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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
THE
BEARING
ON
OF
MORALS
RELIGION.
$ Tnta
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
SUNDAY
LECTURE
SOCIETY,
ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE,
ON
.SUNDAY AFTERNOON, 4th 'MARCH, 1877.
BY
Professor W. K. CLIFFORD, F.R.S.
Reprinted from the ‘ Fortnightly Review,' by kind permission of the Editor.
LONDON:
PUBLISHED BY THE SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY.
1877.
Price Threepence.
��THE BEARING OF MORALS
ON RELIGION.
HE word religion is used in many different mea^
ings and there have been not a few- controversy
the main difference between the contending
parties was only this, that they understood by religion
two different things. I will therefore begin by settog
forth as clearly aB I can one or two of the mea g
which the word appears to have in P°Pa y SP
Kr8t’ Sse “TyheX“tha o^e°Vh“ehgion ■”
“?nTisPseX’ce5‘ The religion of Buddha teaches that
the soul is not a distinct substance.
Opinions differ
upon the question what doctrines may properly be callei
religious ^some people holding that there can be no r^
ligion without belief in a god and in a future life jso^ hat
n their judgment the body of doctrines must necessarily
include these two : while others would insist upon other
special dogmas being included, before they could consent
to call thelystem by this name. But the number of such
Deonle is daily diminishing, by reason of. the spread an
thePincrease of our knowledge about distant countries
and races. To me, indeed, it would seem rash to asse
of any doctrine or its contrary that it might not for
part of a religion. But, fortunately, it is not necessary
to any part of the discussion on which I propose to ente ,
that this question should be settled.
.
Secondly, religion may mean a ceremonial or cuLt, m
volving an organized priesthood and a machinery of
T
�6
The Bearing of Morals
sacred things and places. In this sense we speak of the
clergy as ministers of religion, or of a state as tolerating
the practice of certain religions. There is a somewhat
wider meaning which it will be convenient to consider
together with this one, and as a mere extension of it,
namely, that in which religion stands for the influence of
a certain priesthood. A religion is sometimes said to
have been successful when it has got its priests into
power; thus some writers speak of the wonderfully rapid
success of Christianity. A nation is said to have em
braced a religion when the authorities of that nation have
granted privileges to the clergy, have made them as far
as possible the leaders of society, and have given them a
considerable share in the management of public affairs.
So the northern nations of Europe are said to have em
braced the Catholic religion at an early date. The rea
son why it seems to me convenient to take these two
meanings together is, that they are both related to the
priesthood. Although the priesthood itself is not called
religion, so far as I know, yet the word is used for the
general influence and professional acts of the priest
hood.
Thirdly, religion may mean a body of precepts or code
of rules, intended to guide human conduct, as in this
sentence of the authorised version of the New Testa
ment : “ Pure religion and undefiled before God and the
Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”
(James i. 27). It is sometimes difficult to draw the line
bet ween this meaning and the last, for it is a mark of the
great majority of religions that they confound ceremonial
observances with duties having real moral obligation.
Thus in the Jewish decalogue the command to do no
work on Saturdays is found side by side with the prohi
bition of murder and theft. It might seem to be the
more correct as well as the more philosophical course to
follow in this matter the distinction made by Butler be
tween moral and positive commands, and to class all those
�.on Religion.
7
precepts which are not of universal moral obligation
under the head of ceremonial. And, in fact, when we
come to examine the matter from the point of view of
morality, the distinction is of course of the utmost im
portance. But from the point of view of religion there
are difficulties in making it. ' In the first place, the dis
tinction is not made, or is not understood, by religious
folk in general. Innumerable tracts and pretty stories
impress upon us that Sabbath-breaking is rather worse
than stealing, and leads naturally on to materialism and
murder. Less than a hundred years ago sacrilege was
punishable by burning in France, and murder by simple
decapitation. In the next place, ifwe pick out a religion
at haphazard, we shall find that it is not at all easy to
divide its precepts into those which are really of moral
obligation and those which are indifferent and of a cere
monial character. We may find precepts unconnected
with any ceremonial, and yet positively immoral; and
ceremonials may be immoral in themselves, or construc
tively immoral, on account of their known symbolism.
On the whole, it seems to me most convenient to draw
the plain and obvious distinction between those actions
which a religion prescribes to all its followers, whether
the actions are ceremonial or not, and those which are
prescribed only as professional actions of a sacerdotal
-class. The latter will come under what I have called the
second meaning of religion, the professional acts and the
influence of a priesthood. In the third meaning will be
included all that practically guides the life of a layman,
in so far as this guidance is supplied to him by his re
ligion.
..
Fourthly, and lastly, there is a meaning of the word.
religion which has been coming more and more promi
nently forward of late years, till it has even threatened
to supersede all the others. Religion has been defined
as morality touched with emotion. I will not here adopt
this definition, because I wish to deal with the concrete
in the first place, and only to pass on to the abstract m
�8
The Bearing of Morals
so far as that previous study appears to lead to it. I
wish to consider the facts of religion as we find them,,
and not ideal possibilities. “ Yes, but,” every one will
say, “ if you mean my own religion, it is already, as a
matter of fact, morality touched with emotion. It is thehighest morality touched with the purest emotion, an
emotion directed towards the most worthy of objects.”
Unfortunately we do not mean your religion alone, but
all manner of heresies and heathenisms along with it:
the religions of the Thug, of the Jesuit, of the South Sea
cannibal, of Confucius, of the poor Indian with his un
tutored mind, of the Peculiar People, of the Mormons,
and of the old cat-worshipping Egyptian. It must be
clear that we shall restrict ourselves to a very narrow
circle of what are commonly called religious facts, unless
we include in our considerations not only morality
touched with emotion, but also immorality touched with
emotion. In fact, what is really touched with emotion
in any case is that body of precepts for the guidance of a
layman’s life which we have taken to be the third mean
ing of religion. In that collection of precepts there may
be some agreeable to morality, and some repugnant to it,
and some indifferent, but being all enjoined by the reli
gion they will all be touched by the same religious emo
tion. Shall we then say that religion means a feeling,
an emotion, an habitual attitude of mind towards some
object or objects, or towards life in general, which has a
bearing upon the way in which men regard the rules of
conduct ? I think the last phrase should be left out.
An habitual attitude of mind, of a religious character,
does always have some bearing upon the way in which
men regard the rules of conduct; but it seems sometimes
as if this were an accident, and not the essence of the
religious feeling. Some devout people prefer to have
their devotion pure and simple, without admixture of any
such application—they do not want to listen to “cauld
morality.” And it seems as if the religious feeling of the
Greeks, and partly also of our own ancestors, was so far
�on Religion.
9
divorced from morality that it affected it only, as it were,
by a side-wind, through the influence of the character
and example of the gods. So that it. seems only likely
to create confusion if we mix up morality with this fourth
meaning of religion. Sometimes religion means a code
of precepts, and sometimes it means a devotional habit ot
mind ; the two things are sometimes connected, but also
they are sometimes quite distinct. But that the connec
tion of these two things is more and more insisted on,
that it is the key-note of the apparent revival of religion
which has taken place in this century, is a very significant
fact, about which there is more to be said.
As to the nature of this devotional habit of mind, there
are no doubt many who would like a closer definition.
But I am not at all prepared to say what attitude of mind
may properly be called religious, and what may not.
Some will hold that religion must have a person for its
object; but Buddha was filled with religious feeling, and
yet he had no personal object. Spinoza,.the god-intoxi
cated man, had no personal object for his devotion. It
might be possible to frame a definition which would
fairly include all cases, but it would require the expendi
ture of vast ingenuity and research, and would not,
I am inclined to think, be of much use when it was ob
tained.
Nor is the difficulty to be got over by taking any de
finite and well-organized sect, whose principles are settled
in black and white ; for example, the Boman Catholic
Church, whose seamless unity has just been exhibited
and protected by an (Ecumenical Council. Shall we
listen to Mr. Mivart, who “ execrates without reserve
Marian persecutions, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
and all similar acts ?” or to the editor of the Dublin
Review, who thinks that a teacher of false doctrines
should be visited by the law with just that amount of
severity which the public sentiment willj. bear ?Eor
assuredly common-sense morality will passjvery different
judgments on these two distinct religions, although it
�IO
The Bearing of Morals
appears that experts have found room for both of them'
within the limits of the Vatican definitions.
Moreover, there is very great good to be got by widen
ing our view of what may be contained in religion. If
we go to a man and propose to test his own religion by
the canons of common-sense morality, he will be, most
likely, offended, for he will say that his religion is far too
sublime and exalted to be affected by considerations of
that sort. But he will have no such objection in the case
of other people’s religion. And when he has found that
in the name of religion other people, in other circum
stances, have believed in doctrines that were false, have
supported priesthoods that were social evils, have taken
wrong for right, and have even poisoned the very sources
of morality, he may be tempted to ask himself, “Is there
no trace of any of these evils in my own religion, or at
least in my own conception and practice of it ?” And
that is just what we want him to do. Bring your doc
trines, your priesthoods, your precepts, yea, even the
inner devotion of your soul, before the tribunal of con
science ; she is no man’s and no god’s vicar, but the
supreme judge of men and gods.
Let us inquire, then, what morality has to say in re
gard to religious doctrines. It deals with the manner
of religious belief directly, and with the matter indirectly.
Religious beliefs must be founded on evidence; if they
are not so founded, it is wrong to hold them. The rule
of right conduct in this matter is exactly the opposite of
that implied in the t^vo famous texts : “ He that believeth
not shall be damned,” and “ Blessed are they that have
not seen and yet have believed.” For a man who clearly
felt and recognised the duty of intellectual honesty, of
carefully testing every belief before he received it, and
especially before he recommended it to others, it would
be impossible to ascribe the profoundly immoral teaching
of these texts to a true prophet or worthy leader of
humanity. It will comfort those who wish to preserve
their reverence for the character of a great teacher to-
�on Religion.
11
remember that one of these sayings is in the well-known
forged passage at the end of the second gospel, and that
the other occurs only in the late and legendary fourth
gospel; both being described as spoken under utterly
impossible circumstances. These precepts belong to the
Church and not to the Gospel. But whoever wrote either
of them down as a deliverance of one whom he supposed
to be a divine teacher, has thereby written down himself
as a man void of intellectual honesty, as a man whose
word cannot be trusted, as a man who would accept and
spread about any kind of baseless fiction for fear of be
lieving too little.
So far as to the manner of religious belief. Let us
now inquire what bearing morality has upon its matter.
We may see at once that this can only be indirect; for
the rightness or wrongness of belief in a doctrine de
pends only upon the nature of the evidence for it, and
not upon what the doctrine is. But there is a very im
portant way in which religious doctrine may lead to
morality or immorality, and in which, therefore, morality
has a bearing upon doctrine. It is when that doctrine
declares the character and actions of the gods who are
regarded as objects of reverence and worship. If a god
is represented as doing that which is clearly wrong, and
is still held up to the reverence of men, they will be
tempted to think that in doing this wrong thing they
are not so very wrong after all, but are only following
an example which all men respect. So says Plato : —
*
“We must not tell a youthful listener that he ■will be doing
nothing extraordinary if he commit the foulest crimes, nor yet if
he chastise the crimes of a father in the most unscrupulous man
ner, but will simply be doing what the first and greatest of the
gods have done before him. ...
“ Nor yet is it proper to say in any case—what is indeed untrue
—that gods wage war against gods, and intrigue and fight among
themselves ; that is, if the future guardians of our state are to
deem it a most disgraceful thing to quarrel lightly with one
another: far less ought we to select as subjects for fiction and
Rep. ii. 378. Tr. Davies and Vaughan.
�12
The Bearing of Morals
embroidery, the battles of the giants, and numerous other feuds of
all sorts, in which gods and heroes fight against their own kith
and kin. But if there is any possibility of persuading them, that
to quarrel with one’s fellow is a sin of which no member of a state
was ever guilty, such ought rather to be the language held to our
children from the first, by old men and old women, and all elderly
persons; and such is the strain in which our poets must be com
pelled to write. But stories like the chaining of Here by her son,
and the flinging of Hephaistos out of heaven for trying to take his
mother’s part when his father was beating her, and all those battles
of the gods which are to be found in Homer, must be refused ad
mittance into our state, whether they be allegorical or not. For
a child cannot discriminate between what is allegory and what is
not; and whatever at that age is adopted as a matter of belief,
has a tendency to become fixed and indelible, and therefore, per
haps, we ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the
fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most
perfect manner to the promotion of virtue. ”
And Seneca says the same thing, with still more rea
son in his day and country : “ What else is this appeal
to the precedent of the gods for, but to inflame our lusts,
and to furnish licence and excuse for the corrupt act
under the divine protection ?” And again, of the cha
racter of Jupiter as described in the popular legends :
“ This has led to no other result than to deprive sin of
its shame in man’s eyes, by showing him the god no
better than himself.” In Imperial Rome, the sink of all
nations, it was not uncommon to find “ the intending
sinner addressing to the deified vice which he contem
plated a prayer for the success of his design ; the adul
teress imploring of Venus the favours of her paramour ;
.
