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PROFESSOR TYNDALL’S
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
[From The Inquirer of September 5, 1874.]
HE Inaugural Address delivered at Belfast, on
August 19, by Professor Tyndall, President of
the British Association, has probably come like a
thunder-clap to thousands who have read it or heard
of it. For here is one of the strongest, one of the
most generally acknowledged, representatives of
science, the chief, indeed, of the highest scientific
society in the world, from the very throne of science
—the presidential chair—speaking what will seem to
multitudes no other, than the most undisguised
Materialism, which to them will also be the blankest
Atheism. For it will seem the burden of the Address,
that matter alone is the mother and cause of all things,
and that beside it there is no other cause. No God,
no human soul.
When so intelligent a journal as the Spectator thus
interprets the Address in the issue immediately after
its delivery, we may be sure that thousands of persons
will thus interpret it also. And this word of Tyndall,
coming from such a source, supported by such pres
tige and such authority, will make the hearts of many
quail and sicken with fear and sadness. They will
feel a great darkness falling on them. The same
doctrine they will no doubt have often heard before,
but not from such a quarter, with such distinctness,
and coming with such terrible weight. They have
T
�2
thought of it hitherto as the craze of individual and
eccentric scientists, but now it comes as the testimony
of the whole spirit of science, past and present,
spoken through the mouthpiece of one of her latest
and greatest sons. And the thought cannot but
whisper itself: “ Is it, then, really true, or, if not
true, is science going to be all-powerful and make it
seem true, and so make it ultimately prevail ? If so,
then hope and faith must fade. Religion will have
no place. Prayer and preaching will cease. All the
various creeds through which we believe and about
which we contend will equally vanish. Religious
societies will be dissolved, and the whole spirit of
our civilisation must be changed, so that it is terribleto think what the future ages may be.”
We cannot wonder that already the tocsin of alarm
has resounded from many a pulpit. We may be sure
that for months, perhaps years to come, there will be
heard from thousands of pulpits protests, arguments,
denunciations, pleadings, intended to lay the terrible
ghosts which this memorable Address has raised.
But what is it that Dr Tyndall has really said to
cause such sensation and such fear ? He has simply
said out boldly what science has been really saying,
though often with timid, hesitating speech, for many a
year, we may say for many an age. It is this : that
matter, as we become more and more acquainted with it,
shows itself to us as capable, by its own inherent laws
and forces, of developing into all the forms and causing
all the phenomena in the universe that we witness or
experience. And so with matter given to begin with,
existing it may be in its crudest form, but still with
all its inherent laws and forces, there is no need of
any other Being, any Creator, any God to mould it,
for it will infallibly mould itself. It is but the same
thought with a wider extension which Laplace
uttered : “ I ask no more than the laws of motion,
heat, and gravitation, and I will write you the
nativity and biography of the solar system.”
�3
Yet do not let us be alarmed through mistaking
the real force and bearing of this apparently most
materialistic affirmation. Observe at the outset the
expression, that matter being given with its inherent
laws and forces, no other creator is necessary to
mould it. Surely not, we, too, say, because the
Creator, the eternal former and sustainer, is in the
laws and forces : they are but the expression of his
action. It is not, then, against the idea of God
Himself that the hostility of science, as represented
by the President of the British Association, is
directed, but against a form of thought in which
men in general have clothed God and presented him
to their minds. They have thought of Him under
the image of a Great Artificer, one who, using matter
as his raw material, worked it up by his power and
skill into the forms which we behold. It is this
thought of an Almighty Artificer, separate from
matter, that science cannot tolerate. But the de
struction of this form of thought, instead of plunging
us into the darkness of Atheism, opens upon us the
light of true Theism. It leaves us free to form
another far grander and worthier thought of God,
that of the In-dwelling, all-forming, and all-sustaining
Spirit of the Universe, which it is clear that Dr Tyndall
recognises under what he calls a Cosmical life—that
is, a life of the Universe.
The truth is, that this conception of God as the
Great Artificer has been inadequate and erroneous
from the beginning. We can now see that it was an
idol, because not the highest conception that we can
form, though perhaps inevitable to the times of
ignorance at which God has winked. And science,
like a young Abraham, has sought from its very
youth to break the idol in pieces. This is why
science has seemed so Atheistic in its tendencies.
The legend of Abraham preserved in the Koran is,
that when he was a young man he went into one of
the temples of his people in their absence and broke
�in pieces all the idols except the biggest there.
Abraham’s hostile feeling towards the idols was
known. He was arrested and brought before the
Assembly. “ Hast thou done this unto our gods,
O Abraham ? ” they inquired. “Nay, that biggest
of them has done the deed : ask them, if they can
speak.” For a time the people were confounded
with his reply, but soon recovered to say to oneanother, “Burn him, and avenge your gods.” The
young Abraham, science, conceived from the first a
hostility to the idol of an artificer God set up in the
temple of man’s mind, and sought to destroy it.
Dr Tyndall’s Address is partly a history of these
endeavours of science to break in pieces the idol.
He tells how in the infancy of Greek science Demo
critus, the laughing philosopher, declared his uncom
promising antagonism to those who deduced the
phenomena of nature from the gods. Empedocles,
who probably met death in his zeal for science in the
burning crater of Etna, and then Epicurus, followed
in the footsteps of Democritus. In the century
before Christ the Roman poet Lucretius boldly
announced the doctrine that Nature was sufficient for
herself. “If,” said he, “you will apprehend and
keep in mind these things, Nature, free at once and
rid of her high lords (the gods and demons), is seen
to do all things spontaneously of herself without the
meddling of the gods.” Whilst science slept, during
the Middle Ages, the voice of protest was not heard;
but when she awoke again, in the era of the Refor
mation, Giordano Bruno, once an Italian monk, again
raised the old witness, and declared that the infinity
of forms under which matter appears were not
imposed upon it by an external artificer. “ By its
own intrinsic force and virtue f he said, “ it brings
these forms forth. Matter is not the mere naked,
empty capacity which philosophers have pictured it,
but the universal mother who brings forth all things
as the fruit of her womb.” And the devotees of the
�5
idol, an artificer god, which he sought to break in
pieces, said, “Burn him, and avenge your god.” And
the Venetian Inquisitors did burn him at the stake.
Taking up Tyndall’s thought, we can now see that
the whole progress of science has seemed to strengthen
the protest and to give more strength to the doctrine
of Lucretius and Bruno, that “ matter, by its own
intrinsic force and virtue, brings these forms (of
nature) forth.”
Newton’s “Principia” went to show that, given,
in matter, the force and law of gravitation and the
laws of motion, there needed no artificer now to
conduct the solar system. The nebular hypothesis
of Kant and Laplace set forth that matter originally
needed no artificer to mould it into worlds, if we
suppose its particles scattered abroad in space
endowed with repulsion and attraction. They would
of themselves form rings, planets, satellites, and sun.
Dalton’s Chemistry showed that if we suppose a few
kinds of primordial atoms of different magnitudes, or
endowed with different forces and possessing certain
laws of attractive affinity, no artificer is necessary to
combine them into the innumerable compounds and
endow them with the qualities with which we are
familiar.
Darwin’s “ Origin of Species ” and
“ Descent of Man ” suggested that, given certain
organic forms of lowly type, no artificer was needed
to construct all the countless forms of organic nature.
For there were in these lowly forms intrinsic force and
virtue, by which they develop into higher forms, and
these into higher, until the ascidian becomes the man.
Herbert Spencer, and now Tyndall, suggest that even
in the inorganic forms of air, water, phosphorus, and
a few other elements, there are intrinsic force and
virtue to make them at some period or other of the
world’s history—Bastian says to make them now—of
themselves combine and form organisms of low type,
which develop, according to Darwin’s idea, even into
higher type ; therefore these inorganic atoms possess
�6
a latent life. Huxley would persuade us not only
that these inorganic atoms come in organic forms to
live, but that in the human brain they think and feel
and will. Thus every line of scientific inquiry seems
to have led to larger and larger belief in Bruno’s
intrinsic force and virtue of matter, making more
and more needless the conception of a Supreme
Artificer.
But we shall be mistaken if we suppose that this
antagonism between matter and God—that is, God
as the Artificer—has been felt only in the world of
science. It has been felt, too, though with less open
confession, in the world of religion. It has been
felt, it may be, where ignorance was bliss. As long
as science was unknown or ignored in the Church,
as during the Middle Ages, religions minds could
hold the belief in an artificer God without misgiving.
But as soon as science began to creep into the Church,
the paralysis of faith began. From that moment was
acted over again the story which the Greek poets
give us of the Theban Sphinx, the beautiful monster,
half-maid, half-lion, who, sitting on a rock, proposed
enigmas to the passers-by, and those who could not
answer them destroyed.
Beautiful but terrible science became the Sphinx.
She was always proposing to those who came near
her the enigma, “How can matter, which seems to
have force and virtue in it sufficient to account for
all things, have any need for an artificer Creator ? ”
And those who could not answer the question were
lost as to their faith in God. This, we believe, is
partly the explanation of the coldness and deadness
that came upon our Churches, especially our Pres
byterian Churches, during the last century. Ministers
and people had become more educated, they had
learnt something of the new science that was rising;
and then they heard the enigma of the Sphinx and
were troubled. Thenceforth it was a struggle with
them to believe. They had lost the child-like faith of
�7
their fathers. The old heartiness of prayer was gone.
Ministers and people began to be shy of strictly reli
gious topics, and to fall back on these ethical common
places of which they were more sure. And if this
same coldness and deadness has lasted on in some of
our churches till our own day, we suspect it has been
because there the old conception of God as the Arti
ficer has been maintained, whilst all the while the
Sphinx has been putting the question which has made
it unbelievable ; and that it is chiefly where the new
conception of the In-dwelling God has been introduced
through the influence of men like Dr Channing,
Martineau, and Theodore Parker, that the devotional
life has been again quickened and deepened.
Truly, then, men like Tyndall and Huxley, Spencer
and Darwin, with the terrible weapons of their
materialism, do but break down an old and much
battered idol which has long been the cause of dread
ful doubts, even to its own devotees, and has set
religion and science at bitter variance. But in
breaking down the idol they are doing us the greatest
service. They are letting in the light; they are
leaving us face to face with a conception of God
before hidden from us by our idol, but which presents
him to us not only in a form which science will allow
—before which, indeed, science and religion become
one—but in a form which is immeasurably grander,
more beautiful, and every way worthier of God than
that which has been broken down. Let us clearly
recognise that, when Tyndall claims for matter that
it is sufficient for everything, he is not thinking of
matter as that dead brute thing which the mass of
men suppose it. To him, as to Herbert Spencer,
matter is but the manifestation of a Great Entity, in
itself unknown and unknowable. It is but the
garment of what Tyndall calls the great cosmical
life—the great life of the cosmos—the Universe.
What is this Great Entity, what is this Great
Cosmical Life, but the Eternal God Himself, of whom,
�8
and through whom, and to whom are all things, who
“besets us behind and before,” and “ in whom we
live and move and have our being ” ? What is this
■conception suggested of the relation of God to the
world but that of the Psalmist—“The heavens shall
wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt
thou change them ” ? And what is this doctrine of
the unknown and unknowable life but that of Job?
“Lo ! these are parts of his ways, but how little a
portion is heard of him ! but the thunder of his power
who can understand ? ”
T. E. P.
FRITTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTEKEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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Professor Tyndall's inaugural address
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 4 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Signed 'T.E.P.'; possibly Thomas Elford Poynting. The Address was given in Belfast to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on August 19, 1874. Reprinted from 'The Inquirer', September 5, 1874. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London. "The address before the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was an occasion to state the aims and concerns of the premiere body of elite men of Victorian science. It was consequently one of the most prestigious places from which to pronounce on what men of science should be doing. John Tyndall famously used his address in 1874 to argue for the superior authority of science over religious or non-rationalist explanations. By the time of this address the Association had largely been taken over by the young guard, men like T.H. Huxley and Tyndall. Nevertheless, Tyndall's bold statement for rationalism and natural law was made in Belfast, a stronghold of religious belief then as now and so it was taken as an aggressive attack on religion. The address was popularly believed to advocate materialism as the true philosophy of science. It remains a powerful call for rationalism, consistency and scepticism." From Victorianweb: http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/belfast.html [accessed 12/2017].
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[Thomas Scott]
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[1874]
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G5529
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[Unknown]
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Philosophy
Rationalism
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Professor Tyndall's inaugural address), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Conway Tracts
Materialism
Natural Law
Philosophy and Science
Rationalism
Science and Religion
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Text
A FEW THOUGHTS
ON THE
^hilosopltg of ©toil anb (Suffering,
From the Stand-point of Reason and Intuition.
It is impossible for a reflective mind to
contemplate the wonders of creation with
out feelings of awe and admiration at the
manifestations of wisdom and power dis
played in its marvellous adaptations and
developments. The beauty, the grandeur,
the beneficence, that meet us at every
turn, speak of Intelligence and Design.
The Power that governs the varied pheno
mena of nature is apparently unlimited.
Our conceptions of this Almighty Power
will depend either upon the theo’ogical
education we have received, or upon the
deductions of our own reasoning faculties
from the phenomena of earth-life and expe
rience. Starting from premisses which of
necessity must be, to an extent, hypotheti
cal, we proceed to deduce certain principles
which appear to underlie the mysterious
phenomena of Evil and Suffering.
Almost all religious minds will admit the
following propositions: it is therefore not
intended in this paper to discuss them:—
1. That Deity is an Intelligent Principle,
Almighty in Power, and perfect in Good
ness.
2. That Man is an embodied Intelligence,
limited in Power, and imperfect in Goodness.
3. That Man is free to the extent of his
power.
4. That Man survives the change we call
death.
5. That by far the larger portion of
human experiences are pleasurable.
6. That a very large proportion of Evil
and Suffering may be traced to ignorance,
and to errors arising therefrom.
With the rejection of so-called infallible
revelations, the proofs we have of man’s
immortality are scientifically inconclusive.
The universality of the feeling in favour of
immortality may be regarded as a spiritual
instinct. The feeling, however, is not alto
gether one of intuition, but rests upon a
logical necessity, arising out of the utter
impossibility of reconciling the experiences
of life with the existence of a Ruling Power
of infinite Intelligence and Goodness, except
upon some such hypothesis.
A thoughtful mind can hardly rest satis
fied with a negation. When, from the force
of honest convictions, men are compelled
to reject any particular account of the
origin of Evil and Suffering, they are still
pressed with the necessity of forming some
theory to supply the void thereby occa
sioned. The facts are too painfully selfevident to be overlooked in any sytem of
philosophy men may consciously or uncon
sciously entertain. With a profound con
viction of the impossibility of any human
faculties being able to compass the mind of
Omnipotence, we would, with all reverence,
use the powers given to us in endeavouring
�2
A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL AND SUFFERING,
to discover some beneficent purposes which
Evil and Suffering may serve in the Divine
economy.
Our conceptions of Deity will ever be the
reflex of our ideas of Perfection. The em
bodiment of all that is Powerful, Holy,
Righteous, and Good, is man’s highest
conception of God ; and, wherever these
attributes culminate in a high degree in
any human being, that being becomes
man’s best representation or manifestation
of Deity. The immeasurable distance be
tween the finite representation and the
infinite reality must, however, never be
overlooked. Nature, in all its varied phe
nomena, is a manifestation of the Mind of
God. The laws that govern creation are
the expressions of the Divine Will. Motion,
life, sensation, and intelligence, are exhibi
tions of God’s Wisdom and Power. These
manifestations are probably all that man
can know of his Creator in the present
state of existence.
It is impossible to suppose that the
creation of the Universe and all that it
contains is purposeless, or that Creation
can fail to glorify its Creator. If the glory
of God be the object of Creation, it follows
that a Being of infinite Power and Wisdom
must, of necessity, adopt the best means
for the attainment of His purpose. May
we now, without irreverence or presump
tion, assume a necessity even to Deity ?
From the constitution of our nature, we are
justified, I think, iu saying that, according
to finite conceptions, even Deity could not
possibly be glorified by intelligences who
were not free to give or withhold their
homage and affections. We have no facul
ties for perceiving how Infinite Intelligence
could be satisfied with ought less than the
spontaneous love and worship of His own
intelligent creatures. Here, then, in the
free will of man, appears to be the key
which unlocks many of the mysteries at
tached to the presence of Evil and Suffering
in a world created and governed by supreme
Love and Intelligence.
We postulate, then, the Love of the
creature as the desire of the Creator ; and,
if this hypothesis be correct, it follows,
that the free will of the creature is an
indispensable condition to the spontaneity
and perfection of that Love. If this be
allowed, we may be said to have arrived at
the conception of an adequate purpose in
Creation, viz., the generation, development,
and education of intelligences capable of per
ceiving, appreciating, and enjoying, by the
spontaneous efforts of their own free will,
the Love of their Creator. In this way we
may regard the Creator as providing an out
let for the overflowing warmth of His
Love, in the creation of individualized in
telligences capable of glorifying their Divine
Author, in the appreciation and enjoyment
of the endless manifestations of His Perfec
tions. On our hypothesis, it is necessary
that the will of man, though under laws,
should be absolutely free to the extent
of his power; and experience proves the
truth of this position. Hence arises the
necessity for an education, and this brings
us to the consideration of the plan by which
the Creator, as we conceive, is accomplish
ing His divine purpose.
In considering the phenoifiena of earth
experiences we naturally turn our attention
first to the material Universe in which we
find ourselves, and which, from our point
of view, is regarded as the projection of
the Mind of God into the plane of action,
resulting (possibly, through the condensa
tion of spiritual principles, by a process
incomprehensible by us) in the atoms out
of which the Universe has been developed.
These atoms, under the influence of the
Divine Spirit, fulfil, by chemical changes,
involving concentrations, combinations, and
separations, the will of Him from whom
�FROM THE STAND POINT OF REASON AND INTUITION.
they emanated. It is the constant influx I
of the Eternal Spirit into these atomic con
densations, called matter, which appears to
give rise to the dualism of Life and Death,
Good and Evil, which we see throughout
nature.*
The action and reaction of this dualism
is the pulsation of the heart of Deity, pro- |
ducing and upholding at its every beat the
varied phenomena of mind and matter ;
and thus is evolved, in a perpetual series of
progressive and ascending degrees, the end
less variety of atomic combinations or
organisms of which the Universe, with its
varied productions, is composed ; each at
tracting that which it needs and is capable
of receiving from the fountain of Universal
Spirit ; the only limit being capacity, the
only condition receptivity. Thus, from the
most rudimentary atomic combinations to
the most refined human organism, all draw
from the same illimitable Source that which
they are capable of receiving and appropri
ating ; and this by laws which are immu
table, because infinitely wise.
Inanimate Nature thus derives the Motion
by which all its changes and developments
are effected : this is the character of its
receptivity, and this it attracts from the
energy of the Divine Spirit, which fills all
that is. The vegetable kingdom, by virtue
of its advanced organization, in addition to
Motion, is receptive of Life ; and, to the
extent of its capacity, is filled from the
same Divine source. The animal kingdom,
embracing the properties of the lower or
ganizations, advances a step higher in its
receptive capacity, and attracts to itself
Sensation, answering to the instinctive fa
culties, enabling it to fulfil its part in the
*“In the divine order,” says Emerson, '‘intellect
is primary ; nature secondary. It is the memory of
the mind. That which once existed in intellect as
pure law has now taken a body as nature. It existed
already in the mind in solution : now it has been pre
cipitated, and the bright sediment is the world.”
Divine drama of life; whilst, from the same
inexhaustible source in the progress of de
velopment (or order of creation), the human
organism, in all its endless varieties, attracts
to itself, in addition to the faculties pos
sessed by the lower organisms, all those
Spiritual powers of thought and ratiocina
tion which constitute Man a rational being
— an Embryo Spirit ; having, compared
with the animal world, increased perceptive
powers and a receptive capacity for higher
manifestations of the Divine intelligence.
From the reception of this intelligent
principle by the refined human organism,
arises that which constitutes the difference
between the human and animal kingdoms;
a difference not so much in kind as degree,
viz.: —of enlarged perceptive powers—more
refined susceptibilities, and a more acute
sensitiveness, enabling man, by the exer
cise of these improved faculties, to acquire
a knowledge of the constitution of his nature
and the laws that govern it. From an in
tuitive or emotional feeling, arising out of
the development of the intellectual faculties,
originated, most probably, man’s first con
ception of a Creator or God. As these
increased powers of perception and ratio
cination are evolved, the moral sense be
comes developed, and a knowledge of what
is not inaptly termed Good and Evil, with
its attendant responsibilities, is attained.
Thus, the first rays of Light from the
Divine Intelligence break through the dark
clouds of man’s animal nature (dark by
comparison only), producing within him a
consciousness, to an extent, of the dualism
of that nature, and a recognition, to an
extent, of the Will of the Divine Spirit
“in whom he lives, and moves, and has
his being.”
The Light of the Divine Spirit once re
cognised, Conscience may be said to be
formed; and, however dimly this light may
be discerned during the process of intel
�4
A FEW THOUGHTS ON T1IE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL AND SUFFERING,
lectual development, to that extent, and law, and can no longer shield himself under
that extent only, is man responsible to God the plea of ignorance. Man may, from ignor
for the action of his Will. Thus arises the ance, err and suffer; but if his conscience
conflict between so-called Good and Evil— reproach him not, he cannot be said to sin.
the higher and the lower Good—the Flesh The silent monitor, once recognized, ever
and the Spirit. This conflict originates in remains a witness and an accuser. In the
the dualism of our nature, educating us by torments of this inward self-condemnation
its action and reaction, through and by and remorse may be traced the chastening
ourselves, in the wise order of Providence, of a Father’s love, educating in suffering the
into the perception of that which alone can will of His wayward and erring child.
The more we search into the phenomena
make us intelligent, wise, good and happy,
of nature, the more impressed do we become
viz.The knowledge and love of God.
The active recognition of the Spiritual with the fixity of the laws that govern its
character of this warfare between the lower every change, and the marvellous adap
and higher natures, of which man, as an tation of means to ends. This produces in
entity, is a compound, may be well defined the observant mind a conviction amounting
as being “born again of the Spirit.” It to absolute certainty that the wisdom and
brings man into conscious contact with the beneficence here displayed cannot be lack
Divine Spirit, and man perceives, as of ing in the higher phenomena of human life
himself, the Will of God in the eternal and destiny. That the Creator is absolutely
principles of Love and Righteousness, which impartial in His government of the world, is
are the points of universal agreement be to the reflective mind so obvious, that it is
tween men of every creed. And here, needless to dwell upon the fact. Were it
as ever in nature, for God is absolutely not so, all science w'ould be at fault, and
impartial, the conditions of receptivity wise men would lose hope if once it could
are dependent upon the capacity of the be proved that the acts of God are capri
Organism and the direction of the Will. cious. On the contrary, the sun shines and
Experience testifies to the fact that, if the the rain falls on the evil and the good alike.
Light of the Divine Spirit is actively lived If this be so, and if it be allowed that all
out, the capacity to receive further light which emanates from the hands of Infinite
(all irrational influences apart) is corres Wisdom must of necessity be perfectly ad
pondingly increased, and this quite inde apted to the purpose it is intended to fulfil,
pendent of creeds or views which, when we are justified in regarding the world in
not the result of personal thought and which we live, with all the varied expe
investigation, are dependent mainly upon riences of humanity, as the best school for
the development and education of free
educational influences.
When the will of man is in harmony with intelligences, who are to work out their
the will of God, there is Peace, no matter own endlessly diversified individualities
what the stage of intellectual development, (which in itself we conceive to be a great
or what theological views its possessor has source of happiness), and develop by and
imbibed. If, on the other hand, the voice through their individual and combined
of Conscience is disregarded, then the light efforts the inherent possibilities of their
of the Spirit becomes obscured, but not ex nature.
Broken laws fail to explain the whole of
tinguished. When once the spirit of man
has perceived the will of God, he is under the mystery of Evil and Suffering, as is evi
�TROM THE STAND-TOINT OF REASON AND INTUITION.
as necessary aids to man, in provoking
efforts which an atmosphere of ease and
security would most assuredly discourage.
Hence, while, on the one hand, the Love
of the Creator is displayed in providing a
series of ever advancing motives for man’s
progressive aspirations, so, on the other
hand, God’s Wisdom is equally displayed
in providing, by laws that may appear
harsh aud cruel, those necessary incentives
to action and effort by attention to which
man’s health, progress, and happiness, are
assuredly to be attained. Evil—that is,
lower good-and Suffering are the insepar
able conditions of sensitive organic life.
Without the aids of Evil and Suffering we
are unable to conceive any possible means
by which Man, as a free agent, could have
attained to the higher good, or appre
hended Truth and Goodness. Evil and
Suffering are the levers by which God
moves the world.
We are apt to overlook the compensatory
nature of the laws that prevail in connec
tion with Evil and Suffering. The unde
veloped mau has pleasures unappreciated
by the man of refinement. The hardships
ho is thought to endure are more apparent
than real, and his wants are comparatively
few. The anxieties attending material
prosperity, the nervous susceptibilities of
the cultured intellect, and the acute sen
sitiveness to pain of the refined organism,
are absent to a great extent in the ignorant
and undeveloped. The so called evil man,
whilst lacking the power of appreciating
and enjoying the higher pleasures attend
ant upon a perception and appreciation of
the higher good, is nevertheless compen
sated to a degree seldom duly estimated, in
the enjoyment he derives from the gratifica
tion of the appetites of his lower nature.
On the other hand, it must be allowed that
* “ The law of growth,” says a recent writer, “ is the finest, the noblest, and the holiest men
this, that all progress is preceded by calamity, that
this world has produced, have been mould
all improvement is based upon defect.”
dent in accidents by natural phenomena,
and the inevitable decay of the organism,
with its attendant weaknesses and ailments.
In some way, Evil and Suffering are neces
sary accompaniments to progress. Why it
is so we do not know ; but if we are able
to discover Love and Wisdom in the men
tal sufferings and remorse attending the
violation of those moral laws which are re
vealed to all in whom Conscience is formed,
we are justified in concluding that the lower
form of physical suffering is also the best
accomplishment of the Divine ends.
Where the intellect is undeveloped or
the conscience seared by the vacillation of
the human Will, producing a tendency to
physical disorganization or mental retro
gression, we can conceive how beneficent
may be, and probably is, human sensitive
ness to pain. The experience of pain leads
to the investigation of its cause, and this
tends to reflection, and ultimates in know
ledge of a physical and mental character,
the benefit of which, in the process of
human education, is incalculable. This
knowledge is cumulative; and, when men
are free enough to think and investigate
for themselves, and to live in harmony
with the Divine laws, progressively un
folded to the earnest searchers after Truth,
then may the first victory over evil and
suffering be said to be won
As, in the evolution of the world, physi
cal convulsions and disasters are the means
by which, in the inscrutable wisdom of
Providence, Progress, Order, and Beauty
are attained, so, in the development and
education of mind, does it seem a necessity
that human effort should be provoked by
convulsions and catastrophes, which com
pel observation, reflection, and effort.*
Thus considered, Evil and Suffering appear
�6
A PEW THOUGHTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL AND SUFFERING,
ed and purified in the furnace of affliction
and suffering.
How could man know aught of sympathy
and love, were it not for sorrow and suffer
ing which draw them out ? How could man
appreciate the beautiful as beauty, if there
were nothing in the shape of contrast to
guide him to recognize it ? It appears im
possible that self-educated free intelligences
could ever have attained to a knowledge
of such circumstances as Virtue, Pleasure,
Peace, Knowledge, and Truth, without
coming into contact with their opposites,
Vice, Pain, Strife, Ignorance, and Error.
The one is learned by and through cont.ic'.
with the other. Thus, the so-called Evils
of life may truly be looked upon as lower
Goods. Again, the Good of one generation
has been the Evil of the next. The Good of
the ancient Hebrews was to destroy their
enemies. The Good of Jesus was to love
them. By far the larger portion of the hu
man race are still under the influence of
the Evil (lower Good), and desire to destroy
their enemies. The time will probably
come when the religion of Jesus and other
noble reformers will be understood, and the
higher Good they advocated be actively
displayed by the enlightened governments
of a civilized world.
The principle of selfishness, inherent in
sentient life, is an absolute necessity to its
progress, and affords an apt illustration of
the truth of the proposition that all socalled evil may be regarded as undeveloped
good. Selfishness, born of sensation, gene
rates desire, desire provokes action, action
stimulates thought, and the exercise of
thought (observation and reflection) deve
lops intelligence. Indigenous to the soil of
intelligence are those spiritual faculties or
perceptions which correspond to the moral
sense, in the exercise of which man inspires
eternal principles from the all-pervading
Spirit of Deity. The evolution and cultiva
tion of these spiritual faculties appear to
be at once the object and business of life.
Man thus learns by and through the selfish
ness of his animal nature, to perceive, by
comparison, the higher good of disinterested
unselfishness or love in its highest (spiritual)
sense.
Man, thus, is born in ignorance, and de
veloped gradually from the lower Good to
the higher, that he may learn for himself,
through the experiences of life, which are
alternately painful and pleasurable, of his
own free will to choose the higher and
forsake the lower Good. The evils and
sufferings of life from this point of view
may be truly and intelligently regarded as
beneficent necessities, through and by which
man is enabled to perceive God—first, in His
works, then, in the operation of His laws,
evidences of His will—and, finally, rise to
the power of appreciating and enjoying the
endless manifestations of the Divine love
and perfections. If we can thus trace, with
our present limited capacities and know
ledge, evidences of wisdom and goodness in
the so-called evils and sufferings of hu
manity, constituting a beneficent necessity |
in the development and education of free I
intelligences, we may reasonably infer that
the sufferings of the animal kingdom are I
neither vindictive nor purposeless. We are
here more in the dark, from the fact of our 1
being unable to enter into the experiences i
of the animal creation, or to gauge their
sensitiveness to pleasure or pain. Change h
and decay, life and death, good and evil, |,
certainly seem inseparable conditions to the |s
combination of spirit with matter, in its la
early stage of development. Thus, with |di
animals as with man, the individual amount Bn
of suffering can only be fairly reckoned in
i
the account; and again the term of suffering I: i
must not certainly be regarded without refer- »■■si
ence to the pleasure of existence. In the Ijj
case of slaughtered animals, or those who
�FROM THE STAND-POINT OF REASON AND INTUITION.
are the victims of beasts of prey, they pro
bably have none of those sufferings by sus
pense and anticipation which must be far
greater than the sudden, unexpected,
and, perhaps, unconscious separation of
life from the organism. In addition
to this, from the lack of sensitive
ness in the organisms themselves, the
sufferings of animals may possibly be re
duced to the minimum. The laws relating
to the conjunction of spirit with matter (if
God be impartial) are compensatory. The
capacity for enjoyment is coextensive with
the sensitiveness to pain ; hence, the more
refined and complex the organism the
greater the capacity for pleasure, the more
sensitive is it to pain. On the other hand,
the lower and simpler the organic combina
tion the less acutely it experiences either
pleasure or pain. Our ignorance as to the
experiences and destiny of the lower king
doms makes it more difficult for us to trace
a cause for their undoubted sufferings ; but
that there is no suffering without a reason,
a purpose, and a compensation, is shown to
us by those beneficent results of suffering
we are enabled to trace in the kingdom to
which we belong.
