican Council. It declares that, besides the way of coming to know God through things created by the natural light of reason, it has pleased His wisdom and goodness to provide another and supernatural way by which to reveal Himself and the eternal decrees of His will to the human race : [wherefore], as the Apostle says, “ Having in past days spoken at many times and in many ways to our forefathers through the prophets, in these latter days God has spoken to us through His Son.” 1 Wisdom, cap. xiii. �The Encyclical on “ Modernism And again that to render the obedience of our faith conformable to reason, God has willed to conjoin with the interior aids of the Holy Spirit, external proofs of His revelation, divine facts and especially miracles and prophecies, which, inasmuch as they evidence the omnipotence and infinite knowledge of God, are signs of a divine revelation which are both most certain and adapted to the intelligence of all. And here again the Vatican is only formulating what has always been held and taught in the Church by theologians, Fathers, Apostles, and even our Lord Him­ self. It is a consistent scheme of divine revelation, and the scheme which, in contrast with it, is set up by the Modernists, is also, it must be acknowledged, consistent with itself. If human reason is incapable of any certain knowledge of God, it follows that it cannot be capable of recognizing the divine character of such facts as miracles and prophecies, and hence of recognizing that there was anything more than purely human in the personality of Jesus Christ. If, then, in any narrative of His life, such as is furnished by the four Gospels, miracles are ascribed to Him, or predictions fulfilled in Him which are not explicable as coincidences, the only consistent course for the Modernist is to assume that these superhuman occurrences were not genuine facts, and to inquire by what myth-making or other propess of the devout imagination they came to be read into the story. And so the historical Christ becomes “ a man of the choicest nature ” indeed, but still only a man, whom it is impossible to regard as the trustworthy organ of a divine revelation. Accordingly, we have here, too, not a development but a flat contradiction between the belief of the Catholic Church and the Modernist tenets. 3. IN REGARD TO THE NATURE OF FAITH. Next we come to the question of faith. According to Catholicism, as we have known it hitherto, faith is the assent given to propositions the truth of which is certified to us not directly by the light of our personal reasoning, but indirectly, and on the testimony* of God, �The Encyclical on “ Modernism ” 19 which we can absolutely trust. So defined it is of like nature with the faith we repose, in regard to earthly facts and truths, in the testimony of human witnesses more experienced than ourselves and known to be truthful. Provided we can have evidence, of the nature specified in the last section, that God has really spoken, the human mind easily recognizes this to be a reason­ able mode of arriving at truths otherwise inaccessible to us. And here once more we have a Vatican decree enforcing the definition : This faith, as the Catholic Church professes, is a supernatural virtue by which, through the gift of God and the aid of grace, we believe that the things revealed by Him are true, not because of their intrinsic truth as seen by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself who reveals them to us, and who can neither be deceived or deceive. Again, too, the Vatican definition is one which the simplest inspection of the writings of theologians, Fathers, and Apostles will show to be in accord with them. Such a definition for the Modernist, however, is inadmissible, for it implies a divinely authenticated external witness to make the revelation, and that, as we have seen, his fundamental principle of agnosticism forbids him to recognize. Hence the substitution of another species of faith, that of the religious sentiment, which, evolving under the action of vital immanence, arrives by means of suitable experiences at “ a firm conviction ” that there is a God, personal, omnipotent, omniscient, all-good, &c. ;1 that Jesus Christ, even though historical criticism can find nothing super­ 1 It has been suggested in some quarters that this doctrine of the “religious sentiment” as the source of our religious knowledge is substantially the same as that of Cardinal Newman in the Grammar of Assent. The reader should not be misled into imagining this to be the case. The Holy See is not likely to have wished to condemn our great Cardinal and his luminous teaching in this indirect way, and we know as a fact that the idea did not enter into its mind. Besides, although with a little ingenuity it may be possible to bring together some Modernist phrases and some phrases of the Cardinal’s, and draw a plausible parallel between them, the two conceptions on analysis are radically different and opposed. On this see Cardinal Newman and Modernism, in the Month for June, 1912. �20 The Encyclical on “ Modernism ” human in His life, was the ambassador of God and even the Son of God ; and that the whole "doctrinal code of the Catholic Church is true, at least in a symbolic sense. This “ firm conviction ” is taken by the Modernist as sufficiently certifying us of the objective truth, in a symbolic sense, of these doctrines, but it is not easy for our minds to see how that can be. What is this religious sentiment ? Is it of the nature of perception or volition ? If of perception, why is it not referred to the intellect like the other perceptive acts that occur within us ? If of volition, which seems to be the case since it is called an “ intuition of the heart,” how can volition assure us of the nature of anything, or do more than supply a ground from which some per­ ceptive faculty can infer some truth ? These are questions which at once suggest themselves when we hear of the new species of faith originated and matured by vital immanence ; but in any case the opposition between faith of this sort and the faith which believes on the warrant of the divine attestation is as marked and complete as can well be. 4- IN REGARD TO THE NATURE OF DOGMA. In regard to dogma, too, the opposition is radical. According to Catholicism, as we have known it hitherto, the doctrines of the Christian revelation are true beyond fear of doubt for all times and places. The warrant for their truth is ultimately the testimony of Christ, and proximately the teaching of the Catholic Church, which Spirit guards from error in her exercise of this teaching office. When the Church makes it clear beyond doubt, in undisputed cases by the tenor of he r daily teaching and in controverted cases by her solemn decrees, that such and such doctrines are a true part of the Christian revelation, then doctrines are called dogmas, and, being what they are, are immutable. faithfi^H7^1116^!?6 more fully understood by the in erli n Y W1“ "eVer ”eed to be set aside in ‘he interests of greater accuracy. On the other hand according to the Modernist theory, dogmas are religious �The Encyclical on “Modernism” it formulas tentatively set before the religious sentiment by the devout mind, but which, being only approxima­ tions to the truth, and besides symbolic in their relation to the object-world, are liable and even likely to require reconstruction or rejection with the flight of time and the advance of investigation. Moreover, the final test by which their validity is determined is not the voice of Christ speaking with authority through the Church, but acceptance on the part of the religious sentiment which finds them conformable to its need. And this Modernist conception of dogma involves a further and twofold opposition to Catholicism, as we have known it hitherto. For if the test of doctrinal truth is neither with the rational motives intrinsic to the doctrine, nor with the external testimony of Christ and His Church, but with acceptance or rejection on the part of the religious sentiment, how are we to dis­ tinguish between Natural and Supernatural Religion ; and again, between the true and false forms of Chris­ tianity ? Natural Religion, as the Church understands it, is the Religion based on such knowledge of God as we can attain by the exercise of reason apart from revelation. Supernatural Religion is the religion based on the revelation made to man by our Lord Jesus Christ. As the latter elevates man far above the exigencies of his natural state, it is not due to him, and so cannot become known to him except by revelation. The difference, again, between the true and the spurious forms of Christianity is to be determined by reference to the testimony and commands of Christ, preserved to us by the methods and institutions which He originated and authenticated. Here are tests which under our present system we can apply, and so hope to arrive at the truth. But, under the new theory of dogma and its relation to the religious sentiment, how are we to dis­ criminate in this important matter ? The religious senti­ ment, however much it may have been fed and nurtured by experience, has but the alternative acts—to accept or reject a dogma or practice according as it finds itself in living harmony with it, or the reverse. Moreover, its acceptance when accorded is the outcome of a �22 The Encyclical on “Modernism* natural need ; that is, of an exigency which, in the case of supernatural religion, supposing it to be such, cannot arise. And if, as regards the choice between Catho­ licism and (say) Protestantism, one large group agrees in finding that its religious sentiment is satisfied, only by the Catholic system, and another only by the Pro­ testant, on what ground is one to be deemed universally preferable to the other ? It might be said that the strength of endurance was a criterion. But Hinduism and Buddhism are both older than Catholicism, and Mohammedanism is only six centuries younger, and, if it may now seem to some possible to predict an early dissolution of Protestantism, how was that possible to our ancestors of two centuries ago ? 5. IN REGARD TO TRADITION AND SCRIPTURE. Tradition, according to the Church's belief, is the faithful guardianship and transmission from generation to generation of the doctrines which in the first instance were revealed by our Lord Jesus Christ. And Scripture^ according to the same belief, is the Word of God com­ mitted to writing by men who were under the dictation of the Holy Spirit. It is because this is their nature and origin that an absolute authority attaches to theii contents, as the Vatican Council, following in the foot­ steps of the Council of Trent, has distinctly defined. But with the Modernist reconstruction of the concep­ tions of revelation and dogma there must now be a corresponding reconstruction of the conception of Tradition and Scripture. And so Jesus Christ becomes merely the founder of a great spiritual movement, and tradition becomes the transmission to future genera­ tions, by preaching and other modes of oral communin^°n’° i?6 or!SinaKl.1exPeriences gathered by Him and oSXThk6^ -’?Vhl ? Scr<1Pture differs from Tradition y his, that it contains <l those original experiences ?eliXVa°^ina5 *™d which h;"'c happened in any " Nor can the notion of authority constrain­ ing to acceptance be discovered anywhere in these reconstructed concepts <mywnere in these �The Encyclical on “Modernism" 23 6. IN REGARD TO THE NATURE OF THE CHURCH. The Church, according to Catholicism, as we have known it hitherto, has its origin in the commission given by our Lord to St. Peter and his fellow Apostles to go and teach all nations, accompanied as it was by the promise that they and. their successors should be divinely guarded in the fulfilment of their trust, as well as by the sanction which exacted under the heaviest penalties acceptance of their teaching and obedience to their commands. It is from this source that the Church claims to derive that authority the exercise of which is found by the Modernist to be so cramping. But according to the latter the Church is “ the product of the collective conscience, the society of individual con­ sciences which depend on one first believer who is Christ?’ And the origin of Church authority is “in the need which every society has of a directing authority to guide it to the common end and to guard its doctrine and worship ”—which involves that it is an authority coming to the Church’s rulers from below not from above, from the people not from God, and overstepping its just limits and ceasing to bind when it sets itself in opposition to the democratic methods which are the modern people’s will. How different these two con­ ceptions are does not need to be shown. 7. IN REGARD TO THE SACRAMENTS. The Sacraments have hitherto been held not only to signify but also to impart grace. But that implies institution by Christ during His earthly life, since none but He could give such power to a ceremonial rite. The Modernist conception of a sacrament is that it is a “bare sign or symbol with no power whatever to impart grace, but only to make a deep and useful impression on the mind and heart of the recipient,” and not instituted immediately by Christ, but only mediately and at a date far removed from that oi the Public Life. Again the opposition is palpable, and needs no showing. �24 The Encyclical on “Modernism" Conclusion. To conclude very briefly. Following in th.e footsteps of the Encyclical, we have endeavoured to explain, in language divested of technicalities and intelligible to the plain man, the character of this new system, and have called attention to the chief points of opposition between it and the Catholicism to which we have all been brought up. May we not conclude that, if we are to attach the name of Catholicism in any sense to the new system, we must call it Catholicism turned upside down ? Why, then, should it be deemed surprising that the Pope has spoken out plainly and condemned it, especially if it is spreading, as it is said to be, particu­ larly in France and Italy, and even infecting the minds of the young aspirants to the ministry, through the agency of their teachers. Had he forborne, would he not have been neglecting his trust and departing from the venerable tradition of his predecessors on the Apostolic throne ? Of outside critics there are indeed those who will admit freely that from the point of view indicated Pius X is fully justified and has shown an admirable courage; but who will tell us magisterially that in electing to be consistent with traditional Catholicism he has lost a golden opportunity of making terms with modern science and progress, and has embarked his Church on a course inevitably leading to destruction. Well, that is a kind of forewarning we have heard so often before, and it has ceased to impress us. In the past it has ever been not the Church but her monitors who have perished first ; and confiding in the promise of indefectibility so marvellously fulfilled hitherto, we may trust that the issue from our present crisis will follow the same rule. At all events we cannot but feel that a Catholicism transformed in the sense of the Modernist theory would cease to have attractions. for us and might well be allowed to perish. PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY THE CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, LONDON. U.