. the thief praying to Hermes Dolios for aid in
his enterprise, or offering up to him the first-fruits of
his plunder;
youths entreating Hercules to
expedite the death of a rich uncle.”*
When we reflect that criminal deities were worshipped
all over the empire, we cannot but wonder that any good
people were left; that man could still be holy, although
every god was vile. Yet this was undoubtedly the case;
* North British Review, 1867, p. 284.
�cn Religion.
ij
the social forces worked steadily on wherever there was
peace and a settled government and municipal freedom ;
and the wicked stories of theologians were somehow ex
plained away and disregarded. If men were no better
than their religions, the world would be a hell indeed.
It is very important, however, to consider what really
ought to be done in the case of stories like these. When
the poet sings that Zeus kicked Hephaistos out of heaven
for trying to help his mother, Plato says that this fiction
must be suppressed by law. We cannot follow him
there, for since his time we have had too much of trying
to suppress false doctrines by law. Plato thinks it quite
obviously clear that God cannot produce evil, and he
would stop everybody’s mouth who ventured to say that
he can. But in regard to the doctrine itself, we can
only ask, “ Is it true ?”
And that is a question
to be settled by evidence. Did Zeus commit this
crime, or did he not ? We must ask the apologists, the
reconcilers of religion and science, what evidence they
can produce to prove that Zeus kicked Hephaistos out
of heaven. That a doctrine may lead to immoral conse
quences is no reason for disbelieving it. But whether'
the doctrine were true or false, one thing does clearly
follow from its moral character: namely this, that if
Zeus behaved as he is said to have behaved he ought not'
to be worshipped. To those who complain of his violence
and injustice, it is no answer to say that the divine attri
butes are far above human comprehension, that the wavs
of Zeus are not our ways, neither are his thoughts our
thoughts. If he is to be worshipped, he must do some
thing vaster and nobler and greater than good men do,
but it must be like what they do in its goodness. His
actions must not be merely a magnified copy of what bad
men do. So soon as they are thus represented, morality
has something to say. Not indeed about the fact; for
it is not conscience, but reason, that has to judge matters
of fact; but about the worship of a character so repre
sented. If there really is good evidence that Zeus kicked
�14
The Bearing of Morals
Hephaistos out of heaven, and seduced Alkmene by a
mean trick, say so by all means ; but say also that it is
wrong to salute his priests or to make offerings in his
temple.
When men do their duty in this respect, morality has
a very carious indirect effect on the religious doctrine
itself. As soon as the offerings become less frequent, the
evidence for the doctrine begins to fade away; the pro
cess of theological interpretation gradually brings out
the true inner meaning of it, that Zeus did not kick
Hephaistos out of heaven, and did not seduce Alk
mene.
Is this a merely theoretical discussion about far-away
things ? Let us come back for a moment to our own
time and country, and think whether there can be any
lesson for us in this refusal of common-sense morality to
worship a deity whose actions are a magnified copy of
what bad men do. There are three doctrines which find
very wide acceptance among our countrymen at the pre
sent day: the doctrines of original sin,vof a vicarious
sacrifice, and of eternal punishments. We are not con
cerned with any refined evaporations of these doctrines
which are exhaled by courtly theologians, but with the
naked statements which are put into the minds of chil
dren and of ignorant people, which are taught broadcast
and without shame in denominational schools. Father
Faber, good soul, persuaded himself that after all only a
very few people would be really damned, and Father
Oxenham gives one the impression that it will not hurt
even them very much. But one learns the practical
teaching of the Church from such books as “A Glimpse
of Hell,” where a child is described as thrown between
the bars upon the burning coals, there to writhe for
ever. The masses do not get the elegant emasculations
of Father Faber and Father Oxenham ; they get “ a
Glimpse of Hell.”
Now to condemn all mankind for the sin of Adam and
Eve; to let the innocent suffer for the guilty;, to keep
�on Religion.
15
any one alive in torture for ever and ever : these actions
are simply magnified copies of what bad men do. No
juggling with “ divine justice and mercy” can make them
anything else. This must be said to all kinds and con
ditions of men : that if God holds all mankind guilty for
the sin of Adam, if he has visited upon the innocent the
punishment of the guilty, if he is to torture any single
soul for ever, then it is wrong to worship him.
But there is something to be said also to those who
think that religious beliefs are not indeed true, but are
useful for the masses ; who deprecate any open and public
argument against them, and think that all sceptical books
should be published at a high price ; who go to church,
not because they approve of it themselves, but to set an
example to the servants. Let us ask them to ponder the
words of Plato, who, like them, thought that all these
tales of the gods were fables, but still fables which might
be useful to amuse children with : “T7e ought to esteem vt
of the greatest importance that the fictions which children
first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to
the. promotion of virtue.” If we grant to you that it is
good for poor people and children to believe some of these
fictions, is it not better, at least, that they should believe
those which are adapted to the promotion of virtue ?
Now the stories which you send your servants and chil
dren to hear are adapted to the promotion of vice. So
far as the remedy is in your own hands, you are bound
to apply it; stop your voluntary subscriptions and the
moral support of your presence from any place where the
criminal doctrines are taught. ¥ou will find more men
and better men to preach that which is agreeable to their
conscience, than to thunder out doctrines under which
their minds are always uneasy, and which only a con
tinual self-deception can keep them from feeling to be
wicked'.
Let us now go on to inquire what morality has to say
in the matter of religious ministrations, the official acts
and the general influence of a priesthood. This question
�16
The Bearing of Morals
seems to me a more difficult one than the former ; at any
rate it is not so easy to find general principles which are
at once simple in their nature and clear to the conscience
of any man who honestly considers them. One such
principle, indeed, there is, which can hardly be stated in
a Protestant country without meeting with a cordial
response ; being indeed that characteristic of our race
which made the Reformation a necessity, and became the
soul of the Protestant movement. I mean the principle
which forbids the priest to come between a man and his
conscience. If it be true, as our daily experience teaches
us, that the moral sense gains in clearness and power by
exercise, by the constant endeavour to find out and to see
for ourselves what is right and what is wrong, it must
be nothing short of a moral suicide to delegate our con
science to another man. It is true that when we are in
difficulties, and do not altogether see our way, we quite
rio-htly seek counsel and advice of some friend who has
more experience, more wisdom begot by it, more devo
tion to the right than ourselves, and who, not being in
volved in the difficulties which encompass us, may more
easily see the way out of them. But such counsel does
not and ought not to take the place of our private judg
ment ; on the contrary, among wise men it is asked and
given’for the purpose of helping and supporting private
judgment. I should go to my friend, not that he may
tell me what to do, but that he may help me to see what
is right.
.
Now, as we all know, there is a priesthood whose in
fluence's not to be made light of, even in our own land,
which claims to do two things : to declare with infallible
authority what is right and what is wrong, and to take
away the guilt of the sinner after confession has been
made to it. The second of these claims we shall come
back upon in connection with another part of the sub
ject. But that claim is one which, as it seems to me,
ought to condemn the priesthood making it in the eyes
of every conscientious man. We must take care to keep
�on Religion.
this question to itself, and not to let it be confused with
quite different ones. The priesthood in question, as we
all know, has taught that as right which is not right,
and has condemned as wrong some of the holiest dutiesof mankind. But this is not what we are here concerned
with. Let us put an ideal case of a priesthood which,
as a matter of fact, taught a morality agreeing with thehealthy conscience of all men at a given time ; but which,
nevertheless, taught this as an infallible revelation. The
tendency of such teaching, if really accepted, would be
to destroy morality altogether, for it is of the very essence
of the moral sense that it is a common perception by men
of what is good for man. It arises, not in one man’smind by a flash of genius or a transport of ecstasy, but
in all men’s minds, as the fruit of their necessary inter
course and united labour for a common object. When
an infallible authority is set up, the voice of this natural
human conscience must be hushed and schooled, and
made to speak the words of a formula. Obedience be
comes the whole duty of man; and the notion of right
is attached to a lifeless code of rules, instead of being the
informing character of a nation. The natural conse
quence is that it fades gradually out and ends by disap
pearing altogether. I am not describing a purely con
jectural state of things, but an effect which has actually
been produced at various times and in considerable popu
lations by the influence of the Catholic Church. It is
true that we cannot find an actually crucial instance of
a pure morality taught as an infallible revelation, and so
in time ceasing to be morality for that reason alone.
There are two circumstances which prevent this. One
is that the Catholic priesthood has always practically
taught an imperfect morality, and that it is difficult to
distinguish between the effects of precepts which are
wrong in themselves and precepts which are only wrong
because of the manner in which they are enforced. The
other circumstance is that the priesthood has very rarely
found a population willing to place itself completely and
�18
The Bearing of Morals
absolutely under priestly control. Men must live together
and work for common objects even in priest-ridden
■countries ; and those conditions, which in the course of
ages have been able to create the moral sense, cannot
fail in some degree to recall it to men’s minds and gra
dually to reinforce it. Thus it comes about that a great
and increasing portion of life breaks free from priestly
influences, and is governed upon right and rational
grounds. The goodness of men shows itself in time
more powerful than the wickedness of some of their re
ligions.
The practical inference is, then, that we ought to do
all in our power to restrain and diminish the influence of
any priesthood which claims to rule consciences. But
when we attempt to go beyond this plain Protestant
principle, we find that the question is one of history and
politics. The question which we want to ask ourselves
—“Is it right to support this or that priesthood ?”—can
only be answered by this other question, “ What has it
done or got done ?”
In asking this question, we must bear in mind that
the word priesthood, as we have used it hitherto, has a
very wide meaning—namely, it means any body of men
who perform special ceremonies in the name of religion ;
a ceremony being an act which is prescribed by religion
to that body of men, but not on account of its intrinsic
rightness or wrongness. It includes, therefore, not only
the priests of Catholicism, or of the Obi rites, who lay
claim to a magical character and powers, but the more
familiar clergymen or ministers of Protestant denomina
tions, and the members of monastic orders. But there
is a considerable difference, pointed out by Hume, be
tween a priest, who lays claim to a magical character
and powers, and a clergyman, in the English sense, as
it was understood in Hume’s day, whose office was to
remind people of their duties every Sunday, and
to represent a certain standard of culture in remote
country districts. It will, perhaps, conduce to clear-
�on Religion.
19
ness if we use the word priest exclusively in the first
sense.
There is another confusion which we must endeavour
to avoid, if we would really get at the truth of this
matter. When one ventures to doubt whether the
Catholic clergy has really been an unmixed blessing to
Europe, one is generally met by the reply, “ You cannot
find any fault with the Sermon on the Mount.” Now,
it would be too much to say that this has nothing to do
with the question we were proposing to ask, for there is
a sense in which the Sermon on the Mount and the
Catholic clergy have something to do with each other.
The Sermon on the Mount is admitted on all hands to
be the best and most precious thing that Christianity
has offered to the world ; and it cannot be doubted that
the Catholic clergy of East and West were the only
spokesmen of Christianity until the Reformation, and
are the spokesmen of the vast majority of Christians at
this moment. But it must surely be unnecessary to say,
in a Protestant country, that the Catholic Church and
the Gospel are two very different things. The moral
teaching of Christ, as partly preserved in the three first
gospels, or—which is the same thing—the moral teach
ing of the great Rabbi Hillel, as partly preserved in the
Pirke Aboth, is the expression of the conscience of a
people who had fought long and heroically for their
national existence. In that terrible conflict they had
learned the supreme and overwhelming importance of
conduct, the necessity for those who would survive, of
fighting manfully for their lives and making a stand
against the hostile powers around; the weakness and
uselessness of solitary and selfish efforts, the necessity'
for a man who would be a man to lose his poor single
personality in the being of a greater and nobler com
batant—the nation. And they said all this, after their
fashion of short and potent sayings, perhaps better than
any other men have said it before or since. “ If I am
not for myself,” said the great Hillel, “who is for me ?
�20
The Bearing of Morals
And if I am only for myself, where is the use of me ?
And if not noiv, when ?" It would be hard to find a morestriking contrast than exists between the sturdy unsel
fish independence of this saying, and the abject and
selfish servility of the priest-ridden claimant of the skies.
It was this heroic people that produced the morality of
the Sermon on the Mount. But it was not they who
produced the priests and the dogmas of Catholicism.