To sum up our thoughts. It appears
that all creation derives from the Divine
Spirit, who upholds and governs it, that
which it is adapted to receive and appro
priate in order to fulfil its destiny. Man,
an intelligent individuality, derives from
the Divine Energy which fills the Universe
that Life which the condition of his animal
organization enables him to receive and ap
propriate ; and, from the Divine Intelli
gence, that Light which from his condition
physically., mentally, and morally, he is ca
pable of receiving and appropriating. Phy
sical conditions are dependent upon the
bodily organism which, though capable of
considerable modification and improvement
by the action of man’s free will, neverthe
7
less, to an extent, retains its inherent in
dividuality. This involves an endless va
riety of receptive capacities, a wise and
beneficent arrangement, contributinggreatly
to human happiness. The condition of men
tal receptivity depends upon the degree of
intellectual development and mental culture,
the extent of a man’s knowledge, and the
perfect freedom he enjoys to observe, reflect,
and investigate. The condition of man’s
moral receptivity is dependent upon the ac
tion of his will. When a man is honestly
living out his conscientious convictions as to
what is Good and True, that man (with per
fect intellectual freedom) must of necessity
be progressing in the knowledge and love of
his Creator; and, where this is combined
with a healthy organism, we are justified
in regarding that man as possessing as much
of human happiness as humanity is capable
of enjoying. Thus, simply stated:—We
have what we are capable of receiving,
and are what we make ourselves. The in
comprehensible Intelligence, whom we call
God, governs His creation by laws that are
infinitely wise. The apparent contradic
tions and inexplicable expedients that
appear to be adopted in the evolution of a
world and the development of individualized
intelligences are the conditions by which the
immutable laws of God are transforming a
nebula of chaotic Atoms into a World of
beauty, grandeur, and intelligence, in
whose womb are generated, and on whose
bosom are developed, educated and puri
fied, immortal spirit-entities, who, in the
furnaces of affliction and suffering, and in
the warfare against the propensities and
passions of their lower nature, are made
thereby meet to glorify their Creator in an
active obedience to His will, in which is
involved their own everlasting happi
ness.
If this is clear to us, it follows that the
sufferings of the Animal Kingdom are also
�8
A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL AND SUFFERING/
the results of wise and beneficent laws, em
ploying apparently cruel agents in the ac
complishment of equally benevolent ends.
Under any circumstances, the difficulties are
enormously increased on the theory of Evil
and Suffering being the result of a single act
of disobedience committed in the infancy of
the race.* Earth-Life thus appears to be
the first chapter in a Book the pages of
which are endless, the theme of which is
the Wisdom, Power, and Goodness of God,
and its earliest teachings the rudimentary
principles of Spirit existence. To attain a
knowledge of these principles, appears to be
the work of every individual soul, and the
means best adapted to the purpose are, in
the wisdom of God, the experiences inci
dental to this stage of existence. In the
action and reaction of God’s immutable laws
(material and spiritual), men are ever learn
ing lessons, the full value of which, like
children at school, they will realize in after
life.
In a recent essay by Moncure D. Conway
on “ Theism, Atheism, and the Problem of
Evil,” he says, —“ Seeing so much, we re
member that we have come to it only very
gradually. We know that the human mind
once saw disorder in many regions where it
now sees order; that knowledge reveals
good in many things which ignorance held
altogether evil, consequently we are war
ranted in believing that more and more ex
perience, and increasing knowledge, will
make clear the surrounding realm of dark
ness.” .... “ If we could now by a
word remove from the world all that has
been done for it by pain and evil, we should
behold man relapsing from the height he
has won by struggle with unfriendly ele
ments and influences, falling back from
point to point, losing one after another the
energies gained by mastering evil, and sink
ing through all the stages of retrogression
to some miserable primal form too insigni
ficant to be attacked, too nerveless to suffer. ”
. . • . ‘ ‘ But even now this darkness
rests only upon the final cause of evil, that
is, upon the inquiry why the ends secured
by evil were not reached by a more merci
ful method. If, in reply to the question,
Why is not the universe painless ? we must
answer, We do not know. In reply to the
question, What good end does evil serve ?
we may answer, We know very well.”
I am here reminded of a question put to a
distressed parent by a little girl during a
prolonged and painful illness, ‘‘Why does
Maggie sutler so?” The parent was wise,
consequently silent. Religion may tranquilize, intuition whisper hope, and philo
sophyproduce resignation; but reason is here
out of its depth. We can but say,—we do not
know. Theories are propounded, and it is
impossible for thoughtfuT’taen, consciously
or unconsciously, to avoid entertaining some
views with regard to the presence of Evil
and Suffering in a World created by Infinite
Wisdom, governed by Infinite Love, and
upheld by Infinite Power; but so long as
we are under the influence of reason, and
alive to the dictates of conscience, we can
* The sincere evangelical Christian believes that not rest satisfied with any explanation of
the Evils and Sufferings of men and animals, and the
natural dissolution of living organisms, are all the re this mysterious phenomenon which involves
sults of “The Fall”; that death leads to an eternity
the contradiction of the highest and noblest
of misery for all who are unable intellectually to ap
impulses of our nature, or the absence of
prehend and consciously to lay hold of such doc
trines as “The Trinity” and “The Atonement.” It those principles of Righteousness and Jus
must be left to the reason and conscience of intelli
tice which are the intuitions of the civilized
gent men to judge on which side the balance of proba
conscience.
bility lies.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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A few thoughts on the philosophy of evil and suffering, from the stand-point of reason and intuition
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: 8 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed in double columns.
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[s.n.]
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[187-?]
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G5358
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Rationalism
Evil
Ethics
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[Unknown]
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English
Conway Tracts
Evil
Reason
Suffering
-
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Text
GRACE.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
II THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD,
LONDON, S.E.
1876.
Price Threepence.
�LONDON
THINTED BY C. TV. REYNELL, LITTLE TULTENET STREET,
HAYMARKET.
�GRACE.
------ *-----VICTIM to the received system of religious
education, I have suffered considerably for socalled conscience’ sake. Finding nay questions as
irritating to my instructors as their answers were
unsatisfactory to me, I early sank down into the
mould prepared for me, and at nine years old was at
the top of the religious class in a school I attended.
An excellent memory, a distinct utterance, and a
sort of knack of finding out texts with great rapidity,
were points in my favour, and as I soon left
off asking what were called impertinent questions,
it was assumed that the process of thinking had,
by the merciful interference of a superintending
Providence, been checked ere it had developed into
an insurmountable hindrance to salvation. At first
I did not think very much, but I thought a little, and
to some purpose. I learnt a hymn which contained
these lines : “ I thank the goodness and the grace
which on my birth have smiled, and made me in
these Christian days a happy English child. I was
not born, as thousands are, where God was never
known,” etc. I did not sufficiently value my privi
lege of sitting in a close room learning abstruse texts,
and when I looked at the pictures of little negroes in
sugar-plantations I did not pity them at all, but
thought that they had the best of it.
A
�6
Grace.
To check the free expression of thought is an
admirable means towards the desired end—the an
nihilation of thought itself—and had not a counter
influence been at work out of school I should, doubt
less, have become a “ chosen vessel.” As it was, I
went about, as numbers do, under false colours, sup
posed to be very pious, because I had a good verbal
memory, a quiet, old-fashioned manner, and great
digital dexterity in finding out passages in the Bible.
I seemed, of course, like a piece of wax, as all good
children should be, ready to receive any religious
impressions stamped upon me by my teachers. I
was being educated in hypocrisy under the name
of religion. The system was calculated to foster
conceit, and, until a few years ago, I thought I under
stood all that is included in the comprehensive word
grace. I was called a child of grace, I coveted grace,
prayed daily for an increase of it, explained its sup
posed effects to others, pleaded with those who seemed
indifferent to it, and mourned over those who had
fallen from it. My teachers used grace as synonymous
with self-denial, self-control, patience, fortitude, re
signation, etc., and I was accustomed to attribute all
that is elevating to its influence, and all that is
degrading to its absence. But? when a mere child, I
had silently observed the supposed effects of grace in
those who never resorted to the “means ” of it, and
before I had attained maturity, I had, when away
from the restraints of school, indulged in many a
flippant remark as to the inefficacy of grace in those
who seemed indefatigable in their strivings after it.
I was puzzled and disappointed, but not until many
years had elapsed did it occur to me that I had been
deceived, deceived by well-meaning individuals who
were themselves deceived, and who, I have every
reason to suspect, preferred to be deceived, and
would have gone on deceiving others, even if
they had permitted themselves to be undeceived.
�Grace*
7
My spiritual masters and mistresses told me that
grace was “ a supernatural gift freely bestowed upon
me for my sanctification and salvation.” I was early
taught to seem grateful that, while thousands of chil
dren were suffered to live and die in heathen lands,
where grace was unknown, I had been elected by
special favour to be “a member of Christ, a child of
God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.”
I knew that the unbaptized were the devil’s children,
that God hated them, that they could get no grace
because they were not in a “ state of grace,” and that
actions, to all appearance meritorious, were of no avail
at all towards salvation unless they were performed
in “ a state of grace.” I was exhorted to thank God
repeatedly for the grace of baptism and to look upon
the unbaptized with a mixture of pity and horror.
But for “ prevenient grace,” I should, they told me,
yield to the suggestions of my corrupt nature and
tell lies, give blow for blow, steal, cheat, and become
a hardened sinner.
At school I committed to memory a surprising
number of hymns. I knew that grace was “ a charm
ing sound,” that there was “a fountain filled with
blood,’’ and that I deserved “ his holy frown.” But
at an early age grace began to lose ground in my
estimation. At home hymns were not esteemed;
my parents never asked me to repeat them, and
of “ grace ” I never heard, save at school. I
had a playfellow, about my own age, named Bobby.
Bobby’s real father was the devil, but his reputed
father was a respectable and respected Quaker who
lived close to us, a widower, with two attractive
children, whose education was his sole occupation.
Bobby was a gentle, manly, intelligent child, the
peace-maker in all squabbles, and a great favourite
in the play-ground. In the person of this little
Quaker, Satan had succeeded admirably in transform
ing himself into an angel of light, for a superficial
�Grace.
observer might easily have mistaken. Bobby for “ a
member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor
of the kingdom of heaven.” I knew better—I knew
that he was a child of wrath—that God’s holy frown
rested upon him, and that unless God in his infinite
mercy should call him to the font, his portion would
be “everlasting pains, where sinners must with
devils dwell, in darkness, fire, and chains.” Bobby
never was taken to a place of worship; he was
taught no prayers, and knew no hymns. He squinted
abominably, and it was in consequence of that sad
blemish that my childish thoughts were drawn to a
common-sense view of grace. He was taken to an
oculist, and returned with a most disfiguring glass
over one eye, in comparison with which the squint
seemed almost an embellishment. Poor Bobby ! we
laughed at him, pointed at him, danced round him,
squinted at him, and called him “ old goggle-eye !” I
had frequently wondered at the engaging manners and
generous conduct of the devil’s little boy, but on this
occasion he surpassed himself. He turned red, his
lips quivered, the well-known “ ball ” rose in his
throat, but with steady voice he said, “ You have
nearly made me cry ; you do not know how painful
my eye is; the doctor said crying would make it
worse; I promised him I would not cry. See, I
have got a shilling, let us go and spend it and play
at something else.” “I’ll tell father, see if I don’t! ”
said Bobby’s brother, with fraternal indignation, “ and
he shall know how that shilling went.” “Ho, you
will not,” said Bobby, laughing, “ for a tell-tale is
even worse than a teaze ! ” Of course we all de
clared we were only in fun, etc., but I felt keenly
that the children of God had not set the devil’s little
boy a very good example, and I valued my religious
privileges less from that hour. I continued commit
ting many hymns and texts to memory, but I suppose
I had already “fallen from grace,” for though I
�Grace.
9
recited them with my usual accuracy, they interested
me less. I left off begging to be allowed to learn
some particular hymns, and many of my former
favourites faded unregretted from my memory. My
schoolmistress was an Evangelical gentlewoman, and
I was one of her most attentive pupils. Hearing me
say that Bobby could be good without grace, she
looked very grave, and, turning to an assistant
teacher, remarked, “ How amazing it is that parents
suffer their children to associate with the uncon
verted ! ” I repeated her words to my father. Un
like most parents, he spoke very openly, and explained
to me in very simple language that he had never
observed any moral superiority in the baptized, and
that in his own circle of acquaintances he had found
more genial characters among the unbaptized. He
drew my attention to a gentleman who was a con
stant visitor at our house, one who was in great
favour with all the children who knew him, in conse
quence of his imperturbable good humour and amiable
devotion to their little interests. “That man,” said
my father, “was brought up among the Quakers, and
though he is not a Quaker now, has never been bap
tized, and I cannot see in what respect he would
be a better member of society if he had.
The
gentleman in question was a great ally of mine, and
his children were my playmates. It would have
been difficult to find better people than were these
who had taken no pains to cleanse themselves from
their inherited filth, and it is not surprising that,
with such amiable associates, a child under twelve
should lose sight of the inestimable privilege of
“ grace ” and cease to attribute virtuous conduct to
its influence. I gave up caring about grace. I let
it go without a regret, little knowing that a few
years later I should give myself wholly to its sup
posed influence, and suffer exceedingly in mind and
body ere I succeeded in wrenching myself from a
�iO
Grace.
grasp which was crushing my individuality out of
me.
Before my childhood was quite over an incident
occurred which I shall relate, for it made an im
pression, and preserved me from rushing in after life
into certain extremes, towards which my devotional
acquaintances tended.
There was a lumber-room in Bobby’s house ; books,
pictures, ornaments and furniture, which had been
undisturbed since his mother’s death, were heaped
together in dusty confusion. The humour seized
Bobby to sort out the objects and put the room to
rights. He asked me to help him and we set to work.
I caught hold of a mutilated copy of a book called
‘ The Soul on Calvary,’ and my eyes fell upon the
following incredible and revolting passage:—
“ We will here relate the example of a most
heroic patience in sickness and of a most perfect love
of God in the heart. Perhaps it may wound the
delicacy of some ; but many others will have sufficient
greatness of soul to be edified and touched by it. A
person had fallen into a malady equally painful and
humiliating : a great sore was formed, which, in the
course of time, had engendered a quantity of worms.
This person was eaten up alive by them, and suffered
excessive pains ; yet her lively love of God surmounted
the violence of her sufferings to such a degree that
if any of her worms happened to fall, she picked them
up and replaced them in the sore, saying that she was
unwilling to lose any part of the merit of her suffer
ings, and that she considered those worms as so
many precious pearls which might one day adorn her
crown.” From the disgust excited in me by this
horrible statement, I never rallied, though I was sub
sequently thrown into daily contact with people whose
religious fervour would have inclined them to go and
do likewise.
‘ The Soul on Calvary ’ is a cheap book widely
�Grace.
ii
circulated among Roman Catholics, many of whom
would not shrink from putting into practice the wild
and filthy experiments suggested by the perusal of
that and similar fanatical works.
At a boarding-school, to which I was sent "for six
months for change of air, considerable attention was
paid to the religious instruction of the children. I was
slowly regaining my strength, after a long illness, and
was probably more susceptible to what are called spiri
tual influences than I should otherwise have been; more
over, I was at the impressionable age of fourteen, and
of a grave turn of mind. I was soon “full of grace;” that
is to say, I thought and heard of little else; answering
Scripture questions occupied a great portion of my
time, for, being very weak, I was not required to study
much, and it cost me but little trouble to get up all
the hymns, catechisms, texts, collects, etc., with which
I had formerly been somewhat overburdened. I was
soon a great favourite with my teacher, and to “ grow
in grace” once more became the great object of
my life. For a few years I had been neglecting
grace, but had not retrograded morally, and was
not a whit more unruly than my more persevering
companions.
Schooled in grace for the second time, and
thoroughly engrossed with self, I should, I ima
gine, have become very much like the ideal my
teacher had in view. . She tried hard to work upon
the feelings of her pupils, and I have seen a child of
seven years leave the class in tears, and retire sobbing,
at the thought of her ingratitude to her Saviour; and
we were taught to admire the “ workings of grace ”
in her heart, and to deplore our own indifference. Of
practical piety I do not remember hearing. Faith, grace,
hymns, Bible questions and the Church prayers seemed
all in all. We were not encouraged to make clothes for
the poor, or to deny ourselves anything for the sake
of others; for the souls of others we were earnestly
�12
Grace.
enjoined to pray, but of their bodily wants I neverheard. Once, in consequence of illness, I and another'
girl of sixteen were the sole occupants of a room.
I remarked with horror that she did not kneel downbefore getting into bed. “ Why, Emily,” said I,
f‘you have forgotten your prayers.” “You meanthat I have forgotten to kneel down. I never say
prayers, but I kneel down in the big room because of
the others; I do not mind you.” “ But do you not
mind God,” asked I, with sincere surprise. “ No,”
said she, “ God minds me ! ” I was too much grieved^
to notice the drollery of the remark. Presently she*
resumed, “ What do you. suppose becomes of the
sponge-cakes ? ” I knew dozens of them were con
veyed to the boarders through one of the ser
vants, and now I was informed that they were always
devoured during the extempore prayer made every
evening by a teacher; it lasted, with other devotions,
twenty minutes, and as the girls turned to the wall
during prayers the opportunity was favourable to the
enjoyment of soft cakes. Emily’s revelations sad
dened me indescribably. Had she been an unprin
cipled, unruly, low-minded girl, I should have been
relieved, but, like the graceless Bobby of my child
hood, Emily was superior to the other girls in moral
worth; she never copied sums, verbs, &c., from her
neighbour’s slate, and had often surprised me by her
readiness to admit ignorance, to offer an apology, and,
in short, to act as if this so-called grace had taken
firm hold of her ; but she did not care about grace,
she even called it “ a hoax,” and said that all the
religious people she knew were very disagreeable.
Her father had yielded to the wishes of his wife in
sending her to this school, and as she was soon about
to leave it, she spoke, as all girls do under such cir
cumstances, with reckless candour.
Hypocrisy must infect those who are taught so
many solemn and startling confessions, creeds, hymns.
�Grace.
and texts long before they can understand them..
Emily had discontinued her prayers because she did
not assent to the assertions in them. lc As God made
me,” said she, “ he must know me far better than I
know myself, and therefore it seems very silly to pre
tend to inform him. I am not going to say ‘ I have
followed too much the devices and desires of my own
heart,’ because it is not true; if I were to follow
those desires I should be off in the morning, in spite
of my influenza.”
All she said made me feel extremely uncomfortable,
—she had given up grace, and yet seemed thoroughly
good. However, my six months of school life were
fortunately over, and I returned to a home where all
that is estimable was inculcated without any allusion
to hymns, grace, or any other supernatural means of
arriving at the ordinary virtues which should dis
tinguish the members of a civilized community. I
do not think my father had a Bible ; I never saw him
use one, save to look out some disputed text.
Having been forced in his boyhood to read the Bible
exclusively, he made up for it in his manhood by
reading any book except the Bible. Away from the
gracious influences which for a brief season had
surrounded me, shaken somewhat by Emily’s ex
perience, and highly dissatisfied with my own
immature conclusions, I soon grew very lukewarm as
to prayer and other religious practices, and was
actually learning “ to be good and to do good ” with
out having recourse to the supernatural. I was,
however, ill at ease within, for I had been so
thoroughly impressed with the necessity of grace,
that I was quite alarmed to find how easily I had let
it go and how very well I could do without it. I was
afraid of myself knowing, or rather having been
taught, that in me “ dwelt no good thing,” and I was
greatly perplexed to find no unholy tendencies arise
now that grace had Jost its hold on me. I should
�>4
Grace.
have been quite delighted to have been able to detect
some moral retrogression, which I should have been
justified in attributing to a withdrawal of grace.
I ardently wished to believe in the efficacy of prayer
and indeed in all the doctrines I had been
taught in my childhood, but I was losing both
faith and confidence. I pretended I had not lost
either.
I was afraid to think anything out.
About that time I was invited to pass a few
weeks with a lady and gentleman at Sydenham.
Owing to curious circumstances the lady, though a
Protestant, had been educated in a convent, and was
quite familiar with all the tenets of the various
religious sects. She talked, and apparently thought
frequently about piety, grace, resignation, etc., and
said she intended to leave a large portion of her
wealth to those who had grounded her in religion.
She was, as far as I could judge, an essentially worldly
woman, and, owing probably to her wretched health,
of a singularly trying disposition. In her husband
all those virtues, specially intended, where Christian
virtues are named, shone conspicuously, and I shall
never forget my amazement when with the utmost
composure he informed me that he was hostile to
every form of religion, and that, though it grieved
him sorely to thwart his wife, he had absolutely for
bidden her to teach his little nephew, who lived with
them, any creed, catechism or hymn; she gained her
point as to the Lord’s prayer, which the boy repeated
every night in the drawing-room, beginning thus,—
“ Our Father charty neaven.”
Full twenty years have passed since the day when
I discovered that the man whose character I so much
admired, whose forbearance so much amazed me, and
whose abstemiousness bordered upon the marvellous,
was what is called an infidel! Would that I could
meet him now! How readily would I confess to
him that ‘'whereas I was blind, now I see,”—see that
�Grace.
J5
I was the real infidel, faithless to my own secret con
victions, and faithless to the tenets I was supposed
to have embraced. Fettered by formulas, vague
fears, and by a feeling of restraint which for years
prevented me from daring to be myself, I was unable
to assimilate the wholesome ingredients in the sensible
conversation of my infidel friend, who sought to wean
me from useless theological speculations, and en
deavoured to direct my attention to things practical.
I was then and for years afterwards in the position
which Fichte has so clearly described : “ Instructions
were bestowed upon me before I sought them; an
swers were given me before I had put questions;
without examination and without interest I had
allowed everything to take place in my mind. How
then could I persuade myself I possessed any real
knowledge in these matters ? I only knew what
others assert they know, and all I was sure of was
that I had heard this or that upon the subject. What
ever truth they possessed could have been obtained
only by their own reflection, and why should not I by
means of the same reflection discover the like truth
for myself, since I too have a being as well as they ?
How much I have hitherto undervalued and slighted
myself ! ”
My infidel friend was aware that I was by no means
blind to his many good qualities, for I was frequently
present, to my great discomfort, when he was severely
tried, and was forced to acknowledge that he behaved
like a saint.
“ Well, little lady,” said he one day when we were
speaking of grace, “ I hate the very word grace, I
don’t fully understand its meaning, and as lean do very
well without it, I should consider it a superfluity;
but tell me to what you attribute all that strikes you
as good in me, for as I am the only graceless dog you
know, myself must be my subject ? ”
I had repeatedly asked myself that question, and
�i6
Grace.
invariably winced at my own answer. According to
my religious notions he ought to have been conspicu
ous for moral depravity, but according to my common
sense it seemed to me that no amount of grace could
make him a more genial specimen of a moral man
than he was. However, I said that as he had been
baptized and had been taught to pray in his childhood,
he must have received many graces, and that his
avoidance of great sins was due to God’s grace, which
had preserved him from great temptations. He smiled
as he replied : “ I am afraid your surmise will fall to
the ground when you hear that I early gave up my
prayers. I had a great misfortune when quite a little
fellow. I smashed a most expensive and much-valued
old china jar to atoms. My thoughts instantly flew
to the omnipotent and benevolent Being whose eyes
were in every place, and I ran upstairs to my little
cot, by the side of which I knelt, and most earnestly
entreated God to mend the jar and replace it upon the
bracket before my father returned. Down I rushed, fully
expecting to find all as I wished, the fragments gone,
and the jar in its place. At the bottom of the stairs
stood my poor nurse, too agitated to scold me, feeling
that she would get most of the blame, and dreading
the return of ‘ Master.’ Ko words can convey my
bitter disappointment at seeing the fragments where I
had left them. I had prayed with faith and hope;
but there was no new jar upon the bracket, and never
again did I turn with confidence to that omnipotent
and benevolent Being who had not helped me out of
my terrible scrape.”
What good end Providence had in view by throw
ing me into contact with Bobby, Emily, and this
honourable infidel, pious people have never explained
to me. “ To try your faith,” they told me ; but seemed
at fault when I asked if Providence foresaw that I
should lose my faith.
My visit ended, I returned home ill at ease, honestly
�Grace.
!7
doubting, but dishonestly concealing my doubts for
so-called conscience’ sake. It would, I thought, be
awful to become an infidel, and thus expose myself to
the just indignation of my maker; but it did not occur
to me for some years that my insincerity must long
have rendered me odious in the eyes of the searcher of
hearts, the God of truth, and that I had been in jeo
pardy ever since I had dared to use my own judgment
concerning grace and its effects.
In looking over the past I can say, with the utmost
deliberation, that in my case religion was a hindrance
instead of a help, as it is intended to be. While re
calling my past experience I feel sincerely sorry for
myself and for those who, owing to my devout adhe
rence to sundry New Testament injunctions which I
had “ grace” enough to carry out, suffered acutely.
The certainty that but few have sufficient “grace” to
“ go and do likewise,” is a source of satisfaction to
me. Were I not convinced by hardly-earned experi
ence of the futility of prayer, I would pray with great
fervour that the meaning I discerned in Gospel teach
ing might be for ever hidden from their eyes lest they
should become “ converted” and show forth their
faith as I did. By nature frank and fearless, I early
profited by the lessons taught me by my ghostly coun
sellors, and learnt, like multitudes of other young
people, to conceal what passed within, and to be afraid
of my corrupt nature, and of all that emanated there
from. I was afraid of thinking, of using my own
mind, of following my own impulses, in short, of being
myself.
Conscious of insincerity, alarmed at the probable
consequences of sincerity, siding secretly with what
are called dangerous opinions, frightened at my ten
dencies, confessing with my lips what my understand
ing refused to digest, clinging to planks which I felt
could ill bear my weight, I went on praying that
infidels might be brought to the knowledge of the
�Grace.
truth, but never realising the melancholy fact that
I myself was an arch infidel, for I was a dissembler
before God and man ; reciting incredible creeds in the
house of the former, and carefully concealing my real
sentiments from the latter.
After a while, by dint of pious reading, pious
friends, and lonely visits to sundry churches, I shook
off for a season some of my most disturbing doubts,
and, during four or five years “grace” assuredly
triumphed over nature, and, but for the timely inter
ference of common sense, I too might have been dis
covered magnanimously replacing fallen creepers in
their home on my epidermis !
“ Grace” prompted me to despise “the world,” to
keep aloof from my fellow-creatures, to become
odiously unsociable, and, in adhering to what I con
ceived to be the strict line of duty to God, to disregard,
all the little courtesies and concessions to others as
“ Satanic varnish,” deviations from truth, worldly
wisdom, &c. Reproaches or remonstrances had the
effect of making me persevere still more obstinately
in the course I had chosen. I felt like a martyr
“ persecuted for righteousness ” sake, and was su
premely happy in the conviction that an unusual
amount of grace was bestowed upon me. My spiritual
advisers encouraged me in despising all human con
siderations, and in devoting myself exclusively to my
religious duties, assuring me that the world would
certainly hate me as it had hated Christ, but that I
must “ overcome the world.” In short, I acted upon
the conviction that “ the friendship of the world is
enmity with God,” and that unless I came “ out from
among them ” I was no worthy member of a Head
crowned with thorns. I had the sweet approval of
my own conscience, and felt sure that God was on my
side, so did not fear what man might do unto me.
The requirements of the Gospel seemed to me
peremptory and unmistakable, and as long as I re-
�Grace.
*9
mained under the absorbing influence of what is
called “ grace” I did my best to carry them out; but
a change came over me; old doubts assailed me with
fresh vigour; they took firm hold of me, and I could
not shake them off. During those years of religious
zeal I had been undisturbed by misgivings, and had
acted with sincerity. I look back upon them with
mingled amusement and regret, and rejoicing that I
was at length enabled to be as true to my doubts as
I bad been to my folly and fanaticism. Of course it
will be said by many that I had been guilty of absurd
exaggeration, and that true religion does not demand
that we should fly in the face of the world, that it is
possible to continue in “ grace” without sternly
abjuring “ the world,” &c. ; but such a compromise
seemed to me then impossible, and, to be perfectly
candid, I am still of opinion that to yield to the dic
tates of “ grace ” is to become what I was once, but
with my enlarged experience can never be again.
“ Grace,” as understood by the orthodox, had taken
great effect upon me; it had done its work right well,
and rendered me quite unfit for this world, and, there
fore, as I was persuaded, a worthier candidate for the
other. In my exuberant self-satisfaction, I failed to
see that by steady adherence to my favourite Gospel
texts I was daily sinking deeper into that slough of
selfishness, bigotry, and intolerance, in which the
“Lord’s people” are wont to wallow. I knowmany who
are “ full of grace ;” I avoid them, for a “ burnt child
dreads the fire.” Withdrawn from the pernicious
influence of “ grace,” I can now look dispassionately
on my former God-fearing self, and see myself in the
light in which I must have appeared to those who
deplored my “ supernatural ” tendencies, and des
paired of my return to common sense. Released
from the fetters which so tightly bound me, and
which in my blindness I hugged so fondly, I have
now the “ grace ” to see, and the candour to confess,
�20
Grace.
that I was the victim of a degrading delusion. I have
returned to the miserable “ worldlings,” who are onlydoing their duty, and striving to make the best of the
only world of which we have any knowledge, and in
which I hope I may have “ grace ” to lead a rational
life and set a natural example !
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Pamphlet
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Title
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Grace
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 18 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Published anonymously. Author believed to be Annie Besant. "A victim to the received system of religious education, I have suffered considerably of so-called conscience' sake". [Opening sentence]. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London.
Creator
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Besant, Annie Wood
Date
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1876
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Subject
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Rationalism
Free thought
Education
Rights
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (Grace), identified by <span><a href="www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.
Identifier
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RA1609
CT183
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Free Thought
Religion
Religious Education
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PDF Text
Text
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Title
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Supernatural and rational morality
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Bradlaugh, Charles
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh,63, Fleet St., E. C. - 1886 (p. 8).
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Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh
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1886
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G903
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Rationalism
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Supernatural and rational morality), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Free Thought
Morality
Rationalism
Religion
Supernatural
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HAS MAN A SOUL?
BY C. BRADLAUGH.
[This lecture was originally delivered to the Sheffield
Secular Society, and was printed from the reporter’s notes
without efficient correction from myself, I, at that time,
suffering under a severe attack of acute rheumatism. The
lecture has since been often re-delivered; and three editions
having been exhausted, I have again corrected and revised
the present edition. It is not intended as an answer to the
question which forms the title, but it is intended to provoke
thought upon this important subject.]
What do you mean by soul? What is the soul ? Is it I ?
Is it the body? Is it apart from the body ? Is it an attri
bute of the body ? Has it a separate and distinct existence
from the body ? What is the soul ? If I ask one of those
who claim to be considered orthodox men, they will tell me
that the soul is a spirit—that the soul lives after the body
is dead. They will tell me that the soul is immortal, and
that the body is mortal; that the soul has nothing what
ever in common with the body ; that it has an existence
entirely independent of the body. They will tell me that
after the body has decayed—after the body has become
re-absorbed in the universe, of which it is but a part, that
the soul still exists. Is there any proof of the existence ol
the same individual soul apart from all material conditions ?