—Jan. 1908. � 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 encyclical on "modernism" Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Smith, Sydney F. (Sydney Fenn) Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 24 p. ; 19 cm. Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Catholic Truth Society Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1908 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RA1523 Subject The topic of the resource Catholic Church Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (The encyclical on "modernism"), 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 Modernism (Christian Theology)-Roman Catholic Church https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/bdef040859356f963435a525b6d9d0ec.pdf?Expires=1777507200&Signature=UCoWm9mXgO-Mmair2zZfmItrM-XcaSyaByz2skOT%7E-epYWHS5hxRVjPuOtwgfcJqihSb52HPDXX0jJGejRPP9P33NJJQP7vbrffiuB6IA8Lpb4Z-Us0FzLoiKTwQDNEduGumsF5UR5QbmhZJ3pfi7-ybG3OikMvNC1ksQack%7EuXY2HqaE0QuAqbMEZO22greaeyeH2PWrBH-vwhi9Cup7IRIYDb6yK71WYJeQahDoySgA1GNbQCSDpQB6Gq25oocaTzvM8vAR8Mz-CRGZpuEZjj5epWqD2Auq1j8A%7ES9p14MChe4MW9NyOdne4Eihi9UJT6Hd%7EZt-JwKo0DctBpI1g__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 7043a95697031fc4caadd4214ba5bc2c PDF Text Text A SKETCH AND AN APPRECIATION OF MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY FREETHINKER AND HUMANITARIAN An Address at the Paine-Conway Memorial Meeting of The Manhattan Liberal Club, January 31, 1908 BY EDWIN C. WALKER / . It is my conviction, that there is not one wrong, not one evil, moral or physical, in this great nation [England] which may not be traced to the root of a guarded superstition. That means that every belief, defended by law, involves human sacrifices. Did not man suffer by it, it would need no protecting law.—Conway, “Lessons for To-day.” PRICE, 15 CENTS Published by Edwin C. Walker, 244 West 143rd Street, Manhattan, New York City, May, 1908 ��NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY A SKETCH AND AN APPRECIATION OF MONCURE CONWAY FREETHINKER AND HUMANITARIAN An Address at the Paine-Conway Memorial Meeting of The Manhattan Liberal Club, January 31, 1908 BY EDWIN C. WALKER We must define intellect as that which emerges out of this conven­ tional mass; not indeed unrelated to it, but carrying its slumbering powers to conscious realization and effective action through indi­ vidual thought and will. Intellect must become individual that it may be universal. Conway, ‘‘ Intellectual Suicide.” PRICE, 15 CENTS Published by Edwin C. Walker, 244 West 143rd Street, Manhattan, New York City, May, 1908 �The scholar is not the retained advocate of the party that pays best. He is not the attorney for commerce, nor the professional casuist of those who would combine the advantages of conven­ tionality with those of simple truth. Better he should again be a hermit than dwell in society at the cost of honor. As yet, alas, though subtle as the serpent, our scholarship has also its double tongue, uttering now that which is true, next that which is sordid. From the day when Shel­ ley was banished from Oxford, no scholar has remained under the flag of the common Chris­ tianity save through a visible servility. But it is spiritual perjury! If we demand that the banker shall be honest in money matters, that the soldier shall be brave, that the judge shall be just, shall we be satisfied that he who is con­ secrated to Reason shall weakly or meanly part its sacred raiment among those who would fain trick out their lucrative creeds or customs with its divine sanctions? There is needed a Scholar’s caste, removed from the world of self-seekers; a brotherhood of those whose verdict is the dictate of absolute reason and rectitude; the fraternity of those who, amid a world that weighs eternal verities in their relation to gold and fashion, steadily say, “Unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united.”—“An English Sinai,” in “The Earthward Pilgrimage.” �In Apology This fragmentary and otherwise very imper­ fect sketch of the life and labors of Dr. Moncure D. Conway is offered only because there is no money to pay for the preparation and printing of anything more adequate. Nearly all of it ap­ peared first in The Truth Seeker, and the lino­ types have been held for several months in the hope that it might be possible to bring the ad­ dress out in a form more worthy of its subject than is this in which I am at last compelled to present it to you. Unless one commands almost unlimited re­ sources, it is practically impossible to bear the burden of the repeated corrections and resettings that are necessary in order to completely elimin­ ate the archaic English spellings upon which the printers insist, and work out the defective and wrong-font matrixes which careless workmen use over and over regardless of protests. So this must go out with many cumbersome spellings and numberless wrong-font letters and broken faces. Machine composition has its economic advantages, but its seemingly almost conscious antipathy to the use of necessary compounds, its often horrible division of words at the end of lines, and the faults in casting render it very trying to the nerves of the careful writer and the intelligent reader. �—4— There is no Conway bibliography extant, so far as I can discover. Of his works, a few are ac­ cessible in the New York Public Library. The Library of Congress has the largest collection, supplied by Dr. Conway himself. I shall be very glad to receive from any one who may read this, the title, date and place of publication, name of publisher, number of pages, style of binding, and other items of information concerning any book or pamphlet by Moncure D. Conway. Also, data refering to any magazine or newspaper article written by him. EDWIN C. WALKER, 244 West 143d Street, Manhattan, New York. �Moncure Daniel Conway Know’st thou not at the fall' of the leaf How the heart feels a languid grief, Laid on it for covering; And how sleep seems a goodly thing, In Autumn at the fall1 of the leaf? And how the swift heat of the hrain Falters because it is in vain, In Autumn at the fall of the leaf, Knowest thou not? and how the chief Of joys seems not to suffer pain? Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf How the soul feels like a dried sheaf, Bound up at last for harvesting; And how death seems a comely thing In Autumn at the fall of the leaf? These perfect lines, written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, set to music by his friend Dannreuther, and given to Dr. Conway in 1874 for incorporation in his “The Angel of Death/’ voice the some­ times mood in the closing years of‘ the life of this tireless worker for man. A Record of Struggles In the preface to his “Autobiography” (1904) Moncure Conway says: “The wisdom or unwisdom of a new genera­ tion must largely depend on its knowledge and �interpretation of the facts and forces that operat­ ed in the generations preceding, from which are bequeathed influences that become increasingly potent when shaped in accepted history. ... I have been brought into personal relations with leading minds and characters which already are becoming quasi-classic figures to the youth around me, and already show the usual tendency to invest themselves with mythology. ... A pilgrimage from pro-slavery to anti-slavery enthu­ siasm, from Methodism to Freethought, implies a career of contradictions. One who starts out at twenty to think for himself and pursue truth is likely to discover at seventy that one-third of his life was given to error, another third to ex­ changing it for other error, and the last third to efforts to unsay the errors and undo the mistakes of the other two-thirds.” We see that Conway realized, what many radi­ cals forget, that the past, present and future are links in a chain that cannot be broken, and that forgetfulness of this brings in its train individual and social peril and catastrophe. The value of memorial meetings and papers consists far less in eulogies of dead leaders of thought and ac­ tion than in summaries of their principles and pic­ tures of their environment, with the record of their struggles to inculcate those principles and modify that environment. In a word, history before worship. At the outset, I must indicate what I think is the relation of my part of this commemorative meeting to the parts taken by the other speakers.. It was not merely the great work done by Mon- �-7cure Conway in the rehabilitation of the fame of Thomas Paine, important as that work was, that made him so commanding a figure in the world of letters and in the Freethought party. Farther along, it will be shown that the love of justice and the service of it were the vital elements in the life of this friend and leader so recently dead. He could not bear to witness the neglect of worthy character and intellectual power; still less could he endure the misrepresentation of that charac­ ter and that mental energy. It was his love of justice—and with Moncure Conway justice was not simply a fair name with which men are prone to flatter, and disguise, if they may, their ven­ geance—it was this genuine love of justice that made him the biographer and vindicator of Paine, just as it had earlier led him to write his “Omit­ ted Chapters of History,” in order to take from the name of Edmund Randolph the stain of un­ deserved obloquy; it was this loathing for un­ truth and injustice that made him protest against the slander with which, through the centuries, the Christian world had clouded the reputation of Mary of Magdala. With Conway, “truth” was not an abstraction; it did not rnean'W truth,” something mystical and divinely given; it meant what science means by the word, the correspon­ dence of statement to fact. That which Conway did for Paine’s memory merges into and is a com­ ponent of the vastly greater whole of the labor of the nearly sixty years that followed the first steps he took as a youth, when he entered upon what he so aptly calls his “Earthward Pilgrim­ age.” Earthward, mind you; not “earth/v” in �—8— the theological sense of contumely. It was an Earthward Pilgrimage from the skies and the gods to the earth-home and to man, closer and closer, more and more powerfully drawn with every year of the too-quickly speeding existence. So my task is to say something of the immediate antecedents of this splendid man, to follow in un­ satisfactory haste that long trek from the fabled land's of angels and demons to this home of men and women and the children that renew them. There are two Pilgrimages here, that of the man whose activities objectively were concerned with the sufferings and joys of his kind; that of the mind that journeyed from error to partial truth, from one partial truth to another partial truth, until the moment when the golden bowl was shattered on the rocks of mortality. The “Scholar in, Politics ” Moncure Daniel Conway was one of our few splendid examples of the “scholar in politics,” and by “politics” I mean the affairs of men considered in their larger aspects, involving the rights and ac­ tivities of communities, states, nations, races, and world-embracing religious and secular federations. In the culminating years of the slavery struggle in America, he was intimately associated with nearly all the leading workers for emancipation; and with the progressive ministers and the great writers, men and women, of the country. During his thirty years ministry in London, he was at the centre of the intellectual and esthetic life of the generation, and touching hands with a multitude of the teachers of the preceding generation who passed off the stage in those three decades. Of �the great men of science of that period in Eng­ land, the leading statesmen, the eminent indepen­ dent clergymen, the poets, essayists, Orientalists, dramatists, tragedians, musicians, and wielders of brush and chisel, it is possible to name but few that he did not know well. With many, very many, of the most famous men and women of the age he was on terms of the closest confidence and cooperation. He knew the surviving exiles of ’48, the men of Germany and Italy, the French victims of Napoleon the Little, fugitive Commun­ ards, Russians who had come to London fortheir lives, East Indians who had made a like journey in search of the knowledge of the West, even as later he visited Asia on his “Earthward Pilgrim­ age” in search of the lore of the East. Of William Johnstone Fox, who for forty years had occupied the pulpit of South Place Chapel, where Conway spoke for thirty succeeding years, we read in Conway’s “Autobiography” (ii, 54): “He was for nearly twenty years the most famous orator in England; neither Bright nor Cobden could be compared with him; but in 1864, ten years after his public career had closed, the people generally who had idolized him hardly knew that he was living, and the new generation had no knowledge of him.” This should not be and I think will not be Conway’s fate, for