Shaven crowns, linen vestments, and the claim to priestly
rule over consciences, these were dwellers on the banks
of the Nile. The gospel indeed came out of Judaea, bub
the Church and her dogmas came out of Egypt. Not,
as it is written, “ Out of Egypt have I called my son,”
but, “ Out of Egypt have I called my daughter.” St.
Gregory of Nazianzum remarks with wonder that Egypt,
having so lately worshipped bulls, goats, and crocodiles,
was now teaching the world the worship of the Trinity
in its truest form.”* Poor, simple St. Gregory! it was
not that Egypt had risen higher, but that the world had
sunk lower. The empire, which in the time of Augustus
had dreaded, and with reason, the corrupting influenceof Egyptian superstitions, was now eaten up by them,
and rapidly rotting away.
Then, when we ask what has been the influence of the
Catholic clergy upon European nations, we are not in
quiring about the results of accepting the morality of the
Sermon on the Mount; we are inquiring into the effect
of attaching an Egyptian priesthood, which teaches
Egyptian dogmas, to the life and sayings of a Jewish
prophet.
In this inquiry, which requires the knowledge of facts
beyond our own immediate experience, we must make
use of the great principle of authority, which enables us
to profit by the experience of other men. The great
civilised countries on the continent of Europe at the
present day—France, Germany, Austria, and Italy—
* See Sharpe, ‘ Egyptian Mythology and Egj ptian Christianity,’ p. 114.
�on Religion.
21
have had an extensive experience of the Catholic ^ergy
for a great number of centuries, and. they are forced by
strong practical reasons to form a. judgment, upon the
•character and tendencies of an institution which is sutficiently powerful to command the attention of all w o
are interested in public affairs. We might add the ex
perience of our forefathers three centuries ago, and ot
Ireland at this moment; but home politics are apt to be
looked upon with other eyes than those of reason. Let
us hear, then, the judgment of the civilised people o
Europe on this question.
It is a matter of notoriety that an aider and abettor ot
clerical pretensions is regarded in France as an enemy
of France and of Frenchmen ; in Germany as an enemy
of Germany and of Germans ; in Austria as an enemy of
Austria and Hungary, of both Austrians and .Magyars ;
and in Italy as an enemy of Italy and the Italians. He
is so regarded, not by a few wild and revolutionary en
thusiasts who have cast away all the beliefs of their
childhood and all bonds connecting them with the past,
but by a great and increasing majority of sober and con
scientious men of all creeds and persuasions, who are
filled with a love for their country, and whose hopes and
aims for the future are animated and guided by the
•examples of those who have gone before them, and by a
sense of the continuity of national life. The profound
conviction and determination of the people in all these
countries, that the clergy must be restricted to a purely
ceremonial province, and must not be allowed to inter
fere, as clergy, in public affairs—this conviction and de
termination, I say, are not the effect of a rejection of the
Catholic dogmas. Such rejection has not in fact been
made in Catholic countries by the great, majority. It
involves many difficult speculative questions, the pro
found disturbance of old habits of thought, and the toil
some consideration of abstract ideas. But such is the
happy inconsistency of human nature, that men who
would be shocked and pained by a doubt about the cen
�22
The Bearing of Morals
tral doctrines of their religions, are far more really and
practically shocked and pained by the moral consequences
of clerical ascendancy. About the dogmas they do not
know; they were taught them in childhood, and have
not inquired into them since, and therefore they are not
competent witnesses to the truth of them. But about
the priesthood they do know, by daily and hourly expe
rience ; and to its character they are competent wit
nesses. JSo man can express his convictions more
forcibly than by acting upon them in a great and solemn
matter of national importance. In all these countries
the conviction of the serious and sober majority of the
people is embodied, and is being daily embodied, in
special legislation, openly and avowedly intended to
guard against clerical aggression." The more closely the
legislature of these countries reflects the popular will,
the more clear and pronounced does this tendency be
come. It may be thwarted or evaded for the moment
by constitutional devices and parliamentary tricks, but
sooner 01 later the nation will be thoroughly represented
in all of them ; and as to what is then to be expected let
the panic of the clerical parties make answer.
This is a state of opinion and of feeling which we in
our own country find it hard to understand, although it
is one of the most persistent characters of our nation in
past times. We have spoken so plainly and struck so
hard in the past, that we seem to have won the right to
let this matter alone. We think our enemies are dead,
and we forget that our neighbour’s enemies are plainly
alive : and then we wonder that he does not sit down,
and be quiet as we are. We are not much accustomed to
be afraid, and we never know when we are beaten. But
those who are nearer to the danger feel a very real and,
it seems to me, well-grounded fear. The whole struc
ture of modern society, the fruit of long and painful
efforts, the hopes of further improvement, the triumphs
of justice, of freedom, and of light, the bonds of patriotism
which make each nation one, the bonds of humanity
�on Religion.
2$
which bring different nations together—all these they
see to be menaced with a great and real and even press
ing danger. For myself, I confess that I cannot help
feeling as they feel. It seems to me quite possible that
the moral and intellectual culture of Europe, the light
and the right, what makes life worth having and men
worthy to have it, may be clean swept away by a revival
of superstition. We are, perhaps, ourselves not free
from such a domestic danger; but no one can doubt that
the danger would speedily arise if all Europe at our side
should become again barbaric, not with the weakness
and docility of a barbarism which has never known better,
but with the strength of a past civilisation perverted to
the service of evil.
Those who know best, then, about the Catholic priest
hood at present, regard it as a standing menace to the
state and to the moral fabric of society.
Some would have us believe that this condition of
things is quite new, and has in fact been created by the
Vatican Council. In the Middle Ages> they say, the
Church did incalculable service ; or even if you do not
allow that, yet the ancient Egyptian priesthood invented
many useful arts; or if you have read anything which is
not to their credit, there were the Babylonians and
Assyrians who had priests, thousands of years ago ; and
in fact, the more you go back into prehistoric ages, and
the further you go away into distant countries, the less
you can find to say against the priesthoods of those
times and places. This statement, for which there is
certainly much foundation, may be put into another
form : the more you come forward into modern times
and neighbouring countries, where the facts can actually
be got at, the more complete is the evidence against the
priesthoods of these times and places. But the whole
argument is founded upon what is at least a doubtful
view of human nature and of society. Just as an early
school of geologists were accustomed to explain the pre
sent state of the earth’s surface by supposing that in
�24
The Bearing of Morals
primitive ages the processes of geologic change were far
more violent and rapid than they are now—so cata
strophic, indeed, as to constitute a thoroughly different
state of things—so there is a school of historians who
think that the intimate structure of human nature, its
capabilities of learning and of adapting itself to society,
have so far altered within the historic period as to make
the present processes of social change totally different in
character from those even of the moderately distant past.
They think that institutions and conditions which are
plainly harmful to us now have at other times and places
■done good and serviceable work. War, pestilence, priest
craft, and slavery have been represented as positive
boons to an early state of society. They are not
blessings to us, it is true; but then times have altered
very much.
On the other hand, a later school of geologists have
■seen reason to think that the processes of change have
never, since the earth finally solidified, been very diffe
rent from what they áre now. More rapid, indeed, they
must have been in early times, for many reasons; but
not so very much more rapid as to constitute an entirely
different state of things. And it does seem to me in
like manner that a wider and more rational view of his
tory will recognise more and more of the permanent and
less and less of the changeable element in human nature.
No doubt our ancestors of a thousand generations back
■were very different beings from ourselves ; perhaps fifty
thousand generations back they were not men at all.
But the historic period is hardly to be stretched beyond
two hundred generations ; and it seems unreasonable to
■expect that in such a tiny page of our biography we can
trace with clearness the growth and progress of a long
life. Compare Egypt in the time of King Menes, say
six thousand years ago, with Spain in this present cen
tury, before Englishmen made any railways there : I
suppose the main difference is that the Egyptians washed
themselves. It seems more analogous to what we find
�on Religion.
2$
in other fields of inquiry, to suppose that there, are cer
tain great broad principles of human life ■which have
been true all along; that certain conditions have always
been favourable to the health of society, and certain
other conditions always hurtful.
Now, although I have many times asked for it, from
those who said that somewhere and at some time man
kind had derived benefits from a priesthood laying claim
to a magical character and powers, I have never been
able to get any evidence for this statement. Nobody
will give me a date, and a latitude and longitude, that I
may examine into the matter. “ In the Middle Ages the
priests and monks were the sole depositories of learning.’*
Quite so ; a man burns your house to the ground, builds
a wretched hovel on the ruins, and then takes credit for
whatever shelter there is about the place. In the Middle
Agesnearly all learned men were obliged to become priests
and monks. “ Then again, the bishops have sometimes
acted as tribunes of the people, to protect them against
the tyranny of kings.” No doubt, when Pope and Caesar
fall out, honest men may come by their own. If two
men rob you in a dark lane, and then quarrel over the
plunder, so that you get a chance to escape with your
life, you will of course be very grateful to each of them
for having prevented the other from killing you; but
you would be much more grateful to a policeman who
locked them both up. Two powers have sought to en
slave the people, and have quarrelled with each other;,
certainly we are very much obliged to them for quarrel
ling, but a condition of still greater happiness and security
would be the non-existence of both.
I can find no evidence that seriously militates against
the rule that the priest is at all times and in all placesthe enemy of all men—Sacerdos semper, ubique, et omni
bus inimicus. I do not deny that the priest is very often
a most earnest and conscientious man, doing the very
best that he knows of as well as he can do it. Lord
Amberley is quite right insayingthat the blame rests more
�06
The Bearing of Morals
.with the laity than with the priesthood; that it has in
sisted on magic and mysteries, and has forced the priest
hood to produce them. But then, how dreadful is the
system that puts good men to such uses!
And although it is true that in its origin a priesthood is
the effect of an evil already existing, a symptom of social
.disease rather than a cause of it, yet, once being created
and made powerful, it tends in many ways to prolong
and increase the disease which gave it birth. One of
these ways is so marked and of such practical import
ance that we are bound to consider it here; I mean the
education of children. If there is one lesson which his
tory forces upon us in every page, it is this : keep your
children away from the priest, or he will make them the
enemies of mankind. It is not the Catholic clergy and
those like them who are alone to be dreaded in this
matter ; even the representatives of apparently harmless
religions may do incalculable mischief if they get educa
tion into their hands. To the early Mohammedans the
mosque was the one public building in every place where
public business could be transacted ; and so it was natu
rally the place of primary education, which they held to
be a matter of supreme importance. By-and-bye, as the
clergy grew up, the mosque was gradually usurped by
them, and primary education fell into their hands. Then
ensued a “ revival of religion
religion became a fana
ticism : books were burnt and universities were closed ;
the empire rotted away in East and West, until it was
conquered by Turkish savages in Asia and by Christian
savages in Spain.
The labours of students of the early history of institu
tions—notably Sir Henry Maine and M. Laveleye—have
disclosed to us an element of society which appears to
have existed in all times and places, and which is the
basis of our own social structure. The village commu
nity, or commune, or township, found in tribes of the
most vaiied race and time, has so modified itself as to
get adapted in one place or another to all the different
�on Religion.
27
•conditions of human existence. This union of men to
work for a common object has transformed them from
wild animals into tame ones. _ Century by century the
educating process of the social life has been working at
.human nature; it has built itself into our inmost soul.
Such as we are—moral and rational beings—thinking
and talking in general conceptions about the facts that
make up our life, feeling a necessity to act, not for our
selves, but for Ourself, for the larger life of Man in which
wre are elements ; such moral and rational beings, I say,
Man has made us. By Man I mean men organized into
a society, which fights for its life, not only as a mere col
lection of men who must separately be kept alive, but as
a society. It must fight, not only against external ene
mies, but against treason and disruption within it.
Hence comes the unity of interest of all its members;
each of them has to feel that he is not himself only but
a part of all the rest. Conscience—the sense of right
and wrong—-^springs out of the habit of judging things
from the point of view of all and not of one. It is Our
self, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.
The codes of morality, then, which are adopted into
various religions, and afterwards taught as parts of reli
gious systems, are derived from secular sources. The
most ancient version of the Ten Commandments, what
ever the investigations of scholars may make it out to
be, originates, not in the thunders of Sinai, but in the
peaceful life of men on the plains of Chaldsea. Conscience
is the voice of Man ingrained into our hearts, command
ing us to work for Man.
Religions differ in the treatment which they give to
this most sacred heirloom of our past history. Some
times they invert its precepts—telling men to be sub■ missive under oppression because the powers that be are
ordained of God ; telling them to believe where they have
not seen, and to play with falsehood in order that a par
ticular doctrine may prevail, instead of seeking for truth
. whatever it may be ; telling them to betray their country
�28
The Bearing of Morals
for the sake of their church; But there is one great dis
tinction to which I wish, in conclusion, to call special
attention—a distinction between two kinds of religious
emotion which bear upon the conduct of men.