I have endeavoured to examine this subject, and, up to the
present time, I have not found one iota of proof in support
of the positions thus put forward. I have no idea of any
existence except that of which I am part. I am. Of my
own existence I am certain. I think. I am. But what is
it that thinks ? Is it my soul ? Is it “me,” and yet distinct
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HAS MAN A* SOUL?
from me? Iam but a mode of existence. I am only part
of the great universe. The elements of which I am com
posed are indissolubly connected with that great existence
which is around me and within me, and which I help to
make up. If men tell me I am a compound, and not a com
pound—a mixture,and not a mixture—a joining together, and
not a joining together—of two entirely different existences,
which they call “ matter” and “ spirit,” I am compelled
to doubt those men. The ability to think is but an attri
bute of a certain modification of existence. Intelligence is
a word by which we express the sum of certain abilities,
always attending a certain mode of existence. I find intelligence
manifested so far as organisation is developed. I never
find intelligence without animal organisation. I find intelli
gence manifested in degree, only so far as I find a higher or
lower type of organisation—that is, I find man's intellectual
faculties limited by his organisation But the orthodox tell.
me that my soul has an immaterial existence, independent
of all organisation—independent of all climatic conditions—
independent of all education. Is that so ? When does the
soul come into man ? When does it go out of man ? If the
soul is immortal, why is it that standing here, in the prime
of health and strength, if part of that roof should fall frac
turing my skull, and pressing upon my brain—how is it,
if my soul is not subject to material conditions, that it
then ceases to act ? Is the plaster roof more powerful than
my immortal soul ? Or is it that intelligence is the neces
sary result of a certain condition of existence, and that the
moment you destroy that condition—the moment you des
troy the organisation—the result ceases to be realisable ?
By the course of reasoning you adopt (says the orthodoi
objector) you reduce man to the same level as the beasts*
And why not ? I stand on the river’s bank, I see there a
man full grown, possessed of the physical figure of man, but
an idiot—an idiot from his birth upward—one who could
not, even if he would, think and act as other men. A little
child is there playing on the bank, and the idiot, having
large destructive propensities, has thrust the child into the
water, and he stands there jabbering and gesticulating while
the little child is drowning in the river. And see how halfvacantly, half-triumphantly, he points to the helpless child.
A. Newfoundland dog has come to the bank; it jumps in and
brings the little child out and saves its life. Yet theologians
veil me that the idiot has a soul, and that the Newfoundland
�HAS MAN A SOUL ?
3
dog has not one. I cannot understand these nice distinc
tions, which make the man so superior to the beast in mat
ters in which he is positively inferior. Man has doubtless
an organisation on the whole far superior intellectually to
that of any other animal, but he is only superior by virtue
of his superior organisation and its consequent susceptibility
for development or education. Many brutes can see more
clearly than man; but they possess not the capability for
the manufacture of telescopes to aid their vision. Many
brutes can run more swiftly, but they manifest no capacity
for the subjugation of a steam power which far outstrips
their speed. But man himself, a well-organised, thoughtful,
intelligent, well-educated man, by a fall from a horse, by a tile
from a roof, may receive an injury to his nervous encephalic
apparatus, and may be, even while a man in shape, as low as
the brute in the imbecility of his reason, and inferior to the
brute in physical strength. There is as much difference
between different races of men, there is, in fact, more
difference between a pure Caucasian and a Sahara negro,
than between the Sahara negro and the infant chimpanzee.
When did the soul come into the body ? Has it been
waiting from all eternity to occupy each body the moment
of birth ? Is this the theory that is put forward to man—■
that there are many millions of •souls still waiting, perhaps,
in mid air, ’twixt heaven and earth, to occupy the still un
born babes ? Is that the theory ? Or do you allege that
God specially creates souls for each little child at the moment
it is born or conceived ? Which is the theory put forward ?
Ts it that the soul being immortal—being destined to exist
for ever, has existed from all eternity ? If not, how do you
know that the soul is to exist for ever, when it only comes into
existence with the child ? May not that which has recently
begun to be, soon cease to be ? In what manner does the
soul come into the child ? Is it a baby’s soul, and does it
grow with the child ? or, does it possess its full power the
moment the child is born ? When does it come into the
child ? Does it come in the moment the child begins to
form, or is it the moment the child is born into the world ?
Whence is it this soul comes? Dr. Cooper, quoting
Lawrence on the “ Functions of the Brain,” says :—“ Sir
Everard Home, with the assistance of Mr. Bauer and his
microscope, has shown us a man eight days old from the
time of conception, about as broad and a little longer than a
pin’s head. He satisfied himself that the brain of this
�HAS MAN A SOUL?
homunculus was discernible. Could the immaterial mind
have been connected with it at this time ? Or was the tene
ment too small even for so etherial a lodger ? Even at the
full period of uterogestation, it is still difficult to trace any
vestiges of mind; and the believers in its separate existence
have left us quite in the dark on the precise time when they
suppose this union of soul and body to take place.” Many
of those who tell me that man has a soul, and that it is im
mortal—that man has a soul, and that the beast has not one
—forget or ignore that at a very early stage in the first
month of the formation of the brain, of the state of
the brain, corresponds to that of the avertebrated
animal, or animal that is without vertebra. If the brain
had stopped in its first month’s course of formation,
would the child have had a soul? If it would have
had a soul, then have avertebrated animals souls also ? if
you tell me it would not have had a soul, then I ask—How
do you know it ? and I ask you what ground you have for
assuming that the soul did not begin to form with the for
mation of the brain ? I ask you whether it was pre-existing,
or at what stage it came? In the second month this brain
corresponds then to the brain of an osseous fish. Supposing
the development of the child had been then stopped, had it
a soul at that time ? If so, have fishes souls ? Again, if
you tell me that the child has not a soul, then, I ask, why
not ? How do you know it had not? What ground have
you for alleging that the soul did not exist in the child ?
We go on still further, and in the third month we find that
brain corresponds then to that of a turtle, and in the fourth
to that of a bird; and in the fifth month, to an order termed
rodentia ; sixth, to that of the ruminantia; seventh, to that
of" the digitigrada ; eighth, to that of the quadrumana ; and
not till the ninth month does the brain of the child attain a
full human character. I, of course, here mean to allege no
more than Dr. Eletcher, who says, in his “ Rudiments of
Physiology,” quoted by the author of the “Vestiges of
Creation”—“ This is only an approximation to the truth;
since neither is the brain of all osseous fishes, of all turtles,
of’ all birds, nor of all the species of any of the above order
of mammals, by any means precisely the same; nor does the
brain of the human foetus at any time precisely resemble,
perhaps, that of any individual whatever among the lower
animals. Nevertheless it may be said to represent, at each
of the above-named periods, the aggregate, as it were, of the
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HAS MAN A SOUL?
5
brains of each of the tribes stated.” Now, should a birth
have taken place at any of the eight stages, would the child
thus prematurely born have had a soul ? That is the ques
tion 1 propose to you. You who affirm that man has a
soul, it lies upon you, here, without charging me with
blasphemy—without charging me With ’ignorance—without
charging me with presumption—it lies upon you who affirm,
to state the grounds for your belief. At which stage, if at
any, did the soul come into the child ? At the moment of
the birth ? Why when a child is born into the world it can
scarcely see—it cannot speak—it cannot think—but after a
short time I jingle my keys, and it begins to give faint
smiles ; and after a few weeks, it is pleased with the jingling
of my keys. Is it the soul which is learning to appreciate
the sound of the jingling keys, and pleased with them? Is
it the immaterial and immortal soul amused and pleased
with my bundle of keys ? Where is the soul ? How is it
that the soul cannot speak the moment the child is born—
cannot even think ? How is it, that if I keep that child
without telling it any thing of its soul until it become
fourteen or fifteen years of age, it would then speak and
think as I had taught it to speak and think ; and if I kept
it without the knowledge of a soul, it would have no know
ledge of a soul at that age ? How is that ? Rajah Brooke,
at a missionary meeting at Liverpool, told his hearers there,
that the Dyaks, a people u ith whom he was connected, had
no knowledge of a God, of a soul, or of any future state.
How is it that the Dvaks have got this soul and yet live
knowing nothing whatever about it ? And the Dyaks are
by no means the only people who live and die knowing
nothing of any immortal and immaterial soul. Again you
tell me that this soul is immortal. Do you mean that it
has eternally existed—has never been created ? If so, you
deny a God who is the creator of all things. If the soul
began at some time to exist, where is the evidence that it
will not also at some time cease to exist ? If it came into
existence with the body’s birth, why not cease with the
body’s death ? You say the soul is immaterial, do you mean
that it is susceptible to material conditions, or do you not?
If susceptible to material conditions, what do you mean by its
being immortal and immaterial ? If not susceptible to mate
rial conditions, then explain to me how it is that under good
conditions it prospers and advances, and under bad con
ditions deteriorates and recedes. If a child is born in some
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HAS MAN A SOUL*
of the back streets of our city, and lives on bad food in a
wretched cellar, it grows up a weak and puny pale-faced
child. If allowed to crawl into existence on the edge of a
gutter, imperfectly educated, in fact mis-educated, it steals—
steals, perhaps, to live—and it becomes an outcast from
society. Is this immortal soul affected by the bodily con
ditions ? or is the soul originally naturally depraved ? And
if the soul is primarily naturally depraved, why is God so
unjust as to give a naturally depraved soul to anybody ? If
not, how is it that this immortal soul, when the body is kept
without food, permits the man without money to buy food,
to steal to satisfy his hunger ? You allege that the soul
moves my body. You assert that matter is inert, unintelli
gent ; that it is my active, intelligent soul that moves and
impels my inert and non-intelligent body. Is my immortal
soul hindered and controlled by the state of my body’s
general health? Does my soul feel hungry and compel my
body to steal ? Some theologians declare that my soul is
immaterial—that there is no means by which I can take any
cognisance whatever of it. What does that mean, except
that they know nothing whatever about it ? Sir W.
Hamilton admits that we are entirely ignorant as to the
connection between soul and body. Yet many who in so
many words admit that they have no knowledge, but only
faith in the soul’s existence, are most presumptuous in
affirming it, and in denouncing those who dispute their
affirmation. It is an easy method to hide ignorance, by
denouncing your opponent as an ignorant blasphemer.
Joseph Priestley in his book upon matterand spirit, quotes
from Hallet’s discourses, as follows:—“ I see a man move
and hear him speak for some years. Prom his speech I cer
tainly infer that he thinks as I do. I then see that man is
a being, who thinks and acts. After some time the man
fells down in my sight, grows cold and stiff, and speaks and
acts no more. Is it not then natural to conclude that he
thinks no more; as the only reason I had to believe that he
did think was his motion and his speech ? And now that
his motion and speech have ceased, I have lost the only way
of proving that he had the power of thought. Upon this
sudden death, one visible thing, the one man, has greatly
changed. Whence could I infer also, the same being con
sisted of two parts, and that the inward part continues to
live and think, and flies away from the body? When the
outward part ceases to live and move, it looks as if the whole
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�HAS MAN A SOUL?
7
man was gone, and that he, with all his powers, ceases at
the same time. His motion and thought both die together,
as far as I can diseern. The powers of thought, of speech
and motion, equally depend upon the body, and run the
same fate in case of declining old age. When a man dies
through old age, I perceive his powers of speech, motion,
and thought decay and die together, and by the same degrees.
That moment he ceases to move and 'breathe, he appears to
cease to think, too. When I am left to my reason, it
seems to me that my power of thought depends as much
upon the body as my sight and hearing. I could not think
in infancy; my power of thought, of sight, and of feeling
are equally liable to be obstructed by the body. A blow on
the head has deprived a man of thought, who could yet see,
and feel, and move ; so naturally the power of thinking
seems as much to belong to the body as any power of man
whatsoever. Naturally there appears no more reason to
suppose that a man can think out of the body than he can
hear sounds and feel cold out of the body.”
What do those mean who say that man is made up of two
parts—matter and mind ? I know of only one existence.
I find that existence manifested variously, each mode having
certain variations of attributes by which it is cognised. One
of these attributes, or a collection of certain attributes, I
find in, or with, certain modifications of that existence, that
is, in or with animal life—this attribute, or these attributes,
we call intelligence. In the same way that I find upon the
blade of a knife brightness, consequent upon a certain state
of the metal, so do I find in man, in the beast, different
degrees, not of brightness, but of intelligence, according to
their different states of organisation. I am told that the
mind and the body are separate from one another. Are the
brightness and steel of the knife separate ? Is not bright
ness the quality attaching to a certain modification of exis
tence—steel? Is not intelligence a quality attaching to a
certain modification of existence—man? The word bright
ness has no meaning, except relating to some bright thing.
The word intelligence, no meaning, except as relating to
some intelligent thing. I take some water and drop it upon
the steel, in due course the process of oxidation takes place
and the brightness is gone. I drop into man’s brain a bullet,
the process of destruction of life takes place, and his intelli
gence is gone. By changing the state of the steel we des
troy its brightness, and by disorganising the man destroy
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HAS MAN A SOUL?
his intelligence. Is mind an entity or a resul. ? ai existence
or a condition? Surely it is but the result of organic
activity a phenomenon of animal life.
Dr. Engledue
says:—“ In the same way as organism generally has the
power of manifesting, when the necessary stimuli are
applied, the phenomena which are designated life; so
one individual portion—brain, having peculiar and dis
tinct properties, manifests on the application of its appro
priate stimuli a peculiar and distinct species of action.
If the sum of all bodily function—life, be not an entity,
how can the product of the action of one portion of
the body—'brain, be an entity 1 Feeling and intelligence are
but fractional portions of life.” I ask those who are here to
prove that man has a soul, to do so apart from revelation.
If the soul is a part of ourselves, we require no supernatural
revelation to demonstrate its existence to us. D’Holbach
says : —“ The doctrine of spirituality, such as it now exists,
affords nothing but vague ideas ; it is rather a poisoner of
all ideas. Let me draw your attention to this:—The advo
cates of spirituality do not tell you anything, but in fact
prevent you from knowing anything.
They say that
spirit and matter have nothing in common, and that mortal
man cannot take cognisance of immortality. An ignorant
man may set himself up as an orator upon such a matter.
He says you have a soul—an immortal soul. Take care you
don’t lose your soul. When you ask him what is my soul,
he says he does not know—nobody knows—nobody can tell
you This is really that which they do. What is this doc
trine of spirituality ? What does it present to the mind ?
A substance unsubstantial that possesses nothing of which
our senses enable us to take cognisance.” Theologians urge
that each of us has a soul superior to all material conditions,
and yet a man who speaks cannot communicate by his speak
ing soul so freely with that man who is deaf and dumb; the
conditions cramp that which is said to be uncontrolled by
any conditions. If you cut out a man’s tongue, the soul no
longer speaks. If you put a gag in his mouth, and tie it
with a handkerchief, so that he cannot get it out, his soul
ceases to speak. The immaterial soul is conquered by a gag,
it cannot utter itself, the gag is in the way. The orthodox
say that the soul is made by Gfod ; and what do you know
about G-od ? Why just as much as we know about the soul.
And what do you know about the soul ? Nothing whatever.
How is it that if the soul is immaterial, having nothing in
�HAS MAN A SOUL ?
9
common with matter, that it only is manifest by material
means ? and how is it that it is encased and enclosed in my
material frame ? They affirm that my soul is a spirit—that
I received the same spirit from God. How is it that my
spirit is now by myself, and by my mortal body, denying its
own existence ? Is my mortal soul acting the hypocrite, or
is it ignorant of its own existence, and cannot help itself to
better knowledge ? And if it cannot help itself, why not,
if it is superior to the body ? and if you think it a hypocrite,
tell me why. What is meant by the declaration that man is
a compound of matter and spirit?—things which the ortho
dox assert have nothing in common with one another. Of
the existence of what you call matter you are certain, because
you and I, material beings, are here. Are you equally cer
tain of the existence of mind, as an existence independent
and separate from matter ? and if you are, tell me why.
Have you ever found it apart from matter ? If so, when and
where ? Have you found that the mind has a separate and
distinct existence ? if so, under what circumstances ? and tell
me—you who define matter as unintelligent, passive, inert,
and motionless—who talk of the vis inertice of matter—tell
me what you mean when you give these definitions to it?
You find the universe, and this small portion of it on which
we are, ceaselessly active. Why do you call it passive,
except it be that you want courage to search tor true know
ledge, as to the vast capabilities of existence, and, therefore,
invent such names as God and Soul to account for all
difficulties, and to hide your ignorance? What do you mean
by passive and inert matter ? You tell me of this world—
part of a system—that system part of another—that of
another—and point out to me the innumerable planets, the
countless millions of w'orlds, in the universe. You, who tell
me of the vast forces of the universe; what do you mean by
telling me that that is motionless ? What do you mean by yet
pointing to the unmeasurable universe and its incalculably
mighty forces, and affirming that they are incapable of every
perceptible effect? You, without one fact on which to base
your theory, strive to call into existence another existence
which must be more vast, and which you allege produces this
existence and gives its powers to it. Sir Isaac Newton
says“ We are to admit no more causes of things than are
sufficient to explain appearances.” What effect is there
which the forces of existence are incapable of producing?
Why do you come to the conclusion tnat the forces of the
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HAS MAN A SOUL?
universe are incapable of producing every effect of which I
take cognisance ? Why do you come to the conclusion that
intelligence is not an attribute—why ? What is there which
enables you to convert it into a separate and distinct exis
tence ? Is there anything ? Is it spirit ? What is spirit ?
That of which the mortal man can know nothing, you tell
me—that it is nothing which his senses can grasp—that is,
no man, but one who disregards his senses, can believe in it,
and that it is that which no man’s senses can take cognisance
of. If a man who uses his senses can never by their aid
take cognisance of spirit, then as it is through the senses
alone man knows that which is around him, you can know
nothing about spirit until you go out of your senses. When
I speak of the senses, I do not limit myself to what are
ordinarily termed man’s five senses—I include all man’s
sensitive faculties, and admit that I do not know the extent
of, and am not prepared to set a limit to, the sensitive capa
bilities of man. I have had personal experience in connec
tion with psycho-magnetic phenon ena of faculties in man
and woman not ordinarily recognist d, and am inclined to the
opinion that many men have been made converts to the
theories of spiritualism, because their previous education
had induced them to set certain arbitrary limits to the
domains of the natural. When they have been startled by
phenomena outside these conventional limitations, they at
once ascribed them to supernatural influences, rather than
reverse their previous rules of thinking.
Some urge that the soul is life. What is life ? Is it not
the word by which we express the aggregate normal func
tional activity of vegetable and animal organisms, necessa
rily differing, in degree, if not in kind, with each different
organisation ? To talk of immortal life and yet to admit the
decay and destruction of the organisation, is much the same
as to talk of a square circle. You link together two words
which contradict each other. The solution of the soul pro
blem is not so difficult as many imagine. The greatest diffi
culty is, that we have been trained to use certain words as
“ God,” “ matter,” “ mind,” “ spirit,” “ soul,” “ intelli
gence,” and we have been further trained to take these
words as representatives of realities, which, in fact, they do
not represent. We have to unlearn much of our school lore.
We have specially to carefully examine the meaning of each
word we use. The question lies in a small compass. Is there
one existence or more ? Qf one existence I am conscious,
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HAS MAN A SOTO
11
because I am a mode of it. I know of no other existence.
*. know of no existence but that existence of which I am a
mode. I hold it to be capable of producing every effect. It
is for the man who alleges that there is another, to prove it.
I know of one existence. I do not endeavour to demonstrate
to you my existence, it needs no demonstration—I am. My
existence is undeniable. I am speaking to you. You are
conscious of my existence. You and I are not separate
entities, but modes of the same existence. We take cogni
sance of the existence which is around us and in us, and
which is the existence of which we are modes. Of the one
existence we are certain. It is for those who affirm that the
universe is “ matter,” and who affirm that there also exists
“ spirit,” to reinember that they admit the one existence I
seek to prove, and that the onus lies on them to demonstrate
a second existence—in fact, to prove there is the other exis
tence which they term spiritual. There cannot exist two
different substances or existences having the same attributes
or qualities. There cannot be two existences of the same
essence, having different attributes, because it is by the
attributes alone that we can distinguish the existences. We
can only judge of the substance by its modes. We may find
a variety of modes of the same substance, and we shall find
points of union which help to identify them, the one with
the other—the link which connects them with the great
whole. We can only judge of the existence of which we are
a part (in consequence of our peculiar organisation), under
the form of a continuous chain of causes and effects—each
effect a cause to the effect it precedes, each cause an effect
of the causative influence which heralded its advent. The
remote links of that line are concealed by the darkness of the
far-off past. Nay, more than this, the mightiest effort of
mind can never say—This is the first cause. Weakness and
ignorance have said it - but why ? To cloak their weakness,
to hide their ignorance. Knaves have said it—but why ? Tb
give scope to their cunning, and to enable them to say to the
credulous, “ Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.” The
termination is in the as yet unknowable future; and I ask
you, presumptuous men, who dare to tell me of God and
soul, of matter and creation—when possessed you the power
to sunder links of that great chain and write, “In the
beginning ?” I deny that by the mightiest effort of the
strongest intellect man can ever say of any period, at this
point substance began to be—before this existence was not.
�12
HAS MAN A
soul?
Has man a soul ? You who tell me he has a soul, a soul
independent of material conditions, I ask you how it is that
these immortal souls strive with one another to get mortal
benefits ? Has man a soul ? If man’s soul is not subject
to material conditions, why do I find knavish souls ?—Why
slavish souls ?—tyrannous souls ? Your doctrine that man
has a soul prevents him from rising. When you tell him
that his soul is not improvable by material conditions, you
prevent him from making himself better than he is. Man’s
intelligence is a consequence of his organisation. Organisa
tion is improvable, the intelligence becomes more powerful
as the organisation is fully developed, and the conditions
which surround man are made more pure. And the man
will become higher, truer, and better when he knows that
his intelligence is an attribute, like other attributes, capable
of development, susceptible of deterioration, he will strive
to effect the first and to guard against the latter.
Look at a number of people putting power into the hands
of one man, because he is a lord—surely they have no souls.
See the mass cringing to a wretched idol—surely these have
no souls. See men forming a pyramid of which the base is
a crushed and worn-out people, and the apex a church, a
throne, a priest, a king, and the frippery of a creed;—have
those men souls? Society should not be such a pyramid, it
should be one brotherly circle, in which men should be
linked together by a consciousness that they are only happy
so linked, conscious that when the chain is broken, then the
society and her peace is destroyed. What we teach is not
that man has a soul apart and independent of the body, but
that he has an ability, an intelligence, an attribute of his
body, capable of development, improvable, more useful,
according as he elevates himself and his fellows. Give up
blind adhesion to creeds and priests, strive to think ana
follow out in action the result of your thoughts. Each
mental struggle is an enlargement of your mind, an addition
to your brain power, an increase of your soul—the only soul
you have.
Printed by Austin & Co., 17, J jhnson’s Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
�
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
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Title
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Has man a soul?
Description
An account of the resource
Edition: [4th ed.?]
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 12 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Pages 3-11 bound in the wrong order (have been corrected in the PDF). "This lecture was originally delivered to the Sheffield Secular Society, and was printed from the reporter's notes without efficient correction from myself ...The lecture has been often re-delivered; and three editions having been exhausted, I have again corrected and revised the present edition." Tentative date of publication from KVK. Includes biblical references. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Creator
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Bradlaugh, Charles [1833-1891.]
Publisher
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[Austin & Co.]
Date
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[1861?}
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G4949
N094
Subject
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Soul
Rationalism
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
NSS
Soul
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/a420e7d248b892e0ed287b3ff420908e.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=KmBHGdh3c7rOxNdmB2XHkD4SSNdscxBkrRvK2qdtWYkj5xX1Qs4E1C%7EGCKn9LLAjt3sM4R3i9tmf6UF9qrhuCySIAqJmgKz1%7EhDvqdMNvbhML-JQgwpot8ujsmhkBrEX924529hd7C84eYSGncO7p7NXnxFA-uR4DFw3hOYm5mTrVQXllDvBBblvmgA8qpfyZn27qVPfBgdo%7EY2gTjhN7QO62-VfauaFQHSzqMHlSySm9McL5LLDaGiUct0K55mxv0tyfNPF6E8vICtJnAzcb-gBeaBEFt4qB8O3AtMC8e1Q-OBGSpf1KGRT-VHdaxQHuNs86sgUVDop6GWkOWKPXw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
ff68873613dab3e634b2903f3c5863fa
PDF Text
Text
REASON
VERSUS
AUTHORITY.
BY
W. 0. GARR BROOK.
“ Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”
Thess., v. 21.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
1871.
Price Threepence.
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET,
HAYMARKET, W.
�REASON
VERSUS
AUTHORITY.
HE present is a sceptical age. We do not, as
in former times, believe, but criticise. Faith,
in these days, has no province, but the whole area of
human expectation is limited to the range of our
reason. If a truth can be shown to be probable, we
accept it. If it is not, in our estimation, reasonable,
we reject it. We assert, in short, that the instrument
and method of our apprehension is the same, whether
the thing to be apprehended be an episode in Homer’s
Iliad or an incident in Luke’s Life of Christ.
If we interpret aright the intellectual position of
those who urge this as a sign of our spiritual deca
dence, they are, in some sense or measure, prepared
to affirm that reason is unrelated to the subject of
religion. We should not, they think, consider the pro
priety or impropriety of a given religious observance,
the reasonableness or unreasonableness of a supposed
religious obligation, the credibility or incredibility of
an affirmed revelation from heaven, but, with regard
to such matters, our reason is to be held in abeyance.
Within the sphere of our higher life, we are not to
argue, but accept; not criticise, but believe; not ask
for evidence, but proceed upon authority.
T
�6
Reason versus Authority.
Taken absolutely and universally, this instruction
to us for our guidance needs, we think, but to be
touched to be disproved. If everywhere and at all
times, within the sphere of religion, reason is to be
quiescent and faith supreme, either we must adopt
every creed, however opposite, in turn, as the advo
cate of each presses it upon us, or we must, under all
circumstances, abide by our original religious impres
sions, and refuse to relinguish them whatever a deeper
experience may say in opposition. In the former
case, it will be our duty, to-day, being urged thereto
by the Protestant, to denounce Mariolatry, and, to
morrow, pressed by the Catholic, to bow down, in
utmost reverence, to the Virgin Mother. In the
latter, it will be incumbent upon us, whether we are
the children of Protestant or Catholic parents, to ask
no questions and to listen to no persuasion to change
our religious sentiments, but accepting them at first
without inquiry, and abiding by them ever afterwards
irrespective of their hold upon our judgment, to
reduce the problem of the growth or retrogression
of Protestant or Roman Catholic sentiment in this
country to the question of the relative fruitfulness of
Protestant or Roman Catholic parentage.
If they who affirm the supremacy of faith and the
unrelatedness of reason to religion do not affirm it
always and everywhere, they, then, affirm it some
times and somewhere, and the question, of course, is
when and where. In reply, if we ask the Protestant,
he informs us that our reason is to give place to our
faith when we read a certain book, but that our faith
is to give place to our reason when we read any
interpretation of the book which is not our own.
The Catholic, in opposition, says, with much show of
sense, that if we need an infallible book we must,
being often ignorant and always liable to err, need,
from the same consideration, an infallible interpreter,
�Reason versus Authority.
y
and offers us that which he esteems to be so. If we
.relinquish our reason, however, since we cannot
assent to both, we can assent to neither. The double
assertion of our duty to accept and not to question is
equivalent, in force, to the single assertion to ques
tion and not to accept. Where there are two autho
rities, each of which denounces the other and claims
exclusive obedience from ourselves, it may or may
not be fortunate, but it is inevitable that we should
withhold our faith till we have exercised our reason.
Regarding the position more leisurely, we think
that whether or not it may be otherwise defensible, it
is not to be expected that we should admit it merely
because they who assert it have the strongest possible
impression that it is so. They may, as they no doubt
most unquestionably do, very sincerely believe that
they are not, but, unless they are prepared, in addi
tion, to affirm their personal infallibility, they must
admit that they may be, mistaken. The positive
certainty which they assert themselves to possess in
an inward impression which they consider transcends
their reason, they must, nevertheless, when affirmed
by others on behalf of an opposing conclusion, and,
therefore, in their case, on behalf of their own, allow,
at least, admits of question. Since Jew and Gentile,
Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Heathen,
have, in turn, been so assured of the truth of their
convictions as to die for them, and such convictions
have, necessarily, been not merely dissimilar but
professedly antagonistic, it is evident that no con
viction can be so strong, and no fidelity to it so
persistent, as to yield, therein, any, much less a
perfect, guarantee, that their faith is a synonym for
the truth.
Neither can we consent to the relinquishment of
our reason in our religion from the affirmed necessity
of an exact intellectual conception of God, and the
�8
Reason versus Authority.
impossibility, by reason, of attaining to it. Were it
true that a certain intellectual conception were essen
tial to the divine favour, it would, of course, follow
that we might expect the Divine Being to supply us
with an unquestionable method of attaining to it.
On the other hand, it is to be inferred that if the
Divine Being has not placed within the reach of men
generally an infallible method of arriving at an
absolute knowledge of him, it is because it is not
necessary to his favour that they should possess it.
The question, then, is, which of the two is the more
reasonable alternative ? and the answer, we think, is
obvious. Which of the many existing and opposing
conclusions, from Catholicism to Rationalism, shall
be ours, in our youth, will be dependent upon the
accidental circumstances of our birth, and, if we are
not to reason but acquiesce in our original religious
impressions, will continue to be so always. But, if
so, there can be no more unquestionable method of
knowing God without than with our reason—rather,
the alternative to which we fly will be worse than
that from which we flee. The assertion that we
should judge for ourselves renders it possible that we
should mistake, but the assertion that we should not
judge for ourselves makes it inevitable that the
greater portion of mankind must do so, and, accord
ing to the theory of those who affirm the necessity
for an exact intellectual conception of God, to their
eternal ill-doing.
We must, also, we think, reject the argument that
the subject-matter of religion is of that kind which
precludes the competency of our reason. Admitted
that the divine existence is not cognisable by our
senses, it does not therefore follow that we should
accept the opinions of other persons with similarly
imperfect bodily organs, but, simply, that we should
listen to them upon this as upon other questions
�Reason versus Authority.
9
with a view to form a correct opinion of our own.
Admitted that the certainty of a future life is not to
be proved by our reason, so, neither, on the other
hand, can we be certain, though we may feel so, with
out it. He who tells us aught which we could not
know without his telling, must bring proof to us that
he has special or exclusive information upon the sub
ject, and the only part of us which is capable of
dealing with proof is our reason. Admitted that
theological truths cannot be known but must be
believed, the conclusion to which it leads is, not
unreasoning acquiescence in anything or everything
which may be affirmed, but a rational endeavour to
discover that which, if not certain, is most probable.
There may or may not in the circumstance that we
cannot know God fully without a revelation, be
ground to expect one, but, even upon the supposi
tion that one is to be expected, whether or not it has
been given, and if so, when and where, and what its
purport, must be matter of opinion ; and inasmuch
as experience teaches us that men are positive upon
such questions, not in proportion to the breadth, but
the limitation of their vision, the strength and extent
to which a conclusion thereon is positively affirmed
is the measure of the necessity for calling it into
question.
Relinquishing our, so far, merely defensive position,
and assuming the initiative in the controversy, we
think we are justified in saying that the primd facie
argument is opposed to the conclusion. If there is a
distinguishing mark of Divine Authorship, it is the
relatedness of the means to the end, and the sub
ordination of the lower to the higher methods of
nature. The unreasoning trust of the child, how
ever, is not equal to the intelligent appreciation of
the man, and the higher purpose of our life is not in
eating or drinking, or buying or selling, or marrying
�io
Reason versus Authority.
and giving in marriage, but in the right understanding
and performance of our spiritual relationships. But
if our reason is the highest endowment, as it un
questionably is, with which the Divine Being has
favoured us, and if, even in the estimation of those
who differ from us, the highest purpose of our life is
not in the enjoyment of the present but in prepar
ation for the future, it would seem that if our reason
were intended to serve any purpose whatever, it was,
in any case, intended to guide us in the matter of our
religious hopes and expectations.