while he was keenly alive to and untiringly active in movements for the settle­ ment of the “issues of his own time,” he was by no means limited to these in his thought and sympathies; a large part of what he wrote is rich in the elements of race-energy and potential �—IO---- growth that is not circumscribed by geography and time. Dominating Ideals Conway (Pilgrimage, 355) mentions the story that when Ralph Waldo Emerson first stood be­ fore the Sphinx she said to him, “You’re another.” Emerson was not a Sphinx in the sense that his lips were sealed, but in that they opened often for the utterance of contrarious transcendental­ isms. In the latter sense, Conway also was a Sphinx, for his positions could not always be harmonized, not even those of his later life. His emotional inheritances sometimes were at war with the conclusions of his studious and logical brain. But our retrospect of his whole mental existence must convince us that he never lost sight of the great and dominating ideals of his earlier years—peace, freedom, love, beauty, truth. The strongest fiber in his being was the love of peace; on its negative side, the hatred of war. Freedom was a goal to be kept ever in view, but it was not to be reached through bloodshed. He grasped firmly the Freethought standard, and it never touched the ground” in all his pilgrimage. Reason must settle all disputes; the wrongdoer is not to be killed', but directed from his evil ways through the enlightening of his mind and the quickening of his conscience. His consistent record as an opponent of war was the most prec­ ious possession of his old age, and the fear of smirching its whiteness, even in seeming, explains his repeated refusals to appear on a platform or at a banquet where there was the slightest danger that his presence might associate him in the pub- �—II— lie mind with any who advocate or condone the use of force in modern reform, or are erroneously supposed to assume that attitude. This he often told me, but it was not until I had carefully read his “Autobiography” and his “Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East” that I fully realized how imperative was the mandate he obeyed. Slavery he hated because it represented vio­ lence and pain; if war represented more of these, then war was the greater evil and liberty was not to be sought by sword and cannon. So he stood for peaceable secession as against blood-cemented union. An unshrinking and uncompromising apostle of his ideas, he was not an undiscriminating parti­ san as concerned persons. Whoever it might be from whom he must differ, whom he must criti­ cise, at the same time he never failed to indicate that person’s acceptable though^ never failed to concede his good qualities, to explain his taking a given attitude rather than to denounce him for that attitude. He would not deny to any one comradeship and opportunity because of race, because of nationality or lesser organization. With him, human, rights did not depend upon “belong­ ing” ; as a Freethinker who knew why he was a Freethinker, he held all badges and labels of exclusiveness and exclusion as symbols of servi­ tude and shame, as the stigmata of disgrace and degradation. He was tender, loving, emotional. Art in all its forms appealed to him far more strongly than did nature outside of man. He knew the com­ posers, singers, instrumentalists, painters, play- �---- 12---- house folk, wherever he went. The old Metho­ dist hymns never lost their charm, while the bare walls of the Protestant house of worship repelled. We catch many glimpses of the esthetic passion of the man. Here is one: It is a Sunday in Eng­ land with some distinguished Liberal friends in their home, and the only religious service has been the rendering of the whole of Handel’s “Mes­ siah” on the piano, without words. I quote (Auto, ii, 156): “It was a beautiful day; the low windows open­ ed on the flower garden and the landscape dressed in living green and blossoming trees. There we sat, souls who had passed through an era of storm and stress and left all prophetic and Mes­ sianic beliefs, but found in the oratorio hymns of an earth in travail.” Growing Radicalism So he was one from whom religious garments dropped slowly, yet ceaselessly, bit by bit, in ap­ prehension and pain. But if his advance was gradual, still it was more swift than that of his congregations, for ever and anon a conservative wing would go off and start anew in the hope of preserving some dogma threatened by his grow­ ing radicalism. Wherever he was, he was a stormcentre of thought. He could learn, even against his hot zeal and prejudices, and continued to learn to the last hour of his life. Emerson gave the first impetus to his “Earthward Pilgrimage,” while the rugged Car­ lyle and the lucid Francis William Newman and Kingdon Clifford probably were next in order of influence, Carlyle in particular cutting through �—13 the transcendental cobwebs that impeded the freeest movement of his mind. Spencer, one of his first friends in England; Huxley, Tyndall, Dar­ win, and others of the great evolutionists of that epoch, contributed largely to his training and equipment. The part that a long heredity may play in the development of the temperament and mentality of a man no less than in his physique is not to be ignored. Moncure Daniel Conway was born in Stafford County, in Northern Virginia, fifteen miles from Falmouth, March 3, 1832. He was a blend of the Conways, Daniels, Peytons, Mon­ cures, Washingtons, Browns, Stones, and other early Virginia and Maryland families. The first Conways in Virginia came in 1640; the first Mon­ cures, French Huguenots, by way of Scotland, in 1733. The Peytons, well known in England, in­ termarried with the Washingtons. The Browns, from Scotland, were in Maryland in 1708; the Stones, in 1649. The Catholic proprietor of Maryland, Lord Baltimore, made William Stone governor, because he wanted a Protestant who would be just as between Catholics and Protest­ ants. Thomas Stone was a signer of the Declara­ tion. The mother of Dr. Conway was a Daniel; the first of the American branch were in Vir­ ginia in 1634. The members of all these families were educated men and women, severally promi­ nent in the social, professional, religious, political, judicial, and material life of the two colonies, later states. Conway says (Auto, i, 6): ‘‘Sir Francis Galton’s works 'on ‘Heredity nut before me in a new form the catechetical question, �-14- ‘Who made you?’ Only when I was beginning to turn grey was any curiosity awakened in me to know how it was that I should carry the names of three large families into association with re­ ligious and political heresies unknown to my contemporary Virginians except as distant hor­ rors. Who, then, made me?” Sources of Conway’s Skepticism Then he tells how, when he was a boy of twelve, he overheard his grandfather, John Mon­ cure Conway, say to his brother-in-law, “I can not believe that the father of mankind would send any human being into this world knowing that he would be damned.” Of this grandfather again: “One Sunday when leaving his office for dinner he saw a gentleman angrily bundled out of the only inn in the place because he had devoted the morning to a walk instead of going to church; he took the ‘Sabbath-breaker’ to his house’and en­ tertained him several days. The guest was A. Bronson Alcott, the Emersonian philosopher, who told me the story.” And there was capacity for untraditional thought on the other side of the house. His mother’s uncle, Walter Daniel, left a Bible with a marginal note in his writing beside Judges i, 19, “The Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain [hill country, Conway renders it] ; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had char­ iots of iron.” The comment was: “Not omnipo­ tent after all!” His great-great-grandfather, John Moncure, for twenty-six years rector of the parish of Overwharton, one evening had his game of �—15whist interrupted by a deputation of farmers re­ questing- that he would next day pray for rain. He said at once, “Yes, I’ll read the prayer, but it isn’t going to rain till the moon changes” (Auto, i, 7)Upon all of which Conway comments: “Can I not pick my skeptical soul out of these old peo­ ple?” As concerned the slavery question, he had good precedents in his family, for his great-grand­ father, Travers Daniel, presiding justice of Staf­ ford county, was a strong emancipationist, and would have freed his slaves had not the laws of Virginia stood in the way. He imported from England in his own ship window curtains “rep­ resenting Granville Sharp striking chains from negroes, and displayed them about his house,” to the disturbance of mind of his neighbors. The independent strain in the blood showed in another way. His father, “a gay and hand­ some youth of high social position,” joined the then lowly Methodists, to the horror oihis father. A brief estrangement ensued, and this “touch of martyrdom” brought to the young convert’s side three of his sisters and two of his brothers. “Thus it was that our family became Methodist—the first of good social position in our region belong­ ing to that sect.” Methodism of Earlier Years In the close atmosphere of the strictest Method­ ism the boy Moncure passed his early years— two sermons on Sunday, Sunday school, only religious reading permitted on that day, even the fourth page of the Christian Advocate being barred, as it was literary and scientific; two prayer �—16— meetings a week in the basement of his father’s house, where his cultivated parents knelt together with the illiterate and unkempt who made up the membership of the new sect. “Every Sunday an hour was found for us—white and black children together—to be taught by my mother the catechism and listen to careful selec­ tions from the Bible. In some way this equal treatment of slaves got out, and some officious men came with a report that my mother was teaching negroes to read, which was illegal. It was not true, but it was prudent to avoid even the suspicion of such an offense in the house of a magistrate; so the mixed teaching ceased” (Auto, i, 21). His parents’ home was a headquarters for preachers. “Two of the most pious,” he says, “were discovered to be impostors, but the major­ ity were honest, hell-fearing men.” He attended Dickerson College, Carlisle, Pa., from which he was graduated when three months past seventeen. Once while there he and his brother and the other Southern students had their belongings packed to go home, their pro-slavery sensibilities having been roughly touched, as they thought; but the storm blew over. He started and edited a collegiate paper, and also was “con­ verted” while there. He characterizes an address of his given at that time as a specimen of “the eloquence of inexperience,” and adds that he felt “the burden of youth.” Going home, he found his father and uncle the respective lay leaders in Virginia of the divided Methodist church, split on the rock of slavery. �—i7— He joined a Southern Rights Association, wrote for the Southern Literary Messenger, and other Virginia papers, gave his first lecture, outside of college, when eighteen (the subject was “Pan­ theism”) and studied law. “My scrap-book of crudities,” he calls his collection of his effusions of this period. Just now some of Emerson’s writ­ ings came in his way and added to the ferment in his mind, as did a work of Hawthorne’s, a series of essays by Greeley, and a volume of Patent Office Reports. They helped to open to him a new industrial, intellectual, and ethical world, as did debates in Congress to which he listened. He wrote a pamphlet on the negro separate-origin theory, but it was not published. To the Constitutional Convention of Virginia (1850) he addressed a pamphlet urging free schools and compulsory education. His uncle printed 500 copies for him at the reduced price of $50, a heavy strain on his literary earnings, and he gave them away to newspapers, ministers, pro­ fessors, and public men. Troubled by Greeley’s letters from Virginia to the Tribune, he wrote to that paper and Greeley replied editorially: “Never will Virginia’s white children be general­ ly schooled until her black ones shall cease to be sold. Our friend may be sure of this.” This was in Conway’s nineteenth year, and Greeley’s prediction was stamped indelibly on his brain. His Plunge Into the Ministry Abandoning the law when prepared for admis­ sion to the bar, and giving up excellent pros­ pects of a good position in Richmond journalism, he plunged into the Methodist ministry, preach- �—18— ing his first sermon when just past nineteen. Rid­ ing the circuit, with Emerson, Coleridge, and Newman beside the Bible in his saddle-bags, he read and thought in the silence of the woods, and the result was that while he preached with fervor, he already was on his Earthward Pilgrimage. After a sermon in his home town of Falmouth, his Methodist father said with a laugh: “One thing is certain, Monc—should the devil ever aim at a Methodist preacher, you’ll be safe.” On this circuit, he encountered the Quakers, and -was deeply impressed by their high character and the happiness of their lives. He corresponded with Emerson, read more widely, thought more deeply, grew more and more heretical in religion and politics, and entered Boston, February 26, 1853, as a student at Harvard Divinity School. He notes that at the hotel where he stopped “they have prayers morning and night, at which a piano with eolian addition is used.” His father could not conscientiously support his son at a Unitarian school, but he managed to make his way, the pay he received for playing the organ in the college chapel helping him a little. “ ’Twas one of the charmed days When the genius of God doth flow,” he writes of May 3, 1853, when he first met Emerson. Then commenced the intimate friend­ ship which lasted to the end. Next he met Tho­ reau, and after that all the Unitarian and Abo­ litionist leaders, Agassiz, and the poets and prose masters of the Golden Age of New England cul­ ture. From the Rev. Jared Sparks, the historian, he first learned that Thomas Paine was a man �—IQ— to be respected. In his Senior year he preached in Boston and other cities. In September, 1854, he went to Washington on the invitation of the Unitarian church there, one of the most import­ ant in the country, and became its pastor in his twenty-third year, which indicates his standing in Boston. Chief Justice Cranch of the District of Columbia, who had held his official position for fifty-four years, was a member of the Wash­ ington church. Conway delivered the funeral discourse and it was published by the society, making it one of the earliest items of the Con­ way bibliography. Enthusiasm for “Leaves of Grass” In 1855 Emerson called Conway’s attention to “Leaves of Grass/’ then first published, and in September Conway visited Whitman in what was then “farther Brooklyn.” Whitman told Conway that he was the first one who had visited him on account of his book. 1 can not forbear to quote a little here: “Here too was a revelation of human realms of which my knowledge had been mainly academic. Even while among the humble Methodists, the pious people I knew were apart from the world, and since then I had moved among scholars or persons of marked individuality. Except the negroes, I had known nothing of the working masses. But Whitman—as I have known these many years—knew as little of the working class practically as I did. He had gone about among them in the disguise of their own dress, and was perfectly honest in his supposition that he had entered into their inmost nature. The Quaker �—20— training tends to such illusion; it was so in the case of Thomas Paine, who wrote transcendental politics and labeled it ‘Common Sense.’ . . . My enthusiasm for ‘Leaves of Grass’ . . . was a sign and symptom that the weight of the world had begun to roll on me. In Methodism my burden had been metaphysical—a bundle of dogmas. The world at large was not then mine; for its woes and wrongs I was not at all responsible; they were far from me, and no one ever taught me that the world was to be healed, except at the millennium. The only evils were particular ones: A was a drunkard, B a thief, C a murderer, D had a cancer, and so on. When I escaped from the dogmatic burden, and took the pleasant ra­ tionalistic Christ on my shoulders, he was light as the babe St. Christopher undertook to carry across the river. But the new Christ became Jesus, was human, and all humanity came with him—the world-woe, the temporal evil and wrong. I was committed to deal with actual, visible, pres­ ent hells instead of an invisible one in a possible future. Such was now my contract, and to bear the increasing load there was no divine vicar” (Auto, i, 218). This marks a most important step in the Earth­ ward Pilgrimage. In Behalf of Negro Education In conjunction with Samuel M. Janney, the lead­ ing Quaker of Virginia, he framed a petition to the Virginia legislature asking for the repeal of the law which forbade the teaching of slaves to read: “a private reply came from a leading4 mem­ ber of the legislature, declaring that no such �—21— petition could be read in that body.” A similar answer came from North Carolina to Daniel Goodloe. During the first presidential campaign of the Republican party, when Fremont was the stand­ ard-bearer, Conway’s Washington church went to pieces over the slavery issue and he was dis­ missed by a bare majority, because he would not be silent on that vital question. He now accepted an invitation to the pulpit of the First Congregational Church of Cincinnati (1856). Buchanan had defeated Fremont; two days after the inauguration, the Supreme Court gave the famous Dred Scott decision. It was a fruitful city and a momentous period for Conway. Earnest friends of his, either within or outside his church, were such men as Judge (later Gov­ ernor) Hoadley, Judge Stallo—both historically placed as Freethinkers—Alphonso Taft, Stanley Matthews, and many others prominent in learn­ ing and position. He threw himself with ardor into every form of literary and artistic life, writ­ ing criticisms of “the classical concerts, the pic­ ture exhibitions, the operas, and plays.’’ “At Cin­ cinnati, I seemed for the first time to know some­ thing of all America.” Here he found remnants of the colonies and other reminders of the work of George Rapp, Robert Owen, and Frances Wright. He read1 Frances Wright’s “A Few Days in Athens” and her lectures, and “many a time,” he says, “joined in the pilgrimages to her tomb.” At Yellow Spring, Horace Mann had founded Antioch College, the first to educate men and women together. Mann was a Unitarian and �■22— the greatest educator ofi his time, but he was fran­ tic because of Dr. T. L. Nichols’s radical com­ munity called “Memnona.” He feared it would corrupt and bring disaster to his co-educational school. In i860, Conway reviewed in his “Dial” Dr. Nichols’s “Esperanza—the Land of Hope: A Work Written on the Gospel of Free Love,” and with his ever-keen instinct for justice, took all pains to discover the facts concerning “Memnona,” long a thing of history only, and he wrote toler­ antly of principles which were new and largely antipathetic to him. Dr. Mann had character­ ized “Memnona” as “the superfetation of diab­ olism upon polygamy.” Conway pointed out that, contrary to this prejudiced view, the asceti­ cism and celibacy inaugurated there had carried Dr. Nichols and seven other leading members into the Roman church, one being at that time a nun in Cuba. Among his correspondence, Conway found a letter from Modern Times, New York. “It seemed to come from some place in Bunyan’s dreamland,” he comments. Answering his inquiry, a friend in New York city wrote that it was “a village on Long Island founded on the principle that each person shall mind his or her own business”; upon which he satirically observes that “the place seemed even more mythical than before.” At the first opportunity he went to Modern Times, made the acquaintance of Josiah Warren and his associates, and in his “Autobiography” he gives us several pages of chatty and) kindly description of his visit and a summary of the principles of Warren. This was in keeping—wherever he went �•23— throughout his life he sought out the Divergent no less than the Convergent, and gathered at first hand his materials for analysis and conclusion. In 1857 or 8, his first book, “Facts for Today,” was published. At Cincinnati, his opening sermon was a plea for liberty for the slave, for reason, and for hap­ piness as against Protestant asceticism. He de­ manded for woman freedom and occupation; for the unfortunate, a hospital for inebriates, and foundling hospitals, and homes for other social victims. “So did I confroiit the wealth and conser­ vatism of my church, and they stood by me from first to last.” In preparing for work along some of these lines, he was in consultation with Arch­ bishop Purcell of the Romani Catholic church, who, remarks Conway, confirmed “my assertion that it was not sensuality that led women into vice, but that the want of lucrative occupation left them no alternatives but physical or moral sui­ cide.” He lectured for the Catholic St. Nicholas Institution, for the Turners, the Jewish societies, the actors, and filled evening appointments in a vacant Methodist pulpit. In the Western Unitarian Conference of 1858 (he was now 26), he was intrusted with the prep­ aration of the manifesto on slavery, and his dec­ laration was adopted, reversing the “timid reso­ lution of three years before.” It caused the with­ drawal of the strong St. Louis delegation. The incident created much comment, and he was de­ scribed as an “ambitious agitator.” In reply, he said to his people that “inhumanity in man or nation must always prove a demon of unrest.” “A �—24— legend on which twenty-three years later I pub­ lished a volume then first arose before me as a prophecy: ‘That fable of the Wandering Jew shall be dread reality to the heart which know­ ingly drives from its threshold the Christ who falls there in the form of those who now bear the cross of wrong and oppression, and toil up the weary hills of life to their continual crucifixion’ ” (Auto, i, 275). “A little recrudescence of prejudice against the Jews” carried Conway into the papers in their de­ fense, and this made the Jews his friends, “and important friends they were,” he avers; and he speaks of Rabbis Wise and Lilienthal as able and progressive leaders. Emerson, Darwin, and Evolution His literary studies were extending and his en­ thusiasm therein was increasing as that decade neared its end, while the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” freshened an interest in evo­ lution that had been created by Emerson in 1853, when the latter had spoken of “the electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years ago —‘arrested and progressive development’—indi­ cating the way upward from the invisible proto­ plasm to the highest organism—gave the poetic key to natural science—of which the theories of Geofrey St. Hilaire, of Oken, of Goethe, of Agassiz, and Owen and Darwin [Erasmus] in zoology and botany, are the fruits showing unity and perfect order in physics.”1 The suggestion of John Flunter, which Emerson had condensed into the phrase, “arrested and progressive develop­ ment,’’ was in these words: �—25— “If we were capable of following the progress of increase of number of the parts of the most perfect animal, as they formed in succession, from the very first to its state of full perfection, we should probably be able to compare it to some of the incomplete animals themselves of every order of animals in creation, being at no stage different from some of those inferior orders; or in other words, if we were to take a series of animals, from the more imperfect to the perfect, we should probably find an imperfect animal cor­ responding with some stage of the most perfect.” When, in 1883, Conway showed this to 'Huxley and Tyndall, they were startled that Emerson should have discovered this very early anticipa­ tion of the theory of Natural Selection. In his Dial for October, i860, Conway points out that “our popular Christianity has not fulfilled the law of the higher formation. It must everywhere sum up all the preceding formations, and lose none of their contributions, as the animal generations are summed up in the forehead of man.” He adds in his “Autobiography”: “It was to be twenty-five years before I dis­ covered that the function of Human Selection was to take the place of Natural Selection, and develop the Calibans into beauty, but also that it was possible for man to develop himself and his world downward.” It is not to be presumed that Dr. Conway meant to be understood as saying that human selection is not natural selection; he intended only to distinguish human from pre-human selection. In 1859. Conway delivered lectures against �—26-- supernaturalism, and the orthodox idea of God that shocked a part of his congregation and led to the secession later of a considerable number of the conservatives, who organized a new society. They could endure his political and other secular heresies, but when he laid profaning hands on the Ark of the Covenant of their primal super­ stitions, they were panic-stricken. This was an­ other demonstration of the fact that, no matter what “reforms” may interest a man, you never can be sure of him until his brain has been cleared of the sediment of the religious flood', for until that hour comes he may at any moment pass back under the dominion of the fears that, together with wonder, lie at the foundations of all cults of supernaturalism. Speaking of “superstition,” I know of no better definition than that given by Conway himself in his book, “Republican Superstitions”—“A super­ stition is any belief not based upon evidence.” His Vindication of Paine During the years immediately preceding the civil war, Conway sometimes attended the Sun­ day afternoon meetings of the small society of “Infidels.” Listening from a quiet corner to the speeches and discussions of these earnest parti­ sans, Conway learned much concerning Paine, which led to his discovery of very much more in his further unprejudiced investigations. The clerical fictions about Paine which had been poured into his ears in his youth now reminded him “that towers may be measured by the shadow they cast.” The immediate fruit of his researches was a sermon on Paine, January 29, �—27— i860. The announcement crowded the church. He had feared that some of his congregation might be disturbed, but instead he received a request to publish the address. The request was “signed by many eminent and wealthy citi­ zens, some of whom did not belong to my con­ gregation.” Thereafter the Freethinkers fre­ quented his church, and Moreau dedicated one of his works to Conway “as the first who had ever uttered from a pulpit a word favorable to Paine.” Conway’s address was printed under the title, “Thomas Paine. A Celebration.” From this period on there rested in Conway’s mind the purpose sometime to place Paine in the right light in the eyes of the world. This pur­ pose he put into splendid effect when he wrote the Life of Paine (2 vols., 1892), compiled and edited Paine’s Works (4 vols., 1893-1896), and prosecuted further researches in the succeeding years, some of the results of which were made known through the Liberal press and other pub­ lications from time to time. It is quite prob­ able that if there shall be posthumous publica­ tion of the papers embodying the results of the labors of the last years of Conway’s life there will be revealed more of these treasures. But the little group in Cincinnati did some thing more for Conway and through him for the world. I quote from page 305, vol. 1, of the “Autobiography”: “My vindication of Paine and its unexpected success was felt by the Freethinkers in Cincin­ nati as a vindication of themselves also, and 1 felt it my opportunity for grappling with what �■28— I considered their errors. My Theism was not indeed of the Paine type—I had passed from all dynamic Theism to the Theism evolved from Pantheism by the poets—but I found that in criticising the opinions of these Atheists I had undertaken a difficult task. Several of them— I remember the names of Colville, Miller, and