We said that conscience is the voice of Man within
us, commanding us to work for Man. We do not know
this immediately by our own experience; we only know
that something within us commands us to work for Man.
This fact men have tried to explain ; and they have
thought, for the most part, that this voice was the
voice of a god. But the explanation takes two dif
ferent forms: the god may speak in us for Man’s
sake, or for his own sake.
If he speaks for his
own sake—and this is what generally happens when
he has priests who lay claim to a magical charac
ter and powers—our allegiance is apt to be taken away
from Man, and transferred to the god. When we love
our brother for the sake of our brother we help all men
to grow in the right; but when we love our brother for
the sake of somebody else, who is very likely to damn
our brother, it very soon comes to burning him alive for
his soul’s health. When men respect human life for the
sake of Man, tranquillity, order, and progress go hand in
hand ; but those who only respected human life because
God had forbidden murder, have set their mark upon
Europe in fifteen centuries of blood and fire.
These are only two examples of a general rule. Wher
ever the allegiance of men has been diverted from Man
to some divinity who speaks to men for his own sake and
seeks his own glory, one thing has happened. The right
precepts might be enforced, but they were enforced upon
wrong grounds, and they were not obeyed. But right
precepts are not always enforced ; the fact that the foun
tains of morality have been poisoned makes it easy to
substitute wrong precepts for right ones.
To this same treason against humanity belongs the
claim of the priesthood to take away the guilt of a sinner
after confession has been made to it. The Catholic priest
�on Religion.
professes to act as an ambassador for his God, and to
absolve the guilty man by conveying to him the forgive
ness of heaven. If his credentials were ever so sure, it
he were indeed the ambassador of a superhuman power,
the claim would be treasonable. Can the favour of the
Czar make guiltless the murderer of old men and women
and children in Circassian valleys ? Can the pardon of
the Sultan make clean the bloody hands.of a Pasha?
As little can any God forgive sins committed against
man. When men think he can, they compound for old
sins which the god did not like by committing new ones
which he does like. Many a remorseful despot has
atoned for the levities of his youth by the persecution of
heretics in his old age. That frightful crime, the adul
teration of food, could not possibly be so common
amongst us if men were not taught to regard it as merely
objectionable because it is remotely connected with
stealing, of which God has expressed his disapproval in
the Decalogue ; and therefore, as quite naturally set
right by a punctual attendance at church on Sundays.
When a Ritualist breaks his fast before celebrating the
Holy Communion, his deity can forgive him, if he likes,
for the matter concerns nobody else; but no deity can
forgive him for preventing his parishioners from setting
up a public library and reading room for fear they should
read Mr. Darwin’s works in it. That sin is committed
against the people, and a god cannot take it away.
I call those religions which undermine the supreme
allegiance of the conscience to Man ultramontane reli
gions, because they seek their springs of action ultra
monies, outside of the common experience and daily life
of man. And I remark about them that they are espe
cially apt to teach wrong precepts, and that even when
they command men to do the right things they put the
command upon wrong motives, and do not get the things
done.
But there are forms of religious emotion which do not
thus undermine the conscience. Par be it from me to
�3©
The Bearing of Morals on Religion.
undervalue the help and strength which many of the
bravest of our brethren have drawn from the thought of
an unseen helper of men. He who, wearied or stricken
in the fight with the powers of darkness, asks himself in
a solitary place, “ Is it all for nothing ? shall we indeed
be overthrown ?” He does find something which may
justify that thought. In such a moment of utter sin
cerity, when a man has bared his own soul before the
immensities and the eternities, a presence, in which his
own poor personality is shrivelled into nothingness,
arises within him, and says, as plainly as words can say,
“ I am with thee, and I am greater than thou.” Many
names of gods, of many shapes, have men given to thispresence; seeking by names and pictures to know more
clearly and to remember more continually the guide and
the helper of men. No such comradeship with the Great:
Companion shall have anything but reverence from me,)
who have known the divine gentleness of Denison
Maurice, the strong and healthy practical instinct of
Charles Kingsley, and who now revere with all my heart
the teaching of James Martineau. They seem to me, one
and all, to be reaching forward with loving anticipation
to a clearer vision which is yet to come—tencLentesque
manus ripcB ulterioris amore. For, after all, such a helper ,
of men, outside of humanity, the truth will not allow us
to see. The dim and shadowy outlines of the super
human deity fade slowly away from before us; and as
the mist of his presence floats aside, we perceive with
greater and greater clearness the shape of a yet grander
and nobler figure—of Him who made all gods and shall
unmake them. From the dim dawn of history, and from
the inmost depth of every soul, the face of our father
Man looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth in
his eyes, and says, “ Before Jehovah was, I am !”
�SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY,
To provide for the delivery on Sundays in the Metropolis, and
to encourage the delivery elsewhere, of Lectures on Science,
—physical, intellectual, and moral,—History, Literature,
and Art; especially in their bearing upon the improvement
and social well-being of mankind.
THE“ SOCIETYS LECTURES
ARE DELIVERED AT
ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE,
On SUNDAY Afternoons, at FOUR o'clock precisely.
(Annually—from November to May).
Twenty-Four Lectures (in three series), ending 24th April,
1878, will be given.
Members’ £1 subscription entitles them to an annual ticket
(transferable and admitting to the reserved seats), and to eight
■single reserved-seat tickets available for any lecture.
Tickets for each series (one for each lecture) as below,—
To the Shilling Reserved Seats—5s. 6d.
To the Sixpenny Seats—2s.., being at the rate of Threepence
each lecture.
For tickets and the published lectures apply (by letter, enclos
ing postage-stamps, order, or cheque), to the Hon. Treasurer, Wm.
Henry Domville, Esq., 15 Gloucester Crescent, Hyde Park, W.
Payment at the door One Penny Sixpence ;—and
(Reserved Seats) One Shilling.
�The Society’s Lectures by Professor Clifford are —
On “ Body and Mind.”
On “ The first and the last Catastrophe : A criticism on some
recent speculations about the duration of the Universe.”
On “ Right and Wrong; the scientific ground of their dis
tinction.”
On “ The Bearing of Morals on Religion.”
The price of each of the above Lectures is 3d., or post-free 3|d.
On “ Atoms ; being an Explanation of what is Definitely
Known about them.”
Price Id. Two, post-free, 2|d.
Recently Printed,
Mr. A. E. FIN CH. On “ The Influence of Astronomical Dis
covery in the Development of the Human Mind.” With
Woodcut Illustrations.
Miss F. MILLER. On “The Lessons of a Life:—Harriet
Martineau.”
Dr. G. G. ZERFFI. On “ The Eastern Question; from a
Religious and Social point of view.”
The price of each of the above Lectures is 3d., or post-free 3|d.
Can be obtained (on remittance of postage stamps) of the Hon.
Treasurer, Wm. Henry Domville, Esq., 15 Gloucester Cres
cent, Hyde Park, W., or at the Hall on the days of Lecture;
or of Mr. J. Bumpus, Bookseller, 158 Oxford Street, W.
�
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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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The bearing of morals on religion : a lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, St George's Hall, Langham Place, on Sunday afternoon, 4th March, 1877
Creator
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Clifford, William Kingdon [1845-1879]
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 30 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: A list of the Society's lectures by Professor Clifford on back page. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Sunday Lecture Society
Date
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1877
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N090
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Ethics
Religion
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The bearing of morals on religion : a lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, St George's Hall, Langham Place, on Sunday afternoon, 4th March, 1877), 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
Language
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English
NSS
Religion and Ethics
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THE OATH AND ITS ETHICS
A DISCOURSE GIVEN BEFORE THE
SOUTH PLACE SOCIETY
MAY i, 1881
(with some additions),
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
LONDON :
II,
SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY.
PRICE TWOPENCE.
�F. G. HICKSON & Co.
257, High Holbobn,
London, W.C.
�THE OATH AND ITS ETHICS
’HEN Christian Pharisaism was resisting the
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equal rights of Jews in Parliament, the Con
servative leader just laid in his grave answered one who
afterwards sat in his cabinet, and those with him—■
“ You are influenced by the darkest superstitions of
the darkest ages that ever existed in this country.”
The day of his burial was celebrated by an outbreak,
led by his late followers, of the same dark super
stitions. By its vote on the oath question Parliament
has plunged back into the cesspool of medieval
absurdities, and made the oath into a mill-stone heavy
enough to sink in that pool every man who shall
deliberately take it.
Hitherto, for a very long time, a man taking the
path has meant only to proclaim formally his purpose
to fulfil an engagement. It was a foolish formula,
but had been conventionalised to mean that, and it
meant no more. The words “ sunrise ’ and “ sunset
are inaccurate, but even an astronomer may say
“ sunset ” without falsehood, since it is a conventional
word for the thing he means. The oath had as little
pretension to exactness. But now it has been made
into a creed. When a member of Parliament says
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“ So help me God ” it is now declared he must mean
just what he says.
I propose to day to prove to you what that meaning
is. But let me first remark that the present situation
of the legislature in this matter is an illustration of
the practical importance of studies often supposed
antiquarian and unpractical. The archeologist, the
philologist, the mythologist, often meet with persons
who regard their researches as useless for the present
time, and their results merely curious. But if either
the member denied his right to take the oath, or his
opponents had possessed full archaeological knowledge
of the subject, it might have been shown that the
whole question is really as simple as it seemed compli
cated. If Mr. Tyler, the author of Primitive Culttire,
had been called before the Committee which decided
some time since that an atheist could not take the
oath, he could have proved to every member present
that not one of them had any more right to take it,
If one step be taken beyond the mere formality, the
affirmation of a purpose, that step is into the original
sense of the formula; and the original sense of it is
what no educated man, however orthodox, believes or
can believe.
There is nothing doubtful whatever about the oath.
There is no room for theories: the facts are established;
every letter and accent in the formula has been traced
�through the history of law to the germ from which
it came. The English oath is in form both Roman
and Jewish; in essence it belongs to the realm of
barbarian superstition. Writers on the subject are
unanimous in the opinion that the oath is of the
nature of an ordeal. The natural development of an
ordeal is illustrated in that used for witchcraft. In
the early panic about witches it used to be the ordeal
of those suspected to be thrown into the water: if
they floated they were evidently witches; if they sank
they were human,—and if they could not be rescued
the crowd held it sufficient compensation that they
had gone to heaven. But some merciful man or men
proposed the ordeal of weighing witches against the
Bible. It was said that if one wrere a witch he or she
could not outweigh God’s -word : so the Bible was
placed in one scale, the suspected witch in the other;
and after that the poor creatures were saved, except
in remote districts where the old fashion was preferred
or the new- not heard of. But in this new form of the
ordeal there was the same soul of superstition as in
the old.
The primitive ordeals bore unfairly against those
subjected to them. They might be, as in some
regions they still are, compelled to drink poison, in
the faith that, if innocent, poison will not harm them.
There was then a transition in which the accused had
to invoke a judgment from the power of the sorcerers
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or priests; these would go through incantations and
solemn ceremonies, which sometimes so wrought
upon the nerves of the guilty that they would confess,
fall sick, or die. Then when or where the priests and
their incantations ceased to be dreaded, the authorities
arranged means by which anyone, whose evidence
they believed false or did not like, might be covertly
punished. An old church at Rome is called Bocca
della Verity or, “ Mouth of truth,” from the legend
that a large round stone-face, preserved in it, was used
for swearing persons. The mouth at the centre is an
aperture, through which it is said the oath-taker had
to put his hand, and hold it there while giving
evidence, in full faith that if he uttered a falsehood
his hand would be smitten off by the Angel of
Justice. The stone being large enough to conceal a
man behind it, legend says the hand was cut off with
a sword whenever the evidence did not please the
authorities. This may be no more than a legend, but
the tradition points to the path by which human
sanctions of the oath superseded the divine. In the
present day, the German, in swearing before a couit,
holds up two fingers, in accordance with the old
belief that they will be smitten off if he perjures
himself,—struck by lightning. But, as he takes care
to hold his fingers up where he can see them, they
are not often struck by lightning.
“In Samoa,” says Farrer, “as at Westminster,
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physical còntact with a thing adds vast weight to the
value of a man’s evidence. Turner relates how, in
turn, each person suspected of a theft, was obliged
before the chiefs to touch a sacred drinking-cup made
of cocoa-nut, and to invoke destruction upon himself
if he were the thief: the formula ran—‘With my
hand on this cup, may the god look upon me and
send swift destruction if I took the thing which has
been stolen,’—it being firmly believed that death
would ensue were the cup touched and a lie told.