This impression is confirmed, we do not hesitate to
say, by the circumstance that the same persons who
call upon us to suspend our reason, nevertheless find
themselves under the ceaseless necessity to appeal to
it upon the subject of our religion. If we remind
the Catholic, for instance, when he presses us to
assent to his proposition, that the Protestant also puts
in a claim, he brings to our mind the modern origin
of the Protestant, calls him a schismatic, and, gene
rally, uses his best endeavours to prove that the
Protestant claim is inadmissible. If, on the other
hand, we inform the Protestant, when he calls upon
us to urge his authoritative dogma, that the Catholic
has anticipated him, the Protestant proceeds to re
mind us that the Catholic is an image worshipper,
quotes secular and ecclesiastical history to bedaub
his church, and, imitating his Roman Catholic
compeer in this at least, uses all his art to
persuade our judgment that he is, and that tho
Catholic is not, entitled to prescribe our religious
opinions. But, if it be true that we should not
reason, why do they each play the part of tempter,
and solicit from us a judgment ? Is it not singular
that our reason should be unfitted to deal with a
subject, and yet that, upon it, the several parties to
the affirmative should never hesitate to appeal to it.
�Reason versus Authority.
11
Surely, of all the transcending mysteries of life,
that which most transcends is the mystery that each
should systematically deny the competency of an
authority to which they appeal, repudiate a right
which they equally recognise, advance and with
draw, according to the conveniences of their argu
ment, the intellectual position, upon which, they
assert, hangs the eternal destinies of their race.
If the pertinency of their conclusion, however, is
not apparent, its wondrous impertinency, if we ex
amine it, it will not be difficult to discover. Traced
to its mental base, is not the meaning of those who
assert that we should not reason but believe, that
they have themselves come to a conclusion upon re
ligious subjects which they wish, whether or not it is
agreeable to our judgment, to impose upon us? Is it
not that the training of their youth, the prejudices of
their class, or the intellectual preferences they have
acquired, point in a certain direction, and that these
appearing to themselves to be sacred, they cannot
understand, and are not prepared to allow, prejudices
and opinions which are not their own ? The reason
why we should not reason is, after all, simply that
they wish to undertake the duty for us. The ground
of their objection is, not that we should come to a
conclusion, bat that we should not come to their con
clusion. If this be not so, wherefore do they recom
mend us to listen to their own polemical discourses ?
How does it happen that books written in defence of
“ the truth,” as they regard it, are laudable, and only
those written in opposition are pernicious ? Of
what other solution is their conduct capable when
they permit — nay, commend — our disposition to
reason, so long as it results in the adoption of their
sentiments ? Stripped of its unintentional disguise,
the assertion that we should not criticise but accept,
�12
Reason versus Authority.
is, simply, the assertion that they who make it believe
that their judgment is, and that the judgment of those
who differ from them is not, to be trusted.
Studiously regarded, indeed, the recommendation
to us for our guidance is not more intellectually
puerile than practically impossible. If the Catholic
has faith in the teaching of his Church, it is not
because he does not exercise his reason, but because,
owing to early training, social circumstance, or
tendency of mind, its claims, upon the whole, appear
to him more rational than any alternative of which
he takes note. If the Protestant is averse to the
claims of the Catholic Church, and sympathises with
the Anglican or any Dissenting formulary, it is not
because he does not come to a judgment upon the
subject of their respective merits, but because, how
ever ignorant and swayed by prejudice, and however
unconscious of the mental operation, his judgment,
nevertheless, inclines to the one in preference to the
other. Nay ! our reason is the only instrument with
which we can assent. Our intellect is the only part
of us capable of faith. Diversity in the things to be
apprehended involves no diversity in the instrument
of our apprehension. Two and two are four, and the
mental operation is the same, when the addition is
of men or angels. The things which are believable
by us, and they only, are such as appear to us
to be probable, whether they be secular or sacred.
Paith is not opposed to, but is the product of, our
reason, alike when it relates to our anticipation of
a summer shower and the second coming of the
Saviour. Taste, feeling, hope, fear, love, hate, educa
tion, or the want thereof, may, as the atmosphere
influences the pendulum, influence the judgment;
but as the eye only sees, and the ear only hears, so
the reason only can assent or dissent, whether the
�Reason versus Authority.
13
proposition submitted to it be the physical relation of
the earth to the sun, or the moral relation of the
human to the Divine Spirit.
In conclusion, we must regard the moral as of
equal value with the intellectual position assigned us
by our critics. The interpretation which they who
do not approve put upon the change which they
correctly assert is coming over society, is that the
present, by consequence, is the less religious age.
Other nations and earlier races, they argue, believed
more readily because they were more spiritual than
we : we are more critical because we are less subject
to a sense of divine obligation. Were we as desirous
of doing God’s will as they were who preceded or
they are who rebuke us, we should be as ready as
they to accept their theological opinions and act upon
their sense of duty. We cannot accept this interpre
tation of our position. Orthodox opinion is sufficiently
tyrannous and persecuting to deter any merely pre
sumptuous person from lightly setting at defiance the
opinion of the many, and asserting, from sheer pride
of intellect, as it is called, a new creed. Were there
no external disadvantage in professing singularity
of religious belief, the force of early association, and
the merely superstitious regard which we have for
the sentiments of our youth, whatever they may be,
would be a sufficiently penal preventive from change,
for the sake of it. The ordinary interests of life
are too present and pressing to admit of length
ened study of religious questions, unless the spirit
within, under the impulse of some strong conviction,
is constrained to give personal attention to a matter
which people generally are willing to leave to
the decision of others. In short, so long as excep
tional attention to a subject is regarded, not as
an indication of the want of ordinary, but of the
possession of a special interest in it, it must be
�14
Reason versus Authority,
assumed that those amongst us who see reason to
change their religious attitude and stand apart, do
so, not because they are less but more impressed;
and they who do not understand and therefore mis
interpret their motive will do well, if not because it is
rational, because, by an authority which they do not
dispute, it is commanded, to follow their example,
and “ prove all things, and hold fast that which is
good.”
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Pamphlet
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Title
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Reason versus authority
Creator
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Brook, W. O. Carr
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 14 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London.
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Date
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1871
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CT151
Subject
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Rationalism
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (Reason versus authority), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Conway Tracts
Faith and Reason
Rationalism
-
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07499ca6b904827b1b5807836164cbed
PDF Text
Text
2SZ-l> mag
OUR CAUSE AND
ACCUSERS.
ITS
A DISCOURSE
GIVEN AT
THE ATHEN/EUM, CAMDEN ROAD,
UNE
1 1TH,
1876.
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
��OUR CAUSE AND ITS ACCUSERS,
It is not because the believer in rational religion has
not clear convictions that he will not shape them into
a creed. It is because the experience of the world
has proved that however well a creed may express the
thought of one generation it is very certain to impede
the thought of another. An oriental Prince once sent
his servant some miles to get a bit of salt for his meal
while out hunting; but when he found that his
messenger had not paid for the salt he sent him all
the way back with some money; for, he said, though
the pinch of salt is a trifle, precedent is not a trifle,
and if he should take even so little without payment
the custom might grow until some prince of the
future might desolate the country. As great despotisms
have grown from small beginnings, so have oppressions
�4
for the human mind and conscience grown out of the
bad habit which our ancestors had of putting their
opinions into dogmatic shape. For when a creed is so
made they who believe it commit their pride of
opinion to it; they get a party to build schools and
churches to teach that creed ; then many people have
pecuniary interests invested in such schools and
churches, are furious with those who question the
creed which props their power and wealth, and do
them all the mischief they can. This is why the
church never burned people for immorality, but only
for doubting or denying their creed. All this amounts
to systematic discouragement of thought; and, as the
rationalist desires to encourage thought, he refuses to
formulate his opinions as dogmas or creeds, or to
build his organisation on any corner-stone which may
crush intellectual liberty beneath it. I have no claim,
therefore, to commit those who have for many years
honoured me with their confidence to any belief
except belief in this liberty of mind and conscience.
We are aiming to build a science of religion and of
morals, based upon the facts of consciousness, the
history of man, the laws of nature,- and in science
there can be no finality, no authority. In stating the
views of rationalists, I speak only as one who has had
long acquaintance with such, and has devoted his life
to study of their principles.
Occasionally, indeed, some few liberals—not exactly
�5
rationalists—have wished for something like a set of
articles; but I think we are justified in our repugnance
to everything of that kind not only by the history
of persecution for opinion’s sake, but by what is now
occurring around us, even here in the most enlightened
metropolis of the world. The transfer of our little
Society to a larger hall than that in which we have
gathered for near ten years in quietness, has been the
occasion of denunciations which could not have been
more fierce had we during those years demoralised
the whole neighbourhood. We have been vilified,
accused, misrepresented, and for what offence ? For
inability to subscribe to a creed framed in an age
when science did not exist, by men who believed more
childish superstitions than the Church of Rome,
a creed which our assailants themselves could not
and would not believe were their faculties unfettered.
Here are two printed sermons directed against us, and
all who tolerate us, by the Vicar of St. Luke’s, West
Holloway. One is entitled “ The Lord’s Derision of
Opposer’s Schemes;” and in it he describes his God as
laughing, but with an awful angry laugh, at our opposi
tion to the Vicar’s creed. The other is called “ The
Lord’s Question to those who harbour his enemies,”
the question being that which Jehovah is said to have
asked Balaam, “ What men are these with thee ? ” The
Vicar talks about his God in this way :—“ First, then,
it is a question of Surprise. It is asked even by God
�6
in a tone of surprise and of startled wonder. What!
God seems to say ; is it possible ? ” And again “ the
question is also one of anger and high indignation"
He also represents Balaam as being killed in battle
because he had joined Jehovah’s enemies.
Now this so-called deity is familiar to all students
of superstition. The God that laughs at the calamity
of his own creatures and mocks when their fear
cometh, and sends into the world opposers only to
deride and then kill them,—even as he hardened
Pharaoh s heart in order, as he said, that he might
show his own glory upon him,—this fearful phantasm
of a semi-barbarous Syrian tribe, is known to us. But
how comes it that he is held up as a real god here in
London, in an age of refinement and culture ? How
comes it that the graduate of a University is prepared
to bid men love their enemies in one breath, and in
another bid them worship a God who derides, mocks,
pursues, and slays his enemies, even though he made
them himself voluntarily ? Why the reverend gentle
man himself shows us how it has come about. He says,
ii There is a false and mock liberality which says that
we may allow people to think and do as they like I
Now that might be true if God had given us no rule,
no law to guide us ; but as He has, men have no such
liberty.” I honour that clergyman’s candour. He
confesses that what he preaches is not his own thought,
not what he might like or believe if he should indulge
�7
in the wickedness of reasoning without prejudice. He
thinks only as authority has prescribed; and because
for ages men like him have laboured not to discover
what is true but to defend the incredible creeds of the
world’s infancy, around which temporal interests and
institutions have grown, we find this idol of the Stone
Age artificially preserved to disgrace the Age of
Reason. This clergyman says our God is “ a clot on
the brain.” I can assure him that I do not believe his
startled, angry, jealous, plotting god is a clot on the
brain : it is the yet uncrumbled fragment of an ancient
cosmogony occupying the place where a brain ought
to be at work in the life that now is, and in the light
shining for its direction.
It is a formidable thing for a man to take such a
conception of God into his mind, and set it up on the
tomb of his freedom; for the day has passed by in
which it can be maintained by fair and honourable
means. As the angry, jealous, mocking god gives no
sign or miracle to attest his existence at a moment
when in all the ranks of literature and science no un
professional defender of that existence is discoverable,
they whose all is based upon that superstition are
tempted to support it by intemperate language, by
personal misrepresentations, and foul aspersions. I
do not feel animosity towards the Vicar on account of
the injustice he has done my friends and myself,
because his sermons reveal the earnestness of his
�8
feeling. His pain and alarm are at least more creditable
than the hypocrisy of the hirelings who flee when they
see the wolf approaching their fold. The only sorrow
I have is that so candid and earnest a gentleman should
mistake me for a wolf, for he cannot help fighting me
as such, without being particular as to his weapons.
Not being a wolf, and indeed trying to watch
beside a flock of my own, I am compelled to
remonstrate against his misrepresentations.
He
tells his people that I call their Lord and Saviour
“ a dead Jew.” That is not true. This phrase,
il a dead Jew/’ is taken from a book of mine,
*
and by detachment is made to seem like an epithet
on Christ, instead of a rebuke to those who ignore
his grand humanity. I remember once to have had
a fear that some one might fancy that sentence was a
slur upon the Jewish race, which I honour for its
genius and its high record in art and philosophy ;
but it did not occur to me that it would ever be so
hopelessly wrested from its meaning as it has been by
the Vicar of St. Luke’s. In the preceding sentence I
speak of laying my “ palm before the heroic prophet
of Jerusalem,” and immediately after on the same
page of “the brave reformer” sacrificed to “the High
Church of Palestine.” When, therefore, I asked in
that connection, “ What shall we say of the cultivated
* The Earthward Pilgrimage. Chatto and Windus, 74,
Piccadilly, W. The reference is to p. 240.
�9
Europeans whose god is a dead Jew ?” I was plainly
not expressing my conception of Christ, but that of
the Churches generally. I heartily wish it were
otherwise. I wish that the sweet humanity of Christ,
his heroic struggle with the Established Church of his
time, his poetry and eloquence, were recognised by
the orthodox; but unhappily it is untheological to
dwell on the human characteristics of Christ. They
insist that he was going through a prescribed routine
in a perfunctory way; his temptations, difficulties, all
unreal, as, being God, he could not sin, and was never
in any danger of failing. So there is no man there at
all. According to that view, so far as his humanity
is concerned, he is merely a dead Jew, his death
being the only seriously important thing about him.
Again, my reverend critic writes as follows :•—“ Can
you ‘ receive into your house’ men who speak thus
of the sacred mystery of the Incarnation. . .
‘ His infant head, (said the poets)—alluding thus, it
would appear, to that most reverent and devout
hymn of good Bishop Heber—and where can
Rationalism find among its disciples such a specimen
of pure high morality, to say nothing of heavenly
spirituality, as we can present it with in Heber ?—
£ Low lies His head, mid the beasts of the stall ’:—‘ His
infant head was laid down amid the beasts of the
stall.’ And now listen to the way in which the Son
of God, your Saviour, and His holy Gospel are
�IO
spoken of: ‘Its helpless infancy must be confided
to donkeys, who shall mingle many a bray with this
new Gospel.’ ”
Such is the fate of my honest effort to save faith in
the wisdom and the greatness of Christ from being
hid and lost for rational people by reason of the stu
pidity and bigotry which for ages have been taking
him under their fatal protection, making him into
their own image, until it is almost impossible to con
vince able men that there was any grandeur in him
at all. In charity I must suppose that some one
must have handed the Vicar the extract, for if he had
read it in its connection he must have known that he
was conveying to his people an impression widely
different, and, so far as related to Christ, exactly the
reverse of what is said in my book. I must now ask
you to listen to what I there wrote:—“ Who is he that
overcometh the world, but he that can pierce through
its glittering shows, and see this Nazarene peasant to
be the Son of God? From that moment the old
heavens begin to fade: on the soul’s eye shines
already the new heaven to whose every tint the new
earth must respond. ... A thousand revolutions ger
minated when the people knelt before a right and
true, and a poor man. He was born amid the wild
winter, said the poets; his infant head was laid low
amid the beasts of the stall; his cause must struggle
with the hostile elements of an icy conservatism; its
�II
helpless infancy must be confided to donkeys, who
shall mingle many a bray with this new gospel. All
the old fables about Jahve, Zeus, and the rest, shall
swathe this babe. Nevertheless, to us this child is
bom; where he enters idols shall fall, oracles be
struck dumb, and all the signs of the heavens hold
themselves honoured in weaving an aureole about
the brow of a Man. This babe shall consecrate
every babe; this mechanic shall establish the dignity
of labour; this pauper shall liberate slaves and strike
off the burdens of the poor.”
Such is the page in which the Vicar detects blas
phemy. I have given it at length, because it is of
very serious importance to me that I shall not be
held up before this community as falling beneath any
man living in my homage to Christ. In a ministry
that has now lasted a quarter of a century no word
concerning that great soul has yet fallen from my
tongue or pen that was not inspired by reverence,
love, and even enthusiasm.
•So much in self-defence. The next point in the
Vicar’s attack is a more serious one, and it involves
the whole Rationalistic community. He virtually
charges it with sensualism. He tells his hearers
■that if they even tolerate us God will withdraw his
light from their mind and his grace from their heart.
“ You will become,” he says, “ first a sceptic, and
then an infidel, and then a scoffer, and then, at last
�12
the openly immoral sensualist!” What is a sceptic?
It is a Greek word, meaning a man who “ considers.”
What is infidel? It means a man who disbelieves
what the majority^believe. It was what Paul con
fessed to when he said, “ This I confess, that after
the way they call heresy so worship I the God of
my Fathers.” According to the Vicar, to consider
(o-KeTTTeiv), and to adopt an individual opinion, in
religion, is the sure path to immorality. Well, Christ
was called a blasphemer and a friend of sinners, and
in league with Beelzebub ; and if priests spoke so of
him we need not be disturbed when priests say hard
things of us. But we have the right to ask the Vicar
to prove his case. The Liberal religious body is of
respectable age, and the Vicar should point out the
examples of immorality in its record of eminent men.
Will he select Channing, or Belsham, or Priestley—
whose house a Christian mob tore down—in the past,
or Martineau and John James Tayler, Dr. Carpenter
and Miss Mary Carpenter of recent years ? Or,
taking more pronounced rationalism, will he name
as sensualists Professor Newman, or Miss Cobbe, or
Sir Charles Lyell, or Mr. Justice Grove, or Lord
Houghton, or the Duke of Somerset, or the poet
Tennyson, or Matthew Arnold, or Herbert Spencer?
These are men who have carried scepticism and
rationalism to its fullest logical results. Are they
known as sensualists, or even as men who bear false
witness against their neighbours ?
�r3
I think most persons will agree that Mr. Gladstone
is about as good a judge of the religious world as the
Vicar of St. Luke. In his article on “ Modern Reli
gious Thought,” Mr. Gladstone speaks of those whom
the Vicar calls Sensualists, in the following terms :—
“ There are within it,” he says, speaking of the
Unitarian, theistic, and rationalistic class generally,
“ men not only irreproachable in life, but excellent;
and many who have written both in this country and
on the Continent with no less power than earnestness,
in defence of the belief which they retain. Such are,
for example, Professor Frohschammer in Germany,
and M. Laveleye in Belgium ; while in this country,
without pretending to exhaust the list, I would pay a.
debt of honour to Mr. Martineau, Mr. Greg, Dr. Car
penter and Mr. Jevons. . . . They are generally men.
exempt from such temptations as distress entails, and
fortified with such restraints as culture can supply.
. . . We should not hastily be led by antagonism of
opinion to estimate lightly the influence which a
School, limited like this in numbers, may exercise on
the future. For, if they are not rulers, they rule those
who are. They belong to the class of thinkers and
•teachers ; and it is from within this circle, always, and,
even in the largest organisations, a narrow one, that
go forth the influences which one by one form the
minds of men, and in their aggregate determine the
course of affairs, the fate of institutions, and the hap
piness of the human race.”
�14
Such is the judgment upon the men and the influ
ences at work in the rationalistic movement uttered
by one who has given as much attention to religious
subjects as any man of our time.
The Vicar challenges us to show in the ranks of
rationalism any man so moral and spiritual as Bishop
Heber. That kind of argument is more absurd than
if I were to ask him to point out among rationalists
one so coarse as the present Bishop of Gloucester
and Bristol, who advised the landlords, when Joseph
Arch and other leaders of the Agricultural Unions
came, “ to duck them in the nearest horsepond.” It
is at least more pertinent to illustrate the character of
an existing belief by living examples than by going
back to one dead over fifty years. There was a time
when the saintliest souls in Europe were Roman
Catholics. The falsity of the system had not then been
exposed: Since Bishop Heber died the religious
mind of England has been revolutionised by the great
discoveries of science, the generalisations of philo
sophy, and the opening to us of the religions of the
East. It is under such influences as these that the
Hebers of the past have become the Thirlwalls, and
Colensos, and Temples of the present. For the ra
tionalist movement in England has been fed at a
fountain which is now the most living in the English
Church. Possibly the Vicar of St. Luke’s may have
excommunicated the late Bishop of St. David’s, when
�he refused to act as a reviser of the Bible translation,
if a leading Unitarian were excluded from the Com
mittee ; and perhaps he is ready to excommunicate,
the rationalist Bishop Colenso, and the Bishop of
Exeter, and Dean Stanley, and Stopford Brooke who
extols the poet Shelley, and the Rev. Mr. Haweis whodeclares that prayer can have no possible effect on the
unalterable course of Nature.
Nevertheless, I
will venture to suggest that it is not one of
the thirty-nine articles that the neighbouring Vicar
shall represent all the wisdom in the Church,
of England. At any rate, it is plain that he
can hardly expect to exterminate our humble society
here until he has dealt with those who in his owrL
Church are fraternising with heretics. We may return,
upon him “the Lord’s question” to Balaam—“What
men are these with thee ? ” Here, for instance, is the
Rev. Dr. Mark Pattison of your own Church, who
answers for us your threat of endless despair, telling us.
that to act in any way “ because God is stronger than
we and able to damn us if we don’t,” argues “a sleek
and sordid epicurism.” Here is the late Professor
Baden Powell who tells us that “ in nature and from
nature, by science and by reason, we neither have, nor
can possibly have, any evidence of a Deity working
miracles.” Here is the present Bishop of Exeter who
declares that men who do not use their reason in perfect
freedom without restraint from any external authority,.
�i6
are “under the law.” “Such men,” he says, “are
sometimes tempted to prescribe for others what they
need for themselves, and to require that no others
should speculate because they dare not. They not
•only refuse to think, and accept other men’s thoughts,
which is often quite right, but they elevate those into
•canons of faith for all men, which is not right.” And
finally I will quote from a man who occupies the
highest educational position in Great Britain,—a man
•to whom this nation has entrusted a position of in
fluence in the training of young men, second to none
<on earth. I refer to the Rev. Professor Jowett, the
Head Master of Balliol College, Oxford. In words
that should have their weight for every mind that hears
•me, he says:—“ The suspicion of Deism, or perhaps of
, Atheism, awaits inquiry. By such fears a good man
refuses to be influenced; a philosophical mind is apt
to cast them aside with too much bitterness. It is
better to close the book (the Bible), than to read it
•under conditions of thought which are imposed from
•without. Whether those conditions of thought are
-the traditions of the Church, or the opinions of the
religious world—Catholic or Protestant—makes no
•difference : they are inconsistent with the freedom of
■the truth and the moral character of the Gospel.”
Do not imagine that I have got these testimonies
-from the Vicar’s clerical brethren by garbling their
»thoughts as he garbled mine : you will find such
�thoughts the main burden of the “ Essays and Re
views,” from which I have taken them. I supposeour accuser does not wish his Church to monopolise
rationalism, nor think that such thoughts become'
sound if one only wears a surplice. Consequently I
have a right to ask him, “ What men are these with
thee ? ” Are you quietly submitting to them, frater
nising with them, getting your living from a church
that exalts them, and then denouncing as blasphemers
and sensualists humbler people who are animated by
the same spirit and honestly carrying out the same prin
ciples? Is it the high Christian spirit to hush up the
heresies of a Bishop or a Dean, and then turn with
fury on the press that gives their views fair play ; to
threaten with vengeance from Heaven English gentle
men who refuse to aid in barring freedom of speech
out of this Athenseum; or is it Christian to conspirefor the injury of an institution because it will not turn
itself into a prison to restrain and punish thought and.
inquiry ?
It may be Christian, but it is not like Christ. It is.
not the spirit of him who said, “ Of yourselves judge
ye what is right,” and “ The truth shall make you free.”
It is not that of his early followers, who said, “ Try
the spirits; prove all things, hold fast that which is.
good; where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
liberty.” Intolerance burned the books of Copernicus,,
and the bodies of scholars, in the past, and it may
�i8
•still trample on the book it cannot answer, and doom
to hell-fire those whom it can no longer bum with
earthly fire; but it is in sharp discord with the civili
sation of our age, which protects the freedom which
is essential to the elucidation of truth, and inhar
monious with that spirit of inquiry which is the great
need of our time, and the charity which is the need
of every time.
Of these tendencies of our age our Society is one
result among many,—an inevitable result. We are
not prepared to adopt any sectarian shibboleth what
ever. We admit ourselves unable to comprehend the
•divine existence, while we feel the reality of that
supreme influence which is expressed by humanity in
the word God. We find in the Bible a sacred reve
lation of the human heart—able to stimulate into
activity our own hearts, but we cannot call that book
the Word of God in any sense that would localise or
limit the spiritual sunshine which has illumined every
race and period. While we love to think upon Christ,
•and study his words, and recognise his unparalleled
•grandeur, we decline to call ourselves “ Christian,”
technically, because, in the first place, we do not wish
to separate ourselves from those brought up in other
religions—Israelites, Hindoos, Mahommedans—among
whom Christianity has for ages carried fire and sword,
unwilling to raise any name by them historically as
sociated with their subjugation and suffering, as a bar
�I9
to that common Religion of Humanity for which we
long and hope. Nor do we wish to raise any sectarian
name, like Christian, which would imply that the
religious culmination of our race has already taken
place in the distant past. We believe that in religion,
as in knowledge and civilisation, the law is progress.
That indeed is the essence of our faith in God. Jesus
called himself by the name of no preceding religion
or sect; neither did the disciples or apostles call
themselves Christian; that word has no sanction
in the New Testament. In the day when souls
are breaking their ancient bonds they cannot
live on memories of days that have set, but keep
their faces ever to the sunrise. There shines the
light that can alone transfigure the life of to-day, and.
in its glory Moses and Elias will again ascend, in it
Christ and all the Prophets and Saviours of the world
shall be glorified.
This is our cause. We have no fear for it. We
love it, for it means to us reverence for all that is
sweet in the past and pure in the present; we have
faith in it, for it means to us pursuit of truth and
fidelity to it; we rejoice in it, for in it we see germi
nating the freedom and fraternity of man, and in it
all the great hopes of Humanity climbing to fulfilment.
�NOTE.
Without undertaking to speak for the Committee
of the Athenseum, who are able to speak for them
selves, it may be well enough to say here that
our
Society regards the
contract for the hall
as purely a business arrangement, made in accord
ance with the usage under which the building
is let for orderly meetings of various characters, and
not in the least as implying any sympathy with our
opinions on the part of that Committee.
�
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Our cause and its accusers: a discourse given at The Athenaeum, Camden Road, June 11th 1876
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Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907 [1832-1907]
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 19, [1] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 1. Includes a bibliographical reference.
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Rationalism
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Morris Tracts
Rationalism
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Text
HUMAN SACRIFICES
IN
ENGLAND.
FOUR
DISCOURSES
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.,
Minister of South Place Chapel, and at the Athenaeum,
Camden Road.
LONDON:
TRUBNER AND CO., LUDGATE HILL.
1876.
�CONTENTS.
PAGE
1.
Human Sacrifices
2. The Daughters
of
...
...
...
$
Jephthah ...
...
7
3. Children, and their Moloch ...
... 19
4. The Sabbath-Jugernath
33
5. The Martyrdom
51
of
Reason
�HUMAN SACRIFICES.
I passed a morning of the last week in the St.
Marylebone Police Court, having been summoned
there as a witness. As I waited through the hours
there passed by a dismal gaunt procession or chain
gang of the captives of the ignorance, the brutality, the
shame, sorrow, despair, of this vast metropolis. There
were young men arrested in one drunken brawl, and
women arrested in another. A shop-girl of twentyone, who had been sent by her humble parents from
the country to earn her living, had stolen a little
finery, perhaps for a babe that would soon be born.
A young “ gentleman,” as he was described, who had
run through an estate, was sentenced for assaulting a
young woman, whose downcast eyes and deep blush
of shame confessed to the judge what her lips could
not utter. A woman of twenty-two, who might once
have been comely, had been arrested for intoxication.
During the night she had three times attempted
�4
suicide, and was barely saved for a life of despair. It
is terrible to look upon a face which tells only of a
life in ruins, and to listen to sobs broken by no plead
ing or word indicating any interest, however faint, in
what the next moment may bring. A little boy five
or six years old, wretched and ragged—with hardly
rags enough to cover him—charged with being “ desti
tute.” Every eye that saw him could testify to the
truth of that charge. The poor boy had been found
asleep on the pavement, and said he had slept there
for three weeks. The magistrate set himself to ferret
out the facts, and little by little was revealed his
story. He was one of six children who had been
living with their father and mother, in utter poverty,
all in one room. At length the mother left that
miserable room to wander and live as she could. But
this little boy had followed her, clung to her; she
carried him about with her for one day, in some
strange place he slept with her the same night; but
in the morning she sent him back home. The father
drove him out because he had gone off with his
mother, and so he had found a London pavement the
only pillow extended to his little head.
The magistrate was consideratej he did his best to
do justice to all, but he must have known—it was
plain—that in no case did he judge or sentence the
real criminal. The visible offenders before him were
�5
victims. Behind each stood the grim and awful
shadow of some ghoul that had fastened upon him.
As the wretched men, women, and children were led
away in custody, free and unfettered beside them stalked
their demons,—Ignorance, Strong Drink, Neglect,
Injustice, Hereditary Taint, Malformation of Brain.
These are the real criminals, and it is they that elude
the grasp of the law which can only deal its penalties
to the already punished, the utterly helpless creatures
on whom the ghastly vampires of our time are
battening.
I am about to speak for a few Sundays of what seem
to me the heaviest wrongs of the present time; but I
do not wish to point out wrongs for which there are
no remedies. Indeed, we can only very dimly dis
cover evils, we can not feel deeply concerning them,
until the light of its remedy falls upon each wrong.
The remedies may be, as yet, ideal; but that is not
their fault; they are necessarily ideal until they are
applied : it is the fault of those great Interests, em
bodying public Selfishness or Superstition, which reject
the truth and the justice which threaten them. But I
believe in the power of ideas. In the end they are
stronger than armies. Waiting there at St. Marylebone—as it were in some weird whorl of Dante’s Hell
__till, to my eyes, all present seemed impersonal,
types and shadows of remorseless forces which once
�6
St. Mary-the-Good tried to conjure down with her
tender image, and then departed, leaving only her
name, made way for the police,—there came upon me
by some association, a memory of early days passed
in a land where the Black-tongued Plague was raging.
Hundreds were struck down daily with swift death;
mourning was heard along the streets of every town
and village ; cries were heard in many homes that
had been happy. Every face was pallid ; the strong
est men and women moved about in the silence of
fear. One night the thermometer fell a degree, and
the Plague was dead.
Not swift and sudden, but just as certain is the in
visible power of the air which works through ideas.
“ God is a spirit.” There is an intellectual, a religious
atmosphere, in which lurks the miasma of moral
death, or through which breathes the spirit of life ;
and any least change in that ideal region will tell
upon the earth as surely as on it is recorded in frost
or flower the viewless march of the seasons.
�THE DAUGHTERS OF JEPHTHA.