Pickles—were shrewd disputants and steadily drove me to reconsider the basis of my beliefs. I entered upon a severely logical statement of the corollaries of Theism. In a course of dis­ courses, I had rejected supernaturalism, to the distress of a third of my congregation, this being the first time that simple Theism had invaded any Western pulpit. “That, however, was less disturbing than the sermon on ‘God,’ in which I maintained that the creation and government of the universe by an omnipotent and omniscient deity was inconsist­ ent with any free will. I affirmed that the socalled free agency of man was a much over­ rated notion. I contended that what theologians called the Will of God was a misconception; an all-wise and morally perfect deity could have no freedom. There can be but one very best, and to that he must adhere; the least deviation from it would undeify him.” And so another stage was traveled on the Earthward Pilgrimage! On the Eve of Civil War The clouds of civil war were throwing out their advance columns in 1859, and the land al­ ready was darkening with the shadows of com­ ing death. John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry �and his capture and execution well-nigh closed all ears to the counsels of reason. In his ser­ mon of October 23, Conway said that Brown had been driven into madness by the murder of his sons in Kansas, perverting devotion to the principle of liberty into a morbid monomania. He thanked God that one man could go crazy for an idea, arraigned the nation for its crime against the negro, and declared that the Aboli­ tionists, being non-resistants, would “denounce the methods” of Brown. He himself described the action of Brown as “worse than a crime—a blunder.” But he had not fully taken into ac­ count the contagiousness of violence. After the sermon, Judge Stallo took him to his home and “argued earnestly” against his view and his “ex­ treme peace principles.” And anti-slavery men in the East—Garrison, Emerson, for examples— also were carried off their feet. On the other side, in Virginia, Governor Wise “raised a mole­ hill into a volcano.” The pro-slavery govern­ ment at Washington used the raid as an indict­ ment of the abolitionists, and “the canonization by them of Brown as a hero and martyr became inevitable.” .Neither side realized the situation of the other, nor could, for passion and panic blurred all eyes. Conway confesses with shame that “the enthusiasm and tears of [his] anti­ slavery comrades” swept him from his solid an­ chorage, confused the calm judgment that dic­ tated the discourse of October 23; the execution of Brown, on December 2, hurling against him the last wild wave of reason-dethroning emo­ tion. “I did not indeed retract my testimony �•30— against the method of bloodshed, except by im­ plication.’’ Three months later came James Redpath’s “The Public Life of Captain John Brown.” Redpath was a friend and follower of Brown, but there was. enough in the book to set Conway to inquiring. Part of the result of this inquiry was given form in the novel, “Pine and Palm” (1887), where “Captain Brown (alias Gideon) figures in a light that could not please his ad­ mirers, but it is better than I could find for him now when, reading his career by the light of subsequent history, I am convinced that few men ever wrought so much evil. John Brown’s Victims “On either side of the grave of a largely im­ aginary Brown wrathful Northerners and panicstricken Southerners were speedily drawn up into hostile camps, and the only force was dis­ armed that might have prevented the catastrophe that followed. Up to that time the anti-slaverjr agitation had marched on the path of peace, and every year had brought further assurance of a high human victory in which South and North would equally triumph. But now we were all Brown’s victims—even we anti-slavery men, pledged to the methods of peace. In my sermon already quoted on Brown’s death, I did entreat that we should all ‘do a manly Christian part in the development of his deed, and in control­ ling it lest it pass out of the lawful realm of the Prince of Peace,’ but the plea was lost under my homage to the insanity of a man who had set the example of lynching slaveholders. Too �—3i late I repented. For other anti-slavery men there might be some excuse; at least it appears to me now that there had remained in nearly every Northern breast, however liberal, some unconscious chord which Brown had touched, inherited from the old Puritan spirit and faith in the God of War. I had been brought up in no such faith, but in the belief that evil could be conquered only by the regeneration of the evil-doer.” I quote so much here because it throws a flood of light on the psychology and exalted ethics of Conway, and explains his attitude as the lead­ ing advocate of policies antithetical to those of the administration of Lincoln. And do I need to suggest that there is in all this a solemn lesson for the radicals of today who have to deal with almost infinitely more nicely balanced and ter­ rible forces, potent for peace or slaughter as a careless breath or hand-touch shall determine? How rapidly this clergyman was leaving be­ hind him the orthodoxy of his church is indicat­ ed in this paragraph of his “Autobiography,” which immediately follows the one just quoted: “I had, however, been influenced by my youthful optimism to adopt the doctrine of a deity that ‘shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.’ When civil war began to threaten the country, I did, indeed, modify my divinity. With some satisfaction I find in the Cincinnati Inquirer a letter signed ‘A Soldier of the Con­ stitution,’ written after hearing one of my ser­ mons, which says: ‘Any man professing to be a Christian minister, who classes Jehovah, the �Christian’s God, in the same category with Mars and Jupiter, and Odin, the barbarous and licen­ tious creations of a heathen imagination, and says, as did Mr. Conway, that our God of Battles is no better than these pagan deities, should be indicted under the statute against blasphemy, if there be one in your state laws.’ ” The Dial and Its Contributors The wide discussion provoked by his theo­ logical and philosophical heresies had its in­ evitable outcome in the establishment of a month­ ly of his own, The Dial, which appeared in Jan­ uary, i860, and which expired at the end of the year, killed by the civil war. The prefatory word was remarkably fine, I think, especially in its symbolry of the floral dial. This is the clos­ ing paragraph: “The Dial stands before you, reader, a legiti­ mation of the Spirit of the Age, which aspires to be free—free in thought, doubt, utterance, love, and knowledge. It is, in our minds, sym­ bolized not so much by the sun-clock in the yard, as by the floral dial of Linnaeus, which recorded the advancing day by the opening of some flowers and the closing of others—it would report the Day of God as recorded in the un­ folding of higher life and thought, and the clos­ ing up of old superstitions and evils; it would be a Dial measuring time by growth.” The magazine “was well received”; “it had a large subscription list—the Jews especially in­ teresting themselves—and received good notices from the press.” The one of these that moved him most was in the Ohio State Journal, and he �—33— soon learned that it was written by a very young man, William Dean Howells. In a few days they met, and became lifelong friends. Emer­ son, Howells, Orson Murray, Frothingham, were among the contributors, as was our old radical of North Carolina, Dr. M. E. Lazarus, who usually used his second name, Edgeworth, in writing for the press. Almost my last communication from Dr. Con­ way was the request to find for him a volume of The Dial; which I succeeded in doing, after an extended search. But, alas! he stopped, in his be­ loved Paris, before it could reach his hand. Idolatry of the Union Conway heard Lincoln say in a speech in Cincinnati in 1859 that “slavery is wrong,” and that “the government is expressly charged with the duty of providing ‘for the general welfare? We believe that the spreading out and perpe­ tuity of the institution of slavery impairs the general welfare.” The words “and perpetuity” had new and startling meaning for Conway, and he printed them in capitals in The Dial and voted for Lincoln. “It was the only vote I ever did cast for a president, having in Washington had no vote and in the later years no faith in any of the candidates or in the office” (Auto, i, 318). But when Lincoln in his inaugural said he had no objection to a proposed amendment to the Constitution which had just passed the Con­ gress, that amendment forbidding any amend­ ment which would authorize the Congress to abolish any state institution, including slavery, �—34— Conway and others were shocked. To him the "idolatry of the Union” "was inconceivable ex­ cept as a commercial interest.” He had no par­ ticular sentiment for the South as a section. "My enthusiasm had been for slavery, and it had turned into an enthusiasm for humanity which naturally sympathized with Garrison; the Union appeared to me an altar on which human sacri­ fices were offered—not merely in the millions of negroes, but even more in the peace! and har­ mony of the white nation. I hated violence more than slavery, and, much as I disliked President Buchanan, thought him right in declining to coerce the seceding states.” The idea of a Union preserved by arms with slavery untouched was abhorrent to him and to such jurists as Stallo, Hoadley, and Alphonso Taft, and the anti-slavery leaders in the East, and he says that such utterances as this, from his first sermon after the fall of Sumter, ex­ pressed their convictions no less than his: "The American arms can win no victory nor conquer any peace which shall not be the victory of hu­ manity from the wrongs that degrade and af­ flict humanity. In the Promethean games of Greece those who ran in the races all bore light­ ed torches, and he won the race who reached the goal first with his torch still lighted. If he reached the goal with his torch extinguished he lost the day. It was not, therefore, the swiftest racers who won the prize. Indeed, the swiftest were more apt to have their torches put out by the wind. It is thus with the contest on the American arena. Our true prize cannot be vron �—35— by getting the better of the South in an appeal to arms. What if, when we reach the goal, the torch of Liberty intrusted to America to bear in the van of nations be extinguished! What if, by some dishonorable treaty with this or that [border] state, which would be a good ally in war, we have pledged ourselves toi continue en­ slavers of men, and come to claim the prize with the light of that sacred torch lost!” (Auto, i, 326.) His Plan to Abolish Slavery Conway went to Washington and found his old church used as a depository of arms. “So had repelled light returned as lightning.” He talked with his old friends, Rev. Dr. Furness and Senator Sumner, who “both trusted a good deal in God,” he says. “I said that I had heard all my life that God would end slavery ‘in his own good time,’ but I had learned from history that when reformation was left to God he brought it about with hell-fire. That, I urged, was just our peril, and it could be averted only by using the natural weapon of liberty—namely, liberty itself. I knew slavery and slaveholders well; if the President and Congress should at once declare every slave in America free, every Southerner would have to stay at home and guard his slaves. There could be no war. We could then pay all the owners with the cost of the army for one month. Furness and Sumner earnestly accepted my doctrine, and Sumner begged me to devote myself to spreading it through the North and West” (Auto, i, 330). This he did, and his maintenance of this �tion in Ohio led the irreconcilable Clement L. Vallandigham to say of him: “It seems to us that about three months in Fort McHenry, in a strait uniform, with fre­ quent introductions to the accommodating insti­ tution called the town pump, and without the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus, would have a tendency to improve the gentleman mentally and, for a while, at least, rid the community of a nuisance” (Auto, i, 338). In a few months this “honest fanatic”—Con­ way’s kindly description—was himself in prison as a traitor. The Republic of Hayti asked for diplomatic re­ lations; Washington, by Seward, answered that a black minister could not be received. Con­ way says: “Then there arose before me asf if in letters of flame—‘The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. “ ‘And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind him to powder.’ His “Rejected Stone ” “Then I set myself to write the little book en­ titled, ‘The Rejected Stone; or, Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America. By a Native of Vir­ ginia.’ ” The rejected stone was Justice. The book had a tremendous circulation, and was reviewed by the whole press. A large edi­ tion was printed for distribution among the sol­ diers, Conway gladly relinquishing his royalty on these tens of thousands. �General Fremont, in Missouri, had proclaimed confiscate the property of those found in arms against the United States, “and their slaves, if any they have, are declared freemen.” The proc­ lamation sent a thrill of joy through the North, but the President canceled the proclamation and soon relieved Fremont of Southern command. A vast indignation meeting was held in Cin­ cinnati, Judge Stallo presiding. Conway’s speech at this meeting so excited the New York Herald that it demanded his suppression by the govern­ ment as a “reverend traitor.’’ The gist of the passage in which The Herald found treason is in these lines: “A decree that this government ignores the relation of slavery ends the war. There is from that moment no army in the South, but a home­ guard.” Conway lectured in Washington early in 1862 and Sumner suggested that he call on the Presi­ dent, which he did in company with W. H. Channing, who had succeeded him; in the Wash­ ington pulpit. The interview with Lincoln was prolonged and earnest, but neither could con­ vince the other. Proceeding from Washington to Boston, the literary men, including Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whipple, Fields, gave him a grand dinner at the Parker House. The next day, Emerson went over with him his forthcoming lecture before the Emancipation League. Its title was “The Golden Hour” and it was soon brought out in book form. Emerson adopted Conway’s idea, al­ ready set forth, that slavery was the commis- �-38sariat of the Southern army, embodied it in his own cpming lecture, "American Civilization,” giving due credit, and it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, April, 1862. The President, so Senator Sumner miormed him, would give him a consulate if he desired it—“which I did not,” he says. At the Western Unitarian Conference at De­ troit, May, 1862, Conway offered this resolu­ tion : “That in this conflict the watchword of our nation and our church and our government should be, Mercy to the South; death to slavery.’’ It was unanimously adopted. An Incident at the Conway Home. It is interesting to know thaH the portrait of the heretical and seditious son saved from des­ truction the old home in Virginia. His father was in Fredericksburg, his two brothers away in the Confederate ranks, and the house in charge of the slaves. As a detachment of Union soldiers was marching by a shot was fired from a win­ dow of Conway House or a corner of the yard and a man was wounded. It was never known who fired the shot. The soldiers were furious and began breaking up the furniture preparatory to destroying the house. But a youth who had known Conway in Washington caught sight of his portrait hanging in the mother’s bedroom and cried to the others to stop. “The servants were called in and were much relieved when they found that it was to speak of my portrait. Old Eliza cried, ‘It’s Mars’ Monc, the preacher, as good abolitionist as any of you!’ ” �—39— This Conway House at Falmouth became a hospital and here, for a time, Walt Whitman nursed the soldiers, the second time that his path and Conway’s had converged. His Father’s Slaves Taken North After much difficulty, Conway got a pass to go down into Virginia and bring up his father’s slaves, all within the Union lines, but before starting he found that they had got away and were quartered in a small house in Georgetown. How to get them into Ohio, where he purposed colonizing them, was a very serious problem. But finally he triumphed over all difficulties, the most grave being the Confederate mob in Balti­ more by which they were surrounded and menaced for three hours while waiting for a train to the West, after being transported across the hostile city by the help of local free negroes. “At length, much to my relief, the ticket­ agent appeared at the window. I saw that, like the other officials, he was angry, but he was a fine-looking Marylander. He turned into flint as I approached; and when I asked the price of tickets, he said sharply, ‘I can’t let those negroes go on this road at any price.’ I knew that he would have to let them gio, but knew also that he could make things very uncomfort­ able for us. I silently presented my military or­ der to the disagreeable and handsome agent, and he began to read it. He had read but two or three words of it when he looked up with astonishment, and said, ‘The paper says that these are your father’s slaves.’ ‘ 1 hey are, I re­ plied. ‘Why, Sir, they would bring a good deal �—40— of money in Baltimore!’ ‘Possibly,’ I replied. Whereupon (moved, probably, by supposing that I was making a great sacrifice) he said, ‘By God, you shall have every car on this road if you want it.’ ” So the seventy negroes were taken to* Ohio and settled at Yellow Spring, where they did well. In September, 1863, appeared the Boston Com­ monwealth. It was financed by wealthy anti­ slavery Republicans and edited by Moncure D. Conway and Frank B. Sanborn. It was on the best terms with Garrison’s Liberator, paid at­ tention to literature, and in its columns several young writers made their bows to the public, among these being Louisa Alcott. Conway rejoiced in the President's emanci­ pation proclamation, limited as was its field. “But,” he mournfully writes, “when our ecstasy had passed, some of us perceived that while free­ dom had got a paper proclamation, the cannon­ ball proclamation had gone to slavery. The anti-slavery generals were in the North; the military posts where slaves might become free were under military generals or governors no­ toriously hostile to emancipation. The three generals who had proclaimed freedom to the slaves in their departments—Fremont, Phelps, and Hunter—had all been removed, and to the slaves these removals were pro-slavery proclama­ tions which they understood, while this of the New Year they could not read even if it were allowed to reach them.” Among the most effective obstructionists was �—4i— Stanley, an old politician of North Carolina, ap­ pointed military governor of the reconquered portion of that state. Boston sent a delegation to talk with the President, Wendell Phillips, Moncure Conway, and Elizur Wright being prominent members. The interview was amica­ ble but resultless. On this visit, Conway preach­ ed to the Senate, having an audience of nearly 2,000 and pressing home his arguments for free­ dom for all. “Complications with England were arising; our golden hour for ending at once both the war and slavery had passed.” In February, Phillips suggested that Conway go to England to lecture for a few months and “persuade the English that the North is right.” The proprietor of The Commonwealth agreed to give him $1,000 for two letters a week; Phillips, Wright, Longfellow, and others raised $700. He started in April, 1863, armed with a letter of introduc­ tion from Emerson to Carlyle, another from Geo. W. Curtis to Browning, several from Garrison to the anti-slavery leaders, while from Mr. and Mrs. George Stearns he carried a life-size bust of John Brown for Victor Hugo. In his diary, written on the steamship City of Washington, he says: “I have brought along John Stuart Mill’s new book on ‘Liberty,’ published in Boston the day I left. It is a book of wonderful truisms, of startling commonplaces. In reading it one feels that such a book should be in the course of college study everywhere, so axiomatic are the laws it states; and yet there is scarcely1 a state! �—42— on earth that would not be revolutionized by a practical adoption of its principles. Mr. Mill’s views of social and individual liberty are in the direction of those stated by William von Hum­ boldt in his ‘Sphere and Duties of Government.’ ‘The grand, leading principle,’ says Humboldt, ‘towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.’ ” There is not time to follow Conway to Eng­ land ; to trace the footsteps of his thirty-years’ pilgrimage there. Nor can I go with him now on his visit to the Wise Men of the East? nor let you get a glimpse of the rich treasures stored in such books of his as “Republican Supersti­ tions,” “The Wandering Jew,” “Lessons for ToDay,” “The Earthward Pilgrimage,” “Idols and Ideals,” “Travels in South Kensington,” and the “Lives” of Hawthorne, Emerson, and Carlyle. Neither can I take you with me now into a score of other fields where I have spent so many de­ lighted and instructed hours. All this must await the pleasure of Father Time and the great god Plutus; it is my hope to put into other papers a small part of what I have been com­ pelled to leave out of this. An Ideal Biographer of Paine I think that you will agree with me that Mon­ cure Daniel Conway was just the man that could have been expected to lift Thomas Paine again into the honoring gaze of his countrymen of the world; I think you will agree that he was a much more important figure in the ethical and �—47— remorseless enough in the South—one who was asked if he had ever been in a certain Virginia town answered, ‘Yes, I was there three weeks one Sunday’—but nowhere else in the world was I ever so waylaid and plundered by! thei Sabbath as in Honolulu.” Again: The missionaries—“Their theology alone might have been innocuous, for the Hawaiians could not have understood it; the moral system, the superstition that nudity is wicked, that gaiety and pleasure are offensive to God, and consequent changes in their ways of life—as Charles Darwin pointed out—these are the things fatal to tropical tribes. Dr. Titus M. Coan, quoted by Darwin in his ‘Descent of Man,’ says, ‘The [Hawaiian] natives have undergone a greater change in their habits of life in fifty years than Englishmen in a thousand years.’ ” Speaking of the distinguished English men and women who raised a fund to buy clothes for the native women of Australia, Conway says: “It was these pious prudes who killed off the Tasmanians. It was the belief of every scientific man I met that they all were attacked by tuber­ culosis soon after they put on clothing.” Of a group of Australian natives: “Were it not for the filthy skins and blankets on which the Brit­ ish prudes insist, they would by no means be repulsive.” Of Australasian federation: “Where either in­ dividuals or states are fettered together, their movements must be that of the slowest; and the slowest is apt to be the colleague that refuses to move at all, unless backward. The more free �-48individuals, whether men or communities, the more chances for those variations from which higher forms are developed. The old shout of ‘Liberty and Union, one and inseparable,’ has a fine sound, but so has the prophecy of the lion and the lamb lying down together. The lamb will be inside the lion, and Liberty be devoured by over-centralization.’’ Justice, Peace—and Farewell I have said that the dominant note in Con­ way’s message was the plea for peace, and so I cannot do better in closing than to give to you his latest suggestion and prayer, offered to us all in these simple and earnest words com­ posing the last paragraphs of his Autobiography: “And now at the end of my work, I offer yet a new plan for ending war—namely, that the friends of peace and justice shall insist on a demand that every declaration of war shall be regarded as a sentence of death by one people on another, and shall be made only after a full and formal judicial inquiry and trial, at which the accused people shall be fairly represented. This was suggested to me by my old friend, Professor Newman, who remarked that no war in history had been preceded by a judicial trial of the issue. The meanest prisoner can not be executed without a trial. A declaration of war is the most terrible of sentences—it sentences a people to be slain and mutilated, their women to be widowed, their children orphaned, their cities burned, their commerce destroyed. The real motives of every declaration of war are un­ avowed and unavowable. Let them be dragged �� 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 A sketch and an appreciation of Moncure Daniel Conway, freethinker and humanitarian : an address at the Paine-Conway memorial meeting of the Manhattan Liberal Club, January 31, 1908 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Walker, Edwin C. [d.1931] Description An account of the resource Place of publication: New York Collation: 49 p. ; 20 cm. Notes: Inscription inside front cover: From Mrs Mildred Conway Sawyer. H.N. Bradlaugh Bonner. Sep. 22, 08. 'The writings of M.D. Conway in print at this date' available from Edwin C. Walker listed on back cover. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Edwin C. Walker Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1908 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context N656 Subject The topic of the resource Free thought Conway Hall Ethical Society 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 (A sketch and an appreciation of Moncure Daniel Conway, freethinker and humanitarian : an address at the Paine-Conway memorial meeting of the Manhattan Liberal Club, January 31, 1908), 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 Moncure Conway NSS https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/5a90f1aa17b5551b2adf43813e012b4e.pdf?Expires=1777507200&Signature=mbNo5aQjTRtlLgvrEeArDWepyU03kCBjea%7EA6IsEtnFtJqyBK8P59pqsiUMz-bL6zEkGLR5X7-yPLXniN0-tlcI-L4ynjKnhiJiw12SJMKtkyCFso91Xrq7Zap6J%7EBegjgorSkjaVCigeL23RfGrD89aHkB2L7nF5Veaw0WtrJ9CDIXGcnwA84skzxfD2%7EKcCmqlFgy0A34f0rdn6yPrF2CT-cqquWqbEFIpyiaMBPUNwMT8HLfkGF8zDgHYyVuTc03wMVr7cBHqaiiqC-IEI67q%7EaZ7xUGB7%7EN9Eh4FLHRkEApCoiUWEp58%7EDN55k-W7ea7W7y0IUF4J0YZwDYW7A__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 4d080b4e091009f620fa86f0b3fa4dea PDF Text Text AN EXAMINATION OF SOCIALISM By HILAIRE BELLOC, M.P? Socialism is a political theory according to which people would be happier and better if the means of production—that is, the land of a country and its buildings, ships, machines, rails, &c.