The physical act of touching the thing invoked has
reference to feelings of casual connection between
things, as in Samoa, where a man, to attest his
veracity, would touch his eyes, to indicate his wish
that blindness might strike him if he lied, or would
dig a hole in the ground to indicate a wish that he
might be buried in the event of falsehood.”
“North Asiatic tribes have in use three kinds of
oaths. The first and least solemn one being for the
accused to face the sun with a knife, pretending to
fight against it, and to cry aloud—If I am guilty,
may the sun cause sickness to rage in my body like
this knife.’ The second form of oath is to cry aloud
from the tops of certain mountains, invoking death,
loss of children and cattle, or bad luck in hunting,
in the case of guilt being real. But the most solemn
oath of all is to exclaim, in drinking some of the
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blood of a dog, killed expressly by the elders, and
burnt or thrown away,—‘ If I die, may I perish, decay,
or burn away like this dog.’ On the Guinea Coast
recourse was had to a common expedient of priestly
absolution, so that when a man took a draught-oath,
imprecating death on himself if he failed in his
promise, the priests were sometimes compelled to
take an oath too, to the effect that they would not
employ their absolving powers to release him. In
Abyssinia a simpler process seems to be in vogue; for
the king, on one occasion having sworn by a cross, thus
addressed his servants — ‘You see the oath I have
taken; I scrape it clean away from my tongue that made
it. Thereupon he scraped his tongue and spat away his
oath, thus validly releasing himself from it.’ ” *
Such is the original sense of the oath, constant
through all its forms, traceable in all its refinements
and abbreviations. In Greek fable Orkos, god of
oaths, is son of Eris, goddess of Discord, daughter
of Night. The ancient Greek gave his oath by
raising his hand towards heaven, and touching the
altar, which stood in court, and saying, “If what I
swear be true may I enjoy much happiness: if not
may I utterly perish.” Perjurers were believed to be
haunted by the Furies, who visited them every fifth
* Farrer’s Primitive Manners and Customs, p. l8osq. (Chatto
& Windus, 1879). See also Lea’s Siiperstition and Force.
�day in the month. The ancient Roman held a flint
stone in his hand and said, “ If I knowingly deceive,
while he saves the city and citadel, may Jupiter cast
me away from all that is good, as I do this stone.”
The flint was symbol of the thunderbolt with which
Jove stood ready to strike the perjurer. At a later
period the Roman oath was by kissing the altar and
and touching the symbols of several gods upon it, and
then saying, at the end of a declaration of veracity—
“ So help me Jupiter, and these sacred thingsI ”
This was the accepted equivalent of being cast away
by Jupiter like the stone, and added to it a belief that
every deity whose symbol had been touched or kissed
■would administer a special blow to the perjurer.
Divine punishments, however, were anticipated, in
the case of detected perjurers, by throwing them from
the Tarpeian rock.
When the shrine of St. Peter was substituted for that
of Jupiter, the relics of saints were placed on the altar
to be touched, or kissed, and the formula now became
“ So help me God and these relics! ” The form
prescribed in Justinian is an oath by the chief sacred
personages who are named, and by the four Gospels,
closing with an imprecation of the curse of Cain, of
Judas, and the leper of Gehazi. In the middle ages
oaths were various : they swore by Sinai, by St. James’
lance, by the brightness of God, by Christ’s foot, by
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nails and blood, by God’s two arms;—-as a verse runs
they swore—
“ By the saintly bones and relics
Scattered through the wide arena ;
Yea, the holy coat of Jesus,
And the foot of Magdalena.”
The Jewish idea of an oath is suggested in
phrases often met with in the Bible : “ The God of
Abraham judge !” “ God do so to you and more also,”
—and the like. The formal judicial oath gave the
full meaning of these phrases—that the curses
written in the law should come upon the perjurer.
The oath-taker held the scroll of the law, and said—
“Behold, I am accursed of Jahve, if what I say be
not true.”
In the oath we have substituted the Bible for the
ancient altar and its relics. We have substituted
kissing the Gospels for invoking the judgment of the
gods or saints. Instead of—“ So help me Jupiter
and these relics,” it was in Catholic times—“ So help
me God and these holy Gospels;” and now the
Gospels are kissed instead of being named.
Every judicial oath consists of two elements : (1) a
covenant or promise; (2) an appeal to the Deity as
able to see whether the promise is fulfilled, and a
summons to Him as one who may be ceremonially
bound to become a party to the covenant made, and as
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a power pledged to guarantee oaths by special punish
ments.
In the words 11 So help me God ” is also preserved
the invocation of the ordeal by combat.
*
The deity
was summoned by a formula of adjustment on both
sides he is bound, as by a spell, to take part; he will
not hold that party guiltless which has invoked his
name in defence of a falsehood. Each side affirms his
case, and risks upon it the unsheathed weapon of the
oath-guaranteeing God “ So {liac lege) help me ! •” says
one; “ so help me! ” cries the other, God defend the
right! says the tribunal. So, in the language of Sir
William Staundford, a learned judge (1557), they
“ leave it to God, to whom all things are open, to give
verdict in each case, scilicet, by attributing the victory
or vanquishment to the one party or the other, as it
pleaseth him.”
Professor Worman (of Michigan State University),
in his learned treatise on oathsf says :—“ All nations,
barbarous or just emerging from barbarism, have
* “The general principle on which the combat was conducted
was the absolute assertion by each party of the justice of his
cause, confirmed by a solemn oath on the Gospels, or on a
relict of approved sanctity, before the conflict commenced”
(Lea, Superstition and Force, p. 142).
■j- Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical.
Literature, New York. (Harper and Brothers).
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resorted to the divinity for the decision of disputed
questions with somewhat similar ceremonies, and un
doubtedly with like success. Part and parcel with
ordeals, whether of bread or of water, of poisons or
of ploughshares, whether of Grecian, Jewish, Hindu
or Scandinavian form and origin, based upon the same
principle, involving the same leading idea, is the oath
by which divine vengeance is imprecated upon false
hood, and by the use of which ceremony, if it be
effective, the deity specially, and for that cause, bound
to inflict the requisite and appropriate punishment in
case of its violation.”
Michaelis says :—11 An oath is an appeal to God as
a surety and a punisher of perjury; which appeal, as
he has accepted, he of course becomes bound to
vindicate upon a perjured person irremissibly. Were
not God to take upon himself to guarantee oaths, an
appeal to him in swearing would be foolish and
sinful.”
We now perceive the implicit sanction of an oath.
It has set in motion a power which must act. It is
not a moral force, but one pledged to punish the
profanation of a ceremony, however the infraction of
it may be demanded by changed circumstances or
considerations even of justice. Mohammed said, when
you swear to do a thing, and afterwards find it better
to do otherwise, do that which is better and make void
�your oath.
He provided certain ceremonies to
commute the oath. But that modification of Semitic
religion never came into Christianity. Jephthah takes
an oath that he will sacrifice to Jahve the first who
shall come from his house to meet him, as a burnt
offering; and when it proves to be his daughter, she
must be the burnt offering. Jephthah says—“ I have
opened my mouth to the Lord and cannot go back.”
Herod is very sorry Herodias has asked the head of
John, but because of his oath to give her what she
would, he beheaded John. These ideas, from the
regions whence all our sanctities have come, imply a
deity who, however much he might be sorry for
Jephthah’s daughter, or for John the Baptist, would be
bound fast as by the law of gravitation to punish the
violation of every oath in which his name had been
appealed to.
What then does our honourable member of
Parliament mean by his oath, if he means anything
more than an atheist means ? He is not at liberty to
put what construction he pleases on the oath. An
oath exists for the purpose of binding the man, not
to be bound by the man.’ The words “ so help me
God,” few as they are, carry with them the belief in
a Deity who has written out in a certain Volume
certain definite penalties against perjury; an example
of these being in the instant death alleged to have
�fallen upon Ananias and Sapphira. The kissed
volume engages his God to send upon him, if the
oath be violated, the curses written in it. It is of the
essence of the oath that God is bound to send such
judgments. He cannot help it.
If our honourable member does not believe in
that particular God it is all the same as if he believed
in none. So far as the oath is concerned he is an
atheist. It is the oath-guaranteeing God he must
believe in ; the God who makes the perjurer’s “ belly
to swell and thigh to rot” (Num. v.), sends “plagues
and sicknesses ” on covenant-breakers, and “ all the
curses written in this book ” (Deut. xxix.), and who
will strike down the perjurer as Ananias was struck :
if that be not his God he might as well worship a
stock or a stone, or have no God at all, so far as the
oath is concerned. To say he believes he will be
punished by God after death does not fulfil the con
ditions of the oath at all. The oath * involves a
a present judgment, and a special one,—a heavier
punishment for the smallest falsehood after uttering
the words and touching the book, than for the basest,
most harmful lie not uttered under oath. The oath,
therefore, can not be regarded as a mere expression
of theism. That were as much bending the oath as if
one were to attack the throne unlawfully after swearing
to support it, and then say that the best way to help
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the throne was to destroy it. The meaning of the oath
must either be discarded altogether—its use be that
of a meaningless form by which an understood
purpose is affirmed—or else the real historic sense of
it must be accepted—the oath, the whole oath, and
nothing but the oath. If a man say that when he
says “sunset” he really means what he says' he is
bound to accept the cosmogony from which the
word was coined; and if the phrase “So help me
God ” bear any religious sense at all, it must bear that
of the faith and usages to which it is traceable.
Does any member of the British Parliament believe
in a Deity such as is implied in the oath ? They who
are elected to a new Parliament are described as going
up to be sworn in batches, chatting in the merriest
way with each other. Would that be the case if they
knew and believed that they were entering into a
contract to which Almighty God is a party : that the
Deity is invisibly present as a guarantor of the
covenant, and that from the moment of that oath
there is suspended over him, and over his children to
the third and fourth generation, all those curses
written in the Bible against those who swear falsely ?
Such, for instance, as those directed against an oathbreaker in Ezekiel (xvii.):—“Seeing he despised the
oath by breaking thy covenant, when, lo! he had
given his hand, and hath done all these, he shall not
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escape. And I will spread my net upon him, and he
shall be taken in my snare.” The sentence on this
particular oath-breaker was “ he shall die.”
A
clergyman recently wrote to an evening paper
advocating the abolition of the oath, mainly on the
ground that the people generally looked for some
kind of special judgment to follow false swearing, and
as such judgments do not occur their faith is
weakened. These simple people are without casuistry.
But even conceding that the punishments for perjury
may be relegated by an orthodox believer to a future
world, does he believe that the punishment there will
be greater for the deviation from an oath than for an
unsworn lie and for injury inflicted by a lie ? If it is
the lying that is punished, the oath is a meaningless
form, in itself. If it be contended that God is more
concerned to vindicate his own dignity against a false
or inconsiderate appeal than to punish malicious lying,
we may safely affirm that such is not the belief of
educated Christians. We are not without evidence
that such a view of the sanctions of the oath no
longer exists except among the most ignorant and
superstitious, and only among very few of them.
The eminent writer already quoted, Professor
Worman, says
“ The oaths of Oxford University
have been taken by the most cultivated minds of
Europe; by those who in after life attained the
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highest dignities of the Church or the State; by those
who, from their station, their education and in
telligence, would be least likely to disregard their
obligation.
These oaths required obedience tostatutes framed centuries ago by and for a set of
monks, and are about as consonant with the present
state of society as the monkish costume would be toa general-in-chief at the head of his army. Con
sequently they are not merely not observed, but their
observance would be a matter of astonishment to allr
equally to those sworn to observe and those sworn
to require their observation.” An Oxford oath not to
wear boots has been taken by gentlemen still living.
Our judges and juries violate the oath, if the oath be
considered as having an intrinsic meaning. Every
time a juryman who holds out stubbornly against the
others is partially starved into agreement, or under
any pressure yields, he technically violates his oath j
which he would not do if he believed that all
the curses on violations of the oath written in
the book he kisses must fall upon him and his
children. In old times, when theft was a capital
crime, juries continually found that the article stolen
was of less value than it obviously was, in order that
the offender might not be hung. And now juries find
nearly every suicide to have been of unsound mind,
order to give the poor creature decent burial r
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which they could not do if they believed that, in case
such had been of sound mind, all the curses written
in the Bible against oath-breaking would be executed
upon them for their humane verdict.