Jephtha, Judge of Israel, marching against the
Ammonites, made a vow unto the Lord that, if
victorious, he would offer up as a burnt-offering to
Jehovah the first person that should come forth from
his house to meet him. Wife or daughter it must have
been : Jephtha had no other offspring but an only
daughter, and who so naturally should hasten to
welcome a father’s return from war and danger as an
only daughter? So went forth the happy maiden
with timbrels and dances to meet her father, the
Prince. The father was in distress, but it never
occurred either to him or his daughter that the Lord
might sympathise with their love and their reluctance
rather than with the vow, and so the fair maid was
slain and burnt on the Lord’s altar. Some efforts
have been made by casuists to show that Jephtha’s
daughter was not sacrificed literally, but only consesecrated to the Lord by not marrying : but such
attempts are unworthy of notice. Human sacrifices
were a recognised part of the Jewish religion, and
�8
careful provisions were made for the redemption of a
man or woman vowed to the Lord by money,—except
when devoted by anathema, in which case the man or
woman the law declared (Lev. 27) “ shall surely be
put to death.” I do not wonder that theologians
would like to escape the effect of the story, for it is
said “ the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephtha,” in
the Old Testament, and in the New that king who
sacrificed bis daughter is enumerated among saints of
whom the world was not worthy.
Well, the story drifted about the world and had its
effect. Jephtha’s daughter was caught up by the Greek
imagination, and reappeared as Iphegenia (probably
Jephthagenia), the daughter of Agamemnon, who was
nearly sacrificed in obedience to a similar vow made
by her father to Artemis. Human sacrifices were
unknown to the ancient Aryan race until it came in
contact with this dark and horrible Shemitic belief
that the deity required blood—and especially the blood
of some spotless being, as the dove, or the lamb, and
finally the most beautiful virgin. This wild and guilty
superstition may be tracked in blood wherever the
Jewish religion passed, and when Humanity had by
reaction revolted from it, the spirit of it was caught up
and preserved in the Christian idea that the world was
to be saved only by the sacrifice of the one most vir
ginal unblemished Soul, the Lamb offered up on Cal
vary to soothe the wrath of God.
�9
But even after that offering, though it was said to
be a final satisfaction of Jehovah’s universal claim
and thirst for blood, the old superstition survived to
the extent of teaching women that it was a holy
thing to vow their virginity to the Lord, to seclude
themselves from the world, and to count themselves
especially happy if they lost their lives by ascetic
devotion to their invisible Spouse. All the nuns of
Christendom were, and are, Jephtha’s daughters.
But that has been by no means the worst result.
The ancient Hebrew idea that woman is the natural
sacrifice to God coloured the whole relation of that
religion and its civil laws towards the female sex.
Woman became the law’s normal victim. We never
read of a Jewish Queen; we rarely read praises of a
woman of that race, except as part of the estate
of some man who was to her the representative of God.
She is sold and bought with her dead lord’s assets. It is
deemed no blot on Abraham when he drives Hagar
from his door. There is no law in the decalogue, or
elsewhere in the Bible, that mitigates the masculine
decree—“ Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he
shall rule over thee.”
All this was reflected in Christianity. It taught
women to submit to their husbands as to the Lord
himself; never to speak in public, or to appear there
unveiled; to stay at home and obey their husbands,—
�IO
“ as also saith the law,” adds Paul,—and understand
that woman is made for man and not man for woman.
I need not pause here to discuss the origin of this
view of the position of woman. We may admit that,
far away in some hard wilderness, or amid certain
primitive exigencies of society, such a theory of
woman was inevitable as a phase of social evolution.
To keep at home and obey might have been the only
way of continuing to exist, or to escape capture. But
when a particular phase of human evolution gets asso
ciated with divine sanction, it gains a permanence
which fetters progress. Most gods have been the
means of perpetuating the barbarism of the age which
invented them.
The Christian system brought this idea of woman
into Europe. Whatever relation it may have had to
Arabia or Syria, whatever justification it might have
had in savage periods, surely it was out of place and
out of time when imported into Europe. And there
is not a more cruel chapter in history than that which
records the arrest by Christianity of the natural growth
of European civilisation as regards woman. In
Germany it found woman participating in the legisla
tive assembly, and sharing the interests and counsels
of man, and drove her out and away, leaving her to
day nothing of her ancient rights but a few honorary
idle titles, titles that remain to mark her degradation
�11
and ours, as they remind us that a peeress, a duchess,
a baroness, a princess, a queen, are not the political
equals of many an illiterate sot who calls himself a
man. Even more fatal was the overthrow of woman’s
position in Rome. Read the terrible facts as stated
by Gibbon, by Milman, and Sir Henry Maine, read
and ponder them, and you will see the tremendous
wrong that Christianity did to woman. All the laws
by which women were protected in their individual
existence were overthrown. The sum of money which
Roman law demanded should be settled by her father
on every married woman, the new Christian code
caused to be paid to the husband instead of her, as a
dowery, or consolation for taking her off her father’s
hands. The idea that the virgin belonged to God
survived, and her espousal to a man could only be by
payment of redemption-money, which is the marriage
fee.
Christianity struck the fatal blowat the independence
of woman by allowing her but two alternatives,—im
prisonment in a nunnery or servitude in a husband’s
house; anything else was for generations accounted sin.
But am I speaking of the far past ? Is it not true
also this day that women are sacrificed to this old
Jewish regime and its Lord? What woman needs to
day is to have her rights and her wrongs decided in
accordance with the conditions and the needs of
�12
Europe, not those of Judea; what she requires is the
unbiassed verdict of the sense and sentiment and
science of the present day ; and yet her case is yielded
up to the authority and law of an ignorant tribe, whose
very Judge knew no better than to burn his daughter as
an offering to his god.
It is to that same Jehovah,
to the laws he is supposed to have proclaimed, the
Bible he is said to have written, and the religion in
which his ferocity is still reflected through all later
mitigations,—it is to him that womanhood is still
sacrificed; and so long as the name of Jehovah,
the god of Jephtha, is bowed to with awe and
fear, so long will the victim-daughters of Jephtha
surround us.
But how are women sacrificed ?
First of all in education. The intelligence and
common sense of Europe declare that there can be
nothing more important, both for themselves and for
man, than the right and thorough education of women.
As the physical mothers of the race they have the
utmost need to know the laws of life, the nature of
their own frame, the principles of health. As the
intellectual and moral guides of all human beings
during the years when they are most susceptible of
impressions and influences, women have need of the
very best knowledge. Their need of scientific drill
is, if anything, greater than that of men. Yet in
�education they are thrown the mere crumbs that fall
from the table of our male youths. It has been shown
that over ninety per cent, of the provision for education
in this country is devoted to boys and young men. It
has been shown that in our universities there are large
sums of money inadequately used,—wealth accumu
lated from ancient endowments, furnishing annual
revenues to the extent of ^500,000,—and yet amid
all the discussions as to what shall be done with that
money, hardly one voice is heard demanding that it
shall be devoted to redressing the heavy wrongs
which woman has suffered through ages, and now
suffers as she sits famishing in sight of such abun
dance. And while the universities are thus barred
against her, and the keys of knowledge denied her,
she is compelled to hear the very weakness and
ignorance so entailed quoted for her further disparage
ment. We are told, woman cannot reason; she is
not logical; she acts by mere impulse and sentiment;
she is superstitious. Well, why is it so ? Who has so
made her? The god of Jephtha, the deity who
exacted the sacrifice of the fair virgins of Israel, and
who by his Bible still demands that we hold English
women mere appendages to man, against all the best
light and conscience of our own time.
Again, women are morally and physically sacrificed
by the denial to them of the right of freedom to enter
�i4
into all the avocations of life by which human beings
may find support, livelihood and independence. In
the laws made by the worshippers of Jephtha’s god it
was enacted that every woman should be sold to some
man as wife or concubine. It was strictly obligatory.
Even that miserable means of obtaining a livelihood
is impossible in this country, where women are in ex
cess of men by nearly a million; but still we find
male prejudice and law providing that marriage shall
be regarded as the only recognised profession, trade,
or vocation by which women may obtain an honour
able livelihood. Compelled by the over-powering
exigencies of modern life we are tolerating them in a
few other simple occupations, but without according
social equality to such; and we make no adequate
provision for their apprenticeship or training for occu
pations which would yield them that independence
which our theology and conventionality most dread.
The sacrificial results of such a state of things are so
appalling that I can hardly name them. By shutting
the usual lucrative professions and occupations to
women, society is driving them by thousands to sell
that which is alone left to them to sell, their own
honourj that which not one woman in a hundred
would part with, were not pauperism and starvation
the dread alternative ; and thereby society sacrifices to
ancient superstition the health and the purity of both
manhood and womanhood.
�i5
I have named but two out of the many forms in
which women are bound hand and foot on the altar of
Jephtha’s god. Why need I repeat the long catalogue
of her wrongs as a wife and a mother ? Even after
the battles and the appeals of generations have wrung
from the reluctant hand of her master a link or two
from the chain with which she was so long fettered, sheis still liable to alienation of her children, and other
wise subject to the caprice and the cruelty of man.
And yet we are told that her interest and necessities
may safely be entrusted to the care of a legislature in
which she has no voice or representation j and that
personally she is not equal to the task of political
deliberation and voting. The ballot is not my idol. My
desire to see woman enfranchised is not because of
any abstract theory of human rights. I admit that
because of the long thraldom that sex has undergone,
and because of the long denial of education and all re
lation to the large affairs of the world, it would be
better if men could be induced to relieve them of their
oppressions—liberate them from the altar to which
they are in large part bound by chains of their own
superstition, and so prepare them for that share in
political power which should be accorded only to
intelligence and moral freedom. Women need the
full advantages of education far more than they need
votes. What they are perishing for is not a ballot,
�i6
but the opening of all the work and culture which
make the equality and secure the liberties of man.
But, with them, I despair of such practical results until
they are admitted among the constituencies of Par
liament. They have amply proved their case. They
have clearly defined their wrong and its remedy.
They have appealed for redress in vain. They are
met by frivolous sneers, by sentimental evasions, not
by reason and argument. Their sufferings have edu
cated them sufficiently to know at least their own needs,
and the unwillingness of men to respond to them.
Their cry for enfranchisement is the cry of victims
bleeding on the altar of established error j it is the
cry of despair ; and it can only increase in painful in
tensity and grief until it shall be redressed. Indeed,
the very sentiment, no doubt sincere with the great
majority of men, which dreads the departure of woman
from the sacred sphere of domestic life, must ere long
be enlisted on the side of her enfranchisement. It will
become more and more clear that there can be no
peace with injustice ; that women in increasing num
bers are, and will continue to be, excited to protest
against the wrongs of their sex. They will appear on
platforms; they will be public speakers; they will be
stimulated to that very life of political agitation which
so many fear, but are blindly engaged in promoting.
For the sake of peace and quietness, if for no higher
�motive, this justice must assuredly be done to woman,
and my own apprehension is that it will not be done
until society has suffered yet more serious disturbances
through the obstinacy and folly of the opposition to a
measure which, if adopted, could not cause anything
more revolutionary than has been caused by the ad
mission of woman to the municipal franchises they
now possess. That which is to-day demanded in the
name of justice, must to-morrow be conceded in the
interest of social order. But this is a poor, mean way of
securing any measure of justice. When wisdom pre
vails the right will be conceded to reason, not wrested
by agitation. But however men may throw away
experience, it still remains true that trouble tracks
wrong like a shadow, and justice alone is crowned with
peace.
2
��I9
CHILDREN AND THEIR MOLOCH.
Five years ago I clipped from a newspaper the follow
ing letter, addressed to the Editor from Shetland :—
“Lerwick, July, 7, 1871.
“ Sir,—It may interest some of your readers to know
that last night (being St. John’s Eve, old style) I
•observed within a mile or so of this town, seven bon
fires blazing, in accordance with the immemorial custom
■of celebrating the Midsummer solstice. These fires
were kindled on various heights around the ancient
hamlet of Sound, and the children leaped over them,
and ‘passed through the fire to Moloch,’ just as their
ancestors would have done a thousand years ago on
the same heights, and their still remoter progenitors in
Eastern lands many thousand years ago. This per
sistent adherence to mystic rites in this scientific epoch
seems to me worth taking note of.—A. L.”
In ancient times, however, the children had to leap
into the bonfire—which is defined in Cooper’s “ The-
�20
saurus ” as 11 Pyra, a bonefire, wherein men’s bodyes.
were burned,”—and not over it. I have often leaped
over a bonfire myself, with little thought that my sport
was the far away relic of the tragedies of human sacri
fice. Our bonfires of Virginia had been lighted from
those of Scotland, whence the first settlers of the neigh
bourhood had come; and there is some reason to
believe that in some obscure nooks of Scotland the
Midsummer fires are yet kindled, and some may still
be found who believe that it is good for a child to passover them.
The Reformers of Scotland made a tremendous
effort to trample out these survivals of ancient super
stition, and measurably succeeded in suppressing the
outward manifestations of them. But they preserved,
the very atmosphere of superstition amid which such
practices were bred originally, and there is reason to
fear they made matters worse. The sacrifice of chil
dren to Moloch had become a pastime, but their
subsequent sacrifice to Jehovah ofSabaoth was serious.
The Scottish Reformers also exterminated with
fierce piety the superstitions of the Church of Rome.
They particularly punished pilgrimages to the so-called1
holy wells which abounded in that region. On the
28th November, 1630, Margaret Davidson, a married
woman, residing in Aberdeen, was adjudged in an
“unlaw” of £5 by the Kirk Session “ for directing
�21
her nurse with her bairn to St. Fiack’s Well, and
washing her bairn therein for recovery of her health
- . . and for leaving an offering in the well.” The
point of idolatry, as stated by the Kirk Session, was
“in putting the well in God’s room.” After the fine
Margaret, perhaps, put God in the well’s room; but
we may doubt whether the change was of any advan
tage to the bairn. Pure water has its sanative effects,
and it is very likely that the wells became holy because
they were healing. But St. Fiack—a Scottish saint—
had to go, leaving only his name to a vehicle {fiacre),
in which his French devotees travelled to his shrine,
and instead of him was set up a Judaic deity whose
providence was not associated with anything so rational
as the use of pure water. Not one particle of super
stition the less remained in Scotland when the fires of
Moloch and the candles of Rome were put out. The
only religious advantage one could have hoped from
the revolution was not gained. It might have been
hoped that when popular Superstition was divested of its
picturesque features, its pilgrimages to holy wells and
shrines, and bonfires and images, its grim and ugly
visage would have been simply repulsive, and its
further reign impossible. But, strange to say, the
Scotch seemed to cling more to superstition the
uglier it became. A Puritanism arose in which all the
Molochs were summed up, and all human joys were
�22
represented, in Shakspeare’s phrase, as 11 the primrose
way to the everlasting bonfire,” the flowery path tohell. It is passing strange that this hideous system
should have been able to desolate beyond recovery
the “merrie England of the olden time,” and to over
shadow America for more than a hundred years.
There is a singular society which met last week, called
the Anglo-Israel Society, whose object is to persuade
this people that they are the lost tribes of Israel, and
the eagerness with which the majority of this nation
has always laid hold upon everything Semitic, gives
some plausibility to their notion; but one thing is
certain, if we are the tribes that Israel lost, we have
never lost Israel. We have hebraised for ages, made
long prayers, sung psalms, named children Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, and otherwise pertinaciously adhered
to the Semitic idolatry.
When Jehovah was brought to Scotland, Moloch
was nominally dethroned, his bonfires extinguished;
but the change was only nominal; all that was dark and
cruel in Moloch was superadded to all that was dark
and cruel in Jehovah; and the result was a Scotch
Jehovah more harsh and oppressive than the phantasm
which haunted the Jews.
For the ancient Jews do not seem to have generally
entered into the spirit of Moloch,—that old brass
deity, whose head was that of a calf, and whose stomach
�23
was a furnace in which children were consumed. The
Jews generally were careful of their children, and those
of them that worshipped Moloch and sacrificed their
children were sternly denounced. That old idol which,
according to Amos (v. 26) the Israelites bore with
them from Egypt through the wilderness, would per
haps have faded away had it not been for Solomon.
Solomon is odiously memorable for two things. He
erected a temple for Moloch on the Mount of Olives,
where children were burned to death, and he wrote
the sentence—which might appropriately have been
inscribed on that Temple—“ Spare the rod and spoil
the child.” The man who wrote that sentence had, of
course, no idea that any people would exist foolish
enough to believe it the very word of God; but,
nevertheless, in conjunction with human superstition,
he has been the cause of more evil to the human race
than any other one man that ever lived. The rod is
a little thing, but it is full of deadly poison ; it has
fostered in the world more deceit, meanness, cowardice,
servility, stupidity, and brutality than our race will
outgrow for many generations. Mr. Edward Tylor
recently exhibited at the Royal Institution the poison
ous Calabar bean used as an ordeal in Africa,
whose consecration enables the savage kings to put
out of the way every man who proposes any change
in their government; and he (Mr. Taylor) expressed
�24
his belief that the continued savagery of Africa was
in large part an effect of that little bean. And I be
lieve that it can be shown that the rod has been the
means of preserving the savage rule of physical force
in the greatest nations of the world. The parent or
teacher who strikes a child does so because his parent
or teacher struck him; and the child that is struck
catches the idea, transmitted all the way from Solo
mon, that the way to deal with people who don’t do
what you like is to strike them. That is, if you are
stronger than they. If they are little and you large,
that is a sign that the Lord has delivered them into
your hand. You must make the child yield his will
to yours, not by love and persuasion, but by brute
force and pain; break his spirit, though that harms
him far more than breaking his back-bone; make the
child another you : so will your child do the like by
his children, and they by theirs, and independence
and individuality be beaten down by violence, genius
crushed, character made characterless, as
“ To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,”
and all our yesterdays light us on the highway of
commonplace, though not, I hope, to the last syllable
of recorded time.
Does it not strike you that a child consists of an
individuality, a will, a spirit, a mind, and that its real
�25
existence depends upon these; and that if these are
not trained, encouraged, cultivated, the child has no
real existence at all? An animal existence it may
have, but beyond that it were a mere appendix or
sequel to somebody else, unless its peculiar powers
are healthily carried forward to maturity. If these are
sacrificed the child is sacrificed, and the man that is
folded up in him. Will a gardener beat his rose-buds
with a stick to make them grow ? The growing of
thoughts and emotions is more tender work than the
culture of roses. But children will be naughty; of
course they will sometimes be naughty if they are
healthy, and they will require restraint until they can
restrain themselves : they must learn morals as they
learn letters. But one might as well flog a child for
not knowing Greek as to flog it for a deception or for
selfishness. Every blow is an appeal to selfishness,
and a lesson in deception. We pardon our parents
and predecessors in this, for they knew not what they
did. But it is a scandal that the rod should linger in
the homes and schools of England, after Herbert
Spencer and others have proved the evil of it. For
many months now I have been trying to find a school in
Kensington for a boy in his eleventh year, and in that
great parish I cannot find one in which they do not
insist on two things,—Beating and the Bible. I must
leave the parish to find a school which will give me a.
conscience clause on these points.
�26
Now, I may ask any person of intelligence, not
hopelessly blinded by superstition, is the Bible a fit
book to put into the hands of a child ? I do not
believe that a child as it advances to boyhood and
girlhood should, with prudish jealousy, be kept in
ignorance as to the follies and vices of the world in
which it lives.
But our children do not live in
ancient Judea. The Bible, moreover, is not limited to
any years. It is believed by bibliolaters to be so holy
that it can do no harm even to a child of tenderest
years, who so soon as he or she can read is permitted
to receive the unnatural stimulant of perusing narra
tives obscene, shocking and cruel. What would be
a glass of gin in the child’s throat, compared with its
first familiarisation with the grossest vices of semibarbarous tribes; vices many of which are even unfit
for more advanced youth to read about, for they are
not those which they will now find in the world
around them, or require to be guarded against. The
very memory of some of the primitive brutalities of
mankind is kept alive only by the Bible. With its
pages are broadcast narratives which the law does not
permit to be printed in any other book. And when
these crimes and vices are laid before a child as the
word of God ; when it reads in that book that many
of the worst of them were instigated by Jehovah,—
that he hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and ordered persons
�27
to be stoned to death, and children to be put to thesword, and so on,—why it is enough to slay theirreverence on the spot, and strike them with moral
idiocy. This is, indeed, the way in which, morallyspeaking, the sins of the father are visited on the
children, to much more than the third and fourth
generation. The Bible is an invaluable book, but it
is not a book for children : there are many forms in
which the incidents and chapters suitable for them
can be separately procured; and for the rest, the
volume may be safely left on the shelf to be searched
out when it is wanted.
The Rod, and the Bible which consecrates the Rod,
along with many other barbarities, make up princi
pally the Moloch of children in the present time. The
sacrifice of the young among us is mainly moral and
intellectual. Physically a great deal is done for the
average of them. There are indeed terrible regions
where children are caught up in the great engine of
commerce and labour, and crushed. There are mines,
and fens, and factories where the struggle for existence
means a joyless existence—hunger and pain, and pre
mature death to many a child ; and yet, because it isa struggle for existence we can only look upon it with
sympathy and with resolution that no man shall add tothe anguish of it. But when we follow even such appa
rently inevitable evils as these to their causes, we dis-
�2S
•cover that they could not continue but for the radical
•error of English Christianity—the principle of sacrifi
cing man to God. We can never hope thoroughly to
master the evils of society while the great religious
organisations of the country, and their vast endow
ments, are directed to divine service instead of
human service, and the poor are taught that their
■chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.
When the wealth and the religious earnestness of this
nation are devoted to the benefit of humanity, instead
•of to the childish notion of personally pleasing and
■.satisfying the deity, there cannot long remain an
unhappy home in it.
But until that Gospel of Pure Reason is heard round
the world, bringing its glad tidings, the weak and
ignorant must still bleed as victims on the altar of an
imaginary being who may be called God, but is much
nearer the ideal of a Demon.
Dogma, too, has still its altar in England upon
which the child is sacrificed. It is true that among the
educated the old doctrine that every child is at birth
a child of the devil, and human nature totally de
praved, has ceased to exist; and even among the
illiterate parental affection has been too strong to
admit of its practical realisation. But still it is taught
by vulgar sects to many millions, and avails to mis•»direct many fathers and mothers, and teachers, in their
�29
dealing with the natural instincts and needs of child
hood. The mirth, the love of beauty, the longing for
amusement, in the young, so indispensable for a healthy
and happy growth, are forbidden, the dance is held tobe sinful, the theatre immoral, and thus many thousands
of children never have any real joy, and pass on to a
youth of precocious anxiety, and a manhood or woman
hood of hard, morose alienation from nature.
The only relief to the gloom of this unnatural
religion, which casts its shadow over so many young
lives, is that dogmatic preaching has become so inhar
monious with the enlightenment of civilised society,
that it tends more and more to sink into the hands of
pulpit mediocrities, who rehearse it in such a dull,
perfunctory way that it loses all impressiveness, and
can now hardly keep congregations awake. Sermon
ising is almost another name for boreing.
In an admirable story just published, called “ The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain,” the
author presents a picture of an average congrega
tional assembly on Sunday, among whom his little
hero was a sufferer. After the lugubrious hymn came
the long, long prayer. “ The boy,” says the author,
“ did not enjoy the prayer, he only endured it—if he
even did that much. He was restive all through it;
he kept tally of the details of the prayer, unconsciously
-—for he was not listening, but he knew the ground of
�3°
old, and the clergyman’s regular route over it—and
where a little trifle of new matter was introduced, his
■ear detected it, and his whole nature resented it; he
considered additions unfair and scoundrelly. In the
midst of the prayer a fly had lit on the pew in front
of him ”—but I will pass over the fate of that fly.
The sermon came on. “ The minister,” writes our
author, il gave out his text and droned along monoto
nously through an argument that was so prosy that by
and by many a head began to nod, and yet it was an
argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone,
and thinned the predestined elect down to a company
so small as to be hardly worth the saving. The boy
counted the pages of the sermon; after church he
always knew how many pages there had been, but he
seldom knew anything else about the discourse.”
Once, indeed, he became interested for a moment. It
was when the preacher, instead of his own dreary
thoughts, drew from an ancient poet the picture of the
hosts of the world gathering at the millennium, when
the lion and the lamb should lie down together, and
a little child should lead them. The boy said to him
self that he would like to be that child, if it was a
tame lion.
I suppose there are many poor little sufferers like
this lad, dragged this day into the chapels and churches
of the world, but we may console ourselves partially
�3r
with the reflection that in their sufferings many a false
hood is smothered. The deadly dogma is happily
also dull, and sinks through the vacant mind into the
gulf of oblivion. And yet that boy is passing through
the years which should be sown with the seeds of
truth, and the germs of thought and purpose. His
faculties need encouragement : they say briars and
thorns are non-encouraged buds. So long as those
sweet, susceptible years are passed amid such errors
that apathy to them all is the child’s best hope, we
must still confess that in this age of light innumerable
children are still passing through the fire to Moloch.
�_______ _ __
�33
THE 8ABBATH-JUGERNATH.
On the sands at Puri, in India, stands the famous
temple of Jugernath. It is nearly seven centuries old,
and the building of it cost as much as a half million
sterling. It is six hundred and fifty feet square, and
its sanctity consecrates the soil for twenty miles around
it,—that land being held rent-free on condition of the
tenants performing certain sacred rites in honour of
Jugernath. There are twelve great festivals held every
year at this shrine, and the alleged performances at
these festivals have been the never-ending theme of
mission meetings ever since we can remember. You
must have been fortunate children if you have no
memories of Sunday School days when your childish
heart was harrowed by accounts of poor Hindoos
crushed under the wheels of Jugernath, and a tithe of
all you possessed annually sent away to convert that
hard god into a Christian, and stop that terrible car.
Some old missionary once estimated the immense
amount of money and labour devoted to the care, the
3
�34
ablutions, and other affairs of this temple, and he said
the same amount of wealth and toil usefully bestowed
might make every barren spot of India into a garden ;
and that missionary might have added that the amount
of money which has been evoked from Christian
pockets by that one idol might have made an equal
number of gardens there, or here,—whereas it has all
been spent, and the car rolls on just as grandly as
ever.
And not only this, but we have now learned on the
best authority that all those pictures of Hindoos cast
ing themselves beneath the Jugernath car to be crushed
were purely imaginary. When the car is drawn, with
the sacred image of Vishnu set up in it, the crowd of
the curious and the devotees is enormous, and no doubt
many accidents have happened. It may be, because
some from a distance are ignorant of the danger, or that
enthusiastic devotees put themselves unintentionally in
danger by going too near the image they believe
holiest on earth, or try to draw the car with hundreds
of others when they are too weak or aged to do so.
But there are no intentional sacrifices under the car of
Jugernath, nor could there ever have been at any period.
For Jugernath, or rather Jaganatb, means simply
“ the Lord of Life •” it is a title of Vishnu, and the
temple is purely sacred to Vishnu. Nothing is more
rigidly forbidden than to slay anything that has life in
�35
the neighbourhood of the Lord of Life. The Hindoos
declare that the holy pages of the Vedas themselves
sprang from drops of blood lost by their Saviour while
protecting Agni in form of a dove from Indra in form
of a hawk; and to Vishnu they offer only things that
are fresh and beautiful, like flowers, and even the
. flowers must not be in the least faded. So it is
impossible that there could have been human sacrifices
to Jugernath except by accident. The accidents were
probably very frequent at one time,—at least it is
•charitable to missionary reporters to think so,—the vast
increase of popularity in the festivals having made the
crowd unwieldy. But in recent years British authority
has insisted upon carefulness—threatened to stop the
car if men and women were injured—and there is now
far less destruction of life by the car of Jugernath than
by the London cab.
Happy Hindoos ' who have at hand an enlightened
authority willing to respect their religious customs so
long as they are harmless, but ready to put Vishnu
himself under arrest if he injures humanity. I would
match an Englishman against any man living for good
sound sense in dealing with such superstitions, pro
vided they are not his own. But when that clear
headed English authority which has put out the fires
that burned widows in India comes to deal with laws
that torture women here, it gets confused among
�36
Scripture texts and precedents. When it is needed
to curb a fanaticism here which deliberately sacrificeshuman life—that, for instance, of the Peculiar People,
who, because of a text in the New Testament, refuse
to call medical aid for their sick, letting them die in
numbers every year, even helpless children—why then
all that common sense seems to vanish. When it is
called upon to regulate our Sabbath-Jugernath, beside
which the car at Puri is an innocent toy, beneath
whose wheels millions of hearts and brains are crushed
in this kingdom, why then the intelligence of the nation
grows timid, and its arm is paralysed.
The celebrations of Jugernath, the Lord of Life,
bring to the poor twelve festivals in the year, The
celebrations of the Sabbath, Lord of Lifelessness, bringto our poor fifty-two funereal vacancies in their exist
ence. They ought to be fifty-two festivals of Reason, of
Beauty, of Happiness, but to the poor they are days of
unreason, of ugliness, of torpor and drunkenness ; days
hateful to children and hurtful to all. Now it is not
merely fanciful to bring together the Jugernath and the
Sabbath superstitions. Even in origin their consecra
tion came from the same source. Our theology has
arbitrarily transferred the sanctity of the Jewish Sab
bath, the Seventh Day of the week, to the Sun-day, the
day consecrated to sun-worship, our first day of the
week. I say arbitrarily, for' there is not a word in the
�New Testament consecrating Sunday, but there are
•strong sentences declaring one day as holy as another.
The early Christians when they went among so-called
pagan ” races met for worship on the first day of
■the week because it was a holiday, and they could only
then get at the people. For the same reason we meet
to-day, because it is the day when people are liberated
from business. But the Primitive Christians had as
•little thought of consecrating the “pagan” Sun’s day
as the Jewish Sabbath, just as most of us would abhor
•the notion that any day is less sacred than another.
But Vishnu also was to his provincial worshippers the
-quickening sun, and his chariot is the car of Jugernath.
So the two institutions are linked together archeeologi•cally. But in a more important sense they are related
by the fact that they are both idolatries. lhe Sab
bath is one of the only two visible idols which pro
nounced Protestantism has left standing for a race of
kindred origin to the Hindoos, and like them
naturally loving outward symbols and images. We
•all belong to the Great Aryan race, from which pro
ceeded all the bright gods and goddesses of Greece
and Rome, and Germany, and all their variegated
symbolism.
Through certain historic combina
tions our Aryan race as it migrated westwaid, became
invested with a Shemitic religion, one which had no
arts and pictures itself, and regarded them as impious
�38
in others. In obedience to this alien religion, our
race now wrote on its temples, “Thou shalt not make
to thyself any graven images, or pictures of anything
in heaven, earth or sea.” But it was one thing to say
this, another to practise. The Eastern Church evaded
the law by putting up certain holy pictures with
frames in relief, which are something like sculpture.
The Roman Church boldly disregarded the law in its
lordly way of requiring the Bible to accommodate itself
to the Pope. In this country all the sacred visible
images were swept away by Puritanism from its own and .
many other churches—leaving all the more graven
images in the mind ; but that race-instinct, that love
of outward symbols and objects of worship with which
the Eastern Church compromised, and to which the
Romish Church succumbed—that instinct and senti
ment remained in our people, and in the empty niche
of the Madonna, on the altar from which god and
goddess and crucifix had been successively swept,
there were now set up the only two visible images of
determined Protestantism—the Bible and the Sabbath.