—belonged to the Government instead of belonging, as they now mainly do, to private citizens and private corporations. That is the only exclusive meaning of Socialism. All the other wobbly ideas that have been tacked on to it by its enemies or its friends—that it is “ atheistic,” or that it involves sexual “ immorality,” that it is “ progressive,” that it is “ Christian ”—have nothing to do with the one proposition which alone distinguishes it from all other policies. A Socialist State need be neither more democratic nor less democratic than the present state of affairs. A State in which all the means of production were owned by the Government might be under a despot or under an aristocracy, or it might be managed as a democracy. However it was managed it would be 1 Reprinted by permission from 'die St. George's Review and revised by the author. �2 An Examination of Socialism a Socialistic State if the means of production were owned and controlled by Government. Socialism does not in its essence imply that nobody should own anything. There is no reason why a man in a Socialist State should not own a great quantity of things for his own private enjoyment. The only thing that would be denied to private ownership would be something commonly used or usable as a means of production ; something which, when one part of the community owns it and the other part does not, permits the owning part to live upon the labour of the non-owning part. A man in a Socialistic State would be allowed to own ornaments and purely personal possessions such as pictures and furniture, watches, and even productive machines should they be used for his own enjoyment alone ; but he would not be allowed a share, large or small, in a factory, or a shop, or a railroad, or a commercial steamship, or a piece of land (to be used for profit), except that share which he might be said to own as a member of the community whose Government owned and controlled all these things. Again, a State could be Socialistic and yet have very different degrees of enjoyment among its citizens. The Government might reward men according to merit, distributing very unequally the wealth produced by labour applied to the capital and land it owned. The Government might give large amounts of the good things to a few people whom it thought deserved them, and very little to the mass of mankind whom it might think so wicked as not to deserve them. It might make an unequal distribution by giving high rewards to the talented, the good organizers and the �An Examination of Socialism 3 good managers, in order to secure efficiency of produc­ tion, and very little to the general mass of labourers. It might act purely by caprice, giving large amounts to its favourites and small amounts to the rest of the community. , It might (as many confusedly think that it must') distribute to each according to his need ; it might make a rigidly equal distribution to each family in the community according to the age and number of its members. Whatever form the distribution took, whether there were great differences between the amounts distributed or exact equality in them, whether the distribution were determined by competition in talent or by caprice, or by the sense of human equality, the State would still be a Socialistic State if the means of production were owned and controlled by the Government. This is the main point to seize ; for it is in this, and in this alone, that Socialism differs from other political theories. It is certain that, whatever may have happened in other parts of the world, our ancestors here in Western Europe never had anything of the kind. There was plenty of co-operative production in the Middle Ages ; there was plenty of common land (as there still is) side by side with land privately owned. There existed for a short time a legal fiction, which still theoreti­ cally survives, that the land of the country ultimately belonged to the Crown ; but in practice no Socialistic State can be discovered in. the past history of men of our own blood. Many have thought to discover it, and guessed it to be present in certain ill-understood and very obscure primitive customs, but the evidence in favour of this kind of guesswork was never strong �4 An Examination of Socialism enough to convince a close critic of evidence, and, as research proceeds, gets weaker every day. The proposal, then, which is the Socialist proposal, to convert all private property in the means of produc­ tion—that is, in the factories, machines, land, houses, &c.—into Government property is a novel proposal. It is a proposal to do something quite new and as yet untried by men of our descent with our inherited tradi­ tions and instincts and ways of looking at things. Why has so revolutionary a proposal been made, and what arguments can be brought forward in its favour ? This revolutionary proposal has been made because the present state of society is in itself a novel one, suffering from evils new in the history of our country, and, for that matter, of the world ; and the arguments in favour of it—the arguments, that is, by which it is attempted to prove that England would be a better and a happier country under Socialism, are many and strong. As things now are in England, a small propor­ tion of the inhabitants of the country possess by far the greater part of the means of production. It is very difficult to obtain exact figures, and all general state­ ments made in this connection must be received with caution. But I think the following general state­ ment is not very wide of the mark, though, of course, it does not pretend to be rigidly accurate. I think one may say that less than two hundred families at the very most control one-quarter of our means of produc­ tion. Another quarter is in the hands of perhaps two thousand families at the most. And the remain­ ing half (unless we are to include properties so small that they hardly count as capital) cannot at the utmost be made to include as much as a �An Examination of Socialism 5 sixteenth of the whole community. The rest consist of families working for a wage, and unlikely, save in exceptional individual instances, to be anything other than wage-earners, either now or in the future. Side by side with this concentration of ownership in few hands you have a highly competitive system of pro­ duction under which security of employment is at its minimum. Thus a great and an increasing proportion of the population—so it is maintained—has no share in the permanent wealth of the country, and can only enjoy what it does on condition of continual labour for others who own that permanent wealth ; while the workers, though not perhaps becoming actually poorer, are becoming relatively poorer compared with the owning classes, and with all this they are less and less secure of permanent employment as trade competition extends over a wider and wider area of the world’s surface. A good crop of some product on the other side of the globe may suddenly throw out of employ­ ment any number of men employed here in the pro­ duction of a similar article. The cessation of demand for something produced by us, but consumed by people whom we have never seen, in India or in China, may suddenly destroy the livelihood of a whole group of artizans in England. Every progress even, every new invention, tends to bring into the experience of some group of labouring men a period of insecurity at the best, and at the worst of acute distress. Meanwhile there is a constant tendency for property to amalgamate still further, there is a constant tendency for the big business to swallow up the small one, and it is the main Socialist argument that if we leave things as they are we shall end in a state of society where quite a �6 An Examination of Socialism small number of exceedingly rich men will control the destinies of all the rest of their fellows. It will, more­ over (they say), be a state of society in which competi­ tion for employment will always maintain the average earnings of the labouring class at an exceedingly low level, and the power of enjoyment of the mass of the community will be miserably small compared with the power of enjoyment of the few owners who control it. It is to avoid a consummation of this kind that Socialists propose the fundamental transformation of our social system, towards which transformation they are working with such enthusiasm and conviction. Now let us look at another aspect of the matter, and consider certain consequences that would follow upon Socialism were it ever brought into being. In the first place, no man in a Socialistic State would be what we now call free. This is a proposition very hotly denied by many Socialists, because they believe it to be an unfair and a misleading one ; but no clear thinker can deny it, and by far the best arguments used in this connection by the clearest thinkers upon the Socialistic side are to the effect that, though the citizen in a Socialist State would not be “ free ” in the sense in which an old independent owner of land and capital used to be, he would be much freer than the mass of the population is to-day. Before returning to that, however, it is well to repeat the first and fundamental objection to the Socialist solution of our modern diffi­ culties. No man under a Socialist State would be what we call free. He could not exercise his will as to where he should go, what he should consume, what he should do with his time, to what activities he should direct his energies. �An Examination of Socialism 7 There is a rather muddle-headed habit, but a com­ mon one, present not only in Socialist discussion but in most other political discussion, which may be briefly described as trying to have your cake and eat it too. Men like to believe that some ideal of theirs would have all the advantages inherent to itself, and also the advan­ tages in contradiction with its very nature. All men love individual freedom—even such a remnant of it as the modern artizan may claim is very dear, and the threat of losing it is a serious one. It is, therefore, not surprising that those who see in Socialism the only remedy for the appalling evils which .we suffer to-day try to reconcile that remedy with individual freedom. But consider for a moment how impossible such a re­ conciliation is. A man in a factory under a master may, if he choose, leave that factory and look for work else­ where. If he prefer, for the sake of security, to remain in that one employment, he is in many things at the disposal of his master’s will during the hours of his labour. He cannot go to the manager or to the master and say : “ I don’t like this job ; I feel inclined for that other one. Be good enough to give it me.” At least he can go and say it, and perhaps in certain cases if he shows large aptitude for the new job and is able to convince his master of. it, or if he finds a special favour extended to him, that liberty of choice will be conceded; but it is obvious that it could not be universal. You could not have every employee in Mr. Jones’s mill saying exactly what he would do and for how long he would do it, or choosing his job according to his private inclination. So far liberty is already largely restricted by the industrial system, and the rich man is far freer than the poor one. But now go a step further. Work �8 An Examination of Socialism is done, and the man goes out into the street. He thinks he will have a glass of beer ; but all the public­ houses in the neighbourhood are owned by Mr. Jones just as much as the mill is, and Mr. Jones will or will not let him drink, according as he sees fit. He goes home, and, finding something not suitable to him in his present house, he decides to move into another which has caught his fancy, and which is more convenient to him for some reason. He finds, to his astonishment, that not only is Mr. Jones the owner of his present house, but of the other house too ; and can deny him the faculty of exchanging his old residence for the new one. He thinks he will use part of his wages to get a pair of boots ; but he can only get boots of the sort provided by Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones can allow him to have a new pair, or not, just as he thinks fit. He will go to a music-hall. He finds that Mr. Jones owns that, too, and decides on his entertainment. Wherever he turns, all the things he desires to get, all the places in which he desires to move and to have his being, belong to the same man as owned the mill where his working hours were spent, and wherever he goes, no matter how far afield, this omnipotent being is every­ where the owner and controller, not, indeed, of his person, but of the food by which his person remains alive, and of the shelter by which he remains alive, and of every recreation or necessity relative to his being. Now Mr. Jones is, under Socialist conditions, the Government; and to the loss of freedom which every man feels during those hours which he gives as a wage­ earner to the capitalist who employs him must be added, under a Socialist system, a similar loss of freedom in all �An Examination of Socialism g the other hours of his life. There is no way out of that truth. To this criticism the Socialist has an answer. The answer is as follows : “ I admit that the ownership of all the means of production by the Government would be a bad thing, if it were used despotically, as such ownership is now used by individual owners. But I would never tolerate a Socialist ideal unless that ideal ir.sluded democratic management.” Note at this point that the two ideas of Government ownership and democracy have no connection. We have all of us met Socialists who were not in the least democratic, and it is perfectly easy to be a Socialist and a most rabid anti-democrat, especially if you are keener on people being made to do whatever you think is good for them than you are upon their being free to choose between good and evil. Still, it must be admitted that the desire for Socialism, springing as it nearly always does in hearts powerfully affected by the misery of the people, is usually associated with a democratic ideal of government; and most Socialists will say to you : “ The man will not be free as regards the Government, but since he will, as a citizen, be the master of the Government, he will be really just as free as the most independent owner is to-day, and much more free than the ordinary wage-earner is to-day. He will be able to make or unmake the regulations which shall control his life.” The critic of Socialism at once replies that this will not be the case. A man voting as one of many thou­ sands or millions is quite a different thing from a man enjoying elastic and immediate personal control every moment over his own actions. No one would be so �io An Examination of Socialism insane as to say that the actions of a modern Govern­ ment, on however democratic a base, are invariably consonant with the will of the great majority of its citizens. Most people would say that usually the actions of the Government were out of touch with the will of the great majority of the people. This, they would say, was true even of the very limited sphere of Government to-day, and of the very slow and imperfect action which it can take in quite a few matters. Those who believe this to be true even of Government as it is cannot believe that Socialism, no matter how democratic the political system with which it was combined, would give freedom of action even to the majority of citizens. The critic of Socialism asks a further question : What about the minority ? Either you must have a constitu­ tion where nothing can be done without an overwhelm­ ing majority, in which case you would be perpetually coming to a deadlock, or else you must work by ordinary majorities, in which case you would be per­ petually creating hearty and intolerable discontent in large minorities opposed to you. Further, this system of majority voting, even if it worked, could only apply to the very large decisions of life. In all the innumer­ able minor details that make up our circumstances we should necessarily be in the hands of officials. I am not saying that would be a bad thing, or that it would be worse than the state of affairs that exists now for most of our citizens. I am only pointing out that this is an absolutely inevitable result of Socialism, and a result that cannot be avoided save by a process of confusion of thought: by trying to believe that a thing can both be and not be at the same time. Nor has �An Examination of Socialism 11 any one ever been able to show how so clear and obvious a resultant of the Socialist system could possibly be avoided. The next criticism offered to Socialism is of a more subtle and profound kind, but is none the less very real. As Socialism would destroy what we call free­ dom, so it would destroy what we call the satisfaction of the desire for property. Now here two very im­ portant arguments used by Socialists against their opponents must be immediately noted. First, they say, under present conditions the vast mass of our fellow-citizens cannot satisfy that human desire for property in so far as it exists • their whole efforts are directed—and God knows under what an anxious strain of body and mind !—to satisfy the bare necessities of human appetite—the necessary food, and clothing, and house room. They would, under a Socialistic State, if it were democratically managed, own, not indeed any of the means of production, but far, far more of the enjoyable permanent possessions of life than they do to-day. This is perfectly true, and all that the critic of Socialism can set against it is a repetition of the undoubted truth just stated—namely, that under a Socialist State the desire for property which can now in theory be satisfied by all, and is in practice satisfied by some, would not be satisfied by any if private property in land and the means of production were abolished. But even to this the Socialist has a second and a very strong reply. He can say: “The desire for property does not exist very strongly in the case of land and of machinery. The desire to have these things is only a desire to be what is called ‘ rich ’—that is, to be able to �12 An Examination of Socialism exchange the product of land and capital so owned against daily enjoyments. The desire is not for the things themselves, for the land itself, or for the machinery itself ; and those things which a man really does desire to own, the things which are part of his permanent possessions, and with which he is constantly in contact, and out of which he obtains a permanent enjoyment because he is their owner, those things—his books, his furniture, his ornaments, his pictures, perhaps even a little plot of land (if he promises to produce nothing for sale with it)—he could possess under the Socialist State; and then everybody would have such personal possessions, whereas now very few do.” There is but one reply to this very powerful conten­ tion, which is that, as a fact, men do desire to own land and the means of production, and to own them absolutely, not only in order that they may be what is called “ rich ”—that is, that they may command passing enjoyments—but for the pleasure and consequences of owning the things themselves, and that for the following reasons : First, that you cannot distinguish between the desire of ownership in a thing according to whether that thing is productive or not. It is true the interest which a man takes in a share of a business is not the same as the interest he takes in a particular instrument which he himself handles and uses. Still, it is a personal interest, and not a mere crude sense of superior opportunity for enjoyment. This is particularly the case with regard to land, which arouses the most powerful sentiment of affection and interest in the possessor, quite inde­ pendently of whether it is cultivated for profit or �An Examination oj Socialism 13 not, and quite independently of the amount in which it is owned. Secondly, this general desire to own is connected with certain human consequences which have nothing to do with whether the thing owned is capable of exploiting the labour of others or not. Of one of these human consequefices, economic freedom, mention has been made above. Another well worth noting, and closely attached to it, is the preservation of personal honour. Where few own, the mass who do not own at all are under a perpetual necessity to abase them­ selves in a number of little details. That is why industrial societies fight so badly compared with societies of peasant proprietors. The mass of the population gets trained to the sacrifice of honour; it gets used to being ordered about by the capitalist,, and partially loses its manhood. If there were but one capitalist, the State, this evil would certainly be exaggerated. Men might be better fed, better clothed, and materially much happier ; they might be brighter in spirits, better companions, and healthier men all round, but they would necessarily have lost all power of expression for the sentiment known as personal honour; they would have one absolute master, all forms of personal seclusion from whom would be im-' possible. This, when it is stated in the midst of modern evils, appears a very small point; but those who have passed by compulsion from a higher to a lower standard of personal honour can testify how vital a point is that honour in the scheme of human happiness. It must, however, finally be asked of the man who criticizes the Socialist proposal: “ If you will not accept this positive and clear remedy for the in­ �i4 An Examination of Socialism tolerable conditions of modern industrial society, what alternative have you ? ” It is as though a man suffering from a bad limb were to hesitate to have it amputated, and the surgeon were to say to him : “If you will not let me cut it off, what other course do you propose to pursue in order to be cured ? ” • This question is a strong and insistent one; it is the root question of the whole affair, and it requires reply ; for any one who pretends that the present con­ dition of society in England is tolerable, or has even the least chance of enduring, is of a mental calibre worthy rather of what is called “ practical politics ” than of serious and vital discussion. Let us see, then, what the answer is which the serious opponents of Socialism (not the politicians, for they do not count) make to its demand. What they say is, that if you could make a society in which the greater part of citizens owned capital and land in small quantities, that society would be happy and secure. They say (as every one must) that such a subdivision is quite possible with regard to land; but they also believe it to be possible with regard to shares in industrial concerns. When they are told that a high division of this sort would necessarily and soon drift again into a congested state of owner­ ship, with a few great capitalists on the one hand and a wretched proletariat upon the other, they answer that, as a matter of fact, in the past, when property was thus well divided, it did not drift into that con­ dition, but that the highly divided state of property was kept secure for centuries by public opinion trans­ lating itself into laws and customs, by a method of �An Examination of Socialism 15 guilds, of mutual societies, by an almost religious feel­ ing of the obligation not to transgress certain limits of competition, &c. When they are told that a State in which property was highly divided would involve more personal responsibility and personal anxiety than would the Socialist State, they freely admit this, but they add that such responsibilities and anxieties are natural to freedom in any shape and are the price one must pay for it. Consider carefully this alternative theory. It is valuable because—First, it is the only possible alter­ native ; secondly, because it is one which has hardly entered into the consciousness of English people. So few English people have ever owned anything during the last few generations that the idea of highly divided capital is not present as a social experience. It is hardly an historic memory. Nevertheless, it remains with English people, just as much as with any other Europeans, an instinctive ideal. And I repeat, between that ideal of highly divided capital and Socialist collec­ tivism there is no possible third ideal ; we must go one way or the other. Every reform, every little tinkering and futile Bill which people maunder through in the House of Commons necessarily tends one way or the other. The whole contention of the future in Europe lies between these two theories. On the one hand you have the Socialist theory, the one remedy and the only remedy seriously discussed in the industrial societies which have ultimately grown out of the religious schism of the sixteenth century—that is, the industrial societies of North Germany, of the Northern United States, and especially of England and the lowlands of Scotland. �i6 An Examination of Socialism On the other hand, you have the Catholic societies whose ultimate appetite is for a state of highly divided property, working in a complex and probably, at last, in a co-operative manner. That is certainly the way the Irish natioii is going. The Irish people— unlike the aliens of the North—have steadily refused to turn themselves into a proletariat, whether in the modern industrial phase or in preparation for the final Socialistic phase. The Irish are determined to own. The same solution appeals to the great mass of the French people (with the exception of certain plague spots such as the mining and spinning districts of the North), and the interest of all our debates in the near future in Western or European society will lie, I think, in the victory of one or other of these two ideals—the Socialist ideal, in which the diseased industrial world will attempt to heal itself upon lines consonant with its existing nature ; the ideal of widely-diffused owner­ ship, in which the healthier and older world, which has survived outside the modern industrial system, proposes to build up its new life, until it can see its way to basing an intensive production upon highly divided individual property. Which of the two systems will win no one can say. The Socialists, of course, do the most prophesying : but then they have grown out of that Biblical enthusiasm in religion and philosophy to which prophecy is native. But prophecy has always Been worthless in human affairs, save where it regarded transcendental things. PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY THE CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY. U.—Dec., 1908. � 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 An examination of socialism Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Belloc, Hilaire [1870-1953] Description An account of the resource Place of publication: London Collation: 16 p. ; 19 cm. Notes: Reprinted by permission from the St. George's Review and revised by the author. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Catholic Truth Society Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1908 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RA1531 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (An examination of socialism), identified by <span><a href="www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span>, is free of known copyright restrictions. 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For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Architecture and Place Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Humanist Library and Archives Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Description An account of the resource A collection of digitised items from the Humanist Library and Archives telling the story of buildings and spaces occupied by the Conway Hall Ethical Society (formerly the South Place Ethical Society). Also includes several born digital items. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Conway Hall Ethical Society Subject The topic of the resource Architecture Conway Hall (London, England) South Place Chapel, Finsbury Mansford, Frederick Herbert (1871-1946) Language A language of the resource English 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 Parchment 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 Lease of 17, 18, 19 and 20 Lambs Conduit Passage, 26 November 1908 Description An account of the resource <p>Lease of 17, 18, 19 and 20 Lambs Conduit Passage, (26 November 1908).</p> <ul><li>(1) Algernon Augustus de Lille Strickland 37 Fleet St, City of London, esq</li> <li>(2) Robert Howe of 7 Finsbury Square, London, gent</li> </ul><p>(1)-(2) 4 messuages nos. 17,18, 19 and 20 Lambs Conduit Passage.</p> <p>Term: 1 year and thenceforth from year to year</p> <p>Rent: £120 pa</p> <p>(2) covenants to insure at £3535.</p> <p>Includes detailed plan of premises.</p> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Unknown Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1908 Subject The topic of the resource Leases Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SPES/3/1/1/24 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource image/jpeg Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <p>Licenced for digitisation by the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/guidance/copyright-orphan-works" target="_blank">Intellectual Property Office</a> under Orphan Works Licence <a href="https://www.orphanworkslicensing.service.gov.uk/view-register/details?owlsNumber=OWLS000075-10" target="_blank">OWLS000075-10</a>.</p> Lamb's Conduit Passage, Holborn Strickland, Algernon Augustus de Lille