*
* The Newcastle Chronicle describes, as follows a scene which
occurred in a court-room, on May 9th, 1881 :—“The oaths
taken by Chinamen in courts of law and in criminal proceedings
are administered after a saucer has been broken, and the
ceremony on Monday was witnessed in the Pilgrim Street
Police Court by a crowded attendance of the public. Foreigners
and Jews have often to be sworn, and a Hebrew Bible is pro
vided accordingly amongst the properties of the Newcastle
Bench ; but a Chinese witness appears to have been a rarity not
-even dreamt about in Pilgrim Street, and it was found that,
simple as the furnishing for the affirmation is, not a saucer was
to be discovered. A policeman was consequently sent to
purchase two china saucers, and on his return one of them was
placed in the hands of the young Chinese interpreter, who,
kneeling down in the witness box, attempted to smash it on the
■edge of the box. British china, however, appeared to be of a
much more endurable kind than Chinese, for the interpreter
tried again and again, with all his force, for at least seven or
eight times, without effecting a smash. When the saucer,
however, did give, it was with a sound that went like the loud
snapping of a pistol through the building. The pieces flew in a
dozen directions, causing clerks, reporters, and policemen to
bow their heads with a sudden and appreciable sense of self
preservation, and no little amusement for a time prevailed in
court. The interpreter then repeated after the Clerk (Mr.
Wilkinson) the following affirmation or Chinese oath :—‘ You
■shall tell the truth, and the whole truth ; the saucer is cracked,
•and if you do not tell the truth your soul will be cracked like
�There is no reason to believe that the members of
Parliament are more technically exact about their oath
than the Oxford professors, or than the juries of the
country. And, if not, they are no more believers in
the Lord of the Oath than Mr. Bradlaugh. So far as
that formula is concerned, the theist and the atheist
are on one level. One can take the oath as honestly
and honourably as the other.
An unjust measure has been used in dealing with
Mr. Bradlaugh, not alone by the House of Commons,,
but by the liberal press, and by some liberal thinkers.
It has been said even by those who defend his right
that he is inconsistent with his avowed opinions in
offering to take the oath. However unconsciously so,
this judgment is unfair. It is also unfair to contrast
his willingness to take the oath with the courageousrefusal of the Jews to take the old oath “ on the true
faith of a Christian.” The distinct creeds of the old
oath,__both political and Christian,—have been
the saucer.’ The second saucer was handed to the prosecutor,
who w’ent through the same form as his shipmate ; but, being.a
more powerful man, he succeeded at the second attempt in
demolishing the article, though at the expense of a finger
severely cut in the operation. The interpreter had also one of
his fingers cut in breaking the article apportioned to him.” But
did the Newcastle magistrate believe that the Chinaman’s soul
might be cracked like a saucer? or did he regard the oath as a
“ meaningless form?”
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abolished. The present oath is not Christian; it is
not theistic in any ordinary sense. Let us hold the
balances of justice with an unprejudiced and un
wavering hand. If Mr. Bradlaugh happened to be
in Samoa, and were witness in a case where his testi
mony might save an innocent man from death, he
would be given a sacred cup to touch, and required
to invoke swift destruction from a god supposed to be
•connected with the cup. That would be his form of
■swearing. In so doing he would be falling in with
the Samoan superstition probably even more than if
he said “ So help me God ” he would be sanctioning
any English superstition. Suppose, being in Samoa
he should refuse so to testify, not believing the literal
meaning of the formality, and, as a consequence of
his refusal, the innocent man were beheaded. What
would be said by those who now censure him ? They
would call it pedantry almost amounting to murder.
They would say he should have accepted the formula
as a recognised means of proclaiming his veracity,
and not to have allowed the wrong to triumph.
When the Jew refused to swear he was a Christian
that would have been furthering the triumph of the
wrong. And if the abolition of oaths had been the
particular reform to which Mr. Bradlaugh had devoted
his life, he would be wrong in taking one. Such, it
seems, is not the fact. He has repeatedly taken oaths,
�when not allowed to affirm, to further what he believed
justice. His aim has been to secure other reforms
chiefly, and abolition of oaths but incidentally. He
has aimed to secure certain reforms by peaceful and
legal means, so far as I can learn, through the national
legislature; and though it was a duty that he should
claim what he believed his right, to affirm instead of
swear, it is difficult to see how it could have been his
duty to let an oath, in itself meaningless, though for its
purpose binding on his conscience as any other con
ventional form of promise, stand between himself and
his constituency and the opportunity of advancing the
practical cause they have at heart.
So, at least, to my mind, stood the ethics of the
case when he offered to take the oath. But now that
the House of Commons has voted that the oath is to be
taken only in its religious sense, I do not see how any
conscientious person can take it. Mr. Bradlaugh can,
indeed, still take it with as much honesty as the rest.
To single him out as the one member who ought not
to take the oath were to confess that an atheist is
expected to have a sense of honour and a sensitiveness
about truth not expected of Christians. It is certain
that the oath either means nothing in itself, but only
in its intent to pledge the word and honour, or else it
means what no man in Parliament really believes—
not even in part believes; for the oath-guaranteeing
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God it invokes is as distinct from the God of
educated England as Bacchus is different from the
Christ of liberal churchmen.
There is, indeed, an upper and a nether side of the
Christianity of our time,—and the nether side lies in
this region of oaths. The Bible in some parts
represents a deity who swears by himself, because he
can swear by none greater, and who is so bound by
his oath that he cannot release himself from it, even
though it binds him to a monstrous injustice.
Having pronounced a curse upon the whole human
race for the offence of their first parents, another
deity had to be evolved,—one not so bound,—who
could bless those his father had doomed to everlasting
tortures, and also satisfy the curse. There is a Christ
imagined in some dark corners of Christendom who
has succeeded to the office of the oath-bound and
oath-binding deity of Eastern tribes. A few English
people seem still to believe in such a Christ. There
was lately a strange account given in the Times of the
seizure at Isvor by Christian brigands of two English
Christians, Mr. and Mrs. Suter. When the brigands
demanded of the terrified inmates their money,
Mrs. Suter pointed to a box containing four lira,
saying that was all the money in the house. The
brigands declared this a lie, and threatened to cut
her throat if she did not give them more money. Mrs.
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Suter then said to the brigands—“ You and I believe
in the same Christ, and in his name I tell you I have
no more money.” This solemn adjuration of their
common Jesus seems to have impressed the brigands.
Had she invoked Christ to confirm a lie they no doubt
supposed she would fall dead. She was spared.
They led them to a certain point, and then they told
Mrs. Suter that she might depart; but they exacted of
her a solemn pledge that she would proceed at once
to Salonica, and not start the soldiers in pursuit. If
the soldiers were seen they declared they would
immediately kill her husband: if not they pledged
themselves that he should be safe up to the time
appointed for the ransom to be paid. The brigands
then bound themselves to this by an oath called the
Bessabees. I do not know what this formula may be,
but it would seem to be so solemn that no brigand
ever breaks it. There is something very droll in this
English lady saying to robbers and murderers—“ You
and I believe in the same Christ.” But there have
been many ages when there would be nothing droll in
it. Whenever a ferocious crusader struck down a
Saracen he said—“ In the name of Christ.” In the
name of Christ millions have been massacred and
despoiled of their property. The old creed survives
among us now in a bad temper. In the name of
Christ,—himself, in his time, a denounced freethinker,
�(
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)
—men may to-day be loaded with curses and reproaches
and deprived of civil rights for speaking their honest
mind and following their sense of duty, smitten while
bearing their heavy cross, by Pharisees—baptised and
circumcised together. Yet the Christ of the brigands
is not normally the Christ of English ladies. The
Christ of the Inquisition is not the Christ of English
Christians. Their dogmas may be in that region
but not their minds. The cruel temper, too, is rather
official than individual. Clerical lips may utter the
curses of Athanasius, but clerical hearts could not
endure to see an infidel burnt for ten minutes much
less through all eternity.
The Parliamentary oath is a survival which really
links Christian England to the Bessabees Brigands.
And survivals may be very corrupting. In the case
of the brigands one may see the exact fruits of
the oath-superstition. God has nothing to do with
their lives, unless they invoke him by a formula.
Having done that they will never dare to incur his
vengeance. But not having done that they may rob
and murder as they like. In some parts of England
it is said that witnesses try to kiss their thumbs instead
of the book, in order that they may freely tell lies. It
is also declared, that in Scotland the sheriff is con
tinually interfering to make swearers in court hold up
their right hand. They often try to hold up their left,
�and if not caught will bravely tell any number of lies.
So Robert of France withdrew the relics and substi
tuted an egg that the souls of his subjects might not
be endangered by their falsehoods. It is impossible
to find room for realities in these Bessabees minds
thus preoccupied with unrealities. It is vain to sup-;
pose that mankind can be fully impressed with the
real sanctity of truth, and the intrinsic evil of false
hood, so long as a formula is preserved to teach them
that lying is not so bad unless they have accompanied
it with a certain motion of the hand and lips. “ Greek
faith” became a proverb for duplicity in the land
where the oath was deified. It is the way of supersti
tion to whiten the outside and rot the heart. The
Oath, chiefly, has taught man the black art of paltering
in a double sense, and how to “keep the word of
promise to our ear, and break it to our hope.”
The right rule of ethics is not to take an oath.
There may be extreme cases where good men might
deem it necessary in order to prevent some larger
evil. But though there are exceptions to rules, rules
are not to be framed upon exceptions. Happily, an
oath is nowhere compulsory in England, except in
Parliament,-—and probably it will go out of that body
also, though in great wrath. There is no real life in
these false formulas. At the first severe test they
crumble. It will one day be a show to see one or
�(
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)
two ancient gentlemen still taking the old-fashioned
oath. And then it will be prohibited as wicked, even
as other “ ordeals ” which have gone before. It is
not so long (1818) since a defendant in an English
court demanded of the judge that he should be
allowed to settle the case with the plaintiff by single
combat. The judge was compelled to decide that he
had that right! A short bill was hurried through
Parliament to end that remnant of barbarism. The
judicial duel, where God theoretically defended the
right, but practically the more skilled swordsman won
the victory, was a method of obtaining justice akin to
the oath as a method of securing truth. That defeated
justice, as this defeats truth.
Oath-taking is a degradation of human nature. It is
also profoundly irreverent to any ideal that an enlight
ened mind may worship. I remember the last time I
took an oath : it was before a consul, when I was
sending some small parcel to a foreign country. I
afterwards found that there must have been about
seven oaths sworn on that parcel before it reached
its destination. Seven times the attention of God
had been called to that wretched little parcel, and he
had been summoned to act as an assistant agent of
Customs, to see that a few shillings was enough duty
on it and was fairly paid. I felt ashamed of that
transaction. The dignified legislator defending this.
�(
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)
childish spell, might well go to the new opera and see
it ridiculed along with the revival of things called
“early English.” There are some early English
things which Puritanism shattered, and which may
well be recovered; but the incantation is not
among them : Puritanism kept that. One of the
opera heroes threatens to curse his rival: the
threatened man falls upon his knees in great alarm :
weeps; implores him to pause before resorting to this
last fearful expedient. But the other refuses; is
resolved; says he is adamant. Then the other says,
I yield. I will comply with your wishes. You swear
it! says the anathematiser. “I do!” That is a fair
caricature of the “early English” which is seriously
trying to defend itself in the Legislature while it is
laughed at in the theatre. The supposed potency of
the curse is identical with that of the oath. They
have no honest habitat in this age of reality and
reason. They take us back to the age of charms,
spells, dooms,—all the nightmares of the dark ages.
Beyond which, not only the reasoner, but the true
Christian, ought to see and hear the great and wise
teacher saying—“ Swear not at all. Let your yea
be yea, and your nay be nay !”
�
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The oath and its ethics: a discourse given before the South Place Society May 1, 1881 (with some additions)
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Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
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Collation: 27, [1] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 2. Works available in the South Place Chapel Library listed on back page.
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T335
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Free thought
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Free Thought
Morris Tracts
Oaths and Affirmations
Parliament
Religion and Ethics
Superstition
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Text
un L i7
What is the Religion of Humanity ?
A DISCOURSE
p
AT
SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL,
MAY i 6th, 1880,
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
LONDON :
SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY.
PRICE TWOPENCE,
i
Mcfi
2.9 2.
�LONDON :
Waterlow & Sons Limited,
LONDON
WALL.
�WHAT IS THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY?
^JpHE phrase Religion of Humanity has been
much and vaguely used; and best phrases so
used are liable to degenerate into cant. There is some
thing pleasant to everybody in the word “Humanity”;
no doubt all sects would claim that theirs is the
religion of humanity. Even sects with creeds based
upon a curse on human nature would declare their
religion adapted to, and revealed to save, humanity,
therefore the religion of humanity.
Among more liberal people we sometimes hear the
word ‘ humanitarian ’ used for a believer in the
religion of humanity. ‘ Humanitarian ’ was coined
to represent the doctrine that the nature of Jesus
was human as distinguished from divine or angelic :
it is a good sign when such theological disputes are
so far past that their phrases are put to more
substantial work.
And this other phrase, the
Religion of Humanity, which I believe came from
the mint of Positivism, also shows a tendency to do
various duty. To the majority it probably means a
�(
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religion which believes in the perfectibility of
mankind; it would include the idea of human
progress, also the sentiment of charity, of sympathy
with mankind, and a spirit of benevolent reform.
No doubt underneath the humanitarian hypothesis
of the nature of Jesus there was at work a faith in
human nature; and under any conception of a
religion of humanity there would be found the spirit
of love to man, the feeling of fraternity, and belief in
a happy destiny for all mankind.
These high feelings will, however, be reinforced in
proportion as it can be made clear to our minds
whether there is any sense in which that group of
sentiments in us which relate to humanity can be
defined as a religion; if so, in what sense it is a
religion distinct from other so-called religions; and
whether it is one which is fully credible to us,—
whether, that is, it represents the facts and phenomena
regarded by the religious sentiment.
That which we call ‘ Humanity ’ is the totality of
all that is moral in nature ; all that distinguishes and
chooses, which discriminates right from wrong, good
from evil, where all nature not human is unmoral—
gives equal support to good and bad,
All history is the history of the war of mankind
against external nature ; when we go beyond history
to tradition, and behind tradition to mythology, we
�(
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we find this and only this—man combating Arctic
frost and torrid heat, tempest and flood, the barren
ness, the ferocities of the earth, the pitiless cruelties
of the pestilential and the rainless atmosphere. That
siege of man against nature has never been relaxed ;
it goes on still; and in that time man has learned
that his own nature represents all that is moral in the
universe he can comprehend.
I say represents : for certain animals seem
capable of love and mutual service; but they possess
this in the ratio of their approach to human nature,
and of their association with it. Therefore they
are man’s humble constituency; their feebler
minds and affections are represented by him as
against the inorganic universe, their common
enemy.
Now, this ancient interminable war
between man and inanimate nature has not been
one of sentiment, but of necessity. To wage it
has always been the condition of human existence
on the planet; all the animals that could not
wage it to some extent have become fossil; and
man would have followed them into extinction if
he had not steadily resisted his hostile environment.
But during all this war man’s sentiments were on
the side of his great adversary. He sang hymns
to the sun which consumed him, to the storm
which beat upon him; evoked a vast array of
�(
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deities out of the elements, and prostrating himself
before them in one moment, in the next arose to
fight and conquer their cruelty.
Primitive man ascribed to the gods as their
particular realm all the elements and regions of
nature which he himself could not control.
His
own empire was built up in practical hostility to
this elemental empire of the gods.
It was the
necessity of the humanised world that it should
ever be encroaching on the gods’ world, turning
the chaos they had created to order and use.
Thus there was no love lost between the two.
Man’s attitude towards the gods was fear; and
that of the gods towards man was deemed to be
jealousy, sometimes fear also, lest he might build
a tower high enough to besiege heaven, or seize
on the apples of immortality. There resulted a
divorce between man’s practical life and his theology.
That set of beliefs, and diplomatic ceremonials to
the sky which were called religion, had nothing ,
to do with man’s humanity, which was necessarily
devoted to constant revision and correction of that
nature supposed to be the creation of the gods.
All of which may seem very childish notions.
Yet the so-called religions of the world have been
generally cast in the same mould; and that is the
shape they bear to this day.
�(
7
)'
The wild powers of nature are translated by
theology and catalogued in the creeds. Where do
you find the doctrine of satisfaction or expiation?
Where do you find any basis for the doctrine that
no deity can forgive an offence except the penalty
be suffered and the law satisfied? You find it in
every creed, but you do not find it in the heart
and life of humanity.
People do not so exact
from others rigid legal satisfaction.
The parent
who worships a god demanding satisfaction, forgives
the child daily without any satisfaction. Humanity
could not have survived if it had practised the
theology of invariable expiation. But you will find
that dogma a reflection of the unswerving course
of natural objects, the unvarying sun and seasons,
the ever-recurring remorseless powers that now freeze,
now bring famine, and listen to no entreaties.
Where will you find the doctrine of vicarious
suffering?
Not in the voluntary life of humanity.
The judge or the parent may worship a deity
satisfied by the suffering of the just for the unjust,
but he would be shocked at any suggestion in the
court or the home that the innocent should, be
made to suffer for the guilty. And in the house
hold or in society, who would deliberately visit
the sin of a father upon his children ?
Where
then, do the creeds get these notions ? From the
�(
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hard forces of nature, which punish transgressions
of natural law even though they be virtuous deeds,
secure the good of one by sacrifice of another;
now make the mother victim of the child, next
the child heir of the parent’s infirmities.
We might indeed go through the whole list of
dogmas that make up what is called religion, and
we should find them to be a rough translation of
nature’s roughness; not religion at all, because
confusing good and evil; unrelated to the moral
sentiment; a crude primitive science, or attempt
at a scientific theory of nature. Those which were
anciently deities personifying the inorganic aspects
of nature, are now abstract dogmas reflecting the
same thing; and as when they were deities or
demons, so now when they have become dogmas,
they represent precisely all that part of nature
which it is the business of humanity to resist,
restrain, or even exterminate.
We must, indeed, never forget that human .
beings are much better than their creeds; that
inside their stony dogmatic walls are cultured
spots of humane feeling; that they speak and act
gently while they worship wrath, and deal justly
while worshipping an unjust deity. There is a
blessed necessity which exterminates from the
practical life anti-social principles; and while it
�(
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allows tongues to recite what creeds they please,
holds heart and hand to their need and duty
with an iron grip. Nevertheless mankind are not
passing unharmed through this opposition between
their dogmas and their humanity.
It is a very
serious thing that men should throw the sanctions
of sentiment and piety around deified reflections of
that inorganic world which it were man’s real
religion to master, and make into his own human
image and likeness.
These ancient ‘ religions ’
have adopted many humane sentiments, some of
them even patronise human life and its joys; but
they never make humanity the main thing, the
great religous force and director: all that immense
power of piety, devotion, enthusiasm, which to
gether make religion, are still on the side of the
inorganic universe and its traditional phantasms.
We may then answer our question, ‘ What is
the Religion of Humanity,’ by saying, it is a
religion which transfers to the moral and intellectual
forces which are mastering nature all the piety
that now worships personifications of the ob
structions mastered.
There is need that our
sentiment and our work should be on the same
side in this great struggle of humanity with
mountain and desert, volcano and flood. It is a
grievous anomaly to worship the mountain-god
�(
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while we tunnel the mountain, and praise the
lightning-god while we raise a rod to divert his
bolt.
That kind of homage and praise are due
to skill and to science, and hard-handed labour;
not to the wild powers they are levelling and
curbing for us.
It may be said that such
adorations of natural forces do no harm; they
are directed to powers that cannot hear or heed
them.
But there is harm done when the finest
seed are sown on clouds, instead of in a soil
where they might bear fruit. We can little dream
what a reinforcement of the human work of the
world it would be if all the devotion and wealth
lavished on deities and dogmas were directed to
aid and animate man in his tremendous task of
humanising his world.
But, it may be asked, and it is the anxious
question of many hearts, is there no God of nature,
no God in nature? Is there no power above our
selves—or power not ourselves—that makes for
righteousness? And, if there be none, are we not
orphans? Are we not robbed of all heart and
hope in our struggle with earthly evil, having no
certainty of ultimate success ?
The Religion of Humanity answers, Yes, there is
a God in nature, a God and ruler of nature; but
that divine parent is nowhere discoverable except in
�(
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)
the spirit of humanity. You may cry for help to
glowing suns and circling stars, to gravitation and
electricity, to ocean and sky, or to all of them
together; but no help or ray of pity will you get
until you have turned to lean on the heart and arm of
human love and strength. For these are the answers
of the universe to your cry. The proof of love in
nature outside you is a loving heart inside you.
Nature has laboured through untold ages to give you
that heart to rest upon, that hand to clasp yours.
We must credit nature with -what has come out of
it. Wild as are the forces around us, terrible as is
this vast machinery roaring around us,—amid which
we move like wondering children, or at some misstep
of ignorance are caught up and crushed, we may
still say that out of it all was evolved the thinker to
warn us, the man of skill to devise good for us, the
man of science to show us the safe path, the
physician to heal us, the artist to beguile us on the
way, the poet to cheer us; the friend, the lover, the
father, the mother, who try to guard us, or, if we are
wounded, seek to heal our wounds. All these were
evolved out of nature. They show us nature pointing
us to humanity,—to humanity, the crown and hope of
nature’s own self, the power which nature has created
for its own deliverance,—in distrusting which we
distrust the only God in nature, the God manifest
within us, and in the sweet humanities around us.
�(
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)
Therefore must we love nature. As we go froth to
contend against its inorganic forces, we recognise
that our contest with nature is a friendly contest, for
deliverance of that inanimate world itself which
suffers the pains of labour until now, awaiting its
adoption into the liberty of the sons of God : it is
the steadfast transfiguration of nature in a light
higher than any dawn, a grandeur which its beauties
but faintly hint and symbolize.
In these days when, under the fierce light that
beats upon the throne of superstition, the ancient
images are falling from many household shrines,—
images which, however low their origin, have been
hallowed by the tender pieties and associations
twining around them,—there is a pathetic cry on
the air. The fine gold has waxed dim! the white
statues are crumbling ! ‘ Give us back our gods ! ’
cried the pagans of old when the Christians
shattered the fair idols of Europe; ‘Give us back
our Saints, our Blessed Mother,’ cried the Catholics
when Protestantism broke up the altars; ‘Give us
back our Faith, our divine Lord,’ cry Protestant
hearts in turn.
But know they not why these
perished and can never return? They could not
do the work of humanity; they could not hear,
they could not heed the cry of hearts that needed
something more than statues, pictures, or sentimental
beliefs.
�(
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)
The other day we heard of the Holy Virgin
appearing in Ireland. The press even sent reporters
who gathered detailed information about the light
that was seen, and Mary, Joseph and John in the
midst. But in their descent these heavenly beings
did not bring bread to save one starving Irish
family. That was left to Saint America who came
over with a loaded ship, and is now doing for poor
human beings what the Virgin Mary does only for
her own altars and priests.
The heretic is not heartless because he cannot be
silenced by the piteous appeal of piety that its
idols and illusions shall be spared. He is listening
to a more sorrowful cry than that; it comes from
the great deeps of human agony, want, evil, despair;
it is a cry ever burthening the air, but never heeded
by the idols which have neither eye, ear, heart,
nor hand. How sweet those idols seem to those
who decorate them, cover them with devotion,
heap on them their gold, their love, and bathe
them with their tears; even so cruel they seem
to one who knows that it is for want of just
that devotion that millions of human beings find
this world a hell.
Poor Humanity, how is it tortured even by those
abstract dogmas, which inheriting the sway of demons,
have power to pervert the human heart; to make it
�(
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)
act cruelly, unrelentingly, like the brutal elements
they embody in words and images !
I picture
Humanity as poor Juliet in her agony. There she is,
the beautiful soul, the perfect heart, the supremest
thing in nature ! Around her an environment of
persons who represent the wild elements. The vin
dictive feud of Montague and Capulet, cruel as
venom of serpents; parents who have taken pea
cock pomp into their breast instead of hearts; a silly
ignorant nurse.
They all represent the inorganic
elements surviving in human nature, pride, ignorance,
vengeance; these not hidden there as shameful things
but consecrated as duty and dignity: this is the lot
with which that heaven, to which Juilet has prayed all
her life, has surrounded her gentle soul in its sore
need 1
Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,
That sees into the Lottom of my grief ?
O, sweet my mother, cast me not away !
But the mother, slave of her lord, has gone. Then
once more to the clouds Juliet cries, ‘ O God ! ’ No
answer. The poor ignorant nurse alone is left her.
O nurse! how shall this be prevented ?
My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven ;
How shall that faith return again to earth,
Unless that husband send it me from heaven
By leaving earth ? —comfort me, counsel me.—
Alack, alack, that Heaven should practice stratagems
Upon so soft a subject as myself!
�(
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)
Alas, Juliet finds that heaven is against her. She
thinks how different it would be if Romeo were only
able to leave earth and be god for a time. She meets
religion presently: the sympathetic, helpful friar, is a
disguise for the Religion of Humanity. For this friar
is a true holy father where the lordly father had
failed ; he does not point Juliet or Romeo to heaven
nor bid them pray, sing, or confess. When Romeo
has slain one in his desperation, the friar gets him off
to a safe place. He has drugs, and secret schemes,
by which he tries hard to outwit the inorganic tempers
that are crushing the lovers. He fails in the end ;
but that torch he holds over the dead faces of those
he sought to save, is the torch of the true Religion,
burning through a midnight of tragedies on to the
hour that shall raise its light to be a flaming dawn.
Do you ask what tidings more glad can the Religion
of Humanity bring to hearts in their agony, the agony
caused by the discord, pride, ungentleness of
spirit in men and women ? Why, it brings hope of a
time when hearts will not be proud and harsh,
because religion will have concentrated all its power
of renovation upon them. Religion will recall its
protecting forces from the nature-gods and gather
them all around human beings, to love them, help
them, save them; so that when Juliet cries ‘O God!
her father shall be at hand, her mother shall serve her
�(
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as if Juliet were the one Holy Virgin, so that no
human being shall ever be brought up to fancy that
there is any higher religion than to promote human
happiness, purity, and wisdom.
The religion of humanity thus has its meaning
and promise for the individual heart, for the soul
with its own grief, in that it brings back piety from its
wanderings to seek out and love the divine in every
heart; but it also holds out to the world at large a
hope unknown to any theology, the promise of a
perfectly developed Humanity implying a perfect
world. For this religion shows mankind to be the
creator, and a loving creator ; whose eternal design is
not the salvation of certain elect ones, of those only
after they are dead, and from evils that do not exist,
but the salvation of all, of the living, from actual
evils. It reveals to each generation that it is not only
the heir of all the ages, but the incarnation of their
summed-up powers; that this trust bequeathed from
all preceding generations, represents not only man in
the past, but all that preceded man; every bird that
ever sang to its mate, every tiger that ever defended
its young; nay, every atom that ever clung to its
fellow-atom amid the star-mist, in the first throb of
that spirit of life which has climbed on to the
splendour of reason and glory of a heart, beside
which the sun and moon are mere sparks.
�This is the Holy Mother. This is the ever-blessed
unwearied Madonna bearing the man-child in her
arms. A legend runs that when Mary was travelling
in Egypt, and her arm failed from long bearing her
babe, a third hand grew out to sustain Jesus : even so
is it with the maternal spirit which is caring for the
world, watching over human hearts, bearing it onward.
Does the old support fail ? Io, another ! Already our
dear Mother is many-handed. Wherever are love,
thought, sympathy, and a devotion to truth and right,
there are her sustaining arms. Her unwearied watch
is with the student seeking truth and wisdom, with
the reformer, the philanthropist, the physician, the
man of science, the poet, the artist. Wherever there
is one who is contriving a new benefit for the earth,
some relief from evil, some mitigation of pain, some
beauty which shall soothe and delight earth’s wayworn pilgrims, some sweet song to beguile sorrow and
pain into self-forgetfulness, win hearts from vain
regrets, cast a sunbeam into the darkened breast of
guilt, proffer a draught of Lethe to the lips of Despair
and Death, there is our divine Father, and there our
heavenly Mother, majestic and beautiful: nature is
glorified in them : with them are the sign and seal by
which all nature, however wild, is for ever bound to
follow and obey their eternal attraction.
This Religion of Humanity therefore has not the
�(
i8
)
disadvantages of some new sect or new idea: it
not only exists already, but it has existed for ages.
I believe it to be the only religion that does really
exist, and that alone which the great teachers have
taught.
It is a very common experience with those who
abandon an established church, sect, or creed, that
they never cease to honour the great teacher said
to have founded that church or creed. Most free
thinkers feel that they love Christ much more
genuinely than Christians. The same phenomenon
appears throughout the world. Wherever there is a
protestant movement we hear the cries, ‘Not
Buddhism but Buddha!’ ‘Not Confucianism but
Confucius!’ ‘Not Christianity but Christ!’
It
is not difficult to see why we love the teacher while
opposing the system named after him. The teacher
represented the religion of humanity. No matter
what he taught, he was another step; he sought to
remove some evil or error, and added something to
the growing life of the world.
But the system
which has borrowed his good name is invariably
one based on that which he resisted. Every socalled religion is a new edition of the old nature
worship : it is a system trying to sanction its power
with the prestige of a breaker of systems. But
such power can never be built up except by reversing
�the freedom and humanity of the system-breaker,
because it must rule by bribe and menace. There
never was a prophet who did not teach love,
forgiveness, gentleness; there never was a system
which did not make its prophet teach wrath,
expiation, satisfaction. ‘ Love your 'enemies,’ says
the prophet as he was; £ Depart into fire,’ says the
prophet as the system makes him.
As time goes on this anomaly is seen.
The
human religion is at work; people grow ashamed
of their dogmas; they more and more dwell on the
sweet parables, the kindly deeds, the human side of
their prophet; they try to hide and forget the awful
character which the system assigns him.
But it is
impossible : that awful character is an old role in the
drama of the gods; Jehovah had to play it, and
Jove, and Jesus; every successful name has to be
put to that part if a creed is to survive after it is
unloved and unbelieved. So, steadily, as know
ledge and liberty advance must such systems
crumble and their idols follow them; when their
supernatural terrors have become grotesque and
their celestial promises antiquated, there are left
only the vulgar fears and interests to which an
existing order appeals, and from that moment the
familiar face of selfishness is seen beneath the mask
of piety.
Such is the process now going on;
�(
20
)
by it true and faithul hearts are hourly set
free; and there is fair prospect of seeing a
swiftly-growing and expanding spiritual union among
the really religious, though the discovery that what
each sincerely loves in his prophet his seeming
opponent loves equally; and what he discards is
that which none can love, though it may be
tolerated. No man loves Jesus for his miracles:
no heart responds to his curse on a figtree; none
rejoices in his formula for cursing the goats at the
last day. The Jesus beloved is he who spoke of
the forgiven prodigal, who wept tears over his dead
friend, knew the scripture of the lilies and the
waving corn, promised peace, and gave men rest in
the faith that even as they forgave the trespasses of
men all the more would the divine love forgive
them.
That is the Jesus really beloved by the
sincere and lowly hearts that are not concerned in
Christianity as a politic system; and they do not
love him more than those called ‘infidels.’
There is one belief concerning Christ in which all
sects, churches, Secularists, Theists, Atheists agree:
they all agree that he was a man. Some believe he
was a God-man, others a miraculous man; all agree
that he was a man. That then is the only doctrine
that can be pronounced literally Catholic, that is
universal. And as the definition of a man grows
�(
21
)
truer, and as more and more mankind come to feel
how dependent they are for all advancement upon the
fidelity and wisdom of great and good men, it will
not be thought derogatory to Jesus that he should be
called a man. But it will be found derogatory to
connect him with the thundergods of primitive ages.
It will be resented more and more as a lowering of
his goodness and greatness to call him the incarnation
of Jehovah, whose biblical record is one of wrath,
injustice and cruelty. As Jove and Jehovah have
died of inhumanity, so will the Doomsday Christ pass
out of human love and belief. It will be realised
that the whole thought and work of Jesus was to
abolish that system of belief which Jehovah repre
sented, and all the gods like unto him. Those
personifications of crude, cruel nature, and Jesus
representing the love and morality which soften and
subdue nature, are practically opposite principles, and
their necessary combat makes all the serious contro
versies of our time.
When the orthodox talk of God becoming man, we
have only to say,—Let him be a real man and we can
believe on him. Remove from him the theologic
costume of miracle, of unforgiving last day wrath, of
ceremonial and ritual preserved from' the ancient
worship of the elements by cowed and terrified
barbarians; give us the great heart and brain, the real
�(
22
)
man as he was, ally him with the grand work of
humanity on earth, unite him with his true brothers,
his peers of every age and race, and be sure there
will be no heart on earth which shall fail to surround
him with love and homage !
Already there are signs that this is the way
Christianity is tending. The character of its defence
has completely changed. We no longer hear its
defenders resting it upon miracles or upon Judaic
history, but upon the morality and the humanities
they believe bound up with it. They plead for the
social and domestic virtues, and say that to the
masses these rest upon Christianity. That is a good
sign.
It is necessary to prove to them that
Christianity does not come into this moral tribunal
with clean hands; that it carries into innumerable
homes a book containing cruelties and obscenities,
as God’s word; that it propagates superstition, and
teaches man to rest for safety upon metaphysical
dogmas rather than righteousness : but, while main
taining this, we may gladly recognise the happy
change by which the dogmas are being steadily
overlaid by considerations of practical virtue. This
I believe will go on until out of these transitional
controversies shall emerge the full-formed religion
of Humanity, to be loved and honoured of all,
and to include all races in a fraternal competition
�(
23
)
to promote the health, happiness, and virtue
of the family of man.
Christian apostles felt
and foresaw this.
‘ Be not deceived,’ cried one,
‘ he who doeth righteousness is righteous.’ Said
another, ‘ Pure religion and undefiled is to visit
the widow and the fatherless in their affliction, and
to keep oneself unspotted by the world.’ A third
added, ‘ Love is the fulfilling of the Law.’ Equally
was this the testimony of Zoroaster, of Buddha, of
Confucius. In this religion have the prophets and
sages lived and died ; and this will remain for ever
the religion of the faithful and true, the helpful and
the just, when all our controversies have died away.
When the dogmatic systems have taken their place
among other relics of antiquated philosophy, there
will still be growing and expanding in the earth the
religion of humanity,—the hatred of pain, which
superstition worshipped; hatred of all sacrifice of
human welfare; passionate horror of all evil, and that
which inflicts suffering; passionate love of all that
promotes welfare; concentration of all powers within
and without to the humanisation of man and his
world; and the immortal hope that Humanity will
survive for ever, conquer all evil, attain perfect know
ledge and joy. .This religion will flourish over the
graves of all idols and creeds,—and this is the
Religion of Humanity.
�SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL.
WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY.
BY M. D. CONWAY, M.A.
The Sacred Anthology: a Book of Ethnical s. d.
Scriptures...........................................
.... 10 0
The Earthward Pilgrimage.................................
5 0
Do.
do.......................................... 2 6
Republican Superstitions .................................
2 6
Christianity .......................
.............
... 1 6
Human Sacrifices in England
.......................
1 0
Sterling and Maurice...........................................
0 2
Intellectual Suicide...........................................
0 2
The First Love again...........................................
0 2
Our Cause and its Accusers.................................
0 1
Alcestis in England......................
0 2
Unbelief : its nature, cause, and cure ............. 0 2
Entering Society
...........................................
0 2
The Religion of Children.................................
0 2
What is Religion ?
0 2
Atheism: a Spectre...........................................
0 2
The Criminal’s Ascension.................................
0 2
Idols and Ideals (including the Essay on Chris
tianity ), 350 pages
.................................
6 0
Members of the Congregation can obtain this Work in the
Library at 5s.
BY A. J. ELLIS, B.A., F.R.S., &c., &c.
Salvation
......................................................
Truth ................................................................
Speculation ......................................................
Duty
................................................................
The Dyer’s Hand
...........................................
0
0
0
0
0
2
2
2
2
2
New Work by Mr. Conway—“A Necklace of Stories,”
illustrated by W. J. Hennessy, is now ready. Price 6s.
Mr. ALEXANDER J. Ellis’s Discourses:—“ Salvation:”
“Truth:” “Speculation:” “Duty:” and “The Dyer’s
Hand. Bound in 1 Vol., price Is.
Mr. Conway’s “ Demonology and Devil-lore.” Second
edition, revised and enlarged, 2 vols, illustrated. 28 s.
Members of the Congregation may obtain this work in
the Library at 23 s. 4 d.
�
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
Dublin Core
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Title
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What is the religion of humanity?: a discourse at South Place Chapel, May 16th 1880
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 23, [1] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 2. Printed by Waterlow and Sons, London Wall. With a list of works to be obtained in the Library of South Place Chapel at end of pamphlet.
Publisher
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[South Place Chapel]
Date
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[1880]
Identifier
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G3347
Subject
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Religion
Ethics
Rights
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (What is the religion of humanity?: a discourse at South Place Chapel, May 16th 1880), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><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
God-Attributes
Human Nature
Humanism
Moral Theology
Morality
Morris Tracts
Positivism
Religion and Ethics
-
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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
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Ethical religion
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Salter, William Mackintire
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 128 p. : ill. (front port.) ; 22 cm.
Series title: R.P.A. Extra Series
Series number: 9
Notes: Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Includes bibliographical references. Printed in double columns. Issued for the Rationalist Press Association, Limited.
Publisher
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Watts & Co.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1905
Identifier
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RA1158
RA1632
RA1821
E342
N603
Contributor
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Coit, Stanton [1857-1944]
Subject
The topic of the resource
Religion
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Ethical religion), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Ethics
NSS
Religion and Ethics