There are some branches of the Church of England
which approximate to the Catholic Church enough to
preserve other symbols—exalting the sacrament, mag
nifying the cross, or the liturgy—and such care less tomake overmuch of the Sabbath, and respect saintly
tradition as much as the Bible. But when you find
�an out-and-out Evangelical, or a Calvinist, or a member
of a sect which has nothing symbolical about it, you
find one who will fight for the literal Bible and the
literal Sabbath, exactly as a barbarian fights for his
idol. They are his idols. They are to him precisely
what the Jugernath is to the devotee in India. The
Bible and the Sabbath are all he has left; and if you
were to really take from the average sectarian his
idolatry of those two visible objects, he would feel as
if he had nothing to lean upon at all. For this aver
age religionist has not a vivid interior life, he has not
the mystical sense cognisant of pure ideals, most
visible when the outward eye is closed. He needs to
have something he can see and handle, and feel
physically, or realise by physical effects.
There is not the least use in trying to argue with an
idolator. Nothing can be influenced by reasoning
which was not reached by any effort of reason. Real
thinkers, even in the sects themselves, have tried their
strength against this miserable Sabbath superstition,
Luther and Calvin, and George Fox, as well as the
most learned men of the English Church. But the
Sabbath stands like the Hindoo Temple described in
the curse of Kehdma :—
“ And on the sandy shore, beside the verge
Of ocean, here and there a rock-cut fane
Resisted in its strength the surf and surge
That on their deep foundation beat in vain.”
�40
Even so, deep-cut in the plutonic rock of human
ignorance, is this idol shrine, against which all our
protests, appeals, facts, and arguments will beat in
vain, until the ignorance itself shall be undermined and
crumble away.
There is no advantage, therefore, in pleading with
Sabbatarians. The more we groan the better they
feel, for it shows them that Jehovah is having his will
by crushing ours. But there is great reason that we
should appeal to the constituted rulers of England, in
the name of our religious liberty, against the claim of
Sabbatarians to oppress consciences that are not
Sabbatarian. The right of any individual to be him
self a simpleton seems inalienable. We do not deny,
though we may deplore, the claim of Sabbatarians to
pass their “ holy time ” in any depth of sanctimonious
stupor they like.
But they have no right to bind on
the altar of their ugly idol the life of other people.
That they are still able to do so is not due to any
Sabbatarianism in those who make our laws. There
is not one member of our Government or Parliament
who does not violate the Judaic Sabbath law every
week of his life. Nearly fifty years ago, William Lovett,
and several thousand working men with him, drew up a
petition to Parliament, declaring their conviction that
much of the drunkenness and crime in London is due
to the absence of proper resources for instruction and
�amusement on Sunday. Honest Joseph Hume pre
sented their petition and appealed to Parliament for
the opening of such resources. Since then the appeal
has been repeated by Sir Joshua Walmsley, Peter
Taylor and others, but steadily refused, even while
the principle has been conceded by the opening of
museums in Ireland, where Puritanism is not strong.
The last-named valiant member of Parliament has
now for some years moved that body to admit the
poor drudges of this metropolis to gain some know
ledge, to catch some gleam of light and beauty, on the
one day when they are released from toil, in our grand
national collections which they help to support but
never see—institutions which represent the secrets of
nature and ideality of poets and artists, the history of
man in his steady mastery of the earth by skill and
genius, the sacred story of heroes, saints, saviours of
humanity. But at last that member has declined to
renew his appeal, because, as he has stated to me, he
has ample evidence that while the majority of the
House are quite convinced that his motion is right,
and have no respect for Sabbatarianism, they yet vote
for it. The Puritan Sabbath can always roll up a
majority even in a House that applauds arguments
against it. The member referred to is naturally not
willing to go on convincing men already convinced.
But why then do these politicians vote against the
�42
relief of suffering non-Sabbatarians ? Why, because
they do not wish to be also victims of the Sabbath.
To the average Member of Parliament his seat there
is the immediate jewel of his soul. He would, no
doubt, like to have right on his side, but he must have
his borough. He knows perfectly well that if he
votes for opening museums and picture galleries to the
people, on the very next Sunday his constituency
will be listening to awful burdens against him from
all the reverend Chadbands and Stigginses and
Mawworms and Cantwells and Pecksniffs, whose com
bined power can defeat any man in England, as their
like defeated the great man in Jerusalem who broke
the Sabbath, and declared it subject to man, not man
to it. Nevertheless, we must not proceed upon the
opinion that the average Member of Parliament is so
much afraid of this power behind him, or so tenacious
of his seat, that he will carry it to the extent of sup
porting what he felt to be a very serious oppression.
All the honour and courage have not entirely gone
out of this nationality. Men will be found ready to
risk their seats when they have fully apprehended
the nature and extent of the wrong that is
suffered. Parliament consists mainly of wealthy
gentlemen, whose every earthly need is so com
pletely answered that they can only with difficulty
realise the wants of the poor. On Sunday they have
�their carriages to drive in, their right to visit botanical
and zoological gardens, their libraries, pictures, clubsand billiard-rooms. Their Sunday is free enough.
They turn it to repose or recreation as they may need,
In all their lives they have never had one day of
serious want, not one day of confinement in a miserable
lodging with no alternatives but the chill street or thegin-shop. In some way it must be brought before
these gentlemen, and kept before them— like the
widow’s plea in the parable before the judge, who waswearied out at last—that the lot of the masses whose
labour makes so much of their comfort is a mean and
miserable lot. They must be made to know that
there are millions who from the cradle to the grave,
toil—and toil—and toil, year in and year out, and
whose life is one long want. It must be impressed
upon them that a large part of the sorrow and heavi
ness of the poor man’s and poor woman’s fate is the
presence in them of mental and moral faculties and
possibilities which are a perpetual hunger without any
supply, which never rise to be real intellects and tastes
because they are kept by drudgery as seeds under the
sod, unquickened by any beam of light shining from
all the knowledge around them, unsunned by any ray
of beauty. Then they will comprehend that a fearful
system of human sacrifice is going on around them,
and they will not find their parliamentary seats easy
�44
if retained by any connivance with those sacrifices.
There is an Eastern fable of a throne luxuriously soft
to any monarch who sat upon it, until a wrong had
risen somewhere in his realm; then the throne became
so hard that no sovereign could sit upon it, until the
wrong was sought out and redressed; and there is
•conscience enough among our commoners to change
many a legislative seat to flint, when its holder shall
know that he maintains it only as a coward, through
the servility that dare not grapple with serious in
justice because it is in the majority.
Those are the men who must ultimately listen to
our cause and decide it rightfully. And our cause is
that the brain and heart, and even the work of the
poor, is suffering grievously because of the restrictions
placed by superstition upon that day of the week
which represents their all of opportunity for any high
enjoyment or improvement. The Sundays of life
represent one-seventh of every man’s time; but for
the drudges of the world it represents the whole of
their time. All the rest of life is not their time; it
belongs to their employer; it is mortgaged by physical
toil. What life is at their own disposal is counted by
.Sundays. If those free days are unimproved or
unhappy the whole life goes sunless to the grave.
What provision does this nation make, and wnat
■does it permit to be made, for the elevation, instruc
�tion, and happiness of those whose other days, asGeorge Herbert said, “trail on the ground,” on the
one day susceptible to nobler impressions ?
First it provides sermons.
Twenty thousand
churches are open this day for the people, and in
them are places for a limited number of the poor.
Well, let us forget how many dull sermons are
preached, how many gloomy, false, repulsive dogmas,,
how many threadbare superstitions, and how few work
ing people have any disposition to enter these assem
blies, or such dress as would let them feel comfortable
when there. Let us pass over all that. Admitting
that one hour and a half or two hours of the poor
man’s only leisure day may be so passed, what provision
is made for the remainder ?
Why, there are the parks in which he may walk.
But that is a very inadequate reply. Our English
weather renders the park attractive for but a small
part of the year. Much of the labour done is too
wearisome to render mere walking on Sunday any
delight to the workers. Nor is there anything in that
merely physical exercise which answers the real
demand, a demand not of the feet but of the head.
Well, there is the great provision that comes next
to the church, the public house. This great nation
has been appealed to by some of its noblest scholars
for permission to accompany the poor on Sunday
�46
■afternoons, when churches are closed, through the
national collections of art and science, to explain to
them the objects of interest, to interpret for them the
wonders of nature and unfold the splendours of art.
But thus far our rulers have replied, “ No, we will
deliver you to the publican, but never to Dr. Carpenter;
Ruskin shall not teach you the glory of Raphael’s
•cartoons, but you may gaze at pleasure on the interior
decorations of the gin-palace; you must not see the
grandeurs of art, nor the fine traceries of skill, nor the
antiquities of humanity, nor the wondrous forms and
•crystals of Nature, but do not complain : do we not
allow you limitless supplies of whiskey and beer?”
And just here, by the way, I remark a little sign of
hope. The Sabbatarians begin to perceive the scandal
that the beer-house should be kept open while the
museum is closed, and they begin to demand the
closing of the public-house also. They have carried
a. measure of that kind for Ireland, and I sincerely
hope they will manage to carry one for England. For
the day that sees the beer-house close will see the door
•of the museum start. The great ally of the Sabbatarian
has been the publican, and when that alliance is broken
our success will draw near. The parson drugs the
people’s brains with superstition, and the publican
drugs with beer those whom the parson cannot reach;
and the streams from church and tap-room blending
�47
together reinforce the Lord’s-day people, so that they
can always outnumber us. If the Sabbath were not
an idol it would long ago have recoiled from all this
part of its work.
It would have said, “ Open a
thousand museums rather than drive the poor to find
their only Sunday amusement, and spend the means
for which their wives and children suffer, in drink !”
But an idol may always be recognised by just this
fact: z? demands human sacrifices. It may not always
demand the cutting-up or burning of its victims; but,
if not that, it will demand the sacrifice of his intellect
or his affections, his happinesss or his welfare; in
some way a human body, or heart, or brain will be
found bound wherever an idol stands. And though
I cannot, in such brief space, enter into all the details
of the holocaust of human benefits offered up to the
Sabbath, I will affirm for myself that the more I have
considered the needs of this people, and the lost
opportunities of meeting them, the more have I felt
that there is now no cause worthier of a good man’s zeal
than the overthrew of this Sabbath oppression. It is
a wrong for which I have no toleration at all. I can
tolerate any man’s religious conviction about the
Sabbath or anything else ; but I cannot tolerate him
when he insists on binding his dogma upon others.
I will not tolerate his intolerance. This is no issue of
abstract opinion for theological fencing. It is no
�48
sentimental grievance.
The hunger of a million
famished souls is in it. It is a great heart-breaking
wrong, crushing lower and lower one class of society
at a time when other classes are rising higher daily.
And that the poor do not feel it to be so, are in boozy
contentment with their beer or their prayers and
demand nothing better, is only a proof of how fully
the oppression has done its miserable work.
Yet they use this as an argument against us ! They
cry, “The workmen do not want it; behold our
majority.” I answer, the majority is always wrong.
The majority crucified' Christ and poisoned Socrates.
Part of the masses you have deceived by the con
temptible fiction that their day of release from toil will
be endangered by that which would make it more
attractive and therefore more precious; and a larger
part you have so besotted with beer and ignorance
that they are pauperised in soul as well as body, and
hug their own chains. Theirs is not the real voice of
the people.
A true statesman will take the only
suffrage they are competent to cast from their degraded
foreheads and their brutalised forms and faces. The
gardener will not follow the will of the weeds, though
they report the soil he works in. At any rate a rational
man’s duty is clear. The authority of the Sabbath
rests upon what every intelligent mind knows to be
fiction; upon a deity who is said to have created the
�49
universe in six days and rested on the seventh, and
then ordered that anyone working on the seventh
should be stoned to death. That is a fiction. There
is no deity who did anything of that kind. We are told
this is the Lord’s day. We know that if that Lord be
other than a phantom every day is his day. J esus
said, 11 My Father works on the Sabbath and so will
I.” Rest is not stupor. It is well to change our
occupation occasionally, but never well to be idle.
There is no ground whatever for this superstition.
The day of rest originated no doubt in a human want,
afterwards invested with sanctity: but the sanctity
must be entirely removed if the day is to be changed
from a curse to a human benefit.
4
��51
THE MARTYRDOM OF REASON.
Reason is that supreme faculty of man by which he
is cognisant of principles apart from their applica
tions, of laws as distinct from particulars, of ideas as
separate from relations. It differs from the under
standing, which is concerned with those special appli
cations and relations, as a code of laws differs from
the various decisions of courts and judgments made
under that code. A man may reason rightly when his
understanding is in error. A Hindoo walking out saw
a large and dangerous cobra, as he supposed, across
his path, preparing to dart upon him ; it so overcame
his nerves that he fainted; the object proved to be a
piece of rope. The man had reasoned correctly; he
knew the nature of the cobra, and rightly inferred the
danger, but his judgment was in error. Now judg
ment is at the point of distinction between reason
and understanding. By origin it is an organ of rea
son, by result it is the agent of the understanding.
�52
When we consider our human faculties in this
abstract way, we find them perfectly harmonious.
They move in their appointed orbits, in constant rela
tion and interaction, but without collision or jar, their
very differences completing the harmony. Abstractedly
no mortal can conceive of a special judgment with no
general principles to guide it, and none can think of
ideas and laws as things inapplicable to the particulars
of nature and life.
And yet we find in all races and ages a wide-spread
suspicion of reason. Even at this day, and in nations
which are daily reaping and enjoying the fruits of
reason, we find vast numbers of people who have an
impression like that which Shakspere puts into the
mouth of Caesar, “ He thinks too much ; such men
are dangerous.” Still more general is the notion that
the man of ideas must be unpractical. It is easy to
perceive the origin of that notion; it is suggested in
the common saying, “That is well enough in theory,
but it won’t do in practice.” Of course the phrase is
a mistake ; it should be, “ That is wrong in theory, for
it won’t do in practicebut it discloses the fact that
there has been so much false reasoning in the world
that many have come to distrust reason itself.
And just here arises a misunderstanding and a
quarrel between the theorist and the practical man.
One says the error is in the theory, the other that it is
�53
in the application of it. Among educated people the
matter would be tested by experiment. Science, for
instance, has long affirmed that when salt water freezes
it loses its saltness; but the Arctic explorers melting
the sea-ice found it so briny that they could not drink
it. The result is, of course, a revision of theory by
experiments which will probably show that the salt
does not remain strictly in the ice, but between its
crystals, that the theory is not wrong but requires more
careful statemeht to include the practical fact. In this
way the old feud between theory and practice has
entirely ceased from the domain of science.
• But it is in religion that we find the distrust of rea
son most intense and familiar.
On that distrust
Christianity is founded. Christ appealed to reason;
but Christianity has very little to do with him ; it re
lapses into barbaric ages and finds its corner-stone in
a fable that the first effort of intellect led to the cor
ruption of the whole human race. It said that when
God made man and woman he put them into a para
dise for enjoyments sensual and sensuous. The one
thing he was opposed to was knowledge. So resolute
was the Creator on that point, that he did not hesitate
to accompany his prohibition of that one fruit with a
deception. He told them that on the very day they
should eat of the tree of Knowledge they would die.
The serpent persuaded the woman that this was a
�54
fiction, as it proved to be. The truthful serpent also
said, “ Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,”
and no sooner was the fruit eaten than Jehovah,
making no mention of what he had said about their
dying, acknowledged the veracity of the serpent.
“ Behold,” he said, “ the man is become as one of us
(gods) to know good and evil.” Then, lest the gods
should have no advantage at all, and man should eat
of another fruit and become immortal, the first pair
were expelled from Paradise. This fable, which re
presents the first priestly scream against education,
shows us a deity cursing knowledge and a demon en
couraging it; it shows a deity trying to delude man to
remain in ignorance, while the demon speaks the
truth, and secures the birth of intelligence for man and
woman, where Jehovah meant them to live only the
life of the senses. On that fable the whole Plan of
Salvation is founded. The knowledge gained that day
brought on mankind the curse of total depravity, and
doom of eternal torture. To avert that the Son of
God became incarnate on earth and suffered in a few
years all the agonies which the whole human race
would have suffered if every man, -woman and child
that ever lived were damned to all eternity. All of
this is meaningless, and the whole theology of Chris
tendom mere chaff, except to avert the wrath and undo
the curse which fell from a deity jealous of the attain
�55
ments of his own creature, upon man, because of his
first endeavour to gain knowledge.
Fortunately, while that is the theology it is not the
religion, and still less the morality of this country. It
is a sublime example of the kind of theory which does
not do in practice. Nevertheless we must not under
rate the results of the long pressure of instructions like
these upon every human being through a period of
sixteen hundred years. Even now, in the most en
lightened nations, the money devoted to teach that
theology is counted by millions where the money
devoted to pure knowledge is counted by tens. And
we need not wonder that the spirit of that old curse
on knowledge still survives to haunt every seeker of it
for its own sake. It is still strong enough to cast a
certain odium on the tasks of reason. To the popular
mind there is something uncanny about the rationalist,
which means a reasoner, and the sceptic—literally, he
who considers a thing—has still an evil name. Thou
sands who shout for every other kind of freedom will
cry down freethought. They will mourn over an en
slaved African thousands of miles away, but have no
tears to shed for fettered minds at their own door.
Nay, even among those liberated from the old
theology, how much suspicion of reason do we en
counter ! How often do we hear such speak of science
as cold, and of the intellect as inferior to something
�56
they call faith or intuition ! They who have no doubts
about reason are still comparatively few. And yet our
age is full of the grandest facts and illustrations, proving
that it is among the devotees of reason and science
that the divinest life and fire of our age is manifest. I
have just been reading a history, written by the leading
rationalist minister in America, of what is called “ the
transcendental movement” in that country.
*
And it
is well called a “movement ;” for the chief impres
siveness of it lies in the fact that what had been mainly
a speculative philosophy in Europe, there, among one
of the most shrewd and practical nations of the world,
blazed out into a movement, a noble enthusiasm for
humanity, a passionate religion which kindled the hearts
of young men and women, and made them Reformers,
Apostles, Martyrs, who gave up all their goods for the
poor, who brought glad tidings to woman and lifted the
heaviest burthens of her life, and who broke off the
bonds of the slave. There was not an orthodox man
or woman among them. They were rationalists. The
Bible they studied was Kant’s “ Critique of Pure
Reason,” Goethe’s Works, Carlyle’s Essays, Cousin’s
Philosophy: the ideas of Europe became ideals in
America, rose up like pillars of flame; they became a
* Transcendentalism in New England. A History. By Octavius
Brooks Frothingham. New York : E. P. Putman & Sons, 1876.
�57
gospel in the genius of Emerson, the mind of Parker,
and the heart of Margaret Fuller, and under its charm
humble people formed themselves in communities,
ceasing to care for worldly wealth and honours. There
is no type of character that is beautiful in the past
which did not reappear. St. Francis d’ Assisi, Fenelon,
Madame Guion, Berkeley, Sydney, they all had true
counterparts in the piety, devotion, virtue, and genius,
which characterised that movement. This is the
hundredth birth-year of America as a nation; they
who established its independence in the name of
humanity were free-thinkers—Washington, Jefferson,
Adams, Franklin, Thomas Paine—and they broke for
ever the power of a priesthood in the State. And now
remark, in that country where conscience is free, a
hundred years has witnessed but one great religious
movement—but one which corresponds with the
movements under George Fox, and Wesley and Whit
field in this country—but one which exhibited power
to command the passions, conquer selfishness, and
trace itself in practical reforms and a new Church
and that one was a movement born of pure reason.
Such has ever been the work of reason where it has
been set free. And yet there are eloquent men, like
Pere Hyacinthe, who are going about imploring the
priests and prelates of Europe to make a holy alliance
of Anglican, Greek, and Gallican Churches against
�58
this terrible monster—Rationalism. I rejoice to hear
they think there is need of a new league. It is a valu
able testimony to the stream of tendency that makes
for truth. But we must not allow the good father’s
confession, that many people are not only, like him
self, denying that two and two make five, but even
running into the excess of denying that two and two
make three—a radicalism he so much deplores—we
must not allow that to make us over-confident. We
must still face the fact that Reason is a sacrifice and a
martyr amid the great institutions around us.
What is the history of nearly every child born
in this country? The few who are brought up by
rational methods, and taught to cultivate and obey
reason as their highest guide, are hardly notice
able as to numbers.
A large proportion are
neglected, so far as Christian fables are concerned,
but they are victims of popular superstitions, believe
in ghosts and goblins, fortune-telling and the evil eye,
their minds overgrown with rank weeds. The ave
rage Christian child is taught superstition above every
thing else ! Other and true things may be taught, but
they spring up only amid those briars which choke
each other growth before it can bear its fruit. Car
dinal, and bishop, and cabinet, alike agree that no
seed of wheat shall be sown in any mind without a
tare of fable or dogma beside it. Of what use is
�59
geology if one believes that Jehovah created the
universe in six days ? What is the use of any science
to a mind which believes that the laws of nature are
arbitrary, have often been suspended, and may be
changed and altered by the breath of a mortal’s peti
tion ? There can be no reason cultivated where the
law of cause and effect is disregarded. To believe in
the connection of things that have no connection—for
instance, that a man’s word can raise the dead to
life—is to strangle reason. To believe in an effect
without adequate cause—for instance, that the
world stopped revolving that a captain might have
more daylight to fight by—vastates the mind. To
believe in anything whatever for which there is no
evidence, or insufficient evidence, is superstition; and
the essence of superstition is that reason is dethroned
and a mere compulsion of habit, fear, or self-interest
set up in its place to direct the life.
Well, the ordinary studies of the average Christian
child having thus been prevented from developing his
reasoning powers in the direction of religion, he is
completely subjected to the powerful stimulants of
those preternatural fears and hopes which make the
ordinary sanctions of what is called religion, but
really is selfishness. He is warned to avoid certain
things, and do others, because he will go to hell if
he doesn't comply, but will enjoy eternal bliss if he
�6o
does,—motives of calculating self-interest, which it is
the very mission of Reason to restrain and to remand
for the work of mere physical self-preservation.
While we despise the man who loves and serves a
wife or a friend from such base calculations of interest,
children are taught to love God and serve him for
fear of punishment and hope of reward.
But let us follow the growth of the child thus in
structed. The time comes when he must enter into
life. Physical cares, business, the healthy work of
the world claim him. Amid them he is pretty sure to
discover that the theology he has been taught is not
confirmed by experience. Then, haply, he may be
able to assert the rights of his own reason. But, sup
posing he does not, one of several other results will
follow, i. He may believe that the doctrines he has
been taught must have a formal homage as divine
mysteries which he is not expected to understand, but
only blindly to obey. 2. He may become a hypocrite.
3. He may become utterly indifferent to the whole
thing, and utterly reckless. In either case his sacred
reason has been sacrificed.
But do we fully appreciate the tragedy which has
thus happened ? Do we fully realise that even when
men and women do not become either hypocrites or
reckless, they are almost certain, as things now stand,
to reach some day the appalling discovery that they
�6i
have wasted the best years of their life on a sham and
a fraud ?
In the twenty-five years during which I have been
in a position to receive the confidences of those who
were struggling amid doubts, and in the pangs of
transition, the chief agonies I have witnessed have
been those whose awakening came too late for oppor
tunities to be recovered. Youth is gone, enthusiasm
has gone, the time for study and devotion for ever
passed away, and the collective force of all the light
around them enters at last only to bring the bitter
consciousness that the glory of life has been cast away
upon the barren deserts of delusion.
These are the martyrs whom every devotee of
reason should see around him. There is no sorrow
equal to theirs. No doubt rationalism may bring
with it many trials so far as the world is concerned.
There may be separations, friendships clouded, affec
tions wounded ; for superstition can turn hearts to
stone even against their own blood where its autho
rity is denied. There may be intellectual doubts,
too, not to be satisfied, some loved legends vanish
ing, and some pretty dreams made dim along with the
nightmares escaped. But amid all these there is
nothing half so terrible as the fate of those who have
no alternatives but either to slay their reason
.altogether, or to admit its testimony only to find
that the whole life has been a gigantic mistake.
�62
Therefore it is the high duty of every human being
to maintain openly and valiantly the verdict of his
own faculties. Unfortunately the guardians of the
young are so eager to teach them how to say
prayers, and keep sanctimonious on Sunday, and to
refrain from kneeling down to graven images, that few
have ears to hear the great decalogue announced in
their own time. The first of the new commandments
is this,—Seek truth ! and the second is like unto it,
Live the Truth in thought, word, and deed 1 So little
has the virtue of self-truthfulness been taught, that we
often meet people who actually make a merit of con
cealing their convictions, especially if they think they
are thereby saving somebody’s feelings. There is a
great deal of selfishness, as well as sentiment, sheltered
under Paul’s dangerous maxim about being all things
to all men, and a great deal of Jesuitism hides itself
under Christ’s admonition against casting pearls before
swine, which is true only if read by the light of his
own martyrdom for speaking the truth. As a rule the
men and women you meet are not swine, and you
need not fear to offer them—it is cruel to refuse them
—your pearls of truth and sincerity. Many of them,
indeed, are going about silently seeking those very
pearls. No doubt there are times for reserve, no doubt
there are rocks of prejudice and ignorance which have
to be slowly pulverised into a soil before any seed can
�63
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be sown in them. But no one will ever lack wisdom
for all occasions who is animated purely by that love
which is not seeking his own, nor vaunting himself,
but seeking only to advance Truth. Reason supplies
an instinct adequate to all emergencies. Remember
again what reason is, and the ground of its supremacy I
Remember now and always, that its very soul is dis
interestedness. It is the clear vision of the mind as
it rises above all the considerations of self-interest, pre
judice, conventionality, passion, which would lower and
discolour its pure light. Reason is to see things as
they are, and not as majorities or institutions say they
are, or wish them to be. And it is just as much as a
mind can do to keep that holy lamp burning steadily
through life in a world where the most powerful threats
and bribes are continually used to sway and pervert
the judgment. In legal affairs no judge is allowed to
decide a case involving his own interest; a heavy
punishment follows any attempt to bribe judge or jury
man. So we can get just verdicts. But how are
we to get just verdicts on religious questions,
when untold millions and all social advantages
are set apart by Church and State to influence every
mind in favour of creeds and dogmas, as against pure
reason? We can hope for a true verdict only from
those who have ascended above such considerations,
and surrender themselves wholly to the guidance of
reason and right.
�64
When the poet Heine was in Paris, poor, sick,
wretched, he renounced his rationalism. His friends
in Germany heaped scorn upon him. Heine then
wrote :—“ They say Heine has changed and become
a reactionist. Ah, well, lately I went to the Louvre,
and knelt before our lady of Milo. Many tears did I
shed as I gazed upon her beautiful form and face, but
I rose and left her, for she had no arms. She had no
arms, and I was poor and needy.” So he turned to
our lady of the Church, for she had arms and hands,
all full of rich gifts to reward any poet for singing her
praises.
We cannot help feeling compassion for those who
yield to rich and powerful superstition the homage
which is due to reason alone: but the standard cannot
be lowered, whoever may go away sorrowful. He
alone is a true man who stands firm to the mandate of
the Sinai within him, and sees that whatever may
bend or break, it shall not be his fidelity to truth.
��
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Human sacrifices in England : four discourses
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Collation: 64 p. ; 16 cm.
Notes: Contents: I. Human sacrifices -- 2. The daughters of Jephthah -- 3. Children and their Moloch -- 4. The Sabbath-Jugernath -- 5. The martyrdom of reason. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Religion
Rationalism
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Child Rearing-Moral and Ethical Aspects
Children
Children's Rights
Education
Morris Tracts
NSS
Rationalism
Reason
Religion and Civil Society
Sabbath
Social Justice
Women-Religious Aspects-Christianity
Women's Rights
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PDF Text
Text
ON THE
FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
BY THE LATE
EEV. JAMES CRANBROOK,
EDINBURGH.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Threepence.
��ON THE
FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
-----------------PURPOSE this evening to discourse to you upon
“The Formation of Religious Opinions.” The
subject is closely connected with, and arises out of
what I was saying last Sunday evening. I shall
therefore quote the same passage as a text, 1 Cor. x.
15, “I speak as unto wise men; judge ye what I say.”
But what I aim at to-night is to make some practical
observations that I think we are too apt to lose sight
of. Indeed, people seldom follow any principle or
rule in forming their opinions upon questions of
religion. They pick them up at hap-hazard; or
simply retain what they had been taught in their
youth. And even where they come to a resolution to
investigate the subject, and form a judgment for
themselves, they seldom go about it systematically.
One person recommends this book, another person
recommends that book. They read them, and adopt
the opinions which seem the more probable, or to
which particular circumstances incline them. But it
is very seldom they can give you a reason which will
bear strict scrutiny and investigation why they have
chosen one opinion rather than another.
The general spirit of one’s culture and mental
character has more to do with the adoption of
opinions in the majority of cases than anything else.
I
�4
The Formation of
Some men are naturally very narrow-minded, and the
education they have received has not tended to cor
rect the narrowness. They will incline, therefore, to
whatever is. narrow and bigoted. Others, again, are
generous, liberal, and free: whatever partakes of
their own generosity, liberality, and freedom will
therefore seem to them to have a preponderance of
evidence on its side. Some are learned in ancient
literature, and have thoroughly imbibed its spirit.
What harmonises with this will seem to them as
true. Others are addicted to metaphysical specula
tions, and can only discern truth in what presents
itself under the formulae sanctioned by their school.
Whilst others have the purely scientific spirit, and
require all religious opinions before they accept them
to be subjected to the tests of their special methods.
And thus it is each one has certain predilections
which very materially influence him when he thinks
about religious questions and endeavours to make
up his mind as to what is true. They look at
the questions subjectively, rather than objec
tively—study them in relation to their own
thoughts and feelings rather than as they are in
themselves, and resting on evidence which needs to
be examined simply according to its own merits.
And this will be the case with a large number for a
long time to come.
To form an independent rational opinion upon
any subject affecting the higher interests of life re
quires an amount of training and leisure few possess.
The majority must take their opinions at second
hand, and they will naturally take those which are
most in accordance with their own tastes, inclinations,
and culture. It is just the same, for example, in
questions of politics or legislation, as in questions of
religion. These questions depend upon a scientific
knowledge of human nature, its laws and tendencies,
upon a thorough knowledge of all the circumstances,
�Religious Opinions.
5
the conditions physical, intellectual, and moral of
the country, and a foreseeing sagacity capable of
calculating the effects of a given measure upon a
country in such a condition and in such circumstances,
the people of which are subject to those fixed laws of
human nature. Now, I suppose there are not fifty
members of the House of Commons who possess this
knowledge, or who attempt to study these questions
scientifically. Yet we all hold some opinion or
other about the questions. And the opinions we
hold are adopted just in the same way as the majority
adopt their religious opinions, i.e., according as they
agree, harmonise and are in accordance with our
tastes, inclinations, tendencies and general culture.
And opinions upon very many other subjects are
adopted by the mass of people in just the same way.
But you will see that there can properly be no cer
tainty about opinions so received. Their truth or
untruth will be a mere matter of chance, depending
upon accidental circumstances. And it is unworthy
of a man capable of thought and reasoning, not to
form his opinions upon a rational and trustworthy
method. It becomes, therefore, each one of us to seek
out the true method by which our religious opinions
may be formed.
The methods by which real students have formed
their religious opinions have always been the methods
they have followed in their philosophical enquiries—
indeed, religious opinions have never been anything
more than the outcoming of the various systems of
philosophy in this region of religious thought. It
was, for example, the imaginative philosophy of
Plato, modified by neo-Platonism and the Alexand
rian school which determined the theological or reli
gious opinions of the Church of the third, fourth, and
fifth centuries. The method of inquiry pursued by
the philosophers was the method adopted by the
theologians, and the resultant philosophy and theology
�6
The Formation of
were one harmonious whole. So again the special
philosophy which embodied itself in the writings of
Locke, found its religious expression in the theological
school of the English Deists, in the Unitarianism of
Priestley and Belsham, and in certain broad, or, as
they were then called, latitudinarian sections of the
reputed orthodox churches. So, once more, the
transcendental philosophy which Coleridge did so
much to bring into reputation, has furnished F. D.
Maurice and his school with their method and the
basis of their system, and is greatly influencing the
thinking and forms of religious opinion amongst
many who are striving hard to retain their orthodox
position. At the same time the severe method of
positivism is working in another direction and revo
lutionizing the religious opinions of all who come
under its influence.
These illustrations, then, will serve to show you
that the very first step for us to take, when seeking to
form our religious opinions, is to determine upon the
method by which our enquiries shall be conducted.
The method will inevitably determine the conclusions
at which we shall arrive.
But here a certain school interposes and claims for
its method an absolute control over our inquiries. It
says, “ God has given us a revelation in a book, and
the only method we ought to pursue is to take a
grammar and dictionary, ascertain the precise literal
meaning of the book, and accept that as the absolute
truth and rule.” But let us see if this method be as
conclusive as they seem to suppose. We will take a
precept, not a dogma, and that one spoken by the
highest, truest lips, Matt. v. 38, &c., “Ye have heard
that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth
for a tooth—(you will recollect that that is a law laid
down for the guidance of courts of justice, see Ex. xxi.
23, &c., so that Christ is here referring not to taking
personal vengeance, but to getting one who has injured
�Religious Opinions.
7
you punished by law): but I say unto you resist not
evil (by bringing him before the magistrate); but
whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn
to him the other also. And if any man will sue
thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have
thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to
go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that
asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee
turn not thou away.”
Now, I ask respecting these precepts, as I have asked
before on frequent occasions, does any sensible per
son in the present day think they are to be obeyed?
Are we never to prosecute at law those doing us an
injury ? If any one prosecute us for an unjust claim
are we not to defend our cause ? Are we to give
to every beggar ? And are we never to refuse to
lend to those who want to borrow ? There can be
but one answer, and that answer will be in direct
contradiction to the precepts. I ask then upon what
ground, by what authority, these plain, simple and
direct precepts of Christ, spoken in unmistakeable
language, are modified or set on one side ? It will be
said, one's common sense sees they are inapplicable,
and would be unworkable in the present day in our
circumstances. Precisely so. But see what this in
volves. You apply your common sense, or reason, or
judgment, whatever you like to call it, to these pre
cepts and set them aside by its authority. Then you
apply your common sense, reason, or judgment to
other precepts, and by its authority pronounce them
still obligatory. You have left your grammar and
lexicon, and you are trying these precepts by tests
furnished by your own mind. Their authority really
rests therefore not upon the claims of him who
spoke them, but upon the judgments you have
formed respecting them. It is you who pronounce
them binding or not binding in virtue of some
test your judgment has supplied.
�8
The Formation of
. Now, what I say, and what the whole drift of this
discourse is intended to shew, is that it is of the
first importance that in selecting this test by which
moral precepts, doctrines and religious opinions of
all kinds are to be tried, you be guided by right and
rational principles or rules, in other words that
your method of enquiry be sound and good.
In searching for this method it is a fortunate thing
for us that we have the history and experience of up
wards of two thousand years to help us. For we are
thus enabled at all events to see where and how
others have failed, and to avoid the same blunders.
All the old systems of opinion have broken down
and failed to hold their ground against the advancing
tide of progress. Each one in turn has given place
to something fresh and has never revived excepting
under a new phase and with great modifications.
The system of St Augustine, for example, is said to
have been revived by Luther and other Reformers.
And without doubt the statement is partially true,
but no one who knows the writings of Augustine and
Luther would say the Augustine theology of the
sixteenth century is precisely the same as the
Augustine theology of the fourth. The questions are
looked at, argued, and concluded upon under different
phases, under different modes of culture. It is not
the theology of Augustine, it is the theology of
Augustine moulded, modified and permeated by the
spirit of the sixteenth century. The old questions
come up, but they come in a new dress, and they are
discussed from a different standing ground. And so
it has ever been, a constant flux of systems, succeed
ing and superseding each other, but the old questions
ever returning to be debated over again.
Now, how is it that all these discussions and
philosophies have failed to settle these questions or
to give us, at least, some points settled which should
be debateable no more for ever, and from which we
�Religious Opinions.
9
might set out upon fresh and more extended inquiries.
The answer appears to me quite plain. They failed
because their methods of inquiry were vicious from
the very beginning. They started upon untested
assumptions, and built up their theories by imagin
ative reasonings, the elements of which were furnished
by their fancies alone. Sometimes, indeed, they
would appeal to facts of consciousness or of man’s
history, i.e., facts of the inner or of the outer life ;
but when they did so, they interpreted them by
assumptions or fancies wholly gratuitous, and the
facts therefore became as worthless as their fancies.
Thus, as an example, the Semitic and Western con
ceptions of God assumed his similitude to man in
mind, while not also in body. Now, that assump
tion once made the remaining conceptions, and the
interpretations of his proceedings would legitimately
follow according to what men at the time being found
in themselves. Accordingly, at one time his govern
ment was represented as that of an arbitrary despot;
at another time, as that of a constitutional king, his
actions being limited by supposed principles of eternal
right and fitness; at another, as that of a still more
merciful sovereign striving to find a remedy against
the terrible mischief done by his too severe law; and
now recently as a father governing his family and
never chastening but in love. But each and all of
these representations are equally true for those who
have believed them, and equally founded upon a
purely gratuitous assumption, viz., that there is such
a resemblance between the mind of God and man
that you may reason from the principles, modes of
thought, and of action in the one, to the principles,
modes of thought, and of action in the other.
Now, I deny that there is the least pretence in
reason for this assumption. It is purely fanciful and
baseless. There are no means of proving that it is
true, if it be true. And therefore the whole system
�io
The Formation of
of the divine government built upon it is as worthless,
as uncertain, and as irrational as its base. But, say
those who make and rest upon this assumption, if
God be not like to man in his mental character and
principles of action, what is He like ? I answer, I
do not know. But say they, if you do not know,
what affections, dispositions, characteristics, will you
ascribe to him 1 I answer, I ascribe none. Then say
they, you are left in the hands of this terrible
almighty power, in total ignorance of his intentions
towards you. I reply, not so, I know many of
his intentions towards me with tolerable certainty.
I find that he always acts in the same way,
by the same laws, causing the same antecedents
to be followed by the same consequents, the same
causes by the same effects, the same conditions by the
same results. So far, therefore, as I know these
causes, conditions, laws (call them what you please),
I know precisely what God’s intentions are. His
intentions concerning me are, that whenever I come
under any one of these laws, conditions, or causes,
that the consequences he has attached to it in the
order of things shall inevitably follow. And that is
enough for me to know. I have no longing after the
impossible, the comprehension of the Infinite and
Absolute. . I know, as the late Sir William Hamilton .
expressed it, the length of my tether. I acquiesce in
my conditioned knowledge.
Now, this illustration has not been a digression
from our enquiry into the right method of forming
religious opinions. It has expounded it. It lias
shown how baseless, uncertain and fluctuating must
be all systems originated in mere speculative fancies
and assumptions. It has shewn there can be only
one method fixed, certain, and unchangeable—that,
namely, which is purely based upon facts, and brings
all its reasonings to the test of facts before it finally
accepts as true its conclusions. It is by this method
�Religious Opinions.
11
the whole advance in every kind of human knowledge
has been made. So far as it was pursued in ancient
times what was discovered by it, is as true to day as
it was then. Every great deliverance from human
ignorance and superstition has been wrought out by it.
There is not an enlightened conception of the divine
government but what may be traced to its influence
acting directly or indirectly upon the mind. From
its conclusions there can be no possible appeal. It
is the highest and ultimate test of all truth, of all
speculation, of all reasoning. What it ascertains
must be true as long as the world lasts, and its
judgments can never be set aside, excepting by
assumption into higher and more general truths. It
is the only method left to us in this nineteenth
century. But now, you say, where shall we find the
facts to which this method is to be applied, and upon
the study of which all our religious opinions are to be
formed ? I answer, in the whole experience of man,
in general, and in your own special experience in
particular, and this experience carries us out of
ourselves recollect, in virtue of the relations we
sustain to the external world. Whatever is evolved
in your religious experience constantly, under the
same conditions that is for you a religious fact, and
forms the basis of a true religious opinion—the basis
of a true religious opinion for you, recollect, not the
basis of a general religious opinion true for all men.
For our individual peculiarities and circumstances
constitute individual conditions which may lead to
results altogether untrue in the experience of other
men. Yet that these conditions may be true for you
cannot be questioned. It is an individual truth
affecting only yourself. You come into contact, for
example, with some great and sublime object in
nature which immediately produces in you feelings
of reverence and awe, and suggests the idea of a
present good and beneficent Creator calling forth
�12
The Formation of
your love and trust. That, therefore, is the fact of
your experience, and you found upon it the opinion
that it is the tendency of such objects to produce
such results. Now that opinion is true for you
individually. But you extend your inquiries to the
experience of other men, and then you find that
these results do not always follow. In some you find
there is the deep feeling produced by contemplating
the object, but no suggestion of the idea of God.
In others, the idea of God is suggested, but it is
accompanied by fear and terror. So that you correct
the conclusion of your personal experience by the
wider experience of mankind, and instead of
saying that the grand objects of nature tend to
suggest the idea of God and to produce love and
trust, you say these objects tend to produce these
effects under certain conditions only.
Your re
ligious. opinion is modified, generalized by a more
extensive observation of facts. The first opinion
founded upon your own experience is still true for
you, because your mind is in that condition under
which this love for and trust in God follow; but it is
not a general truth and your opinion has to be
modified accordingly.
But now, suppose you are not content to rest here.
You want to ascertain which is the normal, proper
and natural condition and result, that which ends, as
in your own mind, in love and trust, or that which
ends in terror and apprehension. Still you have
nothing but the facts to guide you. You begin
therefore by examining and scrutinizing more closely
the facts. You find in those in whom the terror is
excited some humanised conception of God which
clothes him with attributes which have a malignant
aspect towards man, and by examination you find
that this conception rests upon the baseless assumption
that God must be like man, and so like malignant
and fierce men. Or in other cases you find it has
�Religious Opinions.
13
been produced by some great calamity, which has
produced the impression that God delights in calamity,
an impression depending upon a few circumstances
and not upon general observation. On the other hand,
your own trust and love rest upon no such ground.
You do not pretend to know God as he is in himself;
but by extensive observation you find that upon the
whole his operations in nature are beneficent and
good, leading to human well being and happiness.
You observe that the calamities are the result of
conditions which may for the most part be controlled
and constitute a system of discipline which is benefi
cial and merciful. Seeing therefore that the real facts
call forth the love and trust, and that it is fancy or
an imperfect observation of a few facts that inspire
the mistrust and fear, you form the generalized
religious opinion that those conditions in which the
apprehensions of God’s presence call forth trust and
love, are the true, normal, and proper conditions of
man. Nor could anything possibly shake that opinion
but such an appeal to the facts as would shew you
had misconceived or misinterpreted them.
But possibly some one may say, this method will
answer very well in such a question as you have pro
posed, but will it apply to all, such as the peculiar
doctrines of Christianity for example1? Now, I have
already answered that question in effect. For leaving
out of consideration the evidences by which the
authority of Christianity has to be established,
involving as they do the questions of miracles, which
is purely one of facts, I remind you of what I have
already said about the interpretation. Every one
interprets by his system of philosophy formed by his
judgment according to certain methods. The ultimate
appeal in these questions of interpretation is not to
the grammar and lexicon, but to the principles held
by the interpreter. Hence the opposite conclusions
come to by men equally sincere, equally learned,
�14
Fhe Formation of
equally pious, and equally skilled in interpretation.
The Calvinists, for example, the older Unitarians, and
the Arminians equally believe in the divine authority
of the New Testament or of Christ. They equally
strive to find out the meaning of the text. They
come to opposite conclusions. Why1? Oh, the bigots
of each party would say, because the others do not
come with an open mind, but seek only their own
preconceived opinions. I have, however, nothing to
do with the bigots just now. The real cause is,
because each comes with his own system to the inter
pretation, and so arrives at different results. And
it could not from the nature of things be otherwise,
whether men know it or not. So that in reality the
ultimate appeal is to these judgments formed before
consulting the oracle, and all depends upon the method
by which those judgments are formed.
Take, for example, the doctrine of the atonement.
Now, the Calvinist holding certain views about
God’s justice, government &c., interprets the passages
speaking of Christ’s death in one way, and gives to the
atonement one meaning. The Arminian, holding
modified views of God’s justice and government, and
exalting higher his love, interprets the same passages
in another way, and gives to the atonement a modified
meaning. Whilst the older Unitarian, holding other
views of God’s character, apd exalting his love still
higher than the Arminian, interprets the passages in
quite another way, and does not hold the doctrine of
the atonement in the Calvinistic sense at all. Now
how can any one form an opinion upon these three
different modes of interpretation ? Only by determin
ing the truth or the untruth of the principles upon
which their system of interpretation is based; and that
must be done by the method I have explained. If
any one do not care for any of these systems, and
wishes to determine the question simply upon its
own merits, how can he do so but by a reference to
�Religious Opinions.
15
facts ? Do all those who believe in the atonement get
delivered, so far as we see, from the consequences of
their past sins 1 Would the drunkard, for example,
who has drunk himself into a state verging on
delirium tremens, get saved from the fit which was
coming upon him to-night, by a sudden conversion
experienced at twelve o'clock this morning ? And
secondly, do none but those who so believe, amend
their lives and reap all the good and happiness of
the amendment ? There can be but one answer to
such questions, and it is determined by matters of
fact easily ascertained, and from which there can be
no appeal.
I trust, then, I have said enough to explain the
method by which our religious opinions must be
formed. There is none other left to us amidst the
jarring controversies of the day. At all events, of
this we are quite sure, whatever we come short of,
through this method (for myself I do not think we
shall come short of any then) yet whatever we do
grasp will be unalterable and infallibly sure.
It
will rest on a basis of fact which cannot be
removed. In this method is certainty, and in this
alone. All others are a delusion and a snare.
But let me conclude with one caution. Above all
things, in the use of this method, do not too hastily
generalize your conclusions. See to it that you have
a sufficient number of facts to form your opinion upon.
There is no greater evidence of a philosophical ’mind
than the power of suspending one’s judgment until
all the evidence is before one; as there is no greater
proof of a weak mind than hesitancy after the con
clusions are formed. And herein doubtlessly lies the
danger to which those employing this method are
exposed. Too often they want to rise to certainty
by a leap. Most enquirers get impatient of delay.
After a rapid glance over a few facts, selected it may
be but from one class, age, or type, they rashly conclude
�16
The Formation of Religious Opinions.
that they have comprehended the universal law. They
mistake the individual and it may be accidental
process for the general, and therefore go blundering
on into all sorts of errors. The very first requisite
to the formation of true religious opinions, as of all
others, is patience, caution, suspension of judgment
until the whole field of facts is surveyed and nothing
left out that is essential to the result. Then the con
clusion, so far as it goes, will be as certain as the fact of
one’s own existence. And then recollect, as an
encouragement to this patience and suspension of
judgment, that religion may exist actively where the
opinions are yet in abeyance, for truthful, well
formed opinions are not necessary to religious feeling
and life; although on the other hand the opinions
once formed have a momentous result on the
religious life.
Be deliberate then, scrutinize, weigh, compare,
discount all fancies and all prejudices, earnestly
judge by the facts widely inducted, and God will
guide you into all truth.
TURNBULL AND SPEABS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
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On the formation of religious opinions
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Cranbrook, James
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Religion
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Conway Tracts
Faith and Reason
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Text
MANUEL
DE MORALE
RATIONALISTE
Fondee sur les Lois de la Nature
PAR
MADELEINE DELBENDE
PRIX: UN SHILLING
THE FRENCH ETHICAL SOCIETY
4?-&^RATHBROOK ROAD, LONDRE5, S.W.I6,
ANGLETERRE
7?
£ ffiwK $ iff& ,
3
U
��ts)A?O
nationalsecularsociety
Manuel de Morale
Rationaliste
��Nous ne vivons que par I’harmonie generale de nos actes
avec les Lois de la Nature.
M. Deshumbert.
Il est important de constater qu’une croyance inculquee
Pendant les premieres annees de la vie, alors que le cerveau
est encore impressionnable, semble presque acquerir la nature
d’un instinct; or, ce qui caracterise un instinct, c’est qu’on
lui obeit-independamment de la raison,
Darwin.
��PREFACE
La necessite d’un manuel de morale rationaliste
remplagant les catechismes qui basent la morale sur des
dogmes surannes est evidente pour tous ceux qui ont une
connaissance meme superficielle de psychologie.
Mais faire
un tel traite de morale n’est pas facile. Il ne s’agit
plus en effet d’affirmer au nom d’un Dieu “justicier,” il faut
donner des raisons, fournir des preuves que tel acte est bon,
que tel autre est mauvais.
Ce manuel s’est largement inspire du livre de M.
Deshumbert “La Morale Fondee sur les Lois de la Nature”
dans lequel'est si clairement expose ce qu’on peut appeler
avec certitude : le Bien. Puisse-t-il aider a former
une humanite libre, noble et heureuse.
Madeleine Delbende. 4
5
�I CHAPITRES
I.—Base de la Morale.
II.—Nos Devoirs.
III. —Quelques points supplementaires..
IV. —Nos Droits.
V.—La Conscience.
VI.—La Volonte.
VII.—Les Sanctions.
VIII.—Du Manage.
IX.—De la Mort.
6
�Manuel de Morale Rationaliste
i
BASE DE LA MORALE
1. —Qu’est-ce que la Morale?
La Morale est la Science qui nous indique ce que doit etre
notre conduite pour faire le Bien et eviter le Mai.
2. —Que faut-il entendre par Science?
La Science est 1’ensemble des connaissances resultant de
l’observation patiente, d’experiences nombreuses. C’est
ainsi que l’astronomie est la science qui traite des astres, que
la biologie est la science qui traite des proprietes des corps
vivants, etc.
3. —SuR
QUOI REPOSE LA SCIENCE DE LA MORALE?
La Science de la Morale repose, comme toutes les autres
sciences, sur la connaissance des lois de la Nature.
4. —Que faut-il entendre par Nature?
Par Nature il faut entendre la totalite des etres et des
choses. La Nature est done 1’Univers dans son entier. Elie
est Tout-ce-qui-est.
5. —Qu’entend-on par lois de la Nature?
Par lois de la Nature on entend les phenomenes qui se produisent toujours et de meme faqon chaque fois que les
7
�circonstances sont les memes : “Les memes causes produisent toujours les memes effets.”
6. —Comment pouvons-nous connaitre les- lois de la
Nature?
En etudiant, grace a. la methode scientifique experimentale,
la Nature et les phenomenes qui s’y manifestent,
7. —Quelles
sont
les
lois
la
de
Nature qui nous
INTERESSENT AVANT TOUTE AUTRE?
Les lois de la Vie puisque nous sommes des etres vivants.
8. —Quelles
sont les
sciences
qui
etudient les lois
DE LA VIE?
Ce sont surtout la biologie; la physiologic (fonctions
organiques par lesquelles la vie se manifesto) ; la psychologie
(facultes mentales);
naturelie. Mais toutes les
sciences contribuent a la connaissance de la Vie; la chimie,
la physique, etc.
9. —Quand la Vie
est-elle apparue?
Quand les circonstances l'out permis, quand la temperature
a ete favorable, la vie est apparue dans l’Ocean sous formes
de petites cellules vegetales flottantes.
10. —D’OU EST VENUE LA VlE?
Il y a un temps incalculable, alors que l’atmosphere chaude
de la Terre etait surchargee de vapeur d’eau, de gaz carbonique et d’electricite, le carbone, l’azote, l’oxygene et l’hydrogene qui existaient deja se combinerent d’une facon nouvelle
et formerent la substance “vivante” appelee protoplasms. La
vie est done venue du milieu inorganique (e’est-a-dire du
non-vivant).
En verite aucune ligne bien nette ne separe la nature inor
ganique des etres vivants. C’est ainsi qu’un fil metallique
soumis a un courant electrique se -comporte exactement
comme un muscle; une tige d’acier soumise a une force qui
8
�l’allonge jusqu’ a presque la casser envoie, si .on la lais.se au
repos, des molecules qui se groupent au point aminci afin.
de le renforcer : or, les os font de meme. Les cristaux
aussi reparent leurs blessures lorsqu’ils sont plonges dans un
liquide nourricier; une mince couche de metal fondu qu’on
repand sur une surface froide forme des cellules avec
“noyau”, ce qui, .pensait-on, il y a peu de temps, constituait le
trait caracteristique des cellules vivantes.—Enfin il est
souvent difficile de distinguer entre un mineral et un vegetal
d’organisation inferieure, tels les coraux par exemple.
Quant a l’obj ection que le protoplasme est totalement diffe
rent, des corps qui le composent, il suffit de rappeler que l’eau
differe aussi totalement dans son aspect et ses proprietes
de l’oxygene et de l’hydrogene qui la composent.
. 11.—Qu’est-ce qui caracterise la Vie?
1°—ILassimilation, c’est-a-dire l’absorption de substances
differentes tirees du milieu et que la plante ou l’animal trans
forme en d’autres substances semblables a celles qui le com
posent deja. C’est ainsi qu’une' chevre transforme l’herbe
qu’elle mange en substances semblables a celles qui composent
ses muscles, son sang, son lait, etc2°—La reproduction qui assure la vie de 1‘Espece. *
12. —Comment s’explique la diversite des etres qui
PEUPLENT NOTRE TERRE?
Par 1’Evolution dont les lois nous expliquent le developpement et les changements des etres.
13. —Quelle est la cause principale de l’Evolution?
Le desir intense qu’a tout etre vivant, du plus petit jusqu’au plus grand, de continuer dans l’existence. De la, la
necessite de ^’adapter au milieu et aux circonstances changeantes : Lamarck (France), Darwin (Angleterre), de Vries
(Hollande), ont a eux trois formule les lois de l’Evolution.
14. —L’Homme fait-il partie de la Nature?
La Nature etant Tout-ce-qui-est, l’homme fait forcement '
partie de la Nature et, comme tel, est soumis a ses lois. Il
9
�fait partie de la Nature au meme titre que tous les autres
etres; il est le dernier produit de revolution sur notre
planete.
.
,
15.—L’Homme est-il
l’Univers ” ?
comme on l’a
dit
le
" Roi ' de
Il y a sans doute sur des millions d’autres planetes des
etres beaucoup plus developpes que nous, les conditions y
etant souvent plus propices (plus de lumiere et de chaleur par
exemple).
16.—Qu’EST-CE
QUE LA “ LOTTE POUR LA VlE ” ?
Par “ lutte pour la vie ”, on entend generalement le triomphe de la force brutale. Mais une etude approfondie nous
montre que si la force brutale existe dans la Nature, celle-ci
favorise surtout le developpement de 1’intelligence et le
developpement moral.
17.—Comment la Morale derive-t-elle de la Vie ?
Parce que tous les etres vivants afln de vivre, et de vivre
plus et mieux ont du accomplir certains actes, manifester
certaines tendances, tels que :
L’activite, le travail, la perseverance, le courage, la prevoyance, la patience qui permettent de trouver la nourriture,
de se defendre des especes ennemies, de surmonter les obsta
cles ;
La justice qui permet le developpement de chaque etre;
Id aide mutuelle,
cooperation, la bonte qui aident au
developpement de l’individu et des autres;
U amour maternel et paternel sans lequel les enfants n’auraient pu vivre;
XJaltruisme, ou pensee pour les autres;
Le sacrifice, ou devouement pour les autres.
Il y a eu evolution des sentiments, tout comme il y a eu
evolution des organes : c’est ainsi que l’altruisme dans
l’histoire de la morale remplace peu a peu l’egoisme;
l’altruisme s’etend de la famille a la tribu, de la tribu a la
nation ou patrie, de la patrie a l’humanite, de l’humanite a
tout ce qui a vie.
i
10
■
�18. —Puisque la Morale derive de la Vie, les vegetaux
ET LES ANIMAUX SONT DONC MORAUX?
Il faut bien qu’il en soit ainsi, puisque nous venons de voir
que certains actes moraux sont indispensables a la vie. Un
acte moral reste moral, meme s’il est fait instinctivement. La
mere qui instinctivement, sans prendre le temps de reflechir,
risque sa vie pour son enfant agit moralement. Les
vegetaux et les animaux peuvent done agir moralement. ,
19. —Quels
actes
'trouvons-nous
moraux
chez
les
VEGETAUX ?
Le travail (racines et feuilles);
La perseverance (racines);
La cooperation (les differentes parties travaillent pour le
bien de la plante ou de 1’arbre; de tres petites fleurs comme
les paquerettes placees ca et la sur la tige se sont groupees
afin d’attirer plus surement les insectes qui aident a leur
fertilisation).
La prevoyance (en automne les plantes a bulbes
emmagasinent la nourriture dont elles se serviront au
printemps).
Uamour maternel (soins et sacrifices de la plante pour ses
graines).
Le sacrifice (chute des feuilles en automne; les feuilles
meurent pour que l’arbre, plus important; qu’elles, puissent
continuer a vivre).
,
'
20. —Quels
actes
moraux
trouvons-nous
chez
les
ANIMAUX ?
Tous ceux que nous trouvons chez les vegetaux, mais
accomplis peut-etre plus consciemment. La vie des insectes,
des oiseaux, etc., fournit d’abondants exemples. Les animaux
domestiques menant une vie artificielle ou ils n’ont ni a chercher leur nourriture, ni a se defendre de leurs ennemis, ni a
defendre leurs petits, sont souvent moins moraux que leurs
freres en Jiberte : leurs qualites morales s’atrophient par
manque d’exercice.
11
'
.
�II
NOS DEVOIRS
21. —Quelles qualites devons-nous surtout developper
ET PRATIQUER ?
1° La proprete;
2° L’amour de la verite;
3° La franchise;
4° La justice;
5° L’honnetete;
6° La bonte;
7° La generosite;
''
8° L’aide mutuelle;
9° La cooperation (union dans un but determine).
10° Le respect de soi-meme;
11° La sobriete;
12° La maitrise de soi (volonte);
13° L’amour du travail;
14° La prevoyance;
15° L’attention;
16° La perseverance;
17° La patience;
18° La bonne humeur;
19° L’egalite d’humeur;
20° La modestie et la simplicite;
21° La tolerance;
22° Le respect de la liberte d’autrui ;
23° L’obeissance;
24° La fermete;
25° La politesse;
26° La reconnaissance;
27° L’amour du devoir.
22. —POURQUOI
LA PROPRETE EST-ELLE NECESSAIRE ?
Parce qu’elle est la premiere condition de notre bien-etre
physique et que le bon fonctionnement de notre corps a une
12
�heureuse influence sur notre developpement intellectuel et.
moral. De plus un etre sale est repugnant et devient une
gene, sinon un danger, pour autrui.
23. —POURQUOI FAUT-IL DEVELOPPER
l'AmOUR
DE LA VERITE ?
Parce que la verite que la science seule pSut .decouvrir
avec certitude, est belle; parce qu’elle fortifie notre jugement,
epanouit notre coeur, aide au developpement de l’individu et
des groupes; parce qu’elle est universelie et.aide ainsi a
l’union de tous les hommes.
24. —POURQUOI FAUT-IL ETRE FRANC ?
La franchise est la verite dans les petites choses de la vie
de tous les jours. Il ne faut jamais dire de mensonge : Le
mensonge indique un manque de courage moral, un manque
de cceur lorsque le mensonge nuit a autrui; il nuit certainement a celui qui ment en deteriorant son etre moral, et en
faisant que personne ne croit a ses paroles.
Etre franc ne signifie pas qu’on doive dire des choses desobligeantes ou faire des remarques desagreables. Si cependant on est oblige de dire une chose desagreable il faut avoit
soin de choisir des paroles qui adoucissent le heurt et d’ajou
ter quelques mots aimables. Ne pas oublier que dans ce cas
le but n’est pas de faire souffrir mais de corriger la per
sonne eh lui montrant l’erreur ou elle est tombee.
25. —POURQUOI FAUT-IL'ETRE JUSTE?
Parce que la justice est une condition de securite pour chaque individu; que chacun a un droit egal au notre a vivre,
a posseder des biens acquis honnetement, a se developper le
plus possible. Dire du mal, voler, favoriser, profiter de la
faiblesse d’autrui sont done des actes d’injustice qui engendrent da haine, le desir de vengeance, etc.
26. —POURQUOI FAUT-IL ETRE H0NNETE ?
Nous venons de voir que le vol, quelle que soit sa forme,
est injuste. De plus il est facile d’imaginer l’etat d’une
societe ou chacun essayerait sans cesse de s’emparer par
force ou par ruse du bien de son voisin. Cette societe
ne subsisterait pas longtemps a cause de la desunion qui
regnerait bientot parmi ses membres.
13
�27. —POURQUOI
FAUT-IL ETRE BON ?
Parce que la bonte diminue la peine et augmente le bonheur. Nous serons bons envers tous les faibles, les enfants,
les malades, les infirmes. Nous serons bons aussi envers les
animaux et tout ce qui a vie (plantes), car tout ce qui vit est,
comme nous, sensible a la douleur.
Nous serons bons dans nos jugements des autres:
n’oublions pas que nous ne pouvons savoir ce que nous
aurions fait en des circonstances semblables, avec un tem
perament semblable. La bonte vient done adoucir la justice
et souvent, par l’encouragement qu’elle donne, elle permet a
l’individu de se corriger et de se perfectionner.
Il faut etre bon, non seulement dans les choses importantes,
mais aussi dans les relations ordinaires de la vie : par exemple pas de reproches inutiles, pas de taquineries non plus
car nous ne devons jamais augmenter en ce monde la douleur,
le chagrin, la tristesse, ni jamais decourager.
Il est clair que bonte ne veut pas dire faiblesse, mais sympathie intelligente.
28. —POURQUOI
FAUT-IL ETRE .GENEREUX ?
Parc que la generosite derive a la fois de la justice et de
la bonte.
Il est juste si le sort nous a ete clement de donner notre
superflu a ceux qui a la suite de circonstances malheureuses
sont pauvres ou malades. Et il est bon d’etre genereux, en
pensees et en paroles, de pardonner en son coeur, de ne pas
ajouter au malheur d’un ennemi par des paroles blessantes.
29. —POURQUOI
FAUT-IL
COOPERATION ?
PRATIQUER
L’AIDE MUTUELLE
ET LA
Parce que nous ne pouvons vivre sans l’aide des autres et
qu’il serait injuste de ne pas aider a notre tour- ceux qui
nous aident.
De plus 1’entr’aide encourage; la cooperation diminue les
difficultes et augmente notre pouvoir; enfin elle lie davantagge entre eux les membres de la societe.
30. —PoURQUOI FAUT-IL AVOIR LE RESPECT DE SOI-MEME ?
Il faut avoir le respect de soi-meme (ou de la dignite per
sonnels) tout comme nous avons le respect d’une chose belle
�qui nous est donnee : Nous sommes une manifestation de la
vie; deteriorer notre etre, l’entraver dans ses marveilleuses
possibilites de developpement harmonieux, est un crime
envers la vie et envers nous-memes. .
Nous ne ferons jamais rien de bas, jamais rien qui puisse
entrainer la juste reprobation des autres; nous ne nous
exposerons pas aux influences malsaines, en un mot nous ne
nous permettrons jamais de faire ce qui pourrait entrainer
la deterioration de notre sante, de notre cerveau, de notre
cceur.
■
31. —POURQUOI FAUT-IL ETRE S0BRE ?
Parce que tout exces est mauvais pour la sante, qu’il diminue l’intelligence et l’energie morale, nous rendant ainsi inferieur a nous-meme. Les exces sont done contre la dignite
personnels. C’est pour cela que nous eviterons l’alcool, Ie
tabac, tout ce qui tend a diminuer nos forces physique,
intellectuelle, morale'.
32. —POURQUOI LA MA.1TRISE DE SOI EST-ELLE NECESSAIRE ? (
)
*
Si nous ne pouvons nous gouverner nous-memes nous ne
pourrons certainement pas nous rendre maitres des choses
adverses, des malheurs qui pourrons nous assaillir; nous
serons des impulsifs incapables de marcher sans defaillance
vers un but; des agites incapables d’achever une oeuvre un
peu longue et difficile. Nous serons la feuille detachee que
le vent entraine ou il veut. Etre maitre de soi c’est la vraie,
la seule liberte.
33. —POURQUOI DEVONS-NOUS TRAVAILLER ? .
L’activite est une condition de vie; le travail est l’activite
disciplinee, organisee. Le travail nous developpe et nous
permet d’aider nos semblables; la paresse atrophie notre cer
veau et nos muscles. Travailler, etre utile, est un devoir
envers nous-memes, envers les autres, envers la Vie.
Travailler est done aussi un Honneur et nous ferons
toujours notre travail manuel ou intellectuel, agreable ou
ennuyeux a fond et de notre mieux par amour pour la vie,
par esprit de justice envers les autres et aussi par dignite
personnelle.
(*) Voir, pour -plus de details, le chapitre sur la Volonte.
15
�34. —POURQUOI DEVONS-NOUS ETRE PREVOYANTS ?
Afin de ne pas etre a charge aux autres, afin de pouvoir
aider ceux qui auraient besoin de secours.
35. —Pourquoi
l’attention est-elle necessaire
?
Sans attention nous ne pouvons accomplir notre travail .de
notre mieux, et notre developpement intellectuel et moral en
est retarde.
Une negligence peut aussi entrainer des consequences
graves (tels qu’accidents de machines dus a une piece mal
jointe).
Concentrons done toujours notre attention sur notre
ouvrage, quel qu’il soit.
36.—Pourquoi
la perseverance est-elle necessaire
?
C’est la perseverance seule, e’est-a-dire la continuite dans
l’effort qui nous permet de surmonter une tache difficile, de
perfectionner notre etre, d’acquerir des connaissances.
Aucun effort .n’est perdu et le plus petit effort renouvele
constamment arrive a bout de tout: une goutte d’eau tombant
sans cesse a la meme place finit par creuser la pierre la
plus dure.
37.—Pourquoi
faut-il etre patient
?
Il y a plusieurs sortes de patience :
La patience dans l’attente;
La patience dans les contradictions;
La patience dans la souffrance, et qui est une forme du
courage.
Dans aucun cas 1’impatience n’est utile; au contraire,
elle diminue les forces en fatiguant les nerfs, l’attente semble
plus longue, la souffrance plus douloureuse. L’impatience
est proche parents de la colere qui agit comme un poison
sur l’organisme.
De plus dans les contradictions il n’est que juste d’ecouter le
contradicteur, car il se peut que nous nous trompions ou que
notre contradicteur soit de bonne foi. Enfin, si nous voulons
amener quelqu’un a nos vues, un ton calme, quoique convaincu, fera beaucoup plus d’impression que la violence qui
produit souvent l’entetement.
�38. —Pourquoi faut-il cultiver la bonne humeur ?
En premier lieu parce que la bonne humeur a une influence
salutaire sur la sante. De plus il n’est pas juste d’augmenter
la tristesse des autres en leur montrant un visage morose.
Done, en depit des souffrances physiques ou morales, faisons
preuve de courage; efforqons-nous de montrer un visage
souriant, augmentons ainsi la somme de bonheur chez autrui
et par contre coup en nous-meme.
39. —Pourquoi faut-il pratiquer l’egalite d'humeur ?
L’egalite d’humeur montre la maitrise de soi. Etre tout a
coup triste, tout a coup gai, un jour plein de patience, le lendemain emporte est deconcertant et penible pour les autres
et a sur eux une mauvaise influence.
40. —Pourquoi faut-il etre modeste et simple?
Il se peut que nous soyons orgueilleux de notre position
sociale, de notr.e richesse, de notre savoir.
Or, tout cela est en grande partie du a d’autres qu’a nousmemes. La position, la richesse peuvent nous avoir ete transmises sans qu’il y ait eu un effort de notre part; ou bien
e’est l’intelligence, l’energie, heritees- des parents qui nous
ont permis de les acquerir.
Etre orgueilleux de son savoir e’est montrer que nous
savons encore peu de choses, car, plus on apprend et plus on
s’apergoit que la science est illimitee et que nous en ignorons
une vaste partie. Faire etalage de ses connaissances e’est
aussi manquer de bonte et de tact envers ceux qui n’ont pas
regu les memes avantages que nous.
Soyons simples aussi dans nos paroles et dans nos gouts.
Faire etalage de luxe est non seulement un manque de bon
gout mais e’est aussi un manque de bonte et de justice, le
luxe etant trop souvent fait de la misere d’autrui.
41. —Pourquoi devons-nous etre tolerants ?
Respecter l’opiriion des autres, e’est reconnaitre leur liberte
de penser. L’intolerance a cause la mdrt de savants et de
grands penseurs (1’Inquisition instituee par l’Eglise romaine,
les guerres de religion, certains troubles politiques en sont
d’affreux exemples), et le Progres a ainsi ete retarde de
plusieurs siecles.
17
�Tolerance ne vent pas dire cependant indifference,
faiblesse, lachete. Lorsqu’il s’agit de mensonges, de choses
nuisibles au developpement de l’etre humain, il est de notre
devoir de lutter franchement contre eux, et d’eclairer les
esprits.
42.—Po^feQUOI FAUT-IL RESPECTER LA LIBERTE' D’AUTRUI ?
Nous n’avons pas le. droit d’empecher les autres d’agir
cotnme ils 1’entendent tant que leur conduite n’attente pas au
developpement des autres. Nous n’avons done pas le droit de
medire d’autrui. En general nous nous occupons beaucoup
trop des affaires des autres et presque toujours dans le but
de critiquer, si ce n’est pas par simple curiosite.
43'-—PoURQ.UOI DEVONS-NOUS PRATIQUER L’OBEISSANCE ?
Obeir c’est suivre de notre plein gre les lois, les reglements, les ordres que nous reconnaissons justes et utiles.
C’est ainsi que nous obeissons avec joie aux lois de la
Nature, aux reglements des groupes dont noils faisons partie
(famille, ecole, societes, etc.), aux conseils des personnes
ayant plus d’experience ,que nous.
L’obeissance fait partie de la discipline personnelle, et la
discipline librement acceptee et pratiquee contribue a la
bonne marche du groupe, a l’harmonie generale.
44. —POURQUOI DEVONS-NOUS ETRE FERME ?
Lorsqu’apres mure reflexion et en ayant le droit, une personne a etabli un reglement, des defenses, elle doit les suivre
et les faire suivre avec fermete. Les lois de la Nature sont
inflexibles, et les quelques lois etablies par les parents par
exemple devront etre inflexibles elles aussi. La fermete
engendre le respect.
45. —POURQUOI FAUT-IL ETRE POLI ?
Parce que la politesse n’est que la bonte dans les petites
choses et qu’elle nous permet aussi de montrer notre respect
ou notre reconnaissance. La politesse agit comme l’huile sur
les rouages et empeche bien des heurts, bien des froissements
dans la vie de tous les jours, et surtout dans la vie de ceux
qui trayaillent pour nous.
18
�46. —POURQUOI FAUT-IL ETRE RECONNAISSANT ? '
’
Parce que la reconnaissance est une dette de justice ef de
bonte envers ceux qui se sont occupes de nous, qui nous ont
aide dans la vie, qui ont travaille pour nous, qui se sont meme
sacrifies pour nous.
47. —Pourquoi
Devoir ? •
faut-il developper en nous l’amour du
Parce qu’il est juste, noble et digne de faire ce qu’on
doit.
48. —D’APRES TOUT CE QUI
Bien
PRECEDE,
pouvons-nous dqnner
QUELLE DEFINITION DU
?
Le Bien est tout ce qui contribue a la conservation et a
Paccroissement de la Vie. C’est-a-dire a notre plein develop
pement physique, intellectuel, moral, social et esthetique, a
l’emploi normal de toutes nos activates. Ou, plus simplement,
le Bien est tout ce qui contribue a l’epanouissement harmonieux de l’individu et des groupes dont il fait partie.
En se rappelant que l’emploi normal de toutes nos activites ne peut s’exercer pleinement et notre epanouissement harmonieux ne peut s’obtenir que par la cooperation, l’aide
mutuelle, l’union, la sympathie agissante pour tous les etres
et par le desir actif, toujours present, de contribuer le plus
possible au plus grand epanouissement du plus grand nombre,
—desir qui fait que l’individu se devoue volontairement pour
le groupe quand cela est necessaire.
49. —Qu’est-ce que le
Mal ?
Inversement, le Mal est tout ce qui amoindrit inutilement
la Vie, tout ce qui gene sans raison ce plein developpe
ment, cet epanouissement harmonieux de l’iridividu ou des
groupes (.
)
*
(*) Ces definitions sont tirees de I’owvrage de M. Deshumbert: “ La morale fondee 'sur les, Lois de la Nature.”
Derniere edition: “ Ligue de Propaganda morale de
Belgique,” Bruxelles, 1921. Traductions en anglais,, portugais, espagnol, roumain, hollandais.
19
�Ill
QUELQUES POINTS SUPPLEMENTAIRES
50. —Qu’est-ce qui forme le '‘'temperament7’ ?
Notre temperament, c’est-a-dire l’ensemble de nos ten
dances bonnes et mauvaises, nous est legue :
1° Par nos ancetres (heredite);
2° Par le milieu (education, coutumes du pays, climat,
etc.).
51. —Qu’est-ce que l’heredite?
C’est le premier facteur qui forme notre temperament
physique, intellectuel, moral et esthetique. C’est la loi biologique qui fait que les bonnes et mauvaises tendances des
parents, des grands-parents et d’ancetres plus eloignes, sont
transmises aux enfants. L’heredite que nous transmettrons
nous-memes augmente ainsi notre responsabilite.
52. —Qu’est-ce que la solidarity ?
Par solidarity on entend cette dependance mutuelle qui
existe entre tous les hommes. Nous sommes lies les uns aux
autres par l’influence que nos actes, nos paroles, nos ecrits ne
peuvent manquer d’exercer sur antrui. L’Humanite passee,
presente et a venir forme un tout solidairc: Nous subissons
encore l’influence du Passe avec ses erreurs, ses fautes, se's
vertus, ses efforts. Luttons done pour que notre influence
soit toujours bonne : le plus petit effort compte. Luttons
pour la Verite et le Bien afin de rendre meilleures et plus
heureuses la generation presente et celles de l’avenir.
53. —Qu’est-ce qu’un optimiste?
L’optimiste est celui qui voit le bon cote des choses et
croit en des temps meilleurs. Le pessimiste est le contraire
de l’o/’/wmste.
54. —Est-il bon d’etre optimiste ?
Il est raisonnable d’etre optimiste parce que l’etude des
choses montre abondamment qu’il y a eu Progres.
20
■
�Il est bon d’etre optimiste parce que cette confiance donne
de l’energie, repand le courage, la bonne humeur et la joie.
Au contraire le pessimisme decourage, deprime et empeche
tout effort.
Cependant il faut avoir le courage et l’honnetete de voir
les choses comme elles sont, meme les choses mauvaises, afin
de lutter contre elles. L’optimisme ne doit pas etre une satis
faction beate mais la certitude de pouvoir ameliorer les gens
et les choses. Cette certitude qui entraine Yaction, laquelle
amene un resultat, donne a la vie toute sa valeur.
55. —Qu’est-ce que la “ Dette des Ancetres ” ?
“ La dette des Ancetres ” dont parlent les philosophes
orientaux est la reconnaissance que nous devons avoir pour
les hommes de tous les temps passes, et de tous les pays qui
ont contribue au Progres. Cette dette nous ne pouvons la
payer qu’en contribuant nous-memes au progres physique,
intellectuel, moral et esthetique.
56. —Qu’est-ce que la Patrie ?
La patrie est le pays ou nous sommes nes, ou nous avons
recu notre education, ou nous avons appris les traditions de
nos ancetres. A ce titre nous avons des devoirs envers notre
patrie : nous devons obeir a ses lois justes, travailler pour
elle, la rendre prospere, noble et belleCe n’est pas etre “ patriote ” mais bien plutot ignorant que
de hair ou mepriser les autres peuples. C’est seulement
l’association fraternelle de toutes les nations qui permettra
a chaque Patrie d’atteindre la prosperite et un developpe
ment harmonieux.
57. —Que faut-il mettre au-dessus de la Patrie ?
Au-dessus de la Patrie se place VHumanite qui comprend
toutes les races humaines et toutes les Nations, solidaires
aussi les unes des autres. Nous avons envers l’Humanite le
meme devoir qu’envers les autres groupes plus petits. Nous
devons toujours travailler dans le sens de la Vie.
Un acte “ patriotique ne doit jamais leser l’Humanite.
Par exemple, nous n’avons pas le droit d’attaquer un pays
sous pretexte d’agrandir le notre.
58. —EsT-CE UN DEVOIR DE VOTER ?
Oui, c’est un devoir de voter, puisque c’est un moyen
d’aider au progres du groupe.
21
x
�IV
NOS DROITS
59. —Avon^-nous des
droits
?
Tout etre a incontestablement droit a la Vie, c’est-a-dire
au developpement complet et harmonieux de son etre. Ce
droit entraine done pour tous et sans distinction:
Le droit a l’instruction;
Lc droit au travail;
Le droit au produit de son travail ou a son equivalent;
Le droit d’etre libre (liberte de pensee, de parole, d’action);
Le droit au confort dans la vieillesse.
60. —Sur
quoi reposent nos
Droits ?
Sur le respect et I’amour de la vie, et sur la justice.
61. —Quel rapport
Devoir ?
existe-t-il entre le
Droit et le
Le Droit et le Devoir sont intimement lies. Nous avons,
une fois ne, droit a la vie mais il est aussi de notre devoir
envers la VIE de travailler, nous-memes a notre epanouisse
ment harmonieux.
Le Droit des autres forme aussi nos devoirs envers eux :
Non seulement nous ne devons pas empecher leur developpe
ment mais nous devons les aider en cela.
De plus nous devons toujours avoir en vue le developpe
ment du plus grand nombre, et si notre developpement per
sonnel familial ou national devait gener celui du Groupe plus
grand, il serait bon de mettre le developpement de celui-ci au
premier plan; (done pas de guerres de conquete, pas
d’injustices pour favoriser les siens). Cette renonciation
contribuera d’ailleurs malgre tout a notre developpement
personnel en augmentant notre volonte, la joie du devouement; et le bien-etre harmonieux du Groupe retentira sur
ses parties.
22
�62. —Avons-nous
droit au
..
Bonheur ?
, *
Nous ne pouvons guere dire que nous avons droit au bonheur, le Bonheur n’etant qu’un resultat du a l’harmonie qui
existe entre nos actes et ceux des autres groupes. La
Nature etant le groupe supreme dont tous les autres depen
dent, il importe d’agir en harmonie avec les Lois de la
Nature, lesquelles nous indiquent comme nous 1’avons vu
ce qui est beau, ce qui est Bien. En faisant ainsi nous
eprouverdns tout le Bonheur d'ont notre organisme. est
capable. ‘
63. —Quel
est alors notre but principal dans'la
Vie ?
L’etude de la Vie nous montre que l’individu existe pour
se developper lui-meme, (la Vie ayant son but en elle-meme),
pour etre utile au groupement dont il fait partie : famille,
ecole, societes de gymnastique et de sports, le village, la
'ville, la Nation, l’Humanite. Le groupe reagissant sur
l’lndividu, plus le groupe est parfait plus l’individu peut se
developper librement.
64. —Comment
pouvons-nous
etre
utiles
aux
groupes
DONT NOUS FAISONS PARTIE ?
En nous developpant nous-memes, puis en aidant les
groupes a vivre toujours plus et mieux; en luttant contre le
mensonge, ^injustice, la cruaute sous toutes ses formes,
(envers les animaux aussi bien qu’envers les hommes). .
t
23 •
�V
LA CONSCIENCE
65. —Qu’est-ce qu’on entend par “ Conscience ” ?
Le mot conscience s’emploie pour designer :
1° La connaissance des choses; c’est la conscience physiologique ou philosophique;
•
,
2° Cette espece de “ voix interieure ’ ’ qui approuve ou qui
blame notre conduite : c’est la conscience morale.
66. —La conscience morale est-elle infaillible ?
Non, parce que la Conscience morale est formee par
l’heredite et surtout par le milieu. Cette “ voix interieure ”
n’est qu’un phenomene psychologique du a la comparaison
plus ou moins consciente de notre conduite a l’ideal qu’on
nous a donne, aux coutumes sociales, aux traditions. La
Conscience differe done suivant les individus, les races, les
temps.
La Conscience doit done etre guidee par la Raison,
eclairee par la Science. La connaissance des lois de la Vie
fournit comme nous ■ l’avons vu une connaissance exacte
(scientifique) de ce qui est Bien, un guide sur pour notre
conduite individuelle, nationale et internationale.
67.—Qu’est-ce qu’un cas de conscience ?
Lorsque notre ligne de conduite ne semble pas claire, il y a
ce qu’on a appele un cas de conscience, ou, mieux encore
conflit de devoirs.
68-—Dans ce cas que nous indique la definition du Bien?
Que l’idee dominante qui doit nous servir de guide est
celle-ci:
24
�1° Choisir l’acte qui ne nuira pas a notre developpement
ni a celui du groupe;
2° Choisir l’acte qui augmentera notre developpement
et celui du groupe.
.
, ..
Sans oublier jamais que l’altruisme doit primer l’egoisme,
le groupe, en cas de conflit, etant plus important que
l’individu. D’ailleurs rappelons que plus un groupe sera,
bien organise, plus l’individu pourra se developper librement
et harmonieusement.
Il est evident que dans chaque cas il faudra ■ longuement
reflechir afin de voir tous les aspects de notre acte, afin
d’etre sur de choisir ce qui sera vraiment favorable a plus de
“ VIE”.
69. —Qu’entend-on par examen de conscience ?
Faire un examen de conscience c’est analyser notre con
duite de facon a voir plus clairement en nous-meme et a
nous mieux diriger. Faire notre examen de conscience
chaque jour est une excellente habitude. Il doit etre suivi
de la ferme resolution de mieux faire a l’avenir, et les
bonnes resolutions doivent porter sur des choses bien
precises.
70. —Qu’est-ce que mediter ?.
Mediter, c’est songer profondement a un sujet qui eleve
nos pensees, qui nous rend plus forts. Par exemple : l’eternite
du Cosmos, la vie universelle la solidarite, la justice, les
beautes de la Nature, la dette des Ancetres, la mort individuelle, l’influence de nos actions, etc.
71. —Qu’est-ce que “ Communier ”?
C’est mettre nos pensees en harmonie soit avec la Nature,
soit avec les Grands Hommes. Cette “communion” est done
bonne puisqu’elle aide a notre perfectionnement, en meme
temps qu’elle nous apporte la serenite.
25
�VI
LA VOLONTL
72.—Qu’entend-on
pa£
Libre Arbitre ?
Par libre arbitre (ou volonte arbitraire), on entend le
pouvoir absolu de faire telle ou telle chose que nous “voulons ”. La doctrine du libre-arbitre fait de nous des etres
completement independants au point de vue moral.
73.—Qu’entend-on par
determinisme
?
Le determinisme, au contraire, se rattache a la grande loi
de cause et d’effet. D’apres les partisans de cette theorie,
nos actes sont entierement causes par notre temperament
herite et le milieu qu nous sommes- LogiquemenQ. cette
theorie supprime toute responsabilite morale : nous obeissons
fatalement a la tendance la plus forte.
«
74.—Ou SE TROUVE
*
la verite
?
Nous sommes “ determines ” car nous sommes bien le produit de nos ancetres et du milieu. Cependant, les deterministes ne semblent pas avoir tenu compte de la personne
humaine, produit'nouveau, avec l’assimilation, les combinaisons, les elaborations nouvelles de son cerveau. Or, les faits
prowvent que tout etre normal ayant pris conscience de luimeme et ayant perQu un but a le pouvoir de choisir parmises
innombrables tendances heritees; parmi les nombreuses idees
regues, celles qui le meneront vers ce but; et il se .peut que
les tendances de 1 ’instant soient opposees a celles exigees par
notre but.
.
r ’
r
C’est cette faculte qui constitue ce qu’on a appele volonte,
ou energie morale.
La volonte est done bien influencee par toutes nos activites
(sante, ideal du au temperament et au milieu), mais a son
tour, cette energie morale influence, notre etre. . La volonte
■ ne s’oppose done pas au “ determinisme ”, mais bien plutot le
complete.
26
J
�Tout etre normal est heureusement doue de volonte
laquelle se developpe par Lexercice, comme toute. autre
faculte.
75.—Comment s’explique le mecanisme de la volonte ?
Le mecanisme de la volonte eSt intimement lie au mecan
isme de la pensee : Chaque fois que l’on pense une pensee
quelle qu’elle soit la cellule cerebrale active subit une legere
modification, elle se gonfle de sang aux depens des autres
cellules, devient done plus forte. Cette modification s’opere
d’autant plusfacilement que la pensee se repete, si bien, qu’a
la longue, cette pensee deviendra habituelie. La est le danger
de toute pensee mauvaise : il y a, immediatement, deteriora
tion de notre etre, et toute pensee, toute image mentale, tend
a se realiser, a s’agir.
.
-
'
76-—Comment pouvons-nous exercer un choix parmi
LES TENDANCES OPPOSEES QUI NOUS SOLLICITENT?
En detournant immediatement notre attention de toute
pensee nuisible, et cela en pensant a autre chose, a l’acte que
nous savons preferable, en evoquant les images qui augmenteront notre desir de. bien faire.
Grace au mecanisme
indique, la “ tentation ” disparaitra d’elle-meme.
77. —POURQUOI
LA
CROYANCE
EN
LA
VOLONTE
EST-ELLE
BONNE ?
Parce que cette croyance, justifiee par les faits, nous donne
la confiance necessaire en nous-meme pour surmonter les
obstacles et atteindre le but desire.
L’attention proIongee, la perseverance, la maitrise de soi
sont les manifestations de la Volonte.
78. —Qu’est-ce
qui
est
necessaire
a
une
volonte
CONSTANTE ?
Un but eleve, e’est-a-dire un Ideal vers lequel tous nos
efforts se dirigerdnt- Notre ideal supreme doit etre le Bien
selon la definition indiquee.
27
' ' '
<
�VII
LES SANCTIONS
-
79. —Que faut-il entendre par sanctions ?
On appelle sanction 1’ensemble des peipes ou des recom
penses attachees a la violation ou a 1’observation d’une loi.
80. —COMBIEN
DE GENRES DE SANCTIONS Y A-T-IL ?
On peut distinguer :
1° Les sanctions naturelies;
2° Les sanctions morales;
3° Les sanctions legales;
4° Les sanctions de l’opinion.
81. —Les sanctions naturelles sont-elles justes ?
Ces sanctions, qui fortifient la sante ou amenent la maladie
ou la mort, qui amenent la prosperite ou la pauvrete derivent
etroitement et fatalement d’un fait precedent et ne sont pas
appliquees dans le but de corriger ou de ' recompenser:
chaque acte est suivi de ses consequences naturelies. Celui
qui suit les lois de l’hygiene se porte bien (toutes choses
egales d’ailleurs); celui qui ne travaille pas aura son
cerveau non developpe et ne reussira pas dans sa profes
sion ; celui qui dans un naufrage ne sait pas nager sera sans
doute noye malgre toutes les autres qualites qu’il peut avoir;
l’enfant qui herite d’une constitution faible parce que son
pere etait alcoolique subit les consequences ineluctables des
lois de l’heredite.
Et il est bon qu’il en soit ainsi puisque de cette facon les
plus forts de sante, les plus actifs, les plus intelligents et les
plus moraux finissent par remplacer les faibles, que ce soit au
point de vue sante, intelligence ou morale : Il ne peut en
etre autrement, a nous de nous bien penetrer de cette loi
universelle de cause et d’effet, de decouvrir les lois naturelles
et d’y obeir si nous voulons la meilleure vie pour nous et nos
descendants.
*
28
�82. —Les sanctions morales sont-elles justes ?
Les sanctions morales qui entrainent immediatement selon
l’acte, l’amelioration ou la deterioration de l’individu sont
tres’ justes. Mais les sanctions morales qui entrainent la joie
ou le remords le sont moins car nous avons vu que la “ con
science ” depend de l’individu. Or, ce n’est pas toujours le
plus coupable qui souffre le plus, et il arrive que le remords
pour une faute legere soit plus profond que le remords
d’une faute grave, le remords etant proportionne a la
sensibilite de l’individu, a sa comprehension de la faute
commise.
83. —Les sanctions legales sont-elles justes ?
Comme il est impossible de determiner le degre de responsabilite des accuses, il est difficile de proportionner . le
chatiment a la faute. D’ailleurs, il est convenu qu’on inflige
une punition pour empecher 1’accuse de recommencer, pour
faire peur aux autres qui seraient tentes de mal faire, pour
sauvegarder la societe.
Il peut arriver aussi que des innocents soient punis. Quant
aux recompenses telles que decorations, prix de vertu, etc.,
elles sont trop souvent cause de vanite, de basses intrigues,
et elles ne vont pas toujours aux plus meritants.
84. '—Les sanctions de l’opinion sont-elles justes ?
L’estime, 1’admiration ou, au contraire, le mepris que nous
inspirons aux autres ont une certaine valeur. Le monde
pourtant se trompe souvent, et, souvent, ne connait pas la
mesure.
85. —Faut-il faire le Bien a cause des sanctions ?
Non; faire le Bien en vue d’une recompense ou afin
d’eviter un chatiment est un degre tres inferieur de
moralite. Nous devons faire le Bien par dignite personnelle,
par amour de la justice et du devoir, par amour des autres
(solidarite) par amour de la Beaute et de la Vie universelie
dont nous sommes une parcelle.
29
�VIII
DU MARIAGE
86. —Quelles
sont
les
conditions
d’un
mariage
HEUREUX ?
Le mariage, afin d’etre heureux, doit ctre fait de consentement mutuel, d’attachement, d’estime, d’admiration, de
similarite de sentiments et d’ideal. Le mariage ne doit
famais se faire a la legere.
87. —Quel est le but du Mariage ?
Le developpement complet de l’etre, et, cette immense responsabilite, la continuite de la race. Il importe, par simple
justice de leguer a nos enfants la sante, l’intelligence, les
tendances morales, de former une generation harmonieusement developpee et heureuse.
88. —Quels sont les devoirs entre epoux ?,
Le respect;
La franchise;
La confiance;
L’aide mutuelle.
Beaucoup de bonte, de patience, d’indulgence: s’oublier
pour 1’autre sera toujours le meilleur moyen d’etre
heureux.
89. —Quels sont les devoirs des parents envers leurs
ENFANTS ?
?•
Les devoirs des parents envers leurs enfants commencent, bierf avant la naissance de ceux-ci.
Et cela non
seulement en se perfectionnant eux-memes, mais en etudiant
tout ce qui se rapporte a l’art d’elever les enfants, tant au
point de vue physique qu’au point de vue intellectuel et moral
(psychologie).
30
�L’enfant ne, les parents devront lui prodiguer leurs soins.
Des le berceau leurs actes, leurs paroles, leurs gestes devront
contribuer a developper chez l’enfant toutes les qualites que
nous avons enumerees : Ne jamais oublier que I’exemple
est le meilleur des maztres.
Ils traiteront tous leurs enfants avec la plus parfaite
egalite. Ils ne se permettront jamais de repondre par un
mensonge a leurs questions. Ils etabliront peu de defenses,
mais celles-ci etablies apres mure reflexion seront inflexibles
comme les lois naturelies.
Les parents seront a la fois les maitres et les amis de leurs
enfants. Ils s’interesseront a leur developpement intellectuel, a leurs amusements; ils veilleront a leurs amities,
a leurs lectures.
Par tous ces moyens les parents chercheront a former des
individus nobles et eclaires pouvant travailler a leur tour au
developpement de l’humanite.
90.—Quels sont les devoirs des enfants envers' leurs
PARENTS ?
-
Nos parents ont fait pour nous bien des sacrifices : ils nous
ont soignes dans les maladies, souvent ils se sont prives de
bien-etre afin de nous elever le mieux possible. Nous devons
done les cherir, leur etre reconnaissants, .faire tout en notre
pouvoir pour leur eviter les soucis, les chagrins, et pour les
rendre heureux. Nous’' devons les. respecter a cause de ces
sacrifices faits pour nous avec joie, et a cause de leur
experience de la vie. Nous devons obeir aux quelques lois
erigees par eux pour notre bien : Les parents sont nos conseillers et nos amis naturels. Enfin, plus tard, nous les
soignerons a notre tour avec le meme devouement, et nous
les aiderons pecuniairement si cela est necessaire.
31
�IX
DE LA MORT
91— Qu’est-ce que la Mort?
La mort est l’arret des activites qui caracterisent la vie et
la dissociation, c’est-a-dire la separation des elements qui
composent notre corps.
92. —Pourquoi
la
Mort ?
Peu a peu l’energie des corps s’epuise, peu a peu les organes s’usent, cela ne peut pas ne pas etre, et il arrive un
moment ou le vieillard, le malade, cessent completement
d’agir : Ils “ meurent ”, laissant la place aux jeunes et aux
forts. La mort est done necessaire pour que la VIE puisse
continuer dans toute son activite maximum. Les morts
individuelles sont une condition de VIE eternelle car le
Cosmos reprend les ions qui composent les corps afin d’en
faire de nouveaux groupements. N’oublions pas que le
resultat de nos actions continue losgtemps apres nous.
93. —Quelle
doit etre notre attitude devant la
Mort ?
La mort d’etres chers entraine une grande douleur et
nous devons faire appel a tout notre courage moral afin de
ne pas attrister ceux qui nous entourent.
Pour nous-memes nous devons accepter la mort avec calme
et dignite puisque la mort est une fonction naturelle.et que
nous en comprenons la necessite. La mort est notre sacri
fice supreme a cette Vie a laquelle nous avons consciemment
contribue et qui a ete pour nous la source de joiesD’ailleurs le desir de vivre, si intense chez les jeunes,
diminue dans la vieilesse, et le vieillard s’endort dans le
Grand Tout, comme nous nous endormons le soir, apres une
journee bien remplie.
FIN
Printed by C. A. Watts & Co. Ltd., 5 and 6 Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street,
London, E.C 4.
���
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Manuel de morale rationaliste: fondee sur les lois de la nature
Creator
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Delbende, Madeleine
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 32 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Address on cover edited by pen from "47 Strathbrook Road, Londres, S.W.16" to "78 Braxted Park SW16 3AU". Printed by C.A. Watts & Co. Ltd. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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The French Ethical Society
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[191-]
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N190
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Rationalism
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Manuel de morale rationaliste: fondee sur les lois de la nature), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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French
Nature
NSS